 Okay, we're back. We're live. We're here on Global Connections on a special show here on a given Wednesday morning at the 11 o'clock block with Carlos Juarez, one of our old friends and the host of Global Connections, who joins us by, I guess by VMIX call and by VoIP from a place called University of Puebla, which is 60... University of the Americas. University of the Americas in Puebla. Thank you, Carlos. Correct. I have to get down there and say hi and you have to show me around in Mexico, near Mexico City. And it's a special show because we're going to talk about Venezuela. Welcome to your show, Carlos. Lohan, thank you so much, Jake. Great to reconnect and, of course, offer some insights into this very complex set of issues happening south of the border, so to speak, in basically South America, Venezuela, a real crisis that is now flared to the forefront of our, well, of our news. It's quite dramatic and it's important for us to understand what's going on. Yeah, you know, you are the what? Director of the International Relations part of the University of the Americas there. And you're also, you know, you're also in Mexico, not too far away. And furthermore, you spent a fair amount of time in Venezuela years ago. So you're in a great spot to interpret what the news, interpret not only what's happening, but what might happen and its implications. So tell us from your point of view and from the, you know, the point of view of international relations, what is going on south of Mexico in Venezuela? Well, this is a crisis that as we know, and here we're speaking in early February, it has flared up in the last few weeks. It's been going on for a long time, probably stemmed from about 2009, 2010, actually, when the previous government, Hugo Chavez, had run into a beginning to have economic challenges, difficulties. A few years later, the price of oil plummeted in Venezuela, a very important country in South America, 30 million people, but a very big player in the petroleum markets, of course. And so it has this important crop product that obviously turns the industrial economies. The United States is a major importer, about one third of the exports of their petroleum come to the US alone. Russia, China, other big players. But can you give us an update, Carlos, from Hugo Chavez? He was what, 1999 or so? And from there on, what has happened in Venezuela since then? And so he was there just over a decade and about five, six years ago now, he passed away in, I think, 2003. His successor, his handpicked successor, Maduro is his name, Nicolas Maduro. He's the president now. And he inherited the position, you might say, a year ago in May, almost a year, last May of 2018, that he held a presidential election that the international community basically condemned as fraudulent. It didn't represent fair, open opposition was very much suppressed. And so a wide condemnation of that election well, you fast forward about eight or nine months later. And now in early January, this president, de facto president, of course, declares himself now a new term, and it sparked a lot of pushback, the international community again, but more importantly, internally, suddenly out of nowhere, you had a young leader of the National Assembly, one of their sort of parliamentary bodies, declaring himself the legitimate interim president and saying that Maduro is no longer the president. Well, the reality is today, Venezuela has two presidents. This doesn't happen often. But of course, one is the legitimate, I'm sorry, another one is the de facto president who's been there the last five, six years, who controls the government, who has the army very important, the military behind him. The other who has suddenly garnered support from a lot of international actors, including many of the Latin American countries, Chile, Colombia, Brazil, Peru, et cetera, Uruguay, they've all come in favor of this new opposition leader. Interestingly, Mexico, together with Uruguay, a small South American country, and Cuba, have not, they're kind of trying to go a middle ground. But you also have Canada, many of the European Union countries also supporting this self-declared interim president. His name is Juan Guaidol. It's not a household name that you could say, but he came out of nowhere. A month ago, nobody knew who he was, 35-year-old industrial engineer. But he is now given somehow voice and hope to some that he may be the sort of the person who can transition out of this current regime. Obviously, it's very polarized. Many see the Maduro regime as a very corrupt dictatorship that has obviously lost legitimacy and credibility. Others see it as the legitimate government that has been there. And maybe there are some who view this as imposed from the U.S. It's a lot more complex than that. The U.S. Donald Trump has also come out to support this opposition leader. So he is kind of following the many other international actors. So there you have it. It's a standoff right now. And this leader about two weeks ago, this opposition leader has now declared himself, but he doesn't control the... Well, you said he declared himself. I'm just wondering. It sounds like Hugo Chavez appointed him as a successor, but there was no popular vote where the people... I mean, there's a constitution in Venezuela. And I presume that under that constitution, you're supposed to elect your leaders, but apparently what? There was no election of Maduro. He was merely appointed and de facto. On the other hand, Guaidó was a leader of the National Assembly and elected as such, but not as the leader of the country. But however... Tell me if I'm wrong about this. However, there's a provision in the constitution that says in the event of a squabble, the leader of the assembly becomes the leader of the country. Is it something like that? I mean, it sounds like there's a constitution that isn't working quite right. Yeah. Well, again, depending on who's saying that, because this opposition leader is essentially invoking a provision of the Constitution that says something to the effect that if the president is unable to carry out his duties or essentially have used surface power, and that's his argument that the election held a year ago, in May of last year, was not recognized, was seen as fraudulent, and so it basically doesn't give him the ability to continue in a new term. I wonder what fraudulent means, Carlos, because we know we've had, in fact, yesterday at the State of the Union and the response by Stacey Abrams involved voter suppression, and we've had plenty of evidence in this country about voter suppression. And I'm wondering if the election last year in Venezuela involved fraud and voter suppression along those lines? I would say substantially more than just the purging of roles, etc., and the voter suppression that you've referred to, which is common in particularly some of the southern states. In the case of Venezuela, it was basically making illegal the ability to even run for office, so some of the opposition candidates were imprisoned or simply denied the ability to run, and then using a variety of tactics. And the thing about Venezuela, it represents an interesting model of a form of democratic, well, we would call it an illiberal democracy, so it uses democratic institutions to sort of squeeze out the opposition, the voices it doesn't like to hear, to control every aspect of the political system, but in ways that are deeply political, not fair and open. The courts, for example, are not independent and free, they are stacked and controlled by the regime. But the election itself, again, charges of fraud, charges of ballot stuffings, inability of candidates to simply have a fair shake, let's say, and it was widely condemned by international observers across the board. It's very interesting because what you have is a constitution that theoretically should work, but it isn't working. And you have people who twist and manipulate the language of the Constitution to their own goals and people who live on power. And for example, as we discussed before the show, the whole thing seems to pivot on who controls the army, and right now Maduro controls the army. So going forward, my question to you is, how is this going to play out? You have all this international recognition of Guaido, at the same time, you have Maduro de facto controlling the army, and you have the courts who belong to him, I mean, belong to Maduro. It sounds to me like Guaido, unless there is intervention of some kind, or sanctions, or the imposition of pressure from outside, Maduro is going to win this game, don't you think? Well, he can hold on as long as he does have the support of the military, which he continues to have. But let me add to this, I mean, a year ago, in particular, well no, a little over the year, in 2017, we began to see a massive groundswell of social protests in the streets, and again it took place here in the last month. So there is a widespread condemnation of the legitimacy of the existing regime, criticism of it, massive economic problems, hyperinflation, soaring hunger disease, a massive emigration that we're told up to 3 million Venezuelans, like 10% of the population has now left the country in the last maybe three years. And so some of it is that on the streets, there's a growing sentiment that is trying to push him out. But here the pressure is also now, as you touched on, coming from outside. And so you've got major governments, regional governments, and not just the US, you have Canada, many European Union, most of the major players of Latin America are putting the squeeze on him, and they have kicked him out of the OAS, they have set up a group a year ago called the Lima Group, Lima Peru, the capital, basically of the major South American plus Mexico, and they are essentially trying to put the squeeze on the country. Well, it's at a standstill right now, and what has happened is Lima Group in particular together with the European Union, they've managed to negotiate, you know, or else to put together some negotiations that are going to begin tomorrow, I believe in Uruguay, and they're going to have some dialogue. The hope is that they can negotiate a transition so that somehow it can avoid a bloodshed or a violence. But the reality is that Maduro, the government that is there, essentially controlling the military has the weapons, has the control over violence. The others have maybe, I don't know, a mixture of the moral authority, the international community support. The dynamics right now are such that Maduro is claiming that there's a likely invasion from the US. And, you know, that's an easy sort of whipping dog to sort of, you know, scare up attention. What's happening as we speak, even today, for example, he has blocked the large bridge, a border with Colombia that is expected to receive some humanitarian aid coming from the US and other countries. And then he's trying to close that off saying that this is representing sort of the invasion coming from the US. It's a mess. It's unpredictable. It could languish and go on like this for a little while. But at some point, the writing on the wall seems to suggest that there's going to be some breakthrough, either a negotiated settlement where they decide on a transition government or, you know, this guy gets nudged out in some way. I think in the end, the cards are going to be held by the military and to the extent that they may assess that this leader's resolve and his likelihood of survival should go dimmer, they may have to, they may end up negotiating a sort of support for this opposition leader. And essentially, you know, things will quickly move. If that happens, it'll happen very fast. But it could be stuck like this for a little while longer. Yeah, of course, when you leave it in the hands of the military, you always have the risk of a military coup. And it would be a third person who steps up as a leader, wouldn't it? I mean, if the military took over, say, in a transitional kind of situation, they'd be in charge and they'd pick their own leadership, their own military leadership. Isn't that a possibility? It seems to happen all the time, no? Well, interestingly, Venezuela, you know, it had many dictatorships in the early part of the 20th century. But really, since the 1950s forward, it was a relatively stable, democratic, alternating political parties. Really, until the late 80s, it suddenly began a transition of sorts at that time. Chavez comes in in the late 20th century, and he kind of represents a break from this, even though it was a democratic process and system, it was very oligarchy, very elitist. And so what I want to get at here is, the military as an institution in Venezuela has not been involved in interventions and coups in the ways that we saw in the 60s and 70s in Brazil, in Peru, in Uruguay, in Chile. And so my quick answer would be, I don't myself see the military wanting to step in and be the solution. Instead, what's happened under Chavez and under the Maduro regime, the military has been brought in in many ways to run the country. And so they are put in positions of controlling the oil industry, controlling other, you know, government ministries and agencies. So they are in some ways more like political figures. And as we know, if anything about politicians, what do they want? They want survival. They want to stay in power. They want the benefits of the perks, the patronage that comes from that. But if there's several other issues about the military, many of them are deeply concerned about the integrity of the institution and they don't want to see that go away. And a military coup has the risk of really, you know, harming the institution itself. Also, a public opinion. And that's what's nudging on the streets, the social movement. It may nudge the military to seek, you know, the writing on the wall. On board with the future, they're going to be obviously purged. And many of those who have benefited, there's a large number of generals that have been appointed larger than the military, you know, size would warrant. So many of these are simply political appointees. The new, I'm sorry, not the new, but this opposition leader, Juan Guaido, has tried to reach out and offer them amnesty in hopes that some of them will defect. There's been a few cases. The Etcache in Washington DC did so pretty early on, but he was a lower ranking colonel. I believe a few days ago or this past week, there was one general who essentially did fall down. But for the most part, the core of the leadership, they tend to be loyalists to the, they call them Chavistas, supporters of the former Chavez. And basically, they are benefiting from the power and status they have. But again, they're also rational humans. When the big comes that this other leader, the Maduro may be gone, many of them are going to probably try to strike a bargain. Rather than being prisoned or exiled, they may simply switch their support. You have to look ahead and you have to look, see what the people want to do. And I think we had a show yesterday on our Hispanic-Hawaii series, where we had a couple of Venezuela people here in the studio to talk about, you know, the feelings of the people in Caracas and in Venezuela. And my sense of it from that and elsewhere is that the people on the streets really don't like Maduro at all. They're protesting against him and they're courageous enough to take the risk and go out on the streets, even with the soldiers there. And that represents a groundswell of support for Guaido. So it seems to me that if anyone is looking at the general sense of the population of the public in Venezuela, they will see that if the public has its way, the public will support Guaido. And that's got to affect the thinking of the military. Absolutely, I think so. And then that's where, again, if you look forward, whether it's two weeks or two months or two years, there will be a transition and a change that hope it doesn't get there by way of bloodshed or violence. It's already pretty bad. And some people said, oh, we can't sanction them. We can't do this. They're going to suffer well. The Venezuelans have been suffering quite a bit for the last, you know, years, particularly the last four or five years, the plummeting of oil prices has made it hard for the regime to dole out its support. And now the inflation, the inflation is remarkable and then happening as we speak. We have not seen this since Weimar Germany in the 20s. And even by comparison, I mean, the figures are staggering a million percent a year up to 10 million percent a year. I mean, you can't even fathom what that means. What it means is that the economy is essentially in a free fall and it has meant shortages of food, shortages of medicine. And that means everybody, even those who benefited from, let's say, the previous regime, the Chávez in particular, there was a time when there was a lot of social spending and programs often very targeted, but certainly gained a lot of popularity. And even today, the regime, it's very interesting. We live in this age of, you know, new social media and technologies, the amount of propaganda the amount of, let's say, well, the whole industry of that is just astonishing how every day they're putting out information on Twitter, on Facebook, on other media, the radio, the TV, advertising billboards, websites, the government has a pretty big industry of that. And so they are trying, you know, sort of grip a propaganda, it doesn't let up. And it has meant that, you know, people get bombarded with some information overload. It's hard to know if you're there in Venezuela, getting good information, real information. And so for some, yes, this is all about the gringo Yankee, imperialist invaders. For many others, not quite, it's all about just, you know, the crisis of legitimacy that the leadership is having. And that's going to probably change the tide because the other thing is that Chávez, who was a very dynamic, charismatic leader, did have a considerable amount of support, especially among popular classes. He mobilized a lot of, you know, voiceless people from the past. The leader that's been there now, his successor, Nicolás Maduro, doesn't have a great deal of charisma or chutzpah, former bus driver who, you know, kind of sort of came up through the ranks as a loyal party, you know, follower, but he has not been able to mobilize the population in the same way and then added to that, the economy has tanked and so he just, you know, he's not been able to hold it together. We tend to think of countries south of the border in some, you know, ancient way. Some way goes back many decades as underdeveloped, you know, not having a lot of consumer goods, not having a decent economy, not having law and order for that matter. But I think I'm coming to the conclusion myself that Venezuela has been essentially a democracy in many ways. Venezuela has had some prosperity with the oil and otherwise. Venezuela enjoys a high level of public awareness and education. Venezuela is in large part a middle class state and it's different, you know, from our profiling of South American countries in the past. Am I right about this? Absolutely. And the other is maybe even like the race in ethnicity. If you go to places like Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, these are literally dual societies, race and ethnic divisions that are pronounced. Venezuela is not, it is a more, well we would call it Mestizo, but it had a heavy wave of different immigrants from Europe, but largely, you know, I guess we're lucky to use the word white, but maybe a more middle class. They don't have large indigenous populations. But even more than that, just as you touched on, throughout the 50s and 60s and 70s, there was a pretty booming economy and the oil helped to enrich that a large growing middle class. So, you know, the average secretary or government worker could take the vacation to Miami and, you know, and have a level of development that was the envy of the Andean countries of, you know, even Argentina relatively crossed the place, massive economic problems and chaos and turbulence and political violence. Venezuela relatively stable until about 1989. And I mentioned to you earlier, this was the time when I began doing some research in the area. I went down there in 8990 and suddenly they began a massive sort of social movement at that time, protesting the two-party system, which, you know, on paper, it looked pretty nice. The alternated power looked like our two-party system in the US. But it was very closed and elitist. And if you weren't part of those two parties, you know, you couldn't play ball. And that began what would culminate later. Actually in 92, Chavez attempted a first military coup that didn't work. It got snuffed out. But he would come back later, six, seven years later. And by the end of the 90s, he would suddenly launch, you know, what he called the Bolivarian Revolution, a leftist, populist, you know, transition, and one that worked well for a while, had a lot of international support, particularly from the left. And it reached out to communities that had been marginalized and neglected, that were not part of the elite, let's say, domination. And so while you had oil revenues, you could do that. You could dole out benefits and redirect social spending. But that began to erode. And moreover, Chavez represented a new form of authoritarianism using political institutions rather than the sort of military coups and government, but using democracy in ways that it was what we call illiberal. We see it today in Hungary and Poland. We see it in the US. We see it in the Philippines, where they get elected, they get in office, but they pretty soon begin to chip away at the Democratic institutions controlling the media using massive propaganda themselves. That's terrible. And the United States itself is at risk for that right now in this administration. But I wanted to go to one other thing that we should discuss, and that is the external effect of this. You know, it's become clear that the United, in this administration, become clear the United States must care about the whole continent. It must care about Canada, and it must care about everything south of the border. It must care about Mexico. It must care about all of South America, because they're close and they're contiguous in their own way to our own country. We have land borders and so forth. And so their health, the health of these other countries, affects our health. And so I disagree with the Trump administration on trying to build walls. Rather, we should be building influence and building connection collaboration with every country south of the border, not only Mexico, but every country south of the border for our own security, for our own protection. Here we have Russia coming into Venezuela and then creating its divisiveness, which it likes to do. And to me, that's a risk to us. So my question to you, Carlos, is what effect does all this turmoil in Venezuela have on Mexico, have on South America in general, have on the United States, and have global geopolitical effect? Because you know it's not happening in a vacuum. Well, absolutely. And you touched on many aspects there. Today, this crisis is not just the U.S. and Venezuela. In fact, at all, Trump has come on to support this opposition leader, but he's not calling the shots or driving the issues. Although the U.S. does have considerable influence and can. He's in fact negotiating with some of the other leaders. But I want to first say this crisis also unveils the geopolitical dynamics where, again, you mentioned Russia. With the transition in Cuba, the pastors are now long gone, and the country is no longer, let's say, at the forefront of U.S.-Latin American relations. It's kind of on the periphery. Venezuela has emerged as the main connection that Russia has in Latin America, and they are strategic partners both for oil revenues and investments that Russians have done themselves in Venezuela. Also, China. China is the other player that is a massive foreign investor throughout South America. The largest investor in Peru and Bolivia, obviously, for their mineral wealth, but in Venezuela as well, looking at their oil. And what's interesting is that the relationship Venezuela has with the U.S., it exports a third of its oil, and the U.S. pays with cash. And so that's desperately needed. The regime needs money to function. By contrast, the Russians and the Chinese that get most of the rest of the oil, they are getting paid debts that the Venezuelans owe to them because of their investment in the country. So Venezuela does not get hard cash and currency from Russia or China, but it has to pay them oil for debts that they have. And so it's curious that while you have this widespread international support for Guaido, the opposition leader, Russia, together with China, together with Turkey, together with just a couple of other sort of bad boys are standing firm behind the Maduro regime. And so it's got this curious dynamic. Now, aside from that, it's also interesting to see the role of Latin American countries, big players like Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Brazil, I'm sorry. And Mexico curiously trying to somehow take a softer position, a more neutral one. Some have been critical that it has been too soft. It hasn't really stepped up to join the others. This relatively new administration in Mexico is in some ways trying to assert maybe a non-intervention status, or some have said maybe it's trying to set up to be a mediator. But in fact, that role is now being assumed by Uruguay and the European Union rather than Mexico. So Mexico's a little bit outside of it at the moment, although, you know, they're trying to balance it. They're trying to redefine what their foreign policy should be. Because Mexico, Venezuela, Brazil, these are the big Latin American countries. The other final point I would add is Venezuela is important. I mean, not just because it's the big oil market, but there's a large community today and a growing one given the immigration and the diaspora that exist in South Florida, that exist in New York, New Jersey, and a few other spots. A large number of Venezuelans in the U.S. now, we can speak of a diaspora that much like in the past, Cuba, the Cuban-Americans were determining. In fact, so powerful that any presidential leader had to suck up to them. That's not happening in the case of Venezuelans. But my point is that the economies are linked, but so are the societies. We have a big community of Venezuelans, even there in Hawaii, you've got some that you brought on your show yesterday. And so these people have an interest. They want their country to go back to what its real potential could be. These people that have left, I'm sure many of them would prefer to be going back home and rebuilding. Hopefully that can be done in the coming years. Right now, it's still not there. We're going to see how this crisis unfolds. It could be changing dynamic in a matter of days or weeks. Absolutely. Or it could languish. Yes. Well, Carlos will have to reconnect on it because the takeaway here is it's not over and it's complex and nobody knows exactly which way it's going to go. But I so appreciate this discussion with you. It's been great to have this fire hose of information from you, as always. Thanks so much. I look forward to our next global connection. Carlos Juarez, the host of Global Connection. Thank you so much.