Venezuela’s Maduro
Pleads for Foreign Capital, Biden Deal in Caracas Interview
He’s trying to persuade the U.S. president to ease
sanctions.
By Erik Schatzker, Patricia Laya, and Alex Vasquez
June 18, 2021, 11:00 AM GMT+1
Seated on a gilded Louis XVI chair in his office at
Miraflores, a sprawling, neo-Baroque palace in northwest Caracas, Venezuelan
President Nicolas Maduro projects unflappable confidence.
The country, he says in an 85-minute interview with Bloomberg Television, has broken free of
“irrational, extremist, cruel” U.S. oppression. Russia, China, Iran and Cuba
are allies, his domestic opposition is impotent. If Venezuela suffers from a
bad image, it’s because of a well-funded campaign to demonize him and his
socialist government.
The bombast is predictable. But in between his denunciations
of Yankee imperialism, Maduro, who’s been allowing dollars to circulate and
private enterprise to flourish, is making a public plea and aiming it
directly at Joe Biden. The message: It's time for a deal.
Venezuela, home to the world’s largest oil reserves, is
starved for capital and desperate to regain access to global debt and commodity
markets after two decades of anti-capitalist transformation and four years of
crippling U.S. sanctions. The country is
in default, its infrastructure crumbling and life for millions a struggle for
survival.
“If Venezuela can’t produce oil and sell it, can’t produce
and sell its gold, can’t produce and sell its bauxite, can’t produce iron,
etcetera, and can’t earn revenue in the international market, how is it
supposed to pay the holders of Venezuelan bonds?” Maduro, 58, says, his palms
upturned in appeal. “This world has to change. This situation has to change.”
In fact, much has changed since Donald Trump put the
sanctions on Caracas and recognized opposition leader Juan Guaido as president.
His explicit goal, to drive Maduro from office, failed. Today, Guaido is
marginalized, Venezuelans are suffering more than ever and Maduro remains
firmly in power. “I’m here in this presidential palace!” he notes.
There has, however, been little of the one thing urgently
needed to end the Western Hemisphere’s worst humanitarian disaster: compromise
-- from Maduro, from his opposition, from Washington.
Maduro hopes a deal to relieve the sanctions will open the
floodgates to foreign investment, create jobs and reduce misery. It might even
assure his legacy as the torchbearer of Chavismo, Venezuela’s peculiar brand of
left-wing nationalism.
“Venezuela is going to become the land of opportunities,” he
says. “I’m inviting U.S. investors so they don’t get left behind.”
Over the past few months, Democrats including Gregory Meeks,
the House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman, Representative Jim McGovern and
Senator Chris Murphy, have argued that the U.S. should reconsider its policy.
Maduro, who these days rarely leaves Miraflores or the military base where he
sleeps, has been waiting for a sign that the Biden administration is ready to
negotiate.
“There hasn’t been a single positive sign,” he says. “None.”
A sudden turnabout seems unlikely. With broad support from
Congress, the Trump administration cited Venezuela for human-rights violations,
rigged elections, drug-trafficking, corruption and currency manipulation. The
sanctions it placed on Maduro, his wife, dozens of officials and state-owned
companies remain in place. While Biden’s policy of restoring democracy with
“free and fair elections” is notably different from Trump's, the U.S. still considers
Guaido Venezuela’s rightful leader.
Maduro has been giving a bit of ground. In recent weeks, he
moved six executives -- five of them U.S. citizens -- from prison to house
arrest, gave the political opposition two of five seats on the council responsible
for national elections and allowed the World Food Program to enter the
country.
The opposition, while fragmented, is talking about
participating in the next round of elections in November. Norway is trying to
facilitate talks between the two sides. Henrique Capriles, a key leader who
lost to Maduro in the 2013 presidential vote, says it’s time for winner-take-all
politics to end.
“There are people on Maduro’s side who also have noticed
that the existential conflict isn’t good for their positions, because there’s
no way the country is going to recover economically,” he says, taking time out
from a visit to the impoverished Valles del Tuy region outside Caracas. “I
imagine the government is under heavy internal pressure.”
Venezuela’s economy was already a shambles by the time
Maduro took office. His predecessor, Hugo Chavez,
overspent wildly and created huge inefficiencies with a byzantine program
of price controls, subsidies and the nationalization of hundreds of companies.
“When Chavez came into power, there were four steps you had
to take to export a container of chocolate,” Jorge Redmond, chief executive
officer of family-run Chocolates El Rey, explains at his sales office in the
Caracas neighborhood of La Urbina. “Today there are 90 steps, and there are 19
ministries involved.”
Once the richest
country in South America, Venezuela is now among the poorest. Inflation has
been running at about 2,300% a year. By some estimates, the economy has
shrunk by 80% in nine years -- the deepest depression in modern
history.
Signs of decay are everywhere. At the foreign ministry in
downtown Caracas, most of the lights are turned off and signs on the bathroom
doors say, “No Water.” Employees at the central bank bring their own toilet
paper.
Throughout the country, blackouts are daily occurrences. In
Caracas, the subway barely works and gangs
rule the barrios. Some 5.4 million
Venezuelans, a fifth of the population, have fled abroad, causing strains
across the continent. The border with Colombia is a lawless no-man’s land.
Cuba, of all places, has provided humanitarian aid.
Sanctions on Venezuela date back to the presidency of George
W. Bush. In 2017, the Trump administration barred access to U.S. financial
markets, and it subsequently banned trading in Venezuelan debt and doing
business with the state-owned oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela, or PDVSA.
Venezuela's Maduro: U.S. Should Lift 'Immoral' Sanctions
The offensive was brutally effective, accelerating the
economic collapse. Last year, Venezuelan oil production slid to 410,000 barrels
a day, the lowest in more than a century. According to the government, 99% of
the country’s export revenue has been wiped out.
All along, Maduro was working back channels, trying to start
negotiations with the U.S. He sent his foreign minister to a meeting at Trump
Tower in New York and her brother, then the communications minister, to one in
Mexico City.
Maduro says he almost had a one-on-one with Trump himself at
the United Nations General Assembly in September 2018. The White House, he
recalls, had called to make arrangements, only to break off contact. Maduro
blames it on the foreign-policy hawks in Trump’s orbit, many of them in thrall
to Venezuelan expats in Florida.
“The pressures were unbearable for him,” he says. “Had we
met, history might be different.”
A onetime bus driver and union leader, Maduro has proven the
consummate survivor. He defeated rivals to cement control of the United
Sociality Party after Chavez died in 2013, withstood attacks in 2018 and 2019,
and outlasted Trump.
Guaido, who worked closely with the U.S. campaign to oust
Maduro, has been forced to shift strategy from regime change to negotiations.
“I support any effort that delivers a free and fair
election,” Guaido says in his makeshift offices in Eastern Caracas, surrounded
by unofficial, state-by-state counts of Covid-19 cases. “Venezuela is worn out,
not just the democratic alternative but the dictatorship, the whole country.”
If Maduro feels the heat, he doesn’t show it. Several times
a week, often for as long as 90 minutes, he appears on state TV to blast the
“economic blockade” and pledge his servitude to the people’s power. The
populist theatrics drive home a carefully scripted narrative: Venezuela’s
sovereignty, dignity and right to self-determination are being trampled by the
immoral abuse of financial power.
During the interview, Maduro insists he won’t budge if the
U.S. continues to hold a proverbial gun to his head. Any demands for changes in domestic policy are “game over.”
“We would turn into a colony, we would turn into a
protectorate,” he says. “No country in the world -- no country, and even less
Venezuela -- is willing to kneel down and betray its legacy.”
The reality, as every Venezuelan knows, is Maduro has already been
forced to make major concessions. Guided by Vice President Delcy
Rodriguez and her adviser, Patricio Rivera, a former Ecuadoran economy
minister, he eliminated price controls, pared subsidies, dropped
restrictions on imports, allowed the bolivar to float freely against the dollar
and created incentives for private investment.
Rural areas continue to suffer, but in Caracas the impact has been dramatic. Customers no longer have
to pay with stacks of banknotes and the supermarket aisles, far from being
bare, are often piled high.
Maduro even passed a law full of guarantees for private
investors.
The reforms are so orthodox, they could be mistaken for an
International Monetary Fund stabilization program, hardly the stuff of Chavez’s
Bolivarian Revolution. Maduro responds that they’re tools of a “war economy.”
Sure, dollarization has been “a useful escape valve” for consumers and
businesses, but it and the other reluctant nods to capitalism are temporary.
“Sooner rather than later, the bolivar will once again
occupy a strong and preponderant role in the economic and commercial life of
the country,” he says.
It wasn’t so long ago that the U.S. saw Venezuela as a
strategic ally. Exxon Mobil Corp., ConocoPhillips and Chevron Corp. had major
holdings in the country’s oil industry and refineries in Texas and Louisiana
were retooled to process heavy crude from the Orinoco Belt. Wealthy Venezuelans
traveled to Miami so frequently, they talked about it like a second home.
All that changed when Chavez was elected in 1998. He
expropriated billions of dollars in U.S. oil assets and built alliances with
socialists in Cuba, Bolivia and Ecuador.
Maduro has gone further, embracing Washington’s most
threatening enemies. He describes the relationship with Russia as
“extraordinary” and sends a birthday card to Chinese President Xi Jinping. It’s
a taunt to Biden: Keep mistreating Venezuela and you’ll be dealing with another
Castro, not a leader who still holds out hope for a win-win deal.
Guests at the VIP Lounge at Simon Bolivar International
Airport were reminded of Venezuela’s new friendships. Three clocks mounted in a
vertical row showed the time in Caracas, Moscow and Beijing.
Asked in the interview what they signify, Maduro replies
that the “world of the future is in Asia.” But an idea crosses his mind.
Perhaps, he says, there should be clocks for New Delhi, Madrid and New York, too.
The following afternoon, there are indeed six clocks on the
lounge wall. In this country, Maduro is still all-powerful.
Except for one thing: Like so much else in Venezuela, the
clocks don’t work.
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