By Johanna Mendelson Forman
Watching events in Venezuela over the past two months has been like going to a magic show and trying to figure out all the tricks. There’s the president with the mysterious illness, then various disappearances followed by miraculous materializations and claims of cure. There is a vigorous campaign for re-election, but the president vanishes again, this time so long he misses his own inauguration. The stagehands know what has happened, but the audience is clueless.
Fortunately legerdemain comes to the rescue. Although the constitution demands that the incoming executive be present to take the oath of office, the Supreme Court waives this requirement on the grounds that, as a sitting president, he never left office. Many of his regional supporters from Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua, make a beeline to Caracas to attend an affirmation of his new term, even though he is not present himself. Proof of life appears in the form of a decree bearing the leader’s signature, like the creak of a floorboard at a séance.
If this storyline appeared in a novel by Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez no one would bat an eye. It’s what you would expect in his fictional town of Macondo. Sadly, Venezuela is not Macondo, and what the world is witnessing is the downward spiral of a democratic state so hollowed out as to make procedural gestures and court decisions on a presidential inauguration a fig leaf to cover up the creep of dictatorship.
While these matters of succession are indeed the internal affairs of the people of Venezuela, their government made an international commitment in 2001 to the Inter-American Democratic Charter that calls for adherence to constitutional order. The Charter was a watershed moment in the struggle to get past a legacy of military dictatorship in order to create a hemisphere of democracies that respects citizen rights and civil liberties. So far, with the exception of Cuba and the core Bolivarian Alliance countries, it has been largely successful—a post-Cold War phenomenon that has transformed so many of the regions’ nations into middle-income states with open markets, freer trade, and blooming middle classes.
Unfortunately, the forum that approved the Charter has been largely silent on what has just transpired, much as it was when Honduran president Mel Zelaya was hastily removed from office then illegally deported from his own country in 2009, and as it was when Paraguay’s congress impeached Fernando Lugo with little deliberation in June 2012. Speaking to reporters on January 10, Secretary General José Miguel Insulza summed up his views on the Venezuela situation this way, “the OAS participates when there is an institutional crisis between the powers of a state, but here there is no need. . .” He added that it was up to Venezuelan authorities to “interpret the Constitution and how they interpret it is their prerogative.” No matter if they are all loyalists to the president. No matter that the Charter is law (by way of treaty) in Venezuela.
The weakness of the inter-American system to defend democracy has been evident many times during the last decade or so. It is on display again as events unfold in Caracas. Sadly, one has to ask if this will turn out to be another disappearing act. But what will it be—Venezuela’s democracy, the Inter-American Democratic Charter, the OAS, or all three? Just like at the magic show, only the illusionists and backstage assistants know what’s going on for sure.
Johanna Mendelson Forman is a senior associate in the CSIS Americas program.
Photo credit: pengrinâ„¢, FLICKR, Creative Commons, http://www.flickr.com/photos/pengrin/5091081202.