Opposition leaders will meet representatives of the Nicolás Maduro regime in Mexico on Friday for a new round of negotiations aiming to end Venezuela’s political crisis, but the gathering seems skewed in favor of the rulers in Caracas, as their adversaries will attend visibly weakened amid signs that the country no longer holds Washington’s attention.
The opposition’s weakness is evident by the shifting of its aims, observers said, which have changed from getting Maduro to immediately step down from power to getting access to the upcoming regional elections.
That change shows Juan Guaidó’s diminished influence inside the country. While he is still recognized by the United States and other countries as the legitimate president of Venezuela, his agenda has increasingly been challenged by other opposition groups more interested in participating at the ballot box in municipal and state races than in an all-out effort to remove Maduro, analysts said.
“What’s on the table here (in Mexico) is the conditions for these state and local elections, plus other things that the regime wants — namely getting access to some of the money overseas and getting some of the sanctions lifted,” Elliott Abrams, former U.S. special representative to Venezuela, said.
“If this election turns out to be a complete fiasco, as is completely plausible, that will be a very bad start for those who think elections are the way to remove Maduro,” Abrams told McClatchy in an interview.
Abrams, who for two years spearheaded the Trump administration’s efforts to exert diplomatic pressure on Maduro, argues that the Biden administration is not paying as much attention to Venezuela, weakening the opposition’s chances at the negotiating table.
Washington should be playing a much more active role in facing Maduro and should be demanding a seat at the table in Mexico, he said.
“Under the previous administration, there was a special representative to Venezuela with an office, with a staff, and there was an Office of Venezuelan Affairs in the Latin America bureau. Now, the special representative office has been disbanded, and last week the Venezuela office was disbanded,” Abrams said. “All of this is a reduction in attention — a reduction in energy. Now who is going to represent the United States in Mexico City?”
Another sign of Washington’s waning influence at the negotiating table: Guaidó’s diplomatic representative to Washington, Carlos Vecchio, was removed from the opposition’s negotiating team amid the regime’s insistence that he was too radical.
The opposition has so far given in unilaterally to a series of demands introduced by the regime. That in itself is a sign of weakness, but removing Vecchio is particularly damaging for Maduro’s adversaries at the table, said Antonio De La Cruz, executive director of Washington-based consultancy firm Inter American Trends.
“Vecchio’s presence was the element that allowed that negotiation table a direct communication channel to Washington. The United States still is an ally, but having one of the negotiators talking directly to the United States is not the same as having the negotiators talking to the U.S. through intermediaries. Vecchio is someone who has direct access to the State Department and to Senate leaders,” De La Cruz said.
So far, the negotiations have been playing out in a different way than initially proposed by Guaidó in May as a way to “save Venezuela” from its worst crisis in history, which sought a road map toward “free and fair” presidential elections supervised by the international community.
The process, which suggested the eventual lifting of sanctions as a carrot to the regime, also sought to move Maduro toward opening the nation to international humanitarian aid and to COVID-19 vaccines, the liberation of all political prisoners, the safe return of political exiles and the beginning of a transitional justice process to address crimes committed by the socialist regime.
But while opening the door to a new dialogue, Guaidó admitted that “no one trusts the dictatorship,” while rejecting outright the possibility of holding future elections under the current National Electoral Council, or CNE, saying that the opposition does not recognize the legitimacy of the entity.
Given that the regime-controlled directors of the CNE are still in office and the upcoming regional elections are set to be held in November, it is not at all clear if the opposition still maintains this view.
The Biden administration, however, said that it continues to recognize Guaidó as the interim president of Venezuela, and that its support for the negotiations comes out of his May 11 public call to action.
“In terms of the negotiation process, we’ve been very clear that what we want are ambitious, concrete and irreversible steps that move the country toward free and fair elections,” a senior administration official told McClatchy.
“We’re not going to impose conditions on that — I think that’s a Venezuelan process. But we’ve made clear that, in terms of U.S. sanctions and U.S. pressure, we will increase the pressure if we see that there are steps away from free and fair elections, and we will alleviate pressure if there’s movement toward free and fair elections. And I think that’s a basic proposition,” he added.
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