By Michael McCarthy and Jared Abbott*

Maduro in Protected Cultivation Houses of Quibor-Edo / Flicker / Creative Commons /https://www.flickr.com/photos/chavezcandanga/8402610886/in/photostream/

Venezuela’s Communal Councils (Consejos Comunales), created in 2006, endure as an influential grassroots mechanism amid the country’s cataclysmic economic depression and political crisis. Increasingly, their primary function appears to be helping embattled President Nicolás Maduro’s ruling party maintain loyalty among its declining base. Three factors linked to Chavismo’s melding of party and state have enabled the Councils to survive amid radically changed conditions: linking them to state-run food distribution programs, giving them problem-solving functionality, and building block-level group ties in Council-created spaces.

• Survey data we collected in late 2018 demonstrates that participation in Councils has declined as resources have contracted, but the groups remain alive and well. Our poll of more than 1,078 Communal Council participants revealed that about a third perceive the Councils’ reach as remaining as strong as before the economic slide accelerated four years ago, while another 13 percent believe participation has even grown. Sixty-two percent of respondents who reported ever participating said that they still did in 2018.
• The Councils have been critical in minimizing major disturbances in popular sectors over the past five years through the role they have played – in coordination with the Comités Locales de Abastecimiento y Producción (CLAP) – in distributing monthly food boxes to a large majority of the population. Not surprisingly, of all the Councils’ thematic committees, food committees are by far the most active. Council participants reporting being active in a food committee increased from zero in 2009 to 20 percent in 2018.
• Our survey and interviews show that the Councils have been crucial in sustaining the party’s capacity to mobilize its core supporters in key moments such as during widely criticized elections that Maduro held in May 2018. Our research also finds that most Councils are not necessarily ideologically soaked spaces of pro-regime behavior, although many citizens understand them in highly political terms. Participation, while heavily skewed toward Chavismo, reflects the whole Venezuelan political spectrum and often transcends partisan politics. Our survey shows, moreover, that over 60 percent of Venezuelans reported as recently as last December that the Councils benefit the whole community, not just party members. This practical problem-solving dimension helps enable the Councils to retain relatively broad support among Venezuelan society.
• Our survey results suggest that the Councils are effective in increasing positive attitudes toward the government even in the absence of direct material benefits. For instance, of those who reported that their opinion of the ruling party improved since they began participating in a Council, the vast majority cited their improved social status in the community or increased political efficacy, rather than the receipt of material benefits through the Councils, as the reason for their improved attitude toward the party.

The Councils have operated across three competing models: a “deepening democracy” model focused on expanding avenues of citizen participation within the existing political system; a utopian “dual power” model aimed at replacing the existing political system with a radical direct-democracy; and a “vanguardist” model where the councils serve as a direct instrument of the party to mobilize and grow the electoral base. While all three models played an important role during the early years of the Councils, the vanguard model has recently superseded the others. Although still sometimes used by different party factions to stimulate debate about the government’s policies and performance, the Councils’ role in consolidating a loyal base of supporters to withstand the current period of economic and political crisis has been much more important.

The Councils’ evolving relationship with the ruling Socialist Party raises serious questions about whether, as political and economic conditions grow less stable, participatory institutions like the Councils open political spaces for engagement and incorporation, or devolve into a cynically deployed tool of populist autocrats – with unsettling implications for the future of participatory democracy that some leftist parties in Latin America advocate. Indeed, the Venezuela example suggests that, when political and economic conditions become less favorable for sustaining participatory institutions, most parties will either abandon them or instrumentalize them as part and parcel of an authoritarian power consolidation strategy. The groups’ changing political character becomes a matter not of “if,” but of “when.” Political party leaders can, if they want and if they try, stay true to the participatory vision through imaginative leadership and creative organizational schemes. In Venezuela, however, they have not.

September 9, 2019

* Michael McCarthy is a Research Fellow with the Center for Latin American & Latino Studies, Adjunct Professor of International Affairs at GWU’s Elliott School, and publisher of Caracas Wire, a newsletter on Venezuela and South America. Jared Abbott is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at Harvard University. This is adapted from their article, Grassroots Participation in Defense of Dictatorship, in the Summer 2019 Fletcher Forum.

By Stefano Palestini Céspedes*

EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs at the International Contact Group Meeting in Montevideo, Uruguay / EFE / Presidency of Uruguay / Creative Commons

A common feature of international efforts to deal with the years-long political crisis in Venezuela has been an inability to come up with a common approach – which, despite many countries’ agreement that it’s time for Nicolás Maduro to go, continues to hamper effective solutions. Three different and partly contradictory international approaches have emerged.

• Regime change, supported by the United States, the Secretary General of the OAS, and the 13 Grupo de Lima states (without Mexico). It assumes that there is no exit from the political crisis without the immediate ousting of Maduro and his cronies. All international actions are “on the table,” including coercion through threatened military action, coercion through sanctions (implemented), international recognition of a parallel interim president (implemented), financial support to Maduro’s opposition (implemented), and delivery of humanitarian aid (being attempted).
• Mediation with conditions, launched in Montevideo last Thursday by the Grupo de Contacto. Backed by member states of the EU, the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs, Uruguay, Ecuador, and Costa Rica, it proposes that the solution to the political crisis must be through peaceful means, namely national dialogue with international mediation. It imposes, though, a condition for dialogue and mediation to start: immediate presidential elections.
• Mediation without conditions, sponsored by Mexico, Bolivia, Uruguay, and the Caribbean Community (CARICOM). The so-called Montevideo Mechanism also assumes that the crisis can be overcome only through a national dialogue, with international mediation and monitoring, but it does not impose any conditions on any of the parties before undertaking the dialogue and mediation.

All three strategies entail problems and challenges, although the first sets a precedent that by far is the most problematic. It establishes regime-change, including military intervention by internal or foreign forces, as a legitimate international action to solve political crises. In contrast to what OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro has held in conferences at think-tanks, most experts assess that regime-change violates international law and, in particular, Inter-American Law. From an international perspective, such an action might be justifiable only under the strict observation of the criteria put forward by the UN Responsibility to Protect doctrine, which do not apply to the Venezuelan crisis as severe as it may be. The UN Secretary General has expressed his concern with the regime-change strategy, and some governments at the Lima Group also showed uneasiness with the military option at a summit in Ottawa on February 4. A main criticism is that it endangers civilians’ lives by making them potential targets in a confrontation, and it curtails any other alternative course of diplomatic action.

• The second and third strategies could be the way forward, but they compete with each other, nullifying their potential leverage over the parties in conflict. The “Montevideo Mechanism” was launched by Mexico and Uruguay less than 24 hours before European representatives landed in Montevideo to discuss the Contact Group’s mission. That timing and Twitter politics suggest a leadership struggle between Mexico and the EU that undermines what should have been a common alternative plan. The apparent split has allowed Maduro to reject the EU-sponsored Contact Group and hold out for the “Montevideo Mechanism”. Guaidó has rejected both and suggested that the states supporting national dialogue and mediation are not “on the right side of history.”

International actors’ inability to agree on a common plan severely hampers diplomatic efforts – and plays into the U.S.-led push for regime change by non-diplomatic means. For the Venezuela crisis to have a resolution that sets positive precedents, international actors will need to abide by common international norms, including Inter-American Law, and set aside political interests and ideological visions that preclude the emergence of a unified, effective front that forces Venezuelans to get serious about ending a crisis.  Failing that, the opposition’s preference for military-style regime change and Maduro’s preference for buying time through unconditional negotiations allow them to suck international actors into their family feud – and only delay an end to the crisis.

February 12, 2019

* Stefano Palestini Céspedes is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Political Science, Catholic University of Chile.