How to Respond to Venezuela’s Humanitarian Emergency

Colombia’s hosting of a meeting on Venezuela today stands as an important opportunity to draw attention to the severity of the nation’s crisis, the suffering of its people and the burden it puts on its neighbours. It is also an opportunity to agree on broad outlines of a political and humanitarian response. The meeting should focus on reaching an international consensus on how to deal with mass migration from Venezuela, how to prod the government toward political compromise and how to prepare for sudden shifts in the country’s deepening crisis.

Facts and numbers tell the story. Venezuela’s economy has shrunk by roughly half since President Nicolás Maduro took office in 2013, due primarily to economic mismanagement and the ensuing collapse of oil production. In late 2017, the economy entered a hyper-inflationary spiral; prices currently are rising by over 200 per cent per month. Critically dependent on imports, and lacking hard currency, the country faces acute shortages of food, medicines and other vital goods. Many essential medicines have vanished from pharmacies while others register shortages of 85-90 per cent. The public health service has collapsed, while the provision of utilities such as water, electricity and gas is suffering prolonged disruption. Malaria, measles, diphtheria and tuberculosis epidemics affect large parts of the country, despite the quasi-eradication of these diseases in the past, and threaten to spread to Venezuela’s neighbours.

Up to 90 per cent of Venezuelans live in poverty and over a third cannot afford to eat three meals a day. Thousands scavenge for food in the garbage. In the past three years, according to figures from the International Organisation for Migration, some 1.6 million have fled the country, sparking a major humanitarian crisis and putting acute strains on the social services and job markets of receiving countries, notably Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, as well as in the northern Brazilian state of Roraima.

Meanwhile, from the Venezuelan government comes little but blanket denial. It claims the crisis is an invention of foreign media, blames shortages on U.S. financial sanctions introduced in August 2017 and refuses to allow in humanitarian aid.

The country is also embroiled in a political crisis. In the 2016 elections, the opposition took control of parliament, but since then the government has blocked its attempts to achieve peaceful political change. The government has used its control of the security forces and the judiciary to repress protests and jail, exile or ban its opponents. Most of the opposition boycotted the 20 May presidential election and the results were rejected by the U.S., the European Union and the fourteen-strong Lima Group of Latin American and Caribbean nations, leaders of which had been supporting negotiations between government and opposition until January of this year.

Three series of steps are in order:

• Immediate measures to address the migration and humanitarian crisis: Those countries that are bearing the brunt of the migration crisis need urgent, additional assistance from donors. The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) estimates that Colombia alone needs $1.6 billion a year to deal with the migratory inflow from Venezuela, far more than the circa $50 million provided by the U.S. and EU this year. This support should be funnelled through properly coordinated international mechanisms, including the offices of the new UN envoy for the Venezuelan migration crisis, and draw on pooled funding mechanisms under the supervision of the World Bank and the IDB. In return, Latin American countries receiving Venezuelans should ensure that migrants are eligible for public services and programs of social and economic integration. They also should honour promises made at a recent Latin American summit in Quito not to close their borders or demand unobtainable travel documents from migrants, as Peru and Ecuador threatened to do in August. Foreign donors should strengthen and support civil society groups providing humanitarian aid within Venezuela, while Latin American and European countries, as well as international organisations, must continue to insist to President Maduro that such aid is not a tool of foreign influence but a means of preventing even worse human suffering.
   
• Pressure for political progress: Pressure will need to be brought to bear on the Maduro government to achieve change. Sanctions are one such tool. While the U.S., Canada and the European Union have imposed some restrictive measures, most effective would be similar targeted sanctions – travel bans and assets freezes, for example – applied by Latin American governments against top Venezuelan officials. These penalties should be combined with clear signals that they would be progressively lifted in response to commensurate steps by the government to engage in meaningful negotiations with the opposition and relax harassment of opposition leaders and parties. Regional sanctions would be almost unprecedented and send a stronger signal than those imposed by Western countries alone.
  
  Some steps should be avoided. These include sanctions that would do broader collective harm by affecting strategic economic sectors such as the oil industry (eg, by banning Venezuelan oil exports to the U.S.), or otherwise inflict more suffering on the population. The same goes for more extreme measures. In recent weeks, reports have surfaced suggesting that the U.S. president had joined some in the opposition in floating the idea of military intervention, a position that a recent public statement by Organization of American States Secretary-General Luis Almagro suggests he also entertains. The solution to Venezuela’s crisis does not and cannot lie in such scenarios, which, if carried out, almost certainly would prove disastrous, and which in being proposed merely serve to deepen the Venezuelan government’s siege mentality. Military intervention would risk plunging the country into further instability and low-intensity conflict due to the abundance of illegal weapons and the presence of violent non-state armed groups, as well as the lack of consensus over who should run a putative transitional government.
  
  Only a negotiated transition, likely involving some form of guarantee for top officials in the Maduro government, toward the restoration of more inclusive politics and representative government, the reintroduction of constitutional checks and balances, and the economy’s stabilisation offers the hope of a viable and sustainable solution.
  
  China could play a key role, given its considerable leverage in Venezuela. While it remains close to the Maduro government, its interests would be far better served by a stable transition that respects its investments and Venezuela’s outstanding debt to Beijing, estimated at $20 billion.
   
• Preparation for a worst-case scenario: Even as they proceed on the former two tracks, Latin American governments and other international partners should be ready to adjust to any sudden political change in Caracas, most likely the result of factional tensions and resulting changes in leadership. The emergence of a more conciliatory Venezuelan leadership would provide an opportunity for foreign powers’ re-engagement in political negotiations and economic stabilisation. A more traumatic division or rupture in the ruling coalition, on the other hand, could exacerbate the economic and humanitarian crisis. In this case, regional states and donors should be prepared to further step up aid to affected neighbours and to pressure Venezuela’s allies on the UN Security Council into recognising the threat to international peace and security that the crisis poses.