Uma terceira via para a Venezuela

A Call for Clear Heads on Venezuela: How To Criticize Maduro While Opposing U.S. Regime Change, por Alejandro Velasco:

Amid crippling sanctions and threats of military intervention in Venezuela, many have put forward two options: support regime change or support the government of Nicolás Maduro. But this is a false choice. Instead, the U.S. Left can follow the lead of the popular, working-class sectors in Venezuela who have long maintained a complicated relationship to the chavista government. These movements show that criticism of the government—leftist in name but increasingly prone to corruption and repression—doesn’t mean support for the right-wing U.S.-backed opposition. In fact, healthy critique has been necessary to advance the socialist project. (...)

Yet popular support for chavismo was never uncomplicated or automatic. Anyone who has spent more than passing time with residents of Venezuela’s sprawling urban barrios can confirm that stinging criticism of the government has long been common. In chavismo’s early years, popular sectors inspired by Chávez’s rhetoric of empowerment demanded follow-through in the form of greater control over state resources, often taking to the streets against state institutions and officials deemed weakly committed to the kind of radical change Chavez increasingly promised. At other times they took to the polls, helping hand Chávez his only electoral defeat in 2007 in a failed constitutional reform that sought to concentrate rather than delegate power. (...)

Even if the record of U.S. involvement in the region were not sufficiently sordid to sound alarms, the fact that war hawks such as Marco Rubio, John Bolton and Elliott Abrams are helming U.S. policy on Venezuela should confirm that democracy, human rights and humanitarianism are no priority. Military options would prove catastrophic in the short term, as even some opposition sectors begrudgingly admit. They would also scuttle any effort to generate stability in the medium term, laying the grounds for a puppet regime with little credibility beyond its backers domestically and abroad.

But rejecting U.S. intervention must also mean rejecting Nicolás Maduro—lifting up critical popular-sector voices and refusing to feed into discourse that paints him as democratically legitimate, or a true leftist. Not as an empty gesture to “fairness,” but because Maduro’s government has long proven an obstacle to social justice in Venezuela.