The ruler of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, wants to reach an agreement with the new president of the United States, Joe Biden, to lift the economic sanctions against his country, the world’s largest oil producer, according to a
The US economic sanctions, imposed during the Donald Trump administration, were intended to pressure Maduro to leave power. However, restrictions on the issuance of debt and the sale of oil have only worsened the already precarious Venezuelan economy without weakening the Chavista leader.
“If Venezuela cannot produce oil and sell, it cannot produce and sell its gold, it cannot produce its bauxite and sell it, it cannot produce iron, etc., and in the international market it cannot make its money, where does it go? to take out to pay the holders who have the Venezuelan debt? “said Maduro.
The Venezuelan leader hopes that an agreement with the United States to ease sanctions can open the floodgates to foreign investment, create jobs and reduce poverty. “Venezuela is going to become the land of opportunities,” he commented. “I invite American investors, do not be left behind.”
Some Democratic lawmakers – like the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Gregory Meeks – have argued that the United States should reconsider its policy toward Venezuela.
Due to the coronavirus crisis, some of the US sanctions have been relaxed. The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) issued a license on Thursday that will allow the Chavista government to carry out financial transactions related to the pandemic.
The extensions will allow the Central Bank of Venezuela, Banco Venezuela SA and Banco Bicentenario del Pueblo to carry out transactions that have to do with operations for COVID-19, according to a report from the digital media
However, Maduro assures that “there has not been even a signal” from the Biden government about an opening of the negotiations. And, although he has a very different policy from that of his predecessor, the US president still considers Juan Guaidó as the legitimate leader of Venezuela and demands the holding of “free or fair elections” in the country, something that Maduro has not guaranteed.
In search of negotiation
The Venezuelan leader has given some signs of economic opening in recent months, such as facilitating imports by the private sector and the circulation of the dollar. “The government is giving some oxygen to the private sector in large part because the Venezuelan state is collapsed,” economist Asdrúbal Oliveros, director of the consulting firm Ecoanalítica, told Expansión in February.
“Faced with a brutal fall in its income and, therefore, its expenses, the state has a manifest inability to provide public goods and services, and that vacuum ends up handing it over to the private sector in a very chaotic and disorderly process,” he said the analyst.
On the political level, he granted the political opposition two of the five positions on the board of the Electoral Council and allowed the World Food program to enter Venezuela last year due to the COVID-19 crisis.
Furthermore, Norway has revived attempts to become the venue for a new rounds of negotiations between the opposition, led by Guaidó, and the Chavista regime. “Well, I agree, with the help of the European Union (EU), the Norwegian government, the (international) Contact Group, whenever, wherever and however they want, (I am) ready to meet with all the opposition , to see what comes out of there, “Maduro said on May 13.
At the time, analysts said that these types of statements were a wink for the opposition, but also for the United States and the European Union, at a time when Maduro does not feel threats to his power in Venezuela. but the economic crisis is already unsustainable.
“Although nothing suggests that Maduro is ready to make concessions that could threaten his permanence in power, his recent actions do give indications of wanting to negotiate and could offer a rare opportunity to mitigate a crisis that has the Venezuelan economy on its knees,” he published in May the think tank International Crisis Group.
Even the opposition talks about participating in the next round of elections, in November.
“There are people on Maduro’s side who have also realized that the existential conflict is not good either in the position they are in, because there is no way to recover the country economically,” Henrique Capriles, the former candidate for the presidency that he lost to Maduro in a questioned 2013 election.
Devastating sanctions for Venezuela
Although the sanctions against the Chavista regime date back to the George W. Bush administration (2001-2009), they were reinforced during the Donald Trump administration. In 2017, the United States prohibited access to the United States financial markets. Later, it prohibited negotiating Venezuelan debt and doing business with the state oil company Petróleos de Venezuela SA (PDVSA).
The effects have been devastating for the Venezuelan economy, already weakened since the drop in oil prices in the past decade. This long deterioration is reflected at a general level in the collapse of production: while in 2008 PDVSA produced 3.26 million barrels per day of crude, in 2020 the volume averaged 400,000 barrels per day, the lowest level in the last 80 years.
Maduro assures in the interview with Bloomberg that he tried all the time to start negotiations with the United States in other ways. For example, he sent his chancellor to a meeting at Trump Tower in New York and his brother, the then Minister of Communications, to one in Mexico City.
Maduro says he almost had a face-to-face with Trump himself at the United Nations General Assembly in September 2018. The White House, recalls the Venezuelan leader, had called to schedule the appointment, and then they broke contact.
Maduro blames foreign policy hawks in Trump’s orbit, many of them held captive by Venezuelan expats in Florida.
“In the end, the pressures were unbearable for him and that contact fell off,” he said. “If we had met, another would have been the story.”
Maduro has proven to be a consummate survivor. He defeated rivals to cement control of the United Socialist Party after Chávez’s death in 2013, resisted uprisings in 2017 and 2019, and outlasted Trump.
Guaidó, who worked closely with the US campaign to topple Maduro, has been forced to change strategy, moving from regime change to negotiations.
“I support any effort that creates free and fair elections,” Guaidó told the US agency in his makeshift offices in eastern Caracas, surrounded by unofficial counts of COVID-19 cases, state by state. “Venezuela is exhausted, not only the democratic alternative but the dictatorship, the entire country.”
However, Maduro’s negotiating spirit does not go that far and he insisted in his interview that he will not give in to the United States. “We would become a colony, we would become a protectorate, we would kneel, we would betray the historical legacy of these giants, like Simón Bolívar.”
But it has already given in: it removed price controls, lowered subsidies, removed restrictions on imports, allowed the bolivar to float freely against the dollar, and created incentives for private investment. Maduro even approved a law full of guarantees for private investors, something unthinkable a few years ago for this socialist regime.
With information from Bloomberg
