It is an age of protest and volatility. In the face of entrenched authoritarian governments, ineffectual parliaments, and insufficient rule of law, chronic instability is becoming the norm. First it was Egypt and Libya and Syria, and, in the past few days, it has been Ukraine and Venezuela—and Turkey and Thailand, too. In most of these cases, protesters and police do battle as in some extended Kabuki drama, without apparent conclusion. The protest movement in Thailand is like the tides: it ebbs and flows but is unending, and the collective force that it leaves behind is both amorphous and binding.
In each place, the formula is pretty much the same: demonstrators take to the streets by the thousands to decry varying degrees of corruption, insecurity, and a lack of democratic transparency—all justifiable citizens’ complaints. The response of the embattled leaders has been to objectify their opponents (calling them C.I.A.-bankrolled “fascists” in the case of Ukraine and Venezuela, and “terrorists” in the case of Egypt, Libya, and Syria), to hunker down and fight back, and in some cases, to unleash terror. Their logic is that short, sharp bursts of violence will atomize the opposition, frightening protesters to such a degree that they will give up and go home.
In Egypt—this Egypt, where generals “saved” the country from Islamist “terrorists” by overthrowing a freely elected government—the tactic has succeeded. Fewer and fewer Egyptians protest the new government openly for fear of being branded as terrorists and ending up being tortured in a jail cell. In Libya, the tactic failed. Qaddafi’s use of violence to defend himself merely caused the rebellion against him to spread—and provoked NATO to get involved—until, eventually, the uprising swallowed him. In Syria, similarly, the Assad regime’s decision to open fire on peaceful crowds brought about a vicious civil war that has destroyed much of the country, killing some hundred and forty thousand people. But Assad’s intransigence has also paid off for him and his ruling clique—although not for his country—in the sense that he is still there, in office. The moral in this story is not moral at all, but a cold, stark lesson to those who wield power and hope to preserve it: if you can tough it out, come what may, you might outlast your enemies—and need not fear retaliation from a newly hesitant United States and NATO.
In Ukraine, the Russian-backed president Viktor Yanukovych, whose snipers and henchmen gunned down scores of opponents in public last week in Kiev’s Independence Square, is still on the run, having fled the Presidential palace last Friday night. Speculation as to his hiding places have ranged from a monastery to a military base in the Russian-occupied Crimea to his luxury yacht, the aptly named Bandido. In his absence, Ukraine’s parliament has declared his Presidency null and void, and issued a criminal arrest warrant against him for mass murder. Before he vanished entirely, Yanukovych denounced the move against him as a coup, and claimed that he was still the elected President. The Russians, although evidently contemptuous of Yanukovych’s incompetence as a ruler (and probably his cowardice, too), have nonetheless echoed these sentiments. Putin may yet make a military move, as he did in Georgia, in 2008, or, more likely, back a local secessionist bid in the Crimea. (Russia has a Black Sea naval base in Sevastopol.) There is some truth in what Yanukovych says, too, though rebellion rather than coup is probably the more accurate term for what happened in Maidan; it was the public mood in much of the country toward his government and its corruption and ties to Russia that accounted for the uprising.
In the past year, ever since he took over Venezuela’s leadership from Hugo Chávez, Nicolás Maduro has tried, and failed, to rule by imitating his charismatic predecessor. In facing down his own opponents, Maduro, to the extent that he knows what he is doing at all, seems to be taking a page from the authoritarian’s handbook. Lately, Maduro has attempted to cut off the oxygen for what remains of the country’s independent media by obstructing overly free-thinking television channels and refusing to allow the importation of the paper needed to keep the newspaper presses running. He has also imprisoned a prominent and popular opposition leader, Leopoldo López. López, responding to the spiralling public discontent with the country’s plummeting economy and skyrocketing insecurity, called for protests. At the demonstrations, several people were shot dead; more people have died in a steady trickle in the days since. The protests have carried on, and now, because of the deaths, they seem likely to continue.
Maduro initially blamed unspecified “fascists,” and Leopoldo López in particular, for the protests and the violence. They were, he said, part of an “ongoing coup attempt” against him. But video footage shows that the shootings were, in fact, the work of members of the Venezuelan police and plainclothes agents working with them. (The police also operated in apparent tandem with militiamen from radical colectivos who operate out of the city’s slums and also attacked protesters.) Maduro has acknowledged that members of the Intelligence Service infiltrated the protests, and dismissed its director in response to the video evidence of policeman firing shots at demonstrators.
Maduro speaks constantly, unceasingly, about the United States. In a press conference Maduro held on Friday, in Caracas, in which he spoke for three hours, he grandiloquently invited President Obama to a face-to-face “dialogue.” In an apparent attempt to get brotherly with Obama, he said how much he loved “the blues” and often felt as he had come “from Mississippi in a past life.” But yesterday he named Maximilien Arveláiz, a highly capable adviser, as his choice to become Venezuela’s new Ambassador to Washington. (The visa of the last Ambassador was revoked by the U.S., in 2010, after Obama’s choice for the American Ambassador was rejected by Venezuela; there have been no high-level envoys since then.) This is a wise move and a good start. Last week’s thuggery showed what Maduro’s regime is capable of, should it decide to take the gloves off—or loses control. (Whatever else the fifteen-year-old “Bolivarian revolution” may be guilty of, it had, under Chávez, rarely been violent toward its opponents in the old-school sense of the word; Chávez preferred to undermine Venezuela’s public institutions, and governed by giving speeches to cheering mobs.) It may be that Maduro himself was frightened by what he saw, and seeks to find a way back from the edge of the abyss. Strenuous efforts should now be made by Latin America’s most able diplomats—including those from Cuba, which has a key advisory role in Venezuela. Diplomats in Washington need to help, too.
As in Ukraine, Venezuela, in its own way, today teeters at the brink of something both dangerous and new. Ukraine, too, needs the full attention of regional diplomats. Both countries are confronting the disappointments and disillusionment of once giddy revolutions.
A little over a year ago, as Hugo Chávez lay dying of cancer, I wrote the following in a piece for this magazine: “After nearly a generation, Chávez leaves his countrymen with many unanswered questions and only one certainty: the revolution that he tried to bring about never really took place. It began with Chávez, and with him, most likely, it will end.” There is no doubt that his revolution is over, and it is not the only one. What needs to be found is a way out of the current mess, so that, little by little, Venezuela, Ukraine, and other countries on the edge can find their way back to some kind of working normality. They must become governable states with working economies and something approaching civic order—but they must also be inclusive and show respect for the rule of law. If not, the consequences will probably be catastrophic. In 2001, Chávez told me that if he wasn’t able to achieve a “real revolution,” as he put it, as the country’s President, “the people” would likely come out on the streets, as he had once done himself, “with guns, at midnight.”
Photograph: Carlos Garcia Rawlins /Reuters
