Thank you very much for inviting us both, Mr. Chair, and into this gorgeous and historic chamber.
You have already received a wide spectrum of views on Venezuela: its virtues, its vices, and especially its human rights record. There will be some overlap with others, but I propose a slightly different angle of approach. I will focus primarily on democratic governance, some of which has been touched on by Lesley.
President Chavez has a hemispheric, or, as he would say, Bolivarian vision, and has been exporting that vision of democracy to receptive countries in Latin America and those in the Caribbean that are heavily indebted to him for discounted petroleum.
But first, it may be useful for me to declare which side of the Venezuelan divide I stand on. I'm sure you are familiar with the reports on Venezuela by the OAS's Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. They have taken what I regard as a critical, but not wholly critical, position, and I'm with them. They recognize achievements: the virtual eradication of illiteracy, the reduction of poverty, the narrowing of the gap between the very wealthy and the impoverished, and the increased access by the most vulnerable sectors to health care.
Whether the dark side overwhelms this positive side depends on where you place your values. But the dark side is dark and getting worse. The human rights commission rightly highlights the removal of checks and balances from the exercise of power, the loss of separation of powers, and the draining of independence from the courts. It states unequivocally that Venezuela has enormously diminished political and human freedoms. The police, secret police, and the courts are engaged, as Lesley has pointed out, in denying basic human and civil rights to individuals and groups, whether independent trade unions, indigenous peoples, or the media.
Elections still take place in accordance with a constitutionally approved schedule. So far, what happens in the secrecy of the voting booth appears to remain secret, and the results of voting have been fairly presented; for example, an increased number of opposition seats in the last slate of elections, which has, again as Lesley pointed out, increased the number of opposition and removed the two-thirds government majority that had allowed President Chavez to bulldoze measures through congress.
While one key part of the electoral system still works, that does not validate the whole process. The election playing field is not remotely even. There is no limit on government resources, including transport and the use of controlled media. Key electoral tribunals are controlled by government appointees. With alarming frequency, opposition candidates are jailed or otherwise disqualified.
In other words, Venezuela is not a full-blown dictatorship, but with its many dictatorial trappings it has become an increasingly authoritarian state.
There is also a culture of violence. Caracas is one of the most violent cities in Latin America. The government suffers from incompetence and widespread corruption. In its 2010 report, Transparency International ranks Venezuela as one of the most corrupt nations on the globe, placing it 164th out of a total of 178 contenders.
Non-petroleum sectors of the economy are deteriorating, including electrical energy, manufacturing, and agriculture. For the past two years, even the oil sector registered contraction. Inflation is the highest in Latin America. The economy is a mess.
These negatives touch primarily on the lives of Venezuelan people. However, President Chavez's Bolivarian vision has given some elements of this vision, such as democracy, a regional impact.
So what does Chavez mean by democracy? The best answer that I have seen was given in a paper last month by Joaquim Villalobos, a former Salvadorian guerrilla leader and now one of Central America's most respected intellectual moderates.
Over the past half century, Latin American revolutionaries, especially those shaped by the Cuban model, have looked to health and education as the transformative issues. As Villalobos puts it, western democracy was considered a bourgeois value; if social needs are met, democratic freedoms are not important.
But if not the substance, the label “democracy” is regarded by even the most totalitarian governments as desirable, as conferring legitimacy by resonance; for example, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Chavez has given the term his own spin. When the Inter-American Democratic Charter was being negotiated, he attempted to replace “representative democracy” with “participatory democracy”, which means, as you know, government by plebiscite or by other fora in which only the compliant participate.
This charter was the project undertaken by OAS countries to advance and codify the standards of democratic governance. Attempts to dilute the charter were finally defeated on the last day of the conference, which was September 11, 2001, with the Twin Towers rather literally falling down while Colin Powell delivered a dramatic and very effective speech.
Building on the democracy clause agreed at the Quebec City summit, the democratic charter sought to promote democracy and preserve it not only from military coups d'état but from the “constitutional alteration of the democratic order”, which has become the route by which some governments override the democratic process. These governments, and indeed the OAS itself in the case of Honduras, cherry-pick only those parts of the charter that they wish to see enforced. For presidents Chavez and Ortega and some others in the region, these are the articles that refer to coups d'état. They ignore the articles that refer to separation of powers, checks and balances, and freedom of expression. Missing from the charter are teeth for enforcement and attention to abuses that take place within the constitutional framework.
I will conclude, as Lesley did, with a question: what can Canada do? The answer: at the moment, not very much. Bilaterally, we have zero influence with President Chavez. We have more influence at the OAS, but that organization has been inhibited from addressing the abuses of the charter by Venezuela and its ALBA allies. Brazil, which has a robust democracy and increasing influence in the region, might help to support the very tentative expressions of concern recently expressed by Mr. Insulza, the OAS Secretary General, but has remained on the sidelines of this debate.
So what do we have left? In good company, we should try to shine a spotlight on these abuses, but to attempt to do so by ourselves or with the United States would in my opinion be counterproductive. We should not burn bridges unnecessarily. Internal disarray and dysfunction are tarnishing the Chavez image, and there are a few signs that his popularity in the region may be in decline. We should talk quietly to our Latin American and Caribbean friends and be patient.
Thank you.