The Venezuela crisis may be doing more than turning much of the world against authoritarian socialist leader Nicolás Maduro — who is widely accused of stealing the July 28 presidential election.
It also appears to have split the opinion of the world’s political left.
That cohort is often prone to apologize for Latin America’s authoritarian leftist regimes, including Cuba's and Nicaragua's as well as Venezuela's. But, led by a younger generation troubled by what it sees as a double standard that hurts the left's image in the region, that may be changing.
The more traditional leftist response to Latin American crises like Venezuela's was evident last week when the Labor Community Alliance of South Florida hosted an online forum about the July election.
The Alliance is a Miami nonprofit that admittedly champions worthy and mainstream liberal causes — a higher minimum wage, climate justice, police reform. But its Venezuelan roundtable, featuring leftist activists who say they were eyewitness election observers, was advertised largely as a rejection of the widely held if also proven claims that Maduro committed massive electoral fraud.
“All the objective conditions in regards to the vote were met," Alliance co-chair Lorenzo Canizarez told WLRN before the forum. "So we need to respect the national sovereignty of the Venezuelan people.”
Canizares, a Cuban-American, argues the U.S. and the rest of the world should defer especially to what he calls the sovereignty of the Venezuelan Supreme Court’s recent ruling that Maduro won the election.
Maduro’s opponents insist — as do the U.S. and a host of other countries — that all credible vote-tally evidence shows Maduro lost to his challenger Edmundo González by a landslide. (Maduro so far refuses to release the regime's vote results.)
But Canizares compares the Venezuelans who say Maduro stole the election to the Donald Trump supporters who claimed the 2020 U.S. presidential election was tainted by fraud.
“Here in the United States, close to 50% believe that the elections in 2020 were stolen, because the results were not according to their liking," Canizares says.
"And the same thing is happening in Venezuela.”
Though Canizares asserts he's "very confident Maduro is not behaving like a dictator," he says he’s "not blindly defending" the Venezuelan leader, either.
But his take on Venezuela’s political upheaval is controversial. That's specially true given Maduro’s brutal crackdown on protesters and his arrest warrant for González, all of which has prompted the U.N. and international human rights groups to declare the country is living in a "state of fear."
And what’s different now is that it’s also controversial to a lot of people on his side of the political spectrum: the left.
READ MORE: Police rage and ransoms: Venezuelans face a 'perferse mafia state'
That's most evident in the stand taken by Chilean President Gabriel Boric. Boric is a socialist. But at 38 years of age, he represents if not leads that younger generation of Latin American leftists that’s less accepting of leftist autocracy.
When it comes to Venezuela, older leftist leaders in the region — like Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva — won’t say publicly what Boric recently said:
“I have no doubt the Maduro regime has tried to commit electoral fraud,” said Boric, who added:
“What’s more, it is committing grave human rights violations.”
That rare leftist criticism of Venezuela’s leftist regime is also being heard more on the U.S. left.
"It’s important for progressives to think about who is disempowered in Venezuela in this case — the people on the losing end of state violence."Michael Paarlberg
“The Venezuelan people voted by a 70-30 margin that they want to see Maduro out, so that is the expressed will of the Venezuelan people,” says Michael Paarlberg, a political science professor at Virginia Commonwealth University who was an adviser on Latin America to liberal U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont.
In an article for the left-leaning nonprofit Center for International Policy, Paarlberg — an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive Washington D.C. think tank — writes:
“[I]t is clear that Maduro stole the election.”
Domino effect
Paarlberg argues that doesn't make him or anyone else on the left less progressive. To the contrary, he believes.
He says he certainly understands how the harmful history of pro-right wing U.S. interventionism in Latin America has led many and especially older leftists to give rhetorical cover to leaders like Maduro who present themselves as anti-imperialistas.
But he warns that impulse to "decide that if the U.S. or Europe or whoever is bad, then whoever opposes them is good...is also very lazy." As lazy, he adds, as the right-wing impulse to regard any U.S. ally as good.
He also stresses his stand on the Venezuelan election doesn't cancel out his own criticism of U.S. policy toward the country, including the oil and other economic sanctions that many feel have hurt Venezuela's population more than its regime.
And he appreciates the realpolitik behind the caution taken toward Maduro by leaders like Lula, who has to be mindful of the ardent left wing of his Workers Party the way President Biden has to engage liberal Democrats like New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
"Lula has to hold his governing coalition together," Paarlberg acknowledges.
Still, Paarlberg says the left right now needs to show its solidarity with Venezuelans — not Maduro.
“A more people-centered approach," Paarlberg insists.
"I think it’s important for progressives to understand that governments are temporary but people are the ones living the consequences. They need to think about who is disempowered here — people who are on the losing end of state violence in this case.”
Championing the disempowered, after all, is supposedly what defines the left’s brand — especially in Latin America, home to the worst socioeconomic inequality of any region in the world.
As Boric also insisted in his remarks last month, Maduro's actions "are not the left or the left's ideals."
And when the left betrays those ideals, it also hurts center-left groups like the Democratic Party here in the U.S., say Democrats like Evelyn Perez-Verdia of Fort Lauderdale, who heads the communications consulting firm We Are Más.
“This has a domino effect at the polls," Perez-Verdia says. "It fans the flames of what Republicans are currently calling Democrats — socialists, communists.”
Perez-Verdia argues that alienates Hispanic voters.
“I think it’s very clear when you look at how many Hispanic Democrats have left the party in Florida since 2020," she adds. "It’s been close to 150,000," from 947,000 registered Hispanics then to closer to 800,000 now.
Florida’s Democratic leadership has condemned Maduro. But it probably also didn’t help the party when someone, presumably from the left, spray-painted a threatening pro-Maduro slogan last month in Miami’s Bayfront Park — where Venezuelan expats had just held a pro-democracy rally.
So far no one has been arrested.
Want more stories about the Americas? Sign up for WLRN’s Americas Report newsletter and we’ll send a round up of the most important news and stories from the hemisphere, every Thursday morning. Sign up here.
