It’s not only voices in the Americas that are calling for the removal of Venezuela’s brutal dictator, Nicolás Maduro.
The European Parliament also recognizes opposition candidate Edmundo González as the legitimate winner of last summer’s Venezuelan presidential election. And one of the strongest European voices condemning Maduro is conservative Spanish Congresswoman — or Diputada — Cayetana Alvarez de Toledo.
Alvarez, who is also an opinion journalist, spoke with WLRN last week during her visit to Miami to receive a democracy award from the nonprofit Inter-American Institute for Democracy.
In September, Alvarez, who represents Madrid for the Partido Popular (People's Party), led a drive in the Spanish parliament to urge the government of socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez to acknowledge González's victory in the July 28 contest.
Voter tallies show González won by a landslide over Maduro — who declared himself the victor anyway and had his security forces violently put down the Venezuelan protests that resulted.
"I said in that debate," Alvarez says, "that we must admit the truth publicly, because this has crucial consequences for democracy not only in Venezuela, but elsewhere.
"If we accept Maduro and his band of criminals, then we'll be accepting a sort of diabolical precedent that any other aspirant [to dictatorship] can apply to his own country."
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The Spanish parliament did in fact vote to recognize González as Venezuela's legitimate president-elect.
"It was a very important vote," Alvarez says, "because we managed to break the government's majority in Parliament.
"Unfortunately, the Spanish government has not done anything about this. They have said, 'OK, Maduro did not win the election, but neither did Edmundo González win the election.'
"So I ask: who has won the election — Napoleon?"
Left-wing governments in Latin America, like Colombia's, have also been accused of making excuses for Maduro.
But Alvarez was in the U.S. at a moment when it's a conservative Republican government that's being questioned about possibly placating Maduro so that he'll accept the thousands of Venezuelan migrants President Trump looks set to deport back to Venezuela — after revoking their Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, last week.
"If you want the Venezuelans go back to Venezuela, you have to liberate Venezuela. And that is my main message to the Trump Administration."Cayetana Alvarez de Toledo
Last week, as Alvarez spoke to WLRN, Trump special envoy Richard Grenell was in fact welcomed by Maduro at the Miraflores presidential palace in Caracas — a meeting that resulted in the release of six U.S. prisoners being held in Venzuela and Maduro's agreement to receive Venezuelan migrants deported by the U.S.
It's uncertain what Maduro may have won in return. Either way, Alvarez says she find the engagement concerning.
"To be perfectly sincere, I do worry," she says.
"What we have to do is not send back to Venezuela — to suffer torture, misery, repression — all these people in the U.S. who've been fleeing from the [Venezuelan] regime. What we have to do is address the real issue and the real problem, which is the fact that there is a criminal regime there."
Alvarez says she's aware that a large part of the deportation push has to do with migrants like members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, who've committed violent crimes in U.S. cities like New York. But she insists they're a tiny minority of the Venezuelan migrant population that has been pouring into the U.S. and other countries recent years to escape their country's humanitarian crisis, the worst in modern South American history.
"If you want a safe America, the way forward is not attacking or deporting thousands of Venezuelan asylum-seekers or immigrants. You have to depose Maduro," she said.
"If you want the Venezuelans go back to Venezuela, you have to liberate Venezuela. And that is my main message to the Trump Administration."
Still, as much as most of the world wants to see the Maduro regime ousted, the dictatorship is the reality that Trump, Spain and the rest of the world have to deal with, because Maduro has the Venezuelan military firmly behind him.
International criminal court
What, then, WLRN asked Alvarez, should the U.S., European and Latin American governments be doing to pull Venezuela's generals away from Maduro?
"The processes of dialogue that have taken place in Venezuela in the past 20 years have failed miserably," Alvarez insists. "I say there is an alternative: We have to be brave.
"Appeasement doesn't work. We have to look for maximum pressure on the regime. We haven't even said [formally] this is a dictatorship. So we have a long way to go in that.
"Sometimes we forget there are many mechanisms which nobody even talks about. For example, in 2005 the United Nations adopted a principle called The Responsibility to Protect. It obliges the U.N. to intervene in any nation-state who commits crimes against humanity against its own citizens.
"I mean, if people read the reports of the U.N. or Human Rights Watch — [there are] people with disabilities being beaten up, children and adolescents illegally detained by the regime.
"There's also the [U.N] International Court [of Justice in the Hague]. We voted in Parliament in Spain, I pushed it forward, asking the Spanish government to support the international criminal court order of warrants of arrest against Maduro and his band of criminals."
The other key issue in terms of that maximum pressure Alvarez refers to is oil, since Venezuela has the world's largest crude reserves and its economy depends overwhelmingly on those exports.
As a result, a big question is whether Trump's new administration re-tighten U.S. oil production and export sanctions against the Maduro regime. Spain's oil imports from Venezuela are at their highest level in almost two decades, thanks largely to a new U.S. license the Spanish energy firm Repsol has to operate in Venezuela.
Critics of "maximum pressure" against Venezuela say loosening the oil sanctions is good for relieving the suffering of the average Venezuelan inside Venezuela. But pressure proponents like Alvarez raise other questions:
"Repsol is going to have to assume the moral consequences of its decision to invest in the Venezuelan dictatorship.
"Many times I hear the Spanish government say its complacency with the [Venezuelan] regime is [based on] Spanish interests. And therefore I say: Are the interests of an oil company before those of human rights and democracy in a brother country, a sister country, of Spain?"
Alvarez, who was born in Argentina to an aristocratic French father and Argentine mother, received the Inter-American Institute for Democracy's opinion journalism recognition last week as part of its annual democracy awards.
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