Now that US President Donald Trump has deployed the largest warship in the Caribbean and the Venezuelan regime fears an imminent attack, it is the perfect time to offer an exit strategy to dictator Nicolás Maduro.
It is true that the international community and the Venezuelan opposition offered Maduro a negotiated solution several times in the past, and the latter always used these negotiations to buy time, later failing to fulfill all his promises.
But this time it could be different, more and more experts say. Unlike in the past, there is now a credible threat of military intervention by the United States.
José Morales-Arilla, a professor at Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico, and who has a doctorate from Harvard University, wrote an article on November 18 in “Caracas Chronicles” stating that the time has come for Trump to “offer smart exit alternatives in Venezuela.” According to Morales-Arilla, the current military pressure, along with offers of amnesty to some officials, could break the Maduro regime’s coalition.
When I asked him what he means by “smart exit alternatives,” Morales-Arilla told me that – in coordination with Venezuelan opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado – Trump should propose a two-lane exit plan to senior Venezuelan officials.
Maduro and other officials responsible for crimes against humanity should be offered safe passage to a country where they feel safe. Without that, they will never leave peacefully, because they know that sooner or later they will be judged regardless of the promises made to them today, he said.
But there is a second group of Venezuelan officials who are not directly responsible for serious human rights violations. Trump should offer them an amnesty, to encourage them to break with Maduro, Morales-Arilla said.
These are people linked to the regime who have been corrupt or have committed serious crimes, but who do not reach the moral and legal gravity of those who personally ordered massacres or have directed torture centers.
Obviously, seeing images of Maduro drinking mojitos in Cuba or dining at a luxurious restaurant in Turkey would be a tough nut to crack for the victims of his brutal regime, which has been accused of thousands of extrajudicial executions.
But an even worse alternative would be for Maduro to remain in power for years to come, many analysts say. That could happen if Trump decides not to attack, or if he limits military action to secondary targets, such as drug laboratories or a military base somewhere remote, without posing a direct threat to the regime, they argue.
Trump could decide not to seek regime change in Venezuela because he believes it would drag him into a protracted conflict that would be unpopular in the United States.
Francisco Rodríguez, a researcher at the Center for Economic and Political Research in the United States, wrote in the magazine “Foreign Affairs” on November 17 that Trump should seek an agreement to achieve a shared government between Maduro and the opposition.
“Short of an invasion – a measure that has little internal support and for which the current mobilization is insufficient – a show of force will probably not be enough to overthrow the Maduro regime,” Rodríguez said. In practice, “this would mean that representatives of the regime would have to agree to assign quotas to the opposition in key branches of the government,” Rodríguez wrote.
I fear it is too late to negotiate shared governance. It’s been tried several times before, and Maduro didn’t keep his end of the deal. There is only one legitimate government in Venezuela, and it is led by Edmundo González Urrutia, the exiled opposition leader backed by Machado, who won last year’s elections by a large majority.
Instead of seeking a shared government, the international community should offer safe passage for Maduro and his inner circle, and an amnesty for other officials not directly linked to crimes against humanity. That, together with the current military pressure, could break the unity of the Venezuelan dictatorship.
–Glossed and edited–
© El Nuevo Herald. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC
