In the latest from the Pivotal States series, which examines alternative U.S. foreign policy approaches to the world’s key nations, American Statecraft Program Director Christopher S. Chivvis was joined by Ryan C. Berg, director of the Americas Program and head of the Future of Venezuela Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and Carolina Jiménez Sandoval, president of the Washington Office on Latin America,to discuss the United States’ relationship with Venezuela on the eve of the possible return of sanctions.
This Q & A was adapted from a transcript of the event and has been edited and condensed for clarity. For past episodes from our series, click here.
Christopher S. Chivvis: What are America’s core interests when it comes to Venezuela?
Ryan C. Berg: It’s largely similar to what it is in Latin America, writ large: democracy. We have an interest in ensuring that strong democratic principles are upheld in Venezuela. Of course, those are what we’re here to talk about today because they’re most lacking.
Interest number two is ensuring that the present government in Venezuela doesn’t serve as a beachhead for some of our greatest strategic adversaries. We have seen it pivot to Russia, to China, to an extent to Iran. Part of our strategic interest there is making sure that [these powers] don’t have too cozy of a home in Venezuela to be able to present some kind of tangible security challenge to the United States and the Western Hemisphere.
We have an interest in ensuring that the regime does not serve as an incubator or nurture transnational criminal organizations, which it’s done in the past, especially in the border areas between Colombia and Venezuela. You may say that we have an interest as well in some of the economic factors in Venezuela, particularly the oil that Venezuela might be able to offer to international markets.
Carolina Jiménez Sandoval: I cannot agree more with Ryan when it comes to democracy. I think it is in U.S. interest to have a democratic Venezuela. A democratic Venezuela could be a reliable partner. Right now, the partnership that once existed does no longer exist.
A democratic Venezuela will be a place where some of the more than 7 million people living abroad will perhaps consider returning to. It is also important that people stop being forced to leave their home communities.
Venezuelans cross [the Darien Gap] to come to the United States—sixty miles of pure danger, where sexual abuse is rampant. In 2021, fewer than 3,000 Venezuelans crossed the Darien Gap. In 2023, 328,000 Venezuelans crossed the Darien Gap. In 2021, fewer than 51,000 migrants encountered at the U.S.-Mexico border were of Venezuelan nationality. In fiscal year 2023, that number rose to 334,000 encounters. In the current political context of the United States, migration is a major issue in electoral politics. So thinking about a democratic Venezuela is also thinking about a place where migrants can return to and where people won’t have to flee their communities of origin as they are now.
Christopher S. Chivvis: Do you agree that migration is really a key interest that America has right now when it comes to Venezuela?
Ryan C. Berg: I don’t deny that migration is an important factor when we approach Venezuela policy. I’m doubtful, however—and this is where I disagree with the administration’s policy—that sanctions relief can be that switch that we were hoping it would be to immediately shut off Venezuelan migration. People are leaving for other reasons.
Christopher S. Chivvis: There’s also a regional element to [this migration uptick], right?
Carolina Jiménez Sandoval: The main receiving country of Venezuelan migrants and asylum-seekers is the country next door, Colombia, with nearly 3 million. The United States is the third-largest receiving country of Venezuelan migrants. We’re talking about almost 800,000 people now. This was unthinkable five years ago. So that change has an impact on politics—both in the United States and the region.
The truth is that most Venezuelan migrants are still in South America—around 80 percent. These are developing countries with many needs and a lack of services, and now they have a large foreign population that also needs goods and services to survive. They need policies to be integrated into these economies. Unfortunately, we don’t see much of that happening. Xenophobia is growing in many of these receiving countries.
Christopher S. Chivvis: How did democracy fall apart in Venezuela?
Ryan C. Berg: I think a story that’s pretty well known now within Latin America because we’ve seen it in other countries: populism, charisma, quite a few resources at Hugo Chavez’s disposal, the institutional declines, attacks on civil society and the media, slowly closing civil and political spaces.
This all took place when Venezuela was experiencing an oil boom, so there are plenty of resources for Chavez to spend literally billions of dollars creating free housing, free healthcare systems, educational systems, and so on, which is of course increasing popularity. But at the same time, there’s less of a sense of accountability, institutionally speaking.
When Chavez dies in 2013 and passes the baton to his preferred successor, Nicolas Maduro, the rug is pulled out from Venezuela in terms of oil. There’s a collapse in prices, and Maduro becomes more and more repressive. Maduro’s regime is currently at the International Criminal Court for suspected crimes against humanity. There was a rigged election in ’14, there was a rigged election in ’18, and I fear we’re moving toward another rigged election.
Christopher S. Chivvis: What does a good path ahead look like?
Carolina Jiménez Sandoval: I think the election is one of the few and best chances in a very long time to see democracy in Venezuela restart again. The big question is: How do we get there? How do we make sure that on July 28, when the presidential elections will be held, we have the best possible conditions that are allowed in an authoritarian country? These elections are not going to be free, fair, and perfect. Venezuela is not a democracy.
But there are some positive signs in the last few months after the involvement of different political international and national actors that have opened opportunities that we did not have before. I think that is the path forward—a transition to democracy that is gradual and peaceful.
Christopher S. Chivvis: Very heavy sanctions were imposed on Venezuela during former president Donald Trump’s administration, and those remained in place early on in the Biden administration.
But in 2022 and ’23, secret negotiations resulted in an agreement—the Barbados Agreement—between the opposition and the Maduro regime that was intended to open up some of the [civil society] space. Concurrently, the Biden administration lifted some of the main sanctions that were in place.
My understanding is that the [Biden] administration wanted to demonstrate that it was willing to do something if the Maduro regime was willing to undertake meaningful reforms. But now, six months later, the question is whether to reimpose those sanctions, because so little progress has been made by the Maduro regime.
Ryan C. Berg: April 18 is the self-imposed deadline for the Biden administration to make their decision. The initial idea was to give the regime a six-month period of pretty juicy economic inducements through sanctions relief to try to get them to change behavior.
Instead, the regime has done whatever it thinks it needs to do to remain in power—including throw more innocent people in jail, build up the number of political prisoners that it has repressed in the main parties, and—most importantly—not respected the results of the primary elections. That vote was organized independently of the state and yielded a very popular candidate with 93 percent support, María Corina Machado. The regime blocked her, blocked her preferred successor, blocked pretty much everyone across the political spectrum—including, by the way, leftist parties. The Communist Party of Venezuela is as upset as folks on the other side of the political spectrum because they, too, have been blocked from putting forward their candidates. The thirteen candidates are all regime-approved candidates.
My position would be that the Biden administration should be looking to make alterations to General License Number 44, which allowed companies to partner with Petrovez, the state-owned oil enterprise, to be able to operate for this six-month period of time. Monetarily, the estimate was between $6 billion and $10 billion of economic value in that six-month window of sanctions relief. If you look at the overall budget of the regime, that’s a huge percentage.
We’ve done everything we can to give economic inducement to the regime to behave differently, and I just don’t see that they’ve really given anything. They did not shut the primary process down, and that took place less than a week after they signed the agreement. But immediately after the primary process occurred, they declared it null and void. They started investigating the primary organizers. They tried to haul certain primary organizers before the attorney general’s office, and they clearly haven’t allowed Machado to present herself as a candidate, despite her overwhelming support.
Christopher S. Chivvis: Is there still an argument to be made for extending the sanctions relief?
Carolina Jiménez Sandoval: For me, the question is what has happened since the Barbados Agreement was signed that has opened a window of an opportunity that did not exist before?
For anyone watching Venezuelan politics in the last ten years, the primary elections have been one of the most significant events of that period. [Venezuela is] a country with a humanitarian emergency. That’s why so many people are fleeing: you have to fight to send your kid to school, you have to have three jobs to make $10 a month, one out of three Venezuelans is food-insecure. So it’s very difficult to be politically active. And the primary did something that we hadn’t seen in years: it reenergized the society at the political level, and that was possible because there were negotiations.
For the first time in years, people saw that the opposition had a chance to stand against the regime. People thought that the primaries were going to be a disaster, that people were not going to vote. On the contrary, millions of people went [to the polls] and voted for Machado. For many, she represents change, which is what most people want.
Since then, what have we seen? Persecution, repression—no surprise. We have almost 300 political prisoners in the country. But we also have international electoral observation missions going into Venezuela that we did not think were going to happen. Now we still have to wait and see if these missions sign a MOU with the government. All those steps have been possible because negotiations happened.
Ryan C. Berg: I don’t think this is a question of whether we negotiate with the regime or not. It’s whether they’ve upheld the commitments that they said they would within the time frame that we set.
No one expected the Maduro regime to dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s, but you would really have to have a level of tolerance that I just can’t go to—to extend [sanctions relief beyond April 18]. I think the message that it would send to other authoritarians—on whom we also have sanctions and we’re trying to use them to negotiate certain outcomes—is that when the United States sets a timeline and certain commitments, we expect them to abide by them.
Christopher S. Chivvis: Can you talk a little bit about your alternative strategy here?
Ryan C. Berg: We had a maximum pressure campaign. Unfortunately, we didn’t get political change in Venezuela. So there are some people who will say our policy matters a lot less than we would like to think because the regime is going to do what it wants.
Christopher S. Chivvis: Maybe we just overall have less influence than we would like to believe.
Ryan C. Berg: I think what we’ve seen in the past six months is that sanctions relief is not the light switch that we hoped it would be on migration. Machado herself gave an interview to Andrés Oppenheimer, a Miami Herald columnist, where she said a rigged election in Venezuela is the type of precipitating event that could trigger a massive outpouring of migration. And I think she’s a hundred percent right about that. People lose hope and they leave, and I can’t blame them.
Christopher S. Chivvis: A country like Venezuela can look to Russa, China, or to some degree even Iran for support when the United States imposes these sanctions. Is that accurate? What do we make of that?
Carolina Jiménez Sandoval: There will be nothing new about Venezuela looking for support from China, Russia, Iran, and a lot of the black market if it cannot sell its oil to the United States. The past few years show that this is exactly what the government does. It does create a major deficit in its income because it sells oil at discounted prices to these countries.
Ryan C. Berg: I think it is hard to remove the geopolitical frame from any conversation on Venezuela. Maduro might not be China’s favorite partner—in fact, in Beijing, they probably consider him to be a clown. But he’s their clown, right? And they certainly feel more comfortable with him than a situation of democratic change where the outcome is super uncertain.
One of the things that the [Biden] administration said even before the start of this process was that the U.S. goal in approaching Venezuela was to try to cleave Russia and China away from Venezuela. I share that strategic objective. I think that’s a good one. But the problem that the United States is facing now is a loose network of authoritarian alliances. They don’t look like U.S. alliances and partnerships, but it’s China and Russia in their partnership, and any other countries they can bring along on the margins—the Iranians, the North Koreans, occasionally the Venezuelans—into that group to challenge the global order.
It’s really hard to consider clever diplomacy that can somehow cleave Venezuela away from China and Russia. And I worry that we think that we’re more clever than we actually are.
Christopher S. Chivvis: Is there a path where the United States can leverage its relationships with Venezuela’s neighbors for some kind of settlement or strategy that promises a better outcome in Venezuela?
Carolina Jiménez Sandoval: I think that is actually a very good strategy. There are individual sanctions that we in civil society support, because they are usually targeting perpetrators of human rights violations and sectoral sanctions. They’re multilateral—the European Union has imposed these sanctions, Canada, Switzerland, and the United States. And the sectoral sanctions are American sanctions. They tend to create tensions with Venezuela’s neighbors who feel that the United States is extra limiting Venezuela’s power.
But the truth is that there is a different political landscape, especially in South America since Lula da Silva took power in Brazil and Gustavo Petro in Colombia. And these are two really important leaders that speak to Maduro, unlike many others that have no connection with the Maduro government.
Petro was in Venezuela recently. I don’t think anyone was expecting him to fly to Caracas. He did. They issued a very broad and general statement, but then Petro revealed that he did not only speak to Maduro, but he spoke to the opposition as well. So that shows that those countries that are able to speak to both sides are playing a role. And we cannot forget that the negotiations have been facilitated by Norway, which has been a key player in this political context. So I think supporting multilateral efforts and engaging regional powers is a good strategy for the United States to continue to follow.
Ryan C. Berg: I certainly agree that we’ve been trying really hard to get Lula to say something about Venezuela. We’ve been trying really hard to get Petro to say more about Venezuela, and recently they’ve finally opened up about Maduro and the nature of the election, but it took a lot of effort. These are individuals that Maduro expects to provide him with cover, should he steal the election. So the importance of getting statements out there about the antidemocratic maneuvers and the human rights abuses that we’ve seen thus far is to put him on warning that he’s not going to have that cover.
We’ve finally gotten to a situation where I think both leaders are annoyed enough with Maduro that they’re pushing back. The key question for me is whether they maintain that position after the election, if he in fact rigs it or steals it. Will there be consequences, or will they lapse back into the relationship that they had with Venezuela prior and not really impose any consequences on Maduro?
Christopher S. Chivvis: What’s a positive future for U.S.-Venezuela relations look like?
Ryan C. Berg: My hope is for Venezuela to have a democratic flourishing.
Christopher S. Chivvis: Of course, but what’s a realistic but hopeful scenario?
Ryan C. Berg: The opposition does so well . . . that there’s an outpouring of support that the regime gets caught stealing brazenly an election. And then we have a crisis generated within the ruling elite where some individuals who are otherwise comfortable with Maduro start to say, “Maybe my future isn’t with this guy. Perhaps we should think about a leadership change.”
This could be the last opportunity for a democracy in Venezuela. And part of it I think is because María Corina Machado is just a generational figure. She’s managed to hold together a coalition that is notoriously fragmented. I don’t know how she does it, but all of the usual criticisms of the Venezuelan opposition in this electoral cycle do not seem to apply.
I would hope that for Venezuela, that momentum—even if the election is rigged—carries over into National Assembly elections anticipated in 2025, and the opposition can continue to build momentum. If political change isn’t possible in the moment, you need to build the foundations for it in the future.
Carolina Jiménez Sandoval: I’ll describe two potential scenarios. First, Maduro is reelected. In Venezuela, presidential terms are six years, so Maduro stays in power until 2030. In 2009, Chavez reformed the Constitution to allow for indefinite reelection. Maduro could run again and then be in power until 2036. And he could continue doing this, because that’s what authoritarians want: to remain in power.
The second scenario is what political scientists call stunning elections: elections that surprise, that stun you, that make you feel that something incredible happened. And that will only occur if Venezuelans go to the polls in massive numbers with a unified candidate and with the support of the international community. Then, for the next six years, instead of thinking whether or not Maduro will run for elections in 2030 again, Venezuelans will be rebuilding democracy in their country.
View the whole event in the player below, or watch it on YouTube.
Previously in Pivotal States: