Tamara Taraciuk, expert on Venezuela: ‘Time is on Maduro’s side’

Tamara Taraciuk Broner is closely linked to Venezuela and democracy. The director of the Inter-American Dialogue’s Peter D. Bell Rule of Law Program was born in Caracas, where her parents were exiled by the Argentine dictatorship of the 1970s. Now, from this center for political analysis and exchange, she tries to find solutions to the critical repression and authoritarianism that her native country is experiencing.

Her grandfather, Julio Broner, a businessman who was president of the General Economic Confederation during the last government of Juan Domingo Perón, was a victim of the military regime that kept Argentina under a bloody dictatorship. In 1977, Broner was traveling with his wife Dolly Rubinstein when they were detained at an airport and their passports were taken away, just as many Venezuelans have experienced in the last month. That scene, which she describes in the book Julio Broner, Argentino por opción (Julio Broner, Argentine by Choice) that she published so that her children can learn about their family history, explains the reason why she has worked for more than 20 years documenting human rights violations in Latin America. “It is dedicated to my children with the hope that they can always freely choose their destiny,” says Taraciuk (1979), a lawyer from the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella (UTDT) who worked for almost 17 years at Human Rights Watch. From Uruguay, where she currently lives, she spoke with EL PAÍS about her proposal for legal incentives for a democratic transition in Venezuela.

Question. With your background, what role does the word democracy play in your life? How do you view it at a time of so much discussion about its scope?

Answer. One of the things I learned from my parents and from exile is that the only thing you really have is what you carry inside. It’s something I’ve also seen doing work on the borders, where you find thousands of migrants who leave with just the clothes on their backs. That’s why I think democracy has to do with being able to choose where you want to be and how you want to live.

Q. That links you to the situation in Venezuela, your native country. Following the election, what alternatives do you see for resolving the situation?

A. What happened after the elections was to be expected. My impression is that the Venezuelan government let the elections happen for two reasons. One, because it needed some international recognition from the world’s democracies to accommodate the theory of normalization, that things were not so bad there; and to access certain markets that it needed in order to operate and sell Venezuelan crude oil. And, on the other hand, because they very poorly calculated the opposition’s margin of success and its organizational capacity. So, when election day ended with such clarity in the streets and with the evidence of the voting records that the opposition published a couple of days later, the regime did what it does best: entrench itself in power, repress and attack.

Q. Then came the decision of the Court of Justice, which, however, has not moved the needle in some countries...

A. It was no surprise that the Supreme Court of Justice was used, which has no independence or authority to do what it did and is part of this strategy to try to give a semblance of legality to the fraud. However, it is now very difficult for them to continue maintaining it. Four weeks have passed and they have not shown the voting records because they do not have them. They have no way of corroborating the official result announced by the National Electoral Council.

Q. So what are the scenarios?

A. I see two possibilities. One is that Venezuela will become a pure and hard dictatorship in the style of Nicaragua, which at first glance seems to be what they want to do; but the other alternative, and I don’t think it’s an inevitable outcome, is that they will be forced to negotiate a way out. For that to happen, several factors have to come together: the opposition has to remain united on the electoral path, as it has done until now, and continue to take advantage of the political capital generated by María Corina Machado; also, that people continue to demonstrate despite the repression. People went out to vote in very unfortunate and unfair conditions, and now they have to maintain that effervescence so that their right to vote is respected.

Q. The international community also has a strong role to play in this scenario.

A. That’s what makes this different from the past. Maduro’s traditional allies in the region find it very difficult to defend him today. Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Gustavo Petro and Lula have used some euphemisms, but they have not defended Maduro’s victory. That creates very different conditions because what is happening now is not Guaidó 2.0; the international community is not being asked, in an ideological way, to go and support a parallel government.

Q. What could be the limit for those three countries?

A. It’s good to see that they are not accepting the results and are asking for human rights to be respected, but I don’t think they have much room left if they want to continue saying that they are governed by democratic principles. In a way, Maduro did democracy a favor by doing things so badly. The fraud and the escalation of repression have been so crude that it is indefensible. Mexico has been more timid, but even López Obrador said after the Supreme Court’s decision that the vote tallies must be seen. It would be good then if the three of them called things by their name, said that the elections were stolen and demanded an end to the repression.

Q. What alternatives do you see?

A. Civil society has a role in this complex situation. In our case, what I do from the Rule of Law program is to put on the table a proposal for a legal incentive scheme for a democratic transition. There are a few incentives, although they can be morally very unpleasant for many of us — I have worked all my life collecting testimonies from tortured people and I know that it is not fun. In Venezuela, two major types of crimes have been committed in the last 25 years: human rights violations and crimes of corruption, drug trafficking and money laundering. As for human rights violations, there are some people who are involved in crimes against humanity and in those cases international law is very clear and draws a red line that cannot be crossed. It is not possible to guarantee impunity for those who are involved in these types of crimes because they never prescribe. The best alternative for these people is to seek refuge in countries that are not governed by international law or democratic principles, but these are the minority. Most people who are currently in the security forces, the judiciary, the executive branch, and some in middle and lower management positions, do have the possibility of accessing legal benefits.

Q. And how does this proposal of incentives for other crimes work?

A. While international law in general should investigate and promote transparency, prosecutors have many options. There are legal schemes, especially in the United States, that allow for reduced sentences, and even the president can grant clemency and eliminate a criminal sanction. Now, this cannot come for free, it has to be in exchange for concrete concessions that open the door to a democratic transition. So, there is a possibility that has to come hand in hand with increasing the legal threat. If those in power know that the threat of criminal proceedings outside Venezuela, both by the International Criminal Court and by other courts, is credible, the door is opened for a conversation where these incentives become interesting for some people in power.

Q. And are there already countries open to this proposal?

A. This proposal has two legs. One is legal, which has a strong basis, and the other is political, which has clear support from both the Venezuelan political opposition and the international actors involved. Petro, Lula or López Obrador have the advantage, in theory, of keeping the door open for dialogue with the Maduro government. The best thing they can do is show Venezuelan officials that what they are doing is not the best outcome for them, because this way they will not be able to govern, they will not be able to access the markets, because the bondholders are not happy, because they will not be able to sell the oil and because it is not in Petro or Lula’s interests to have a country governed by a criminal mafia on its borders. It is not just a matter of asking Maduro to willingly get on a plane and go to Siberia or anywhere else; in parallel, we must build these bridges with these other people in power who are not on a blacklist today, and do not have to be. Not everyone in the power structure in Venezuela is predetermined to go to prison for life for all the crimes they committed. And that is an opportunity to break the power structure, which is not monolithic.

Q. Many people say that accepting Edmundo González is like re-editing Guaidó. Why do you say that is not the case?

A. What is happening now is more similar to Guatemala, where Bernardo Arévalo arrived in power by chance, nobody expected it and he had to face an enormous number of challenges to assume power, including the use of the institutional structures of that country. That is what Maduro is trying to do. Obviously, Venezuela has a different global significance, but what is interesting, if we talk about removing masks, is that if in the case of Guatemala, where the facts were similar, there was a coalition in the region and several countries joined together to support a transition of power. It is worth asking, why if the regional community united in favor of Arévalo, they cannot do not do so in favor of González?

Q. Chile is on the opposite end. How do you analyze President Boric’s position?

A. Chile’s position has been extraordinary, remarkable. In Latin America, in general, left-wing governments have not had a consistent foreign policy regarding democracy and human rights. They have made decisions that are totally biased by ideology and that is very bad for the cause of human rights. In this line of work it should not matter if the victim or the perpetrator is right-wing or left-wing. Boric is then an exception on the left, having maintained a policy of principles questioning abuses, and mainly who committed them. In the case of Venezuela, the rest of the left gets the legacy of Chávez in his early years a little mixed up with the current situation, which has nothing to do with a socialist project.

Q. You have documented other repressive processes. Do you see anything new in the post-electoral repression?

A. It has been very intense in terms of the number of people arrested, but the patterns are the same. In the past, there was already the practice of roulette, which is to detain and take people from one place to another without informing their families where the detainees are and which, in international law, constitutes forced disappearance; abuses against detainees; intimidation by armed groups, which in Venezuela are called colectivos. In this case, I do see a greater intensity of intimidation through social networks, people who report how their cell phones are being checked in the street, how they are being made to show their WhatsApp messages. There is a higher level of social control. What we see is that after the elections, they took off their masks.

Q. Finally, there is the factor of the U.S. election in November. How could this affect the outcome if, for example, Donald Trump were to win?

A. In general, for the United States, Latin America is not a priority and Venezuela is not an important issue on the global agenda, but it is important to them in terms of migration. There are already surveys that show that, if the popular will is not respected, there are millions of Venezuelans who have plans to migrate mainly to the United States. Beyond who wins, the important thing is that there is consensus in Congress on the Venezuelan situation and that the foundations are laid for it to be given the importance it should have. The biggest challenge is how to maintain international attention on a crisis of this magnitude, so that it remains a priority issue, because time is playing in Maduro's favor. The urgency is that they do not let him buy time.

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