A man counts 1000-Bolivar-bills to buy groceries at the municipal market of Coche, a neighbourhood of Caracas on June 20, 2018. According to an IMF projection that poses volatile scenarios, inflation in Venezuela would reach 1 million per cent this year, with a single certainty: the dramatic deterioration of living conditions. PHOTO | FILE
The economy is in a shambles. By the end of this year, experts predict inflation there will hit 1 million per cent, one of the highest rates in history. Public services and health care are nearly impossible to come by.
Blackouts are common, water is scarce, and public transportation has all but stopped running. Crime has become rampant: Four of the world’s 10 most dangerous cities are in Venezuela. There is so little food that 60 per cent of Venezuelans say they’ve lost weight. Diseases once largely eradicated, such as diphtheria and tuberculous, are soaring.
Things are so bad that parents are leaving their children at orphanages because they can’t afford to feed them. It’s obvious that Venezuela needs help. Instead, the Trump administration is now threatening to add it to the US list of state sponsors of terrorism . Just four governments - Iran, North Korea, Sudan and Syria - have received that designation, which is given to states accused of repeatedly providing “support for acts of international terrorism.” My Washington Post colleagues John Hudson and Lena H. Sun called it “a dramatic escalation against the socialist government of Nicolás Maduro,” the country’s leader. Qualifications for the list, which was created in 1979, are vague. Joseph DeThomas, a former State Department official and professor of international affairs at Pennsylvania State University, has called placing countries on it “more of an art than a science,” saying that “political and diplomatic context plays a considerable role in such designations.”
States on the list can face sanctions, bans on arms-related sales, prohibitions on economic assistance and other punishments. But it’s a questionable tool, and there’s little evidence that it has helped keep the United States safer. A report by the Brookings Institution from 2008 argued that the whole idea of a list of state sponsors of terrorism is outdated and counterproductive. “The very concept of a binary list, with countries either on it or off, is flawed and often does more harm to US interests than good,” the report’s authors wrote. “Once a country is listed it is hard to remove even if it does not support terrorism (as Sudan has found out), and the list provides little incentive for partial or incomplete counterterrorism cooperation (which is all several countries are realistically likely to give).” The authors argued that the list fails to accurately capture which states support and condone terrorism. Pakistan, which has long aided a range of terrorist groups, is not on the list. Fifteen of the 19 terrorists who carried out the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were from Saudi Arabia, yet that country has never been included.
What’s needed, the report said, is an international consensus on what constitutes state-sponsored terrorism - and clear punishments for those that meet the definition. And even if the list were important and clearly defined, it’s not obvious why Venezuela belongs on it. Republican lawmakers such as Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida have argued that the Maduro government has ties to Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite militia and the FARC, a paramilitary group in Colombia.
But experts say that’s largely untrue. “I suspect this will be based on hearsay and sources of questionable integrity,” David Smilde, a senior fellow at the Washington Office on Latin America, told my colleagues. It’s possible that adding Venezuela to the list could further weaken the Maduro government by making it harder for American oil companies to keep doing business with Venezuela. But that’s unlikely to actually help push Maduro out of power.
In fact, it could have the opposite effect, allowing him to argue that imperialist America is the real enemy and cause of the country’s woes. Ultimately, adding Venezuela to the list would make it harder for the United States to provide humanitarian aid and global leadership on the issue. And support from the United States is needed if the international community is going to tackle the crisis, which is spreading across South America. Nearly 2 million Venezuelans have fled to neighbouring countries such as Colombia and Brazil in the last year. Venezuelans are leaving their home country at a rate of 15,000 a day, inundating the health systems and public services of nearby countries.
Erickson writes about foreign affairs for The Washington Post. Previously, she worked as an editor for Outlook and PostEverything.
