That, in the opinion of the House, the extreme socialist policies and corruption of President Nicolas Maduro and his predecessor President Hugo Chavez have imposed considerable suffering on the people of Venezuela and therefore the House call upon the government to: (a) develop a plan to provide humanitarian aid directly to Venezuela’s people, particularly with respect to alleviating the severe shortages of food and medical supplies; (b) condemn the continued unjust imprisonment and treatment of political opponents who, as reported by Luis Almagro, Secretary General of the Organization of American States on March 14, 2017, “fear repression, torture, and even death”; (c) call upon the Government of Venezuela to respect the right of the people of Venezuela to hold a free and fair referendum to restore democratic rule in their country; and (d) recognize that Canada’s foreign policy should always be rooted in protecting and promoting freedom, democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.
He said, Mr. Speaker, I have brought private member's Motion No. 128 to the House to urge the government to more actively respond to the ever-deepening crisis in Venezuela. This is a crisis not only in terms of the brutal denial of democratic process, free speech, free assembly, and the rule of law in Venezuela but because of the humanitarian tragedy that worsens by the day.
First, a little history.
Venezuela is a magnificently beautiful, resource-rich country on the northeastern top corner of South America. Simón Bolivar, born there in 1783, educated in France, and a disciple of Locke, Hobbes, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Napoleon, returned to the Spanish colony in 1807 and became the leading force, over succeeding tumultuous decades, in the liberation of the continent from Spanish rule and in the independence of Venezuela in 1830.
Jumping forward to modern times, after the Second World War a series of democratic governments presided over the then richest economy in Latin America, an economy driven by its vast oil and gas reserves. However, economic shocks, attempted coups and counter-coups, the impeachment of an embezzling president, and the collapse of public confidence in the government led to the 1998 election of a former coup-plotting soldier, Hugo Chávez.
Chávez launched what he called the Bolivarian revolution, rewrote the Venezuelan constitution, imposed extreme, often contradictory, socialist policies, and presided over the country's tragic downward spiral economically, socially, and democratically.
Chávez engaged in a close relationship with Iran and Cuba in support of terrorist groups like Hezbollah and anti-U.S. states. Under his gross mismanagement of the economy, his elimination of governmental checks and balances, and his survival of an attempted coup, Venezuela developed the worst inflation in the world.
As so many dictators have done over the centuries, Chávez blamed Venezuela's small but dynamic Jewish community for stealing the wealth of the country. His henchmen endorsed the Holocaust. Members of the Venezuelan state police were caught vandalizing and desecrating synagogues with crudely painted graffiti, the mildest being “No Jews wanted here”.
As minister of state for the Americas in 2009, I visited Caracas to hear testimony and to observe evidence directly linking the virulent wave of anti-Semitism to the personal direction of Hugo Chávez.
I must make clear, on behalf of Venezuela's Jewish community, that the long-suffering people of Venezuela did not then or now buy into the anti-Semitism of the regime. However, as the focus of state-directed anti-Semitic human rights abuse, many of the Jewish community have since fled to sanctuary abroad, a significant number now proud members of Canadian society in Thornhill, in the greater Toronto area, in Montreal, and elsewhere.
Under Hugo Chávez, poverty soared, as did crime and corruption. Malnutrition became common and chronic among children and adults. Chávez's death in 2013 and the election of Nicolas Maduro as his named successor, a vote widely considered to have been fraudulently manipulated, coincided with gross economic recession. In 2015, Venezuela's inflation rate passed 100%. Last year, inflation was estimated to have surpassed 700%.
To contain the rising outcry over severe shortages of food and medicines, Maduro last year imposed repressive states of emergency, renewed four times. Amnesty International has since documented a broad range of human rights abuses and crimes under international law.
Prison overcrowding and violence sparked by food and medicine shortages were blamed for a succession of deadly riots. Political opponents of the Maduro regime and pro-democracy protestors have been imprisoned without due process. Critical media companies have lost their operating licences. Unions have been hobbled and blacklisted. The supreme court, packed with regime loyalists, suspended an opposition referendum to recall Maduro and stripped Parliament of many of its powers. Public discontent has boiled over.
For the past two months, street demonstrations have been mounted in Caracas and other large cities and in smaller communities and villages across the country.
People are demanding elections, freedom for jailed politicians and pro-democracy activists, and foreign humanitarian aid for the sick and hungry masses, literally the masses. The street protests have seen steadily increasing violent actions by police, army, and vigilante groups that support the regime. Though the opposition leaders urge non-violent behaviour, protesters are increasingly responding to violence, unfortunately, with violence. At least 60 people have died on both sides of the recent protests. About 1,000 have been injured, and many hundreds of businesses have been looted and burned.
A recording obtained by one news agency is said to carry the words of an identifiable Venezuelan general ordering subordinates to prepare for the use of snipers against future demonstration leaders. Regime brutality in countering the demonstrations is already common. On one occasion last month, social media videos captured a government armoured vehicle deliberately driving into a crowd, killing and injuring civilians, and there are wide reports of civilians now being tried in military courts.
In March, the Secretary General of the Organization of American States, Luis Almagro, called on the 34 members, which includes Canada, to suspend Venezuela from the organization unless Nicolás Maduro's government moves quickly to hold free and fair general elections. In a 75-page letter to the organization, Secretary General Almagro set these conditions: elections within 30 days, the freeing of all political prisoners, the appointment of independent supreme court justices, and the reinstatement of laws suspended by the top court.
I would remind the House that Lilian Tintori, the wife of Leopoldo Lopez, Venezuela's leading political prisoner, who has been in prison and held unjustly for three years, has travelled the world pleading for support, meeting with Secretary General Almagro, President Trump, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the presidents of Mexico and Argentina, and the Pope. Last month, in fact three days after we asked the Prime Minister in question period why he had not met with Señora Tintori, she was granted a meeting and met with other parliamentarians of all parties here in Ottawa.
When it came to a vote at the OAS, Canada, along with 19 other of the 34 member states, including Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the United States, Mexico, and Peru, voted to suspend. Voting against were a small number of Caribbean states, states dependent on Venezuelan cheap oil, along with Bolivia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Haiti, and Nicaragua, as expected. There were not enough votes. It was short of the two-thirds needed to pass.
In response, in anticipation of another vote, President Maduro petulantly denounced the charter of the OAS and announced Venezuela's withdrawal from the organization, more or less emulating Groucho Marx by rhetorically wondering why Venezuela would want to remain in an organization that would have Venezuela as a member. As well, Maduro compared the OAS demands for democratic renewal in Venezuela with the OAS suspension of Cuba in 1962 and quoted Fidel Castro's equally petulant quote then, when he denounced the OAS as the ministry of the colonies. That left the OAS still pondering next steps.
There has been increasing agreement among the majority of OAS members that Maduro's attempt to change the constitution would effectively be a form of a coup within a coup and that as the situation in Venezuela has intensified, the violent polarization is an increasing concern for other countries right across the region. As Secretary General Amalgro has said from the beginning, the Inter-American Democratic Charter outlines two measures that can be applied: diplomatic mediation, or full suspension and effective isolation by members. It is not as though mediation has not already been attempted by the Union of South American Nations, known by its acronym, UNASUR; by the Common Market of the South, known as Mercosur; by the Vatican; by the U.S. State Department; and, of course, by the OAS itself.
As the democracies of the Americas, and beyond, ponder next steps to encourage or pressure the Maduro regime, there has been an unfortunate intervention by the big U.S. investment bank Goldman Sachs, which last week bought devalued bonds of Venezuela's state oil company. Goldman Sachs is reported by The Wall Street Journal to have paid about $865 million, or 31¢ on the U.S. dollar, for bonds worth $2.8 million.
The bank has defended its purchase, saying that while Venezuela is in crisis, it made the investment because it believes life has to eventually get better. It is often said that money has no conscience, and opposition politicians in Venezuela not yet in prison are accusing Goldman Sachs of exactly that. Julio Borges, who leads the opposition in the national assembly, wrote a letter to Goldman Sachs saying, “It is apparent Goldman Sachs decided to make a quick buck off the suffering of the Venezuelan people.”
Venezuela's opposition has previously been urging American banks to avoid any financial investments in Venezuela on grounds that they would serve to bail out the Maduro regime, as the Goldman Sachs' bond purchase seems to be doing.
Was this a less than glorious moment for capitalism? Certainly opposition leader Borges said that he would recommend to any future democratic government of Venezuela to refuse to recognize or to redeem the bonds in question. However, I digress. I will turn back to the democracies of our hemisphere and the next possible steps.
Foreign ministers and ambassadors from 33 member nations attended a meeting yesterday in Washington. Venezuela did not show. Canada, Mexico, Panama, Peru, and the United States put forward a declaration calling for an immediate end to violence, the release of political prisoners, restoration of the rule of law, and a demand that Venezuela abandon plans to confect a citizens' assembly to write a new constitution.
Canada's minister said Canada was ready to do its part for a return to peace and stability. Brazil's foreign minister was somewhat more direct. Aloysio Nunes said, “We're taking about people dying.” He said that democracy is not a luxury and that we must collectively rescue Venezuela's fundamental freedoms.
However, the resolution failed again to get the necessary two-thirds' support because the usual Venezuelan crony supporters like Nicaragua and Bolivia and a number of short-sighted Caribbean nations that depend on cheap oil from the Maduro regime put forward a blocking resolution of their own.
In sharp contrast, as diplomacy stalled in the OAS assembly and the foreign ministers and ambassadors dispersed with a vague plan to return in a couple of weeks or so, yesterday Venezuelan military forces were using tear gas and water cannons to block tens of thousands of civilian protesters attempting to march on the foreign ministry in Caracas.
Therefore, with the Venezuelan crisis deepening by the day, with 60 dead and thousands injured and many more held as political prisoners, with malnutrition on the rise and public health services and hospitals unable to function because of a lack of essential pharmaceuticals, I will return to the motion I bring to the House today, Motion No. 128. Let me remind members very briefly what it says.
Motion No. 128 calls on the government to first develop a plan to deliver humanitarian aid directly to Venezuela's people, particularly with respect to alleviating the severe shortages of food and medical supplies. It also calls for the government to publicly condemn the continued unjust imprisonment and treatment of political opponents, who, as was reported by Luis Almagro, Secretary General of the OAS, fear repression, torture, and even death.
Finally, Motion No. 128 calls on the Canadian government to again call upon the Government of Venezuela for a free and fair referendum to restore democratic rule to that country.