Nicolás Maduro’s support for Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine constitutes an obscenity. That support was unambiguously manifested in the meeting held by the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, and the Venezuelan Foreign Minister, Carlos Faría, in Moscow on July 4, precisely on the Independence Day of the United States. So that there would be no doubts about who are the partners of the Maduro government in world geopolitics.
Other leftist governments in the region, such as that of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, have been more modest in the face of this unjustified and barbaric aggression. Even Xi Jinping, the undisputed leader of the Chinese Communist Party, has taken care of the forms. He has insisted, within the traditional hypocrisy of that country’s diplomacy, on respect for peace, the self-determination of peoples and national sovereignty, without explicitly expressing his support for the military incursion of the Russian army on Ukrainian soil. . Mr. Faría did not even respect the formalities. He enthusiastically referred to the Venezuelan government’s support for the “special operation in Ukraine,” the cynical way the Putin regime refers to the invasion.
The multilateralism that Hugo Chávez raised to justify his distancing from the United States ended up turning him into an accomplice and partner of the most disgraceful dictatorships and authoritarian systems on the planet. That line has been maintained by Maduro throughout the infinite decade that he has been governing. When he dares to leave Venezuela, he always addresses the few countries that approve of receiving him. All authoritarian. On his last tour he visited Iran, Turkey, Algeria, Kuwait, Qatar and Azerbaijan, none of them democratic. To Russia he has addressed several times.
It cannot be affirmed that the former militant of the Socialist League, formed in the ranks of Cuban communism, has many ideological affinities with the Russian despot. Putin is a man of conservative, imperialist thought, allied with the ultra-reactionary Russian Orthodox Church, who promotes a class of super-millionaire plutocrats, of which he himself is a part, in nothing like the ideals of austerity and asceticism that Maduro once upheld. when he admired the figure of Che Guevara. Putin is a wild right-wing conservative, if we stick to the canons of conventional political theory. Maduro, at least that is what he intends to project, is located in the field of the revolutionary left. So, what is the point of such a close alliance between two such dissimilar characters.
Currently, it would be in Maduro’s interest to distance himself from Putin in order to reap the greatest possible benefits from US and European sanctions against Russia. He could get sanctions lifted or relaxed against his own government, as Emmanuel Macron proposes. However, his movements are ambivalent and erratic. The foreign minister’s visit to Russia seemed unnecessary and inconvenient in the current circumstances, when the Joe Biden government has sent clear messages to ease relations with Caracas, and when it is very clear that Russia’s underlying conflict is with the West, with NATO and, above all, with the United States, which abandoned the isolationism promoted by Donald Trump and has once again assumed the world leadership that corresponds to it.
I believe that Maduro’s move points towards 2024. I imagine that he is thinking that Putin will emerge stronger from the invasion of Ukraine and that he, Maduro, will need an ally on the international board that is more active and committed to his regime than the Chinese, always so moderate and unpredictable. If the results of the elections scheduled for that year were unfavorable to him and he, invoking fraud or any other hoax, decided to ignore them and remain in power, he would require a military power to accompany him on that adventure. There would be Russia and a hypothetically victorious Putin, capable of showing his face on the international stage.
There may be several explanations for his behavior, but I can’t find any other reasons why Maduro decided to give such lively support to a Putin faced with the European Union and the United States, beset by sanctions, with creditors who want to collect every last ruble from him, with an economic recession in sight, without the possibility of increasing investments in Venezuela, involved in an armed conflict that will last indefinitely and increasingly isolated on the planet.
Maduro’s miserly support for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine must be understood in the context of his support for the opprobrious regimes in Cuba and Nicaragua, and in the complicity he has maintained with Colombian guerrilla groups in Venezuela. It is clear that democracy is not the political system that most appeals to him. His affinities with authoritarianism around the world should keep us alert, and convince us that we will only regain freedom if we organize ourselves to succeed in 2024 and assert our victory.
@trinomarquezc
