The Final Blow to Venezuela’s Democracy

What Latin America Can Do About It

Author

  • Christopher Sabatini

    Dr. Christopher Sabatini, is a senior fellow for Latin America at Chatham House, and was formerly a lecturer in the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) at Columbia University. Chris is also on the advisory boards of Harvard University’s LASPAU, the Advisory Committee for Human Rights Watch's Americas Division, and of the Inter-American Foundation. He is also an HFX Fellow at the Halifax International Security Forum. He is a frequent contributor to policy journals and newspapers and appears in the media and on panels on issues related to Latin America and foreign policy. Chris has testified multiple times before the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives. In 2015, Chris founded and directed a new research non-profit, Global Americas and edited its news and opinion website. From 2005 to 2014 Chris was senior director of policy at the Americas Society and Council of the Americas (AS/COA) and the founder and editor-in-chief of the hemispheric policy magazine Americas Quarterly (AQ). At the AS/COA, Dr. Sabatini chaired the organization’s rule of law and Cuba working groups. Prior to that, he was director for Latin America and the Caribbean at the National Endowment for Democracy, and a diplomacy fellow with the American Association for the Advancement of Science, working at the US Agency for International Development’s Center for Democracy and Governance. He provides regular interviews for major media outlets, and has a PhD in Government from the University of Virginia.

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For months, most Venezuelans (not to mention the country’s neighbors and the international community) held out hope that there would be a popular vote on President Nicolás Maduro’s mandate this year. It seemed possible that the Venezuelan government would abide by the opposition’s request for a referendum that would put Maduro to a popular vote of confidence and perhaps lead to a change in government. But on October 20, Venezuela’s National Electoral Council (CNE) indefinitely suspended the process that could lead to such a referendum, closing off the last constitutional option to resolve the political crisis that has convulsed the petro-state.

Foreign observers have long debated how to best characterize Venezuela’s political system: it has been described as a participatory democracy, an illiberal democracy, and a competitive authoritarian state. Today, none of those labels hold. By repeatedly violating the constitution and denying citizens the right to express themselves electorally, the Maduro government has shown that it has become a full-on dictatorship. The deeply unpopular president governs by decree, the opposition-dominated National Assembly has been shut out of the decision-making process, the judicial system is under the control of the president, opposition media outlets have been harassed and shut down, and—as the recent declaration on the referendum showed—even the electoral council is in the pocket of the government.

To read more, please visit Foreign Affairs. 

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