Front Burner - Amid desperation, Canada targets Venezuelan 'dictatorship'

Episode Date: January 11, 2019

As Venezuela struggles with food shortages and hyperinflation, journalists Adrienne Arsenault and Evan Dyer describe the conditions on the ground and how Canada is responding. Minister of Foreign Affairs Chrystia Freeland has condemned the country's government, saying it is "fully entrenched as a dictatorship."

Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goltar and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and most of all true crime podcasts. But sometimes I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Jamie Poisson. On Thursday, the Venezuelan president,

Nicolas Maduro, was sworn in for another term. Maduro won re-election last year, but Venezuela is in serious trouble right now. The currency has collapsed. Millions of people have tried to leave the country. And Maduro's opponents boycotted the election, saying it was rigged. A group of countries, they aren't recognizing Maduro's new government. They're called the Lima Group. It includes countries like Argentina, Chile, Brazil, and Canada. Today on FrontBurner, what's happening in Venezuela right now? And why is Canada taking a

stand? We have two of my colleagues here today. The National's Adrian Arsenault. Adrian has been to the Colombia-Venezuela border and has done some really incredible reporting about this crisis. Colombia-Venezuela border and has done some really incredible reporting about this crisis. Evan Dyer is in our Ottawa Bureau and he's been speaking to Canadian officials about our role in all of this. Hi guys. Hey there. Hi Jane. I want to start with some context really quickly. Evan, can we lay out what's happening? Who is Nicolas Maduro first? Quick 101. Well, President Maduro, you often see him described as a former bus driver, which is true, but a lot happened between the days when he drove a bus and the days when he replaced President Chavez as leader of the country. He was a union leader in the bus drivers union,

and that's how he came to have a senior role in the Venezuelan Socialist Party. And then he became Hugo Chavez's foreign minister for many years, going back to about 2005. Over the time that he was foreign minister, he came to be seen as one of the more competent Bolivarian officials. And that led Chavez to sort of handpick him as his vice president and successor. Once President Chavez was very sick and he knew he was going to die, he made it clear that he wanted Maduro to succeed him. And he did. Between us all, he said, we're going to guarantee peace that this dear fatherland deserves.

But he's never had the popularity or the charisma of Hugo Chavez. He's tried to sort of repeat some of Chavez's stunts, the talking to the public through television, sometimes for a couple of hours a day. And yet his folksy manners just haven't clicked with the population the same way that Chavez's did, partly because the economy, unlike under President Chavez, is now a disaster. And he also has been eccentric and strange at times,

talking, for example, about receiving messages from President Chavez from beyond the grave through a little bird that whispers in his ear, that kind of thing. He landed on a wooden beam over there, and he began to sing. I felt his spirit. I felt him as though he were giving us his blessings. To more educated Venezuelans, he's often a figure of fun as well. And I would say that, you know, we're talking about him now,

obviously because he's, you know, he's beginning this second six-year term. And so many people just see it as a total sham because the election, you know, political opponents, popular ones, were banned from running. You know, one of the largest anti-government parties boycotted it. And it's seen by so many people as kind of a painful joke. so many people as kind of a painful joke. You know, the fury about him goes beyond, you know, the quirkiness of, as you said, Evan, the little bird speaking to him. It's real rage now.

Absolutely. I want to pick up on what Evan was talking about, about the economy in Venezuela. Oil prices, they dropped a lot in 2014. It's a very oil-dependent economy. So the currency in Venezuela has now collapsed, essentially. It's lost almost all of its value. Adrienne, when the currency collapsed, what happened to the country's economy?

Can you paint me a picture? Number-wise, math became probably the biggest preoccupation of people in Venezuela because the numbers just started to get crazy. So you've had five years of a really deep recession. You've got 90% poverty rate, an attempt to defeat that. The minimum wage has gone up by like 150%. But that means nothing because there's been this hyperinflation since 2016, and I was just sort of checking some numbers. The last rate I saw that the inflation rate is 224,000%, which, again, sort of means— That's not even a real thing.

No, it's not at all a real thing. So if you look at what that actually means on the ground, I was communicating with a colleague who's in Venezuela now, and I'd love to give her credit for this, but we cannot name her for her own safety. But I was saying, so what's worth what? And she said, okay, so in December, it was sort of 213 bolivars for a dollar. And then on Monday, it was 613. Today, On Monday, it was 613. Today, it's 1,600 bolivars to the dollar. So the hyperinflation is just completely bonkers.

Now the currency. They don't accept the fives or the twos. Now these bills that are not worth anything or aren't in circulation aren't accepted by establishments, commercial centers, businesses. No one wants them. Is the idea here that this was economy that was so dependent on oil that they never created their own industries? They weren't making their own things. So when the price of oil dropped so drastically in 2014, the bottom of this entire country fell out from underneath it. Is that fair? I think that's fair. I think there's a bunch of

reasons for why it's gone so horribly wrong. And of course, if you were to ask Maduro, I mean, Evan, I think Maduro would say, oh, no, this is... It's the embargo. It's the embargo. It's others. It's not internal. As you've seen, the president signed a new executive order that strongly punishes the Venezuelan regime. The United States will not allow an illegitimate dictatorship to take hold in the Western Hemisphere. But this country really didn't diversify its economy, if you will. Like a lot of countries, it's a story of you tear down viable economies and you pour everything you've got into one that falls apart

and is mismanaged and the corruption is rife. Total economic disaster. It's not like a natural disaster that happens quickly. This is sort of a slow motion crisis. In oil dependent economies, people do tend to put all of their eggs in one basket when it's doing well. And that's long been a problem in Venezuela. But Venezuela did produce a lot more other things in the past than it does now. Venezuelan agriculture has collapsed and Venezuela is unable to produce its own food. And in the past, that was not really the case. There's power cuts and all kinds of reasons why Venezuelan industry and agriculture have just

collapsed. And if you produce products in the interior of the country, it's not even safe to put them on the roads and truck them to the capital for export. So it's turned it into a basket case. Can we elaborate a little bit on that? What it's like for people on the ground in Venezuela? How does this affect their daily lives? Again, this young journalist that we've been working with, when we were going back and forth, she was trying to send us some video files. And I said, so walk me through what's happening. And she said, well, we used to have really good internet, but I can't get anything through, in part because people are so desperate they are cutting the cords. So either they're cutting the cables and they're selling them or they're

stripping the copper out of them. And sometimes entire cell phone antennas are being stolen. So that's a huge issue. You've got people who say, you know, we left, we turned the key on our house, it was full of everything we had, we took what we could carry, and we paid a guy to watch our house to make sure it was okay. And then you hear the stories of houses being looted and apartment buildings being really ghostly and kind of empty. And sometimes people are saying, you know, we have enough good friends that will look out for us and chase people away, but they can't have eyes on the place all the time. And people are looking for anything that they can sell. So one of the weird things that was happening when you'd see people cross the border from Venezuela into Cucuta, Colombia,

they would walk a couple hundred meters into the town and then the women would sell their hair. I mean, there'd be someone waiting with a pair of scissors to lop off hair to sell, and then they were getting hard currency that they could buy fruit and vegetables with, and then sometimes walk back into Venezuela. When we talk about people who are leaving the country, who are emigrating the country, the latest numbers are two million people who have emigrated since Majora took office, something that is destabilizing the entire region. Adrienne, you mentioned that you were on the border with Venezuela and Colombia. Can you tell me a little bit more about what you saw there, particularly maybe how organized crime

played a role in what you were seeing? Well, you know, there are always smugglers. There are always people who know how to find an angle. And so sometimes people didn't have the right paperwork to get across, but they knew they needed to get out. So they would work with smugglers who would help them come through the rivers and through the brush. And occasionally we'd see the Colombian police turn away. Go through the bridge. Cooperate. Plus the journalists are here. Do me a favor. Go back. You know, they knew people were coming through,

and a lot of these cops were really wrestling with this because they knew they weren't supposed to, but at the same time, when we said to them, hey, you know, how did that happen? They'd say, look, wouldn't you let them through? Like, they're desperate. Look at their children there. But then you'd see, after the people came through, then came bags of meat.

And that's really frustrating for the Colombian authorities because that meat then goes into the market in Colombia and is sold along with, you know, the copper from the stolen cables and jeans and anything else that can be sold for real currency. And it kind of hurts the economy in Colombia, but you also know that the people in Venezuela don't have access to it. So organized crime is making a fortune off of this disaster for sure. And then other people who are just trying to feed their kids are becoming incredibly inventive. So we were talking about this earlier. I brought in like a brick of cash. Yeah, it literally looks like a brick. It is. And it's stinky, dirty money, right? So this is, I paid about a dollar for this. And these are old Venezuelan bolivars. And some of them were produced in like 2013, 2012, 2015.

You've got denominations of like two here, five, 20, and 100. About six or seven years ago, 100 would have maybe bought you a fair amount of food for maybe a month. 100 bolivars. Yeah, 100 bolivars. Now, I mean, it's completely worthless. Obviously, I could buy a whole stack for a buck. I think there's kind of like a story in these bills because as I go through them, you can see that people have been doing math on them. So this 20, someone scribbled this out and written 400. And then the next one, someone scribbled out, you know, 500 and written 700. So you can see that people

are figuring out what on earth these things are worth, at the time nothing. But then people got more creative. So this is a wallet. This family we met in Colombia took these old stinky bills, and then they decided to weave them into wallets and purses with a little bit of glue and some good old Velcro. And then they sold these on the street in Colombia as souvenirs and were able to get enough hard cash, Colombian pesos, to buy food for their family. enough hard cash, Colombian pesos, to buy food for their family.

You know, Venezuela at one point, not that long ago, was a pretty well-off place. You know, Maduro used to joke about helping out the United States if they were ever in trouble. And in fact, President Chavez used Citgo, the Venezuelan-owned oil company, to donate free heating oil to poor Americans. Yeah, that's right. Adrienne, when you were on the Venezuelan-Colombia border, it was a couple of months ago. And I know to get an update on what's happening now, you spoke recently to your contact on the ground. on what's happening now, you spoke recently to your contact on the ground. You know, this colleague of ours has been asking people questions about,

you know, how do you feel the international community is behaving and what do you need and what is life like? They've been talking with her again pretty bravely. We've seen how the Venezuelan society has lowered its hopes and expectations. And this has to do, it goes hand in hand with a bland opposition that has been more collaborators than a group that has really wanted to solve the challenges of the Venezuelan people. So that was a young man who'd been in several protests before, sort of in 2014, 2017, and each time he had been enthusiastic

that people would see the stories and would see the protests and would do something, and now he's sort of in a position where he's resigned that, look, Venezuela is going to end up being a Twitter hashtag, and people will say, oh, I'm so sorry, it's terrible what's happening, and that's the end of it. So my conclusion is that I think that regrettably Venezuela will just stay a news story, and very unprobably will anything change for the common good, the good of the average citizen. I think that, like in the last 10 years, we will see the government repeatedly abusing its power with impunity. It will just be a news story.

It will be a trending topic in Twitter and nothing else. CARLA CASTILLO, The people our colleague spoke with said, yes, we would like Maduro gone, but we are afraid of what would happen if it happens by force. So the opposition to Maduro right now is super weak. It's really disorganized. They don't speak with a unified voice. They're pretty ineffective, and he has a really strong grip for the moment on the military and the security forces.

And how does that happen? Well, some of it is he's continuing to pay their salaries. A lot of them are getting bonuses. That's an important way to keep loyalty. The moment the soldiers stop getting their paychecks, that's when there's trouble. Because if there are big protests and soldiers are asked to defend their country and go against their own people, and they're not being paid very much, that's the moment in regimes like this where people put down their weapons and walk. Majora was elected last year, although I use the word election with air quotation marks. Yeah.

last year, although I use the word election with air quotation marks. Yeah. Can you tell me a little bit about what happened there and why the international community thinks it's suspicious, for lack of a better word? Well, one of the objections is just the way that the election was conducted, where there was control of the media. The National Election Commission was packed with loyalists of the ruling party, and many opposition members were either in jail or in exile. And for those reasons, observers felt that that presidential election was unfair to the opposition. Those that were not in prison mostly refused to take part. Evan, I want to get to the response from the international community to this crisis. Canada is part of something called the Lima Group.

Can you just very quickly tell me what that is? That's a group of like-minded American nations, pretty much all of South America, with the exception of Bolivia, Ecuador. Those are two countries that sympathize with Chavez and then the Maduro government. But the big neighbors of Venezuela are all in it, Brazil and Colombia,

for example, so is Argentina and some of the other big countries. And of course, Peru was the host. Canada joined too. The one big American nation that's not in it is the United States of America. And why is that if we're in it? It's certainly not because it sympathizes with the Maduro government. It would like to see it gone. This corrupt regime destroyed a thriving nation by opposing a failed ideology. But there's a strong awareness by the other members, including Canada, that part of the propaganda of the Venezuelan socialist government is to accuse all of its American opponents, Latin American opponents, of being lackeys of the empire, of doing the bidding of Washington. And it's constantly drumming out that kind of

sort of Yankee go home ideology. And so to have a U.S. delegate at the Lima group with those other 11 nations was seen as feeding into Venezuelan propaganda, as giving it ammunition to make those claims. And we saw actually when they met last week in Lima and Canada sent Andrew Leslie, who's the parliamentary secretary to our foreign minister down there. Mike Pompeo made a brief appearance. He was actually down in South America for the inauguration of President Bolsonaro of Brazil. And of course, just by showing up, he gave the Venezuelans exactly that kind of ammunition. And they came out and said, see, it's the lackeys doing the bidding of the empire.

Canada actually suggested that Majority referred to the International Criminal Court. Can we talk about why that is? Canada backed that very strongly for two reasons. One was all about Venezuela. It does feel that Venezuela has committed these crimes, has committed these human rights abuses, and should be called on the carpet for it. That's the attitude of Canada's Minister of Foreign Affairs. I know because she said so.

Canada is extremely concerned about the deteriorating humanitarian conditions in Venezuela. She also made the point that Canada was sending a vote of support for the International Criminal Court. In fact, that reference came right after the U.S. came out. And remember that speech where John Bolton said the court is dead to us? I do remember that speech. The United States will use any means necessary to protect our citizens and those of our allies from unjust prosecution by this illegitimate court. So Canada and the other American members of that group who made that filing to the ICC, because it was also Peru, Chile, Colombia, Argentina, and other countries that backed that up. We're making two points there. First of all, they feel that Venezuela needs to be investigated and prosecuted. But secondly, they feel the ICC is the right venue for that kind of case, whatever the U.S. may have to say about it. So they're also demonstrating support for the court and their own independence from the United States. They're saying we're against Venezuela,

but not because Washington is telling us to be that way. One question I have, I think we've made it quite clear why Canada doesn't support the government of Maduro. But what do you think they want to see here? Is it possible that something else could come up behind him that's worse? That's always possible. That's always possible, isn't it? Yeah, I leave to both of you, but why don't we start with Evan? I think the government of Canada wants regime change in Venezuela because the current regime isn't legitimate. Looking at the history of how it's maintained power, looking at the polls, which continue to show that about 80% of Venezuelan people want to change, that number has been rising

steadily. It's hard to disagree with the view that President Maduro has crossed some kind of a Rubicon here when he suspended the National Assembly and held elections effectively without an opposition. He became a dictator. So that's what Canada wants. But what it certainly would not want would be total destabilization of Venezuela. I mean, when 8% of the country's already hit the road, I'd say we're already at that point. But things can always, as I didn't say, get worse. And they could even escalate to the point of a regional war. And it's not impossible to see some kind of a conflict starting, being initiated by Venezuela as a distraction or a last-ditch attempt to hold onto power within the country. And that could really spiral out of control. And, hey, I think we have to be totally clear that when you hear countries talk about worrying about Venezuela, they're worrying about themselves, too.

too, right? Like, so Colombia and Brazil and Ecuador, which are bearing the brunt of having to feed and house and clothe and medically care for and look after the people who are walking through their countries, they're worried about their capacity to handle those hundreds of thousands of people as well. Many of them, you know, not a lot of the people we met were saying that they were trying to get to the United States or Canada, but some are. And so there is a concern further north about, hey, you know, we, this is a planet on the move now for a whole bunch of reasons. Climate refugees, economic refugees, political, people literally fleeing for their lives. And I think a whole bunch of countries are trying to position themselves to make sure that they're generous, but not overburdened. I want to thank you both so much

for coming here today. You've given us so much to think about and I hope that you'll come back as this story evolves. You bet. On Thursday afternoon, Maduro was sworn into office for his second six-year term as Venezuela's president. Maduro tweeted the governments of the, quote, Lima cartel had 48 hours to, quote, rectify their interference position against our homeland, or he would respond diplomatically. Canada's foreign affairs minister, Christa Freeland, rejected that ultimatum. In a statement, she said Canada now considers Maduro a dictator and called on him to step down. That's all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson, and I apologize I've lost my voice at the end of this

week. FrontBurner comes to you from CBC News and CBC Podcasts. The show is produced by Chris Berube, Elaine Chao, Robert Parker, and Shannon Higgins. Derek Vanderwyk does our sound design. Our music is by Joseph Shabison of Boombox Sound. The executive producer of FrontBurner is Nick McCabe-Locos. Thanks for listening. See you Monday. and the Arab Spring is raging. A lesbian activist in Syria starts a blog. She names it Gay Girl in Damascus. Am I crazy? Maybe. As her profile grows, so does the danger. The object of the email was,

please read this while sitting down. It's like a genie came out of the bottle and you can't put it back. Gay Girl Gone. Available now.