Webinar Presentation: Venezuela lets the Carter Center observe its 2024 Presidential election

We should realize what a huge concession that is.

Thanks to all the organizers of this webinar. I’m very honored to have been invited to speak. Since we have several speakers I decided to focus in some detail about a topic I might not otherwise have addressed: the track record of the Carter Center in Venezuela. Much of this material is covered in the book I wrote with Justin Podur, but I’ll also put the outline of this talk on my Substack page and include citations there. 

The Carter Center will be observing the upcoming Presidential election in Venezuela. I am going to explain why Venezuela’s government allowing the Carter Center to observe its elections on July 28 is a huge concession, and that Venezuela would have been more than justified in telling the Carter Center to stay away. 

Why am I doing that? The Carter Center is not an organization whose track record stands out as bad compared to other US-based NGOs, think tanks and corporate media outlets. In 2004, when Hugo Chavez won a recall referendum by a twenty point margin, the Carter Center refuted statistical arguments that were put forward by the likes of Venezuelan economist Ricardo Hausmann to claim that the election had been stolen. The Carter Center actually went to the trouble of hiring statisticians to refute Hausmann’s arguments. But please bear in mind, this was a twenty point victory that Chavez achieved in 2004. The level of fraud required to pull that off would have left a mountain of evidence, so we should not get carried away praising the Carter Center for refuting Hausmann’s arguments. If you can't defend a twenty point victory with a ballot counting system as good as Venezuela's, then, really, what good are you? Defending that victory was the bare minimum to do if you had any integrity or competence at all.  But defending a twenty point victory in 2004 is not all there is to the Carter Center’s track record. 

In 2002, only four days after a military coup had briefly ousted Hugo Chavez, an op-ed by Jennifer McCoy,  who was then the Carter Center’s director for the Americas, appeared in the New York Times. She referred to the  Chavez government as a “regime” that had been “threatening the country’s democratic system of checks and balances and freedom of expression of its citizens.” She also said that Pedro Carmona, the dictator who presided over the deaths of about sixty protesters in the two days he was in power, “seemed to demonstrate autocratic instincts as strong as those driving Mr. Chávez.” She had the gall to compare Chavez to Carmona. 

Her piece also downplayed the US role in the 2002 coup by saying that Washington had sent “mixed signals” about it. There was nothing mixed about Washington’s support for the coup. Aside from US officials parroting Carmona's justification for the coup, the IMF, whose Latin America policy is run by Washington, immediately stepped forward to publicly offer Carmona's dictatorship loans. In fact the IMF official who did that was a former US State Department official (Thomas Dawson). 

In the US, and I’d say in the West in general, we come under a lot of pressure to let things like this pass: to support politicians or groups who offer very limited dissent against western imperialism and ignore that they reinforce very toxic imperial assumptions the way Jennifer McCoy did in that op-ed. 

Consider a widely cited remark by former US president Jimmy Carter, who of course founded the Carter Center. He said in 2012 that Venezuela’s ballot counting system was the “best in the world”. In 2012, Venezuela’s economy under Chavez was in the best shape it had ever been if you consider a wide range of development indicators. And even if you consider real GDP per capita alone, it was very close to its historic peak. So it’s not surprising that , under the conditions that existed in 2012, the liberal end of the US establishment represented by people like Carter would not be in full attack mode against Chavismo.

But in February of 2019 things were drastically different. The US under Trump pulled an “aid” stunt at the Colombia border that had many of us very concerned that the US might possibly invade Venezuela. By that time, Venezuela’s economy had been devastated by a deep and sustained drop in oil prices combined with the impact of crippling US sanctions. What was Carter saying then, in February of 2019? 

The Carter Center put out a statement attacking Maduro's government.  The statement accused Maduro of having “misused” Carter’s praise for Venezuela's ballot counting system in 2012. Carter’s statement did not utter a word criticizing US efforts to overthrow Maduro even as it looked Trump might possibly invade, not a word criticizing US sanctions that became undeniably murderous since 2017. In that statement, the Carter Center very bizarrely accused Maduro’s government of illegitimate “interference” in Venezuela’s elections. That part was so absurd I had to read it over a few times to make sure I hadn’t missed something. To liberals like Carter, foreign governments are obliged to sit back and let themselves be overthrown by US-backed subversives. 

Carter’s statement also stated disingenuously that the Carter Center had not “formally” observed an election in Venezuela since 2004. As people often say nowadays, the word “formally” did a lot of work in that sentence.  The Carter Center had in fact put out a very detailed report on the April 2013 presidential election.  

In preparing for this talk, I looked over the Carter Center’s final report on the 2021 regional elections in Venezuela. I was quite disgusted by it. The report contains exactly one mention of US sanctions. US sanctions - aside from being criminal and murderous - are also massive election interference. The transparently barbaric objective is to convince voters that supporting US-backed candidates is the only way to stop the sanctions.  

The only mention of US sanctions in the Carter Center’s report stated falsely that they were first imposed in 2018. In fact, broad US sanctions were first imposed by Obama in 2015 through an executive order that insanely declared Venezuela an “extraordinary threat” to the United States. The same executive order has been renewed every year since then. Trump dramatically escalated US sanctions in 2017 and by 2018 they could be credibly linked to tens of thousands of deaths. The Carter Center limited itself to a feeble remark that the sanctions were a “factor” that “intensified” a recession that as of 2021 had been ongoing since 2014.   

The report also says the Alex Saab case was an example of a “network organized to poison the information well” “to stoke debate on only one issue”. So to the Carter Center pointing to US criminality and brutality is an unfair tactic to use against the U.S.-backed opposition. The Carter Center also described the US capture of Alex Saab (which should be called a kidnapping) as if it had been an unremarkable international law enforcement that the Maduro government had dishonestly portrayed as sinister. The Carter Center referred to it as “the international warrant for the arrest of Venezuelan diplomat Alex Saab and his subsequent extradition to the United States”.  There was no extradition treaty between the United States and Cape Verde where Alex Saab was kidnapped for helping Venezuela evade the USA’s criminal sanctions. Today, the US Supreme Court Supreme has formally ruled that US presidents can do whatever they like, but this willingness to normalize US executive lawlessness clearly extends to liberal outfits like the Carter Center.   

Consider Jimmy Carter himself. He has an extremely good reputation. It’s totally undeserved. He took office after the US had just suffered a very drawn out and humiliating defeat in Vietnam. So Carter was in no position to take the US public into another war, not directly. The fact that Carter had only had one term in office also helped minimize damage to his reputation. But Carter did absolutely rotten things while in office. Carter funded the savage military of El Salvador even after the late Archbishop Oscar Romero sent Carter a letter begging him not to do so. Even before the Sandisnistas ousted the bloodsoaked Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua, Carter’s government maneuvered  to keep the Somozaist‘s in power, albeit it without Somoza himself. Like every US president since 1970, Carter lavishly armed the genocidal state of “Israel”, and Carter also armed a dictatorship in Indonesia as it carried out some of the largest scale atrocities of the post-WWII era.

Consider Carter's stance on the US war on Vietnam, one of the worst crimes of the entire twentieth century, which was quite a gruesome century. The US killed millions of Vietnamese trying to prevent a very popular communist liberation movement from taking power through elections. As governor of Georgia, Carter was outraged that the conviction of William Calley, the perpetrator of the Mai Lai Massacre, decreased support for the US military. Carter used the day of Calley’s conviction to declare a “American Fighting Man’s Day” in Georgia, to make sure everyone knew how fully supportive he was of the slaughter in Vietnam. Then, as President in 1977, Carter was once asked about the possibility of paying reparations to Vietnam. His response was monstrous :

… the destruction was mutual. You know, we went to Vietnam without any desire to capture territory or to impose American will on other people. We went there to defend the freedom of the South Vietnamese, and don't feel that we ought to apologize or to castigate ourselves or to assume the status of culpability 

So let’s not go easy on Jimmy Carter or the Carter Center.

We who live in the imperial core should try to spread the word about how amazingly tolerant of US-backed sedition the Venezuelan government has been over the last 22 years. If Maduro loses the election on July 28, which I consider unlikely but possible, it will be a huge loss not just for Venezuela but for the entire world. As was the case when the Sandinistas in Nicaragua were defeated at the polls in 1990, the lesson Washington will take away is that terrorism eventually pays, that aggression eventually pays. For a time, it may seem that US sanctions are ineffective or even counterproductive to US objectives, but the US political system enjoys such tremendous impunity that they can maintain murderous sanctions - and other criminal policies - indefinitely and hope that they eventually work.