Latest protests underscore Maduro’s disappointing year as Venezuelan president

The violent protests that have rocked Venezuela since the start of the year have now lost their initial intensity but Nicolás Maduro still has little reason to celebrate a year after replacing Hugo Chávez as the country's president.

At least 41 people have been killed since the unrest started in early February. Worryingly for the uncharismatic president, there have been few displays of mass support that Chávez used to receive from poorer Venezuelans when the middle-class opposition mobilised against him.

Instead, confronting the demonstrators has largely been left to the security forces and armed chavista militias who have attacked unarmed protesters with live ammunition. Combined with this, his moves to muzzle the media have stoked opposition efforts to portray Maduro as a dictator. Delivered without the histrionic showmanship of his predecessor, Maduro’s own claims that the US’s “empire” is behind the unrest in order to seize the country’s oil sound tired.

In fact, the origins of this latest round of protests in the South American nation lie in one of the gravest failings of the Maduro administration – its inability to protect its citizens. The spark for February's demonstrations was the attempted rape of a student in in the city of Táchira.

Many Venezuelans are increasingly desperate at the state’s inability to control violent crime. According to the UN, Venezuela is now the world’s second most violent society, behind only Honduras. The independent Venezuela Violence Observatory estimates last year’s homicide rate was 79 per 100,000 inhabitants, quadrupling since chavismo came to power 15 years ago.

But having started as a protest against crime the demonstrators have since expanded their list of grievances. There is still anger among the opposition at Maduro’s use of the government-controlled electoral authorities to ensure his razor-thin victory in the election that followed Chávez’s death from cancer.

Frustration
Frustration at the slow-motion implosion of the economy is also building. Inflation, which was the world's highest last year at 56.7 per cent, will top 75 per cent by the end of this year, according to the IMF, pushing the country closer to hyperinflation. That would hit the poor – who have benefitted most from chavismo's Bolivarian Revolution – hardest.

Allied with expropriations and price controls this has wrecked Venezuela’s productive capacity and created increasing shortages of essentials from milk, flour and sugar to toilet paper. The central bank’s own shortages index estimates that shop shelves are missing about a quarter of their usual stock. Large queues form early outside supermarkets even as local media carry reports of imported goods rotting in government-controlled warehouses due to mismanagement and corruption.

The economic disaster in Venezuela is all the worse considering the country has the world’s biggest oil reserves at a time of high oil prices. But as the government burns through its reserves in a bid to cover a yawning fiscal deficit that is the result of a spendthrift administration a dollar shortage threatens to leave the country insolvent.

Without access to foreign currency international car makers and airlines are closing down operations in the country. Power blackouts are common. The World Bank predicts Venezuela will be the worst performing Latin American economy this year, slipping into recession. In a research note much-watched Venezuela analyst Daniel Volberg of Morgan Stanley warned that “the day of reckoning could come even as early as this year”. President Maduro has promised an “economic offensive” to reverse the tide but the announcement of details has been delayed.

Political peace talk
More promising has been political peace talk sponsored by the Vatican and regional body Unasur. The protests have damaged the opposition which fractured between the moderates who support Henrique Capriles and those led by Leopoldo López who tried to turn the protests into a demand for "La Salida" – the exit.

That allowed Maduro to paint his opponents as unreformed since the attempted coup against Chávez in 2002. López was arrested and other opposition politicians have been targeted with jail by the pro-government judiciary.

Venezuela’s neighbours are looking on nervously at the mounting chaos. Brazil recently allowed the country to join the regional Mercosur trade bloc and Caracas has become a source of lucrative contracts for Brazil’s construction companies.

Even more concerned is Cuba whose fragile economy is reliant on subsidised oil shipments from Venezuela, which it then sells on at a profit. Any disruption to deliveries and the communist island would lose its main source of hard currency, putting at risk its efforts a gradual economic reform.

Augusto de la Torre, the World Bank’s chief economist for Latin America, recently highlighted the risks chaos in Venezuela could have on Cuba and other Caribbean economies linked to it. “If the situation deteriorates rapidly there could be adverse collateral impacts on these economies,” he warned.