International Crisis Group

Venezuela: A House Divided

Caracas/Bogotá/Brussels  |   16 May 2013

Legal challenges to the close 14 April presidential election and the government’s reluctance to commit to a full review cast a shadow over the sustainability of the new administration in an already deeply polarised Venezuela.

Venezuela: A House Divided, the latest briefing from the International Crisis Group, examines the presidential election triggered by the death of President Hugo Chávez. Nicolás Maduro, Chávez’s chosen successor, won by a margin of less than 1.5 per cent over Henrique Capriles of the Democratic Unity alliance. The opposition has claimed irregularities and filed a court challenge after the electoral commission refused to conduct a full audit. The judiciary and other key institutions have been hollowed out in the fourteen years of Chávez’s rule, creating uncertainty about whether the transition to the post-Chávez era can be accomplished smoothly.

The briefing’s major findings and recommendations are:

• An already polarised country is now clearly divided into two almost equal sides that appear irreconcilable. Dialogue and reconciliation are essential to maintain stability, but doubts surrounding the election must be clarified for this to happen.
• The power vacuum produced by Chávez’s death is a source of potential instability. An extremely personalised political regime has been replaced by an unpredictable collection of group and even individual interests. The Chávez government dismantled important elements of democracy and the rule of law over the past fourteen years, and the costs are now being paid by the population, with homicide rates among the highest in the world and rising economic dislocation.
• Venezuela’s government should recognise that the sharp division of the electorate necessitates consensus building, not a partisan agenda. It should build bridges to the opposition, the private sector and civil society, conduct dialogue to reduce tensions and avoid violence.
• The international community has been mostly indifferent or silent about the deterioration of democracy and rule of law in Venezuela. It is time for stronger messages, particularly from neighbours and partners such as Brazil and regional organisations, regarding the need to avoid regional instability by resolving the political impasse peacefully and promoting democracy, rule of law and human rights, as well as offering mediation assistance if requested.

“There is a potentially dangerous gulf between the regime’s insistence that the election result be recognised as a condition for accepting the opposition, and the opposition’s understandable insistence that it can accept the election results only after a full and transparent review”, says Javier Ciurlizza, Crisis Group’s Latin America and Caribbean Program Director. “If the worst is to be avoided, the moderates (or pragmatists) on both sides need to find a way to bridge that chasm”.

“Venezuela urgently needs to reconstruct its social and political fabric in the post-Chávez era”, says Mark Schneider, Vice President and Special Adviser on Latin America. “It needs to avoid political violence and accept democratic checks and balances in addressing the huge challenges of crime and economic deterioration”. 

FULL BRIEFING

Mexico must curb cartel violence | Houston Chronicle 

By Mark Schneider

While the White House’s attention turned to a violent Middle East last week, right next door a vital ally faces a bloody challenge: In Mexico, 3,000 drug-cartel murders have been carried out in just the 100 days since the country’s president, Enrique Peña Nieto, took office.

The new president has announced plans to address this problem - and to break with the policies of his predecessor, Felipe Calderón. The devil will be in the details, but Peña Nieto’s broad program is a important start.

Cartel murders since 2006 have surpassed 70,000 - nearly 20 times more than NATO combat deaths after a decade in Afghanistan.

When Calderón took office, he turned to the military, eventually enlisting 40 percent of the country’s soldiers in the fight. The rationale seemed clear: No other force appeared capable, given a paltry national police force and state and local forces unable to take on cartels armed with assault weapons and grenade launchers (often purchased in the United States.) But the military, once a universally respected institution, was not ready for this new task, and soon faced charges of abusing human rights.

The International Crisis Group’s new report, “Peña Nieto’s Challenge: Criminal Cartels and Rule of Law in Mexico,” traces the rise of the cartels under Calderón, the initial responses and the way forward being charted by Mexico’s new president.

The loss of Mexican lives has been extreme; the economic losses are, perhaps, immeasurable. Cartels terrorize enough of rural Mexico to transport large quantities of drugs the entire length of the country on their way to U.S. consumers, to steal oil from pipelines (as much as $4 billion worth each year) and to extort and kidnap for profit.

FULL ARTICLE (Houston Chronicle)

Photo: Flickr/Knight Foundation

Myanmar on edge after new eruption of interreligious violence | LA Times

By Emily Alpert

The Meiktila violence echoes clashes last year in the western state of Rakhine, where hundreds were slain in riots between majority Rakhine Buddhists and minority Rohingya Muslims. The bloodshed has marred hopes for Myanmar, also known as Burma, as it takes steps toward democratic reform.

The International Crisis Group has suggested that ethnic unrest might actually be a byproduct of reform, by allowing all kinds of causes “unprecedented space to organize that has been denied for decades.”

“This probably represents the most significant challenge to the democratic reform process underway in Myanmar,” said Mark Schneider, senior vice president of the group. “While the government was able to reestablish order, it’s clear that the underlying problems have not yet been dealt with.”

FULL ARTICLE (LA Times)

Photo: No_Direction_Home/Flickr

Crisis Group presenta informe sobre narco en México | Rumbo

La organización International Crisis Group (ICG) presentó su informe “El desafío de Peña Nieto: los carteles criminales y el Estado de Derecho en México”, en el cual destaca los acuerdos logrados por el nuevo presidente de México con los partidos políticos y la necesidad de seguir el plan de prevención del delito.

El documento de cerca de 50 páginas hace un recuento de las diferentes acciones que han llevado los últimos tres gobiernos mexicanos, incluído el actual, así como de las muertes en el país adjudicadas a esta lucha.

La investigación señala la importancia de que Peña Nieto mantenga el plan de seguridad que anunció al inicio de su mandato para no acer en discordancias como ocurriera con Vicente Fox y Felipe Calderón, sus antecesores.

ARTICULO COMPLETO (Rumbo)

Foto:  Jesús Villaseca Pérez/Flickr

Criminal Cartels and Rule of Law in Mexico

Mexico City/Bogotá/Brussels  |   19 Mar 2013

Mexico must build an effective police and justice system, as well as implement comprehensive social programs, if it is to escape the extraordinary violence triggered by the country’s destructive cartels in extortion, kidnapping and control of transnational crime.

Peña Nieto’s Challenge: Criminal Cartels and Rule of Law in Mexico, is the International Crisis Group’s first report on the country with the world’s fourteenth largest economy but also one of its worst cases of deadly criminal violence. It analyses the Herculean challenge Mexico faces: from the north, pressure to stop the flow of narcotics to U.S. users; domestically, to reduce the killings, kidnappings and extortion by criminal organisations financed largely by the illegal drugs trade. Without institutional reform, efforts to combat the violence may be ineffective; with such reform, supported by programs to rescue the poor, there is hope for a sustainable end to this devastating problem.

“Cartels challenge the fundamental nature of the state, not by threatening to capture it, but by damaging and weakening it”, says Mark Schneider, Crisis Group’s Special Adviser on Latin America. “Washington needs to better control trafficking in guns, especially assault rifles, from U.S. suppliers that give the cartels as much firepower as the security forces they face”.

After years of cartel-related bloodshed that has claimed tens of thousands of lives and shaken Mexico, its new president, Enrique Peña Nieto, is promising to reduce the murder rate. The security plan he introduced offers a window of opportunity to build institutions that can both achieve this target and cut impunity rates. The cartels have thousands of gunmen and have morphed into diversified crime groups. Not only do they traffic drugs, but they also conduct mass kidnappings, oversee extortion rackets and steal from the state oil industry. Estimates of the total that have died in connection with the fighting over the last six years range from 47,000 to more than 70,000, in addition to thousands of disappearances.

Where the military deployment has inflicted serious human rights abuses, it has further eroded trust in government. For the necessary reforms to succeed, the government must train an expanded police force to respect human rights and to build strong cases that stand up under the new trial system.  The vetting of police needs to be expanded and procedures established to gradually remove those who fail. Effective police and courts are crucial to reducing impunity in the long term. Support for victims of the violence needs to be guaranteed, as a new law promises, especially in finding their family members who have disappeared.

The Peña Nieto administration should also follow through on its announced national crime prevention plan. The cartels have been able to recruit tens of thousands of killers in part because poor neighbourhoods have been systematically abandoned over decades, and their youth lack job opportunities.

International leaders need to re-evaluate policies that have failed both to prevent illicit drugs from maintaining dangerous levels of addiction and to reduce the corruption and violence associated with drug production and trafficking. After suffering so much from the violence, Mexico is a natural leader for this debate.

“The Mexican case is pertinent for countries across the world facing similar challenges”, says Javier Ciurlizza, Crisis Group’s Latin America and Caribbean Program Director. “The international community has much to learn from the efforts of the Mexican society and government to overcome these challenges. If they succeed in reducing violence, theirs can become a model to follow instead of one to fear”.

FULL REPORT

Haiti — a state of political dysfunction | Miami Herald

By Mark L. Schneider, Crisis Group’s Senior Vice President

Three years after an earthquake devastated Haiti, its elites seem poised to produce their own man-made disaster of instability and polarization. Unless the nation’s leaders pursue a national governability accord to organize long-delayed elections, halt unconstitutional appointments and address basic needs, Haiti could become a permanent failed state.

The International Crisis Group report published last week: “Governing Haiti: Time for National Consensus” tracks the failure of will across a broad spectrum of Haiti’s national leaders to seek agreement on national challenges.

The most recent triumph of partisan over national interest has been the failure of President Michel Martelly, parliamentary leaders and the business community to implement the governance agreement signed on Christmas Eve with the support of an ad hoc ecumenical body, Religions for Peace.

The pact would have side-stepped the Catch-22 situation where the absence of a third of the senators stymied the legislature’s naming its three members to the nine-member Permanent Electoral Commission (CEP) which was supposed to organize the partial senate elections which should have been held in November 2011.

The agreement provided for a new consensual Transitory Electoral College (TEC). That also would have enabled the removal of the other widely-criticized CEP members who had been named by or were seen as partial to the president.

FULL ARTICLE (Miami Herald)

Photo: Alex Proimos/Flickr

Governing Haiti: Time for National Consensus

Port-au-Prince/Bogotá/Brussels  |   4 Feb 2013

Without an inclusive national pact on critical priorities, President Michel Martelly faces the spectre of a failed presidency, and Haiti risks international abandonment.

Governing Haiti: Time for National Consensus, the latest report from the International Crisis Group, examines the race against time to convince its own people, donors and potential investors that progress and stability are still achievable. After several failed efforts to reach domestic agreement on basic issues, even loyal donors are becoming frustrated by the lack of leadership, governance and accountability.

“The challenges facing Haiti are not difficult to see”, says Javier Ciurlizza, Crisis Group’s Latin America and Caribbean Program Director. “They focus on a need for good governance, consensus building among the elites, effectively implemented poverty reduction strategies and strengthened rule of law. Sadly, these challenges have never been confronted effectively. Haiti today presents little cause for optimism”.

The greatest immediate challenge is to end the persistent polarisation that has blocked free and fair elections, but much more is needed. President Martelly, already struggling to govern the broken and divided nation for more than one and a half years, lacks the stable political base (also denied to his predecessors) to obtain buy-in to his proposed “Five-E” development strategy: employment, état de droit (rule of law), education, environment and energy.

If he is to avoid political paralysis, he needs to build on the tenuous Christmas Eve 2012 agreement shepherded by the ecumenical Religions for Peace group for a credible electoral body to hold much delayed Senate, municipal and local polls quickly. Calling on that group to help reach agreement on implementing the electoral calendar should be followed by its facilitating a national accord on reconstruction and development strategies. The Latin American region offers useful experience about how to build sustainable, effective agreements that can progressively be translated into concrete and sustainable policies.

Haiti has missed previous opportunities to break out of the negative cycle of zero-sum politics and perennial discord. The approaching mid-point in the Martelly administration may offer a new chance to turn toward the kind of national transformation that could give the hemisphere’s second oldest republic a hopeful future.

“If Haiti is to pull through, the better angels in the natures of its leaders are going to have to prevail for once and prevail soon”, says Mark Schneider, Crisis Group’s Senior Vice President and Special Adviser on Latin America. “This is a thin reed on which to float the country’s future; but it might be all it has”.

FULL REPORT