What price democracy amid Venezuela’s political turmoil?

The actions of Venezuela’s socialist president are condemned by Dr Richard Harrold, while Dr Kevin Bannon defends Nicolás Maduro’s right to rule. Plus letters from Peter McKenna, Declan O’Neill, Sasha Simic, Dr Jairo Lugo-Ocando and
Steve Ballard

Ken Livingstone (Letters , 5 August) is spreading misinformation about Venezuela – a country I came to love and then mourn in my years living there. I am the proud husband of a Venezuelan and have watched my extended family suffer hardship and worse as the country has been plunged into turmoil by Maduro’s inept and corrupt regime. It is important to note that Maduro’s government is partly enabled by support from ignorant overseas voices.
Livingstone appears to dismiss the accurate observations that opposition leaders had been arrested by the Maduro government as propaganda. On the contrary, the arrests of Leopoldo López and Antonio Ledezma and now the dismissal of Luisa Ortega from the national assembly, are verifiable facts that demonstrate all too clearly the intention of the Maduro regime to admit no criticism or opposition at all. The government of Venezuela is far from the benign force for social good that Livingstone bizarrely insists it is. We are witnessing a cynical power grab by a corrupt and ruthless cartel. To call it otherwise is to betray democracy and justice.
Dr Richard Harrold
Leiden, Netherlands
While Venezuela’s rightwing opposition boycotts elections and calls for a military coup or foreign invasion, we are to understand that they are in fact champions of democracy (Tensions mount as Maduro ignores critics , 5 August).
Whatever the undoubted problems with
Nicolás Maduro , your photo showing newly elected constituent assembly members from indigenous and other minority groups is likely to disturb the US and its allies, who believe such people do not belong in legislative palaces, and that billionaires rather than bus drivers should lead countries.
Peter McKenna
Liverpool
Good to see that champion of democracy, the Vatican, calling for a suspension of the newly elected assembly in Venezuela. As you report, it joins a group of United Nations experts who stated: “The government of Venezuela must stop systematically detaining protesters and end the growing use of military tribunals to try civilians.”
Has anybody mentioned this to Donald Trump ? Perhaps he might show the same respect for the human rights of those detained in Guantánamo Bay.
Declan O’Neill
Oldham
The Tories and their media allies have been very interested in what Jeremy Corbyn has to say about Venezuela recently. Will Theresa May be pressed with equal vigour to condemn the attempted military coup against President Maduro?
Sasha Simic
London
There are two sides to all issues concerning government and society, a debate that forms the basis of politics. Developments in Venezuela show that the country is divided, but it still has an elected government and an electoral system. The protests do not mean that the Maduro government is without substantial support in Venezuela. I believe there is also such support in the UK – especially among trade unionists, academics in Latin American studies and others. The Guardian’s backing for the anti-government side in recent weeks – in various articles, editorials, cartoons and commentary – has a “four legs good, two legs bad” tone.
Nothing could be more dangerous than the Venezuelan government being forced out by US-led action, already mooted in some quarters. It’s much too soon for the destruction of another politically vulnerable, oil-rich state by such means.
Dr Kevin Bannon
London
The problem with Oscar Guardiola-Rivera’s piece on Venezuela (The problem for Venezuelans: Maduro’s opposition would provide no relief , theguardian.com, 3 August) is that it is makes unsubstantiated claims. For example, he says that “the rightwing opposition can’t rally a majority beyond the middle-upper classes”. He seems to ignore that the opposition won the parliamentary elections of 2015 by a major landslide.
Here are the facts: the national electoral commission – controlled by the regime – convenes in weeks a poll to establish a national assembly while refusing to call regional and local elections, though it was constitutionally mandated back in 2016.
Maduro then suddenly calls this poll to change the 1999 constitution – which Chávez himself called “the best in the world”. His real intention is to dissolve a congress that was democratically elected by the people. The fact remains that the regime faces an economic crisis of its own making. Yes, Maduro inherited the institutional and financial mess from his predecessor, but he also lacks the charisma and capacity to overcome it.
His own ideological stubbornness and a complex web of power, which includes links between the military, illegal mining and drug cartels, makes his own administration something of a rollercoaster. Finally, I would remind Dr Guardiola-Rivera that Venezuela in 2017 is not the Chile of 1973 and that we would be doing Salvador Allende’s memory a disfavour by continuing to make these unfair comparisons.
Dr Jairo Lugo-Ocando
University of Leeds
Prior to the French Revolution, the issue preoccupying compassionate European thinkers was how to end the barbarism of self-righteous “survival of the holiest” Christian cliques seizing an unfair share of the means to sustain life with impunity.
In 1784, Kant defined enlightenment as the adolescent stage in the existence of humankind, akin to the adolescent stage in the existence of every intelligent social animal, when immature ignorance of what sustains its existence is naturally succeeded by the mature understanding that its existence is sustained by the unconditional love of and for one’s kind. Unlike Asa Cusack (What the left must learn from Maduro’s failures in Venezuela , 3 August), Marx and Engels had studied Kant, and recognised the significance of the self-taught compassionate solidarity developed by the new factory-based communities in Britain to mitigate their collective suffering without the advantage of a university education.
The current problems of humankind are the consequence of the systematic corruption of university-educated intellectuals by self-righteous “survival of the richest” mercenary cliques and corporations determined to continue seizing an unfair share of the means to sustain life with impunity. We are reaching the end of the age of enlightenment. It remains to be seen whether it will be marked by the triumph of compassion, or the premature extinction of the most intelligent species on earth.
Steve Ballard

London