Venezuela’s Supreme Court last week unseated the country’s legislature, the National Assembly — then took the ruling back on Saturday, under orders from President Nicolas Maduro. But this still leaves the nation spiraling down into chaos.
Food is increasingly scarce, with the government attempting to draft citizens into forced labor on farms. Criminal gangs range the countryside. Hospitals lack not just medicines, but sufficient water to clean bloody operating tables.
Yet Maduro is focused only on keeping power. And he holds lots of cards: His late predecessor, Hugo Chavez, purged the courts and the military leadership, then packed both with party loyalists — and also negotiated a deal to send oil to Cuba in exchange for reliable secret policemen.
The opposition won control of the National Assembly in late 2015 — but the Supreme Court has since struck down pretty much every measure the lawmakers have passed.
Yet the high court’s decision Wednesday to unseat the entire National Assembly, and itself take control of all legislative power, was still a shock. The opposition called it a coup, and rightly so; the Organization of American States was set to meet Monday to consider extraordinary action.
Which apparently left Maduro worried that his neighbors — fearful of having a failed state like Libya or Syria in their midst — might actually take action. Hence his order to undo the ruling — confirming that the Supreme Court is a pack of kangaroos.
“The coup persists,” opposition lawmaker Juan Matheus said after the reversal. “The rupture of the constitutional order continues.”
The government, meanwhile, blames the nation’s every woe on foreign “harassment and aggression,” all US-orchestrated. In fact, Washington has no appetite for getting involved: The State Department’s take on the ousting of the National Assembly was to call it “a serious setback for Democracy in Venezuela.”
Absent outside intervention or a coup against Maduro by some rival Socialist Party faction, there’s no sign of hope: Venezuela is headed to anarchy or civil war.