Vatican Intervenes as Venezuela's political problems mount.
| Autor | Gaudin, Andres |
With the political crisis in Venezuela veering toward an unpredictable and potentially violent level of confrontation, the Catholic Church decided late last month to take on the role of peacemaker and managed--at least for now--to defuse the situation.
The efforts came directly from the Vatican rather than from the local Catholic leadership, which has sided with the opposition Mesa de la Unidad Democratica (Democratic Unity Roundtable, MUD) coalition and thus compromised its potential as a go-between. On Oct. 24, Pope Francis received President Nicolas Maduro secretly. At almost that same moment, a special emissary for the pontiff --Monsignor Emil Paul Tscherrig, the Vatican's representative in Argentina--arrived in Caracas to launch a mediation process "without preconditions and with an open agenda."
The overtures, as noted by a Catholic affairs analyst with the Argentine news site Diario Registrado, were as "transcendent" as they were surprising. "Such a gesture would have been unthinkable in the era of the European popes, for whom Latin America was the scored prostitute," the writer argued.
Maduro was also received, shortly afterwards, by the UN secretary-general-designate, Antonio Guterres of Portugal, who said, "The path of dialogue is the only civilized way people have to settle their differences." The two met in Lisbon on Aug. 25, just one day after Maduro's visit to the Vatican.
Despite the direct involvement of such global figures, the Venezuelan government and opposition acted, in the days that followed, as if nothing had happened. The two sides kept up their battle of apocalyptic threats and called on their respective followers to take to the streets.
The almost daily demonstrations have not, however, been well attended. "They suggest a certain level of weariness on the part of the people, who have spent the past two years caught between the two sides in this tournament of back-and-forth insults," a correspondent for the Brazilian daily Zero Hora wrote Oct. 26. The same day, a dispatch by the AFP news agency noted that the two-time opposition presidential candidate Henrique Capriles had left a demonstration--on the back of a motorcycle--after "participants booed him and called him a traitor."
Desperate times, desperate measures
The Venezuelan political crisis last turned violent in February/March 2014, when the radical right pursued what it called La Salida (the exit), a plan to "topple the government by any means necessary."...
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