The Middleman in Venezuela
www.washingtonpost.com By Nora Boustany Friday, January 24, 2003; Page A24
When Cesar Gaviria, the purposeful and earnest secretary general of the Organization of American States, was in Caracas, Venezuela, last November, working to defuse mounting tension between the government and its opponents, people would leap to their feet to give him a standing ovation when he walked into restaurants.
Today, 54 days into a crippling yet inconclusive strike intended to topple President Hugo Chavez, most of those eateries and cafes are shut down. So are the art galleries that Gaviria liked to visit for relaxation, as are the cinemas and theaters.
For most of the last three months, Gaviria has goaded Chavez and representatives of the opposition to the negotiating table for talks at the posh Hotel Melia. After each session, he has retired to his room, where nightly he heard the cacophony of demonstrators clanking pots and pans outside. The opposition holds its casserole march at 8:30, and the Chavistas show up at 10.
"I never thought it was going to take this long," Gaviria said on the eve of a meeting of a six-nation "group of friends" in Washington today to discuss ways of solving the conflict. Since early November, his family life has been on hold. He allowed himself 24 hours in Washington over Christmas and a couple of days for New Year's, with a weekend or two in Bogota or Miami.
Gaviria, who served as president of Colombia from 1990 to 1994, is not a novice at wading into Latin America's thicket of conflict and passion-driven egos. With the OAS, he has helped to avert a coup in Paraguay and to oversee a smooth transition to democratic rule in Peru after the rocky last days of President Alberto Fujimori. He continues to skirt disaster in Haiti as he pursues a political settlement. As leader of Colombia, he had to converse with drug lords and guerrillas to survive.
But Gaviria has never seen or experienced a crisis such as the one in Venezuela, which has polarized the entire population. "I don't remember such turmoil in the streets since Argentina and the days of Evita Peron," he said.
The strike in Venezuela was called by the opposition on Dec. 2, with protesters demanding Chavez resign or hold early elections or a referendum on his rule, not due to end until 2007. The shutdown has slashed Venezuela's oil production, choking off revenue, slashing oil exports to the United States and leading to a 25 percent devaluation of the Venezuelan bolivar.
Gaviria said the strike could have been avoided. "We had several occasions when we were very close to lifting the strike," he said of the intensive talks attended by both sides as well as by a representative of former president Jimmy Carter. Gaviria has conferred weekly with Carter since the beginning of the process, even when Carter was in Norway late last year to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Gaviria has met with Chavez five times since the standoff began.
Gaviria said he offered his services to the Caracas government and its detractors last summer after Chavez invited Carter to mediate. The OAS Council gave Gaviria a mandate to proceed, and he has been at it ever since.
"We are there as the OAS to find peaceful solutions. We are obliged to keep trying, and we are trying to learn as we go along," Gaviria said. "In some places, we have been successful, like in Peru, and in others not, such as Haiti. We have been learning to defend democracy in very difficult circumstances. Though there is no certainty of success, everyone recognizes that we are doing our best."
Gaviria has come under attack by both sides in Venezuela but has managed to keep the lid on violence, emphasizing to negotiators the urgency of staying within "an electoral solution" even if the constitution has to be amended to satisfy both sides. Despite difficult days such as Dec. 6, when demonstrators were killed in one of the city's plazas, "When I see both parties coming to the table day after day and working hard, I imagine they want an agreement and they respect one another," he said.
He is grateful that loss of life has been kept to a minimum, praising Venezuelans' standards of human rights. He said he is not concerned if leaders coming to the fore in Brazil, Peru and Venezuela are of a more populist, leftist strain than their predecessors, provided they do not resort to "authoritarian practices that are not part of the rule of law. What concerns me is not whether they were generals, but how they use their power once they are elected."
Colombia's ambassador to the United States, Luis Alberto Moreno, who served in Gaviria's cabinet when he was president and helped manage his presidential campaign, said Gaviria has evolved into a world statesman since he was elected head of the OAS in 1994. "Under him, the OAS is filling the space it ought to occupy and becoming more relevant," Moreno said yesterday in an interview from Davos, Switzerland.
Regardless of the intractability of the crisis in Venezuela, Moreno noted, Gaviria's "personality and his steadiness are critical for dealing with this situation. There is nobody in the international community who has the understanding and the patience which he has shown."
However, Luis Lauredo, a former U.S. ambassador to the OAS, cautioned that a secretary general can go only as far as the member states allow him.
"Gaviria has been a transitional figure in leading the OAS into a new era of proactive and preventive diplomacy," Lauredo said in an interview from Miami. "Everybody is attacking him, which means he is trying to be fair, and his biggest contribution is that he is a witness to what is going on, so I applaud his engagement."