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"International Mediation in Venezuela"

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What was the situation in Venezuela at the start of the Carter Center’s intervention?

The Carter Center began its work in Venezuela in July 2002 at the invitation of the Venezuelan government to help facilitate a national dialogue following a failed coup. It found a society deeply divided and a potentially violent social and political crisis threatening governability of the country. The roots of the crisis lay in the long-term social and political exclusion of large sectors of the population, the struggle for political control and redistribution of national resources and the concomitant clash of development strategies, and the confrontational style and strategy of the Chavista movement led by President Chavez.


What did the Carter Center aim to achieve in Venezuela?

The Carter Center’s initial aim was to foster a dialogue seeking reconciliation and the restoration of functioning, trusted political institutions in Venezuela. Its ultimate aim was to prevent escalation of the conflict into violence, as it saw warning signs and increasingly feared this possibility over the course of the next months. We initially believed we could reach an agreement with Venezuelan actors on the design for a longer-term national dialogue with national and international verification mechanisms, and a short-term truce between government and media. For the longer-term dialogue, we hoped to build an international coalition to provide technical and financial assistance to the dialogue, and incentive and disincentives to encourage compliance by the actors with any agreements reached.


The ultimate goal of preventing violence was achieved by the intervention, but the underlying issues producing polarization and new forms of political exclusion were not resolved. What explains the mixed results of such an unusual international intervention?

The explanation is found at several levels:

  • First, although new opportunities for international influence arose from post-Cold War democracy norms, there are structural constraints on how much influence international actors can have on a resource-rich state. This helps explain both the ability of international third-party actors to prevent violence and promote electoral democratic practices in Venezuela and the limits of the same actors to sustain an international intervention capable of addressing the underlying disputes and influence the course of domestic events once the express invitation for their involvement had been withdrawn.
  • Second, the competing perceptions and values of the opposing sides in Venezuela made it necessary for the mediators to attempt to sufficiently change those perceptions to alter the calculus of each side and open spaces for negotiation. The mediators were able to take advantage of only some of the opportunities for changing perceptions, however, due to the personalities of the mediators themselves, the personal relationships among the actors and the mediators, the nature of the mediators respective organizations, and the mediators’ own real-time analyses, which led them to miss certain opportunities.
  • Third, a sustained peacebuilding initiative at the societal level was fundamental to transforming the Venezuelan conflict, but organizational and resource constraints on the part of the Carter Center and the UNDP prevented them from providing sufficient, enduring support.


While the international community was heavily involved in the Venezuelan conflict between the 2002 coup and the 2004 recall referendum, it scaled back its involvement dramatically following the referendum despite continued political polarization and a growing concentration of power in the hands of the executive and ruling party.  What explains this withdrawal from the Venezuelan situation?

Several factors discussed in this book explain the withdrawal from the Venezuelan context:

  • First, the OAS and the Carter Center could no longer play a facilitating or mediating role when one party to the conflict—the opposition—lost its confidence in and withdrew its invitation to them, attributing the outcome of the recall referendum at least in part to the international actors’ incompetence and even alleging their collusion in electoral fraud.
  • Second the gradual nature of the concentration of executive power and the ambiguity of its democratic character impeded international reaction.
  • Venezuela’s significant petroleum revenues and the related commercial interests of foreign governments both reduced the leverage of those international actors who might otherwise have made international loans and aid conditional upon domestic political reform, and influenced the actions of foreign governments benefiting from commercial relationships with Venezuela an discounted Venezuelan oil.
  • Finally, the traditional notions of sovereignty and nonintervention, historically strong in the Western Hemisphere, came to play a role in the international community’s withdrawal from Venezuela in two ways. First, neighboring Latin governments remained reticent to comment on, much less intervene in, the internal affairs of a fellow government. Second the Chavez government played up the sovereignty card in its calls for South-South alliances and in its constant warnings against U.S. imperialism and alleged invasion and assassination plots, particularly in the wake of U.S. approval of the 2002 coup and after 2004.


What lessons does this case yield for practitioners?

For conflict resolution practitioners operating as a third party in political conflicts, the Venezuelan case yields three lessons. The first explores the chain of hypotheses that we used to look at the perceptions and interactions between the parties; the second underlines the importance of personal relationships among the parties and between the parties and the third party; and the third concerns the level of expectations created by the third party.

The views expressed in this publication are those of the author(s).

PUBLICATION TYPE: Analysis