LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Now, we're going to turn to Venezuela, where there's a stalemate between socialist President Nicolas Maduro and opposition leaders. Both sides say they won last month's election. Neither is backing down, but Maduro has the power, and he's using it, rounding up thousands of dissenters in a widening crackdown. Meanwhile, the U.S. and other world leaders are not recognizing the election results. Benjamin Gedan is director of the Latin American Program at the Wilson Center, a nonpartisan global affairs research institute. Good morning.
BENJAMIN GEDAN: Good morning.
FADEL: So we see Venezuela in clear political crisis. Why is this standoff of such global concern?
GEDAN: The Venezuelan crisis has impacts throughout the Western hemisphere. The collapse of the state over the last 10 years or so has really been unprecedented, and produced a migration crisis very unusual for Latin America. A quarter of the population has left - over eight million migrants, most of whom, more than 80%, have ended up in other countries in Latin America that really don't have the resources to permanently house them and integrate them. That includes countries like Colombia, Peru, Chile.
FADEL: I mean, we've seen this rare effort by other Latin American leftist leaders - Colombia, Brazil and Mexico - all stepping in to talk to Maduro. Did that effort make any progress? Could that be a solution?
GEDAN: I mean, the fact that the effort is underway, I think, really is significant. The leaders of Brazil and Colombia and Mexico are leftists who had spent years building reasonably friendly relationships with Nicolas Maduro, the ruler of Venezuela, and the fact that they refuse to recognize the election result is meaningful, and does isolate the government in Latin America. It puts on some political pressure, and fundamentally, they may be the only people who have access to decision-makers in Venezuela right now. They have not produced results, but as we talked about earlier, they do have a national interest in not seeing Venezuela get worse, not seeing the migration crisis intensify further. And so that's why I think, for now, the United States has somewhat deferred to those mediation efforts in the region.
FADEL: Well, let's talk about the U.S. role here. I mean, it eased sanctions on Venezuela in exchange for Maduro holding elections, which were supposed to be free and fair, as requested. Do you expect the administration to reimpose them, now that this has happened?
GEDAN: There's an enormous amount of pressure on the White House right now to reimpose sanctions, and even find further ways to isolate and pressure the regime in Caracas. It probably will do that at some point, and certainly, the regime deserves any sort of economic punishment one could think of. I think the hesitance right now is that that's been tried, and it has failed. Under the Trump administration, the United States imposed a policy then known as maximum pressure - an unprecedented set of economic and individual sanctions - and it fundamentally didn't bring about political change. At one point, the United States even recognized an opposition figure as Venezuela's legitimate leader, and, for an extended period of time, treated him as if he were president of Venezuela. And again, none of that produced the desired results, and so I think you do see a reluctance right now for the United States to go down that same path.
FADEL: Now, what do we actually know about who won? I mean, has Maduro provided proof that he's the real winner, and has the opposition proven that they won?
GEDAN: No. The regime generated this idea of a ruling-party victory, but the results were laughable, and they were never justified with any documentary evidence. By contrast, the opposition collected physical evidence from polling booths - more than 80% in all - and showed that by a more than 2-to-1 margin, the opposition candidate, Edmundo Gonzalez, had won the election. They've made those documents public. They have a website, and governments, including the government in the United States, have reviewed and verified those findings.
FADEL: Benjamin Gedan is director of the Latin America Program at the Wilson Center. Thank you for joining us.
GEDAN: Thanks so much for the invitation.
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