The U.S.'s Relationship With Venezuela May Hinge On What Happens This Weekend

Venezuela will hold legislative elections this Sunday, an event that will likely end up determining whether the U.S. finally normalizes relations with the South American country after years of tension.

For a brief moment over the summer, the U.S. and Venezuelan governments looked poised to mend the two countries’ relationship, which has been troubled since the turn of the millennium. But as Sunday's elections approach, along with the possibility that the opposition could take control of the national legislature, U.S.-Venezuelan relations have once again soured. The future of the relationship will likely depend on what Venezuela’s national assembly looks like after this weekend.

Opposition expects a big win

Washington hasn’t gotten along well with Venezuela ever since deceased former President Hugo Chávez, a nationalist who decried U.S. interference in the region, first took office in 1999. The two countries severed diplomatic relations in 2008.

Chávez built a left-wing movement that elected him to the country’s highest office four times before he died in 2013. But his successor, President Nicolás Maduro, has struggled to maintain that momentum.

Maduro has presided over a contracting economy, runaway inflation and shortages of consumer goods, partly resulting from a complex system of price and currency controls created to subsidize costs for poor Venezuelans.

Polling shows the opposition will likely hand the government its first major electoral defeat  since Chávez came to power in 1999.

"Venezuelans really need some kind of course correction," Chris Sabatini, the director of the think tank Global Americans, told The WorldPost. "The government has shown little inclination [to perform one], either because they don’t know any better or they're just too entrenched."

Because Venezuela uses a mixed proportional system to assign seats in its single-chamber national assembly, it’s not clear how extensive the opposition’s gains might be.

Alejandro Velasco, a professor of Latin American studies at New York University, said U.S.-Venezuelan relations will have the highest chance of improving if the opposition wins a simple majority, which would incentivize the opposition to work with members of the chavista coalition disillusioned with Maduro’s leadership. “That would be a path to normalization,” Velasco said.

An opposition supermajority, on the other hand, would likely encourage hard-line elements of the opposition coalition to mount a prolonged confrontation, with the goal of forcing the Maduro administration out of office ahead of the country's next presidential election, in 2019. And if the government retains a majority on Sunday, Velasco said both the opposition and some U.S. politicians will question the results, further polarizing the country.

“It will immediately not be seen as illegitimate by the U.S., whether rightly or wrongly, and might lead to further sanctions,” Velasco told The WorldPost.

A deteriorating relationship

The U.S. has imposed a raft of sanctions  on Venezuelan officials and companies over various allegations of supporting Colombian rebels or doing business with Iran. U.S. sanctions also prohibit government contracting  with Venezuela’s state oil company.

In February, Maduro accused the Obama administration of trying to foment a coup, expelled some diplomats and issued a requirement for Americans to secure visas to enter the country. In March, the Obama administration declared Venezuela a threat to U.S. national security and sanctioned seven Venezuelan officials accused of human rights abuses -- a move widely criticized by other South American governments .

Still, tensions appeared to decline over the next few months. In July, Tom Shannon, a top U.S. diplomat, met with the president of Venezuela’s national assembly in Haiti. Venezuelan media reported that the two discussed re-establishing relations.

But more recently, negative coverage in the U.S. press and comments from various U.S. presidential candidates have led Venezuelan officials to regard the United States with renewed suspicion. GOP presidential hopefuls Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio -- both from South Florida, which is home to a large contingent of Venezuelan migrants who oppose their home country's government -- have each criticized President Barack Obama for not acting more harshly with Venezuela.

Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton this week accused the Venezuelan government of trying to “rig” the elections , though Venezuelan officials point out that international monitors, including former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, have approved of the Venezuelan electoral system.

U.S. Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-Fla.) proposed legislation this year that would offer permanent residency to Venezuelan migrants without serious criminal records who arrived in the U.S. before 2013. Curbelo argued that such migrants should be classified as refugees.

In late October, Venezuelan prosecutor Franklin Nieves fled to the U.S. with his family and posted a video online accusing Maduro of personally ordering the arrest of Leopoldo López, an internationally prominent opposition leader. Nieves -- who promised to make public other major charges of wrongdoing, but who has yet to do so -- was among the prosecutors who helped convict López of fomenting violence during a series of protests last year.

In November, two nephews of Maduro’s wife were arrested in Haiti , handed over to U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents and charged with drug trafficking.

The latest point of contention emerged last week, when opposition figure Luis Manuel Díaz was shot and killed during a political rally in Venezuela. The U.S. State Department condemned the killing and criticized the Venezuelan government for failing to stop what it called “campaigns of fear, violence and intimidation.”

Venezuela’s top diplomat in the U.S., Maximilien Sánchez Arvelaiz, said he views the stream of negative news coverage as suspiciously timed and likely derived from opposition sources. "The timing is always quite strange," Sánchez said at a briefing for a handful of reporters on Tuesday at the country’s residence in Washington. Many officials in the U.S. are ready to embrace a more normal relationship with Venezuela, he said, but others still have a "Cold War mentality."

Sánchez expressed disappointment at the State Department's claim that Díaz's murder was politically motivated and tied to the Venezuelan government.

"I feel sorry for the guy and his family," Sánchez said -- but he also described Díaz  as a gang member and "a thug" with a criminal record, and said he appeared to have been targeted as part of a dispute unrelated to politics.

Ryan Grim contributed reporting.