Senior State Department Official on Venezuela

MODERATOR: Hey guys, good afternoon. Thank you for joining today's press call on Venezuela. Just to start with the ground rules, this call will be held on background attributable to a Senior State Department Official. That's on background attributable to a Senior State Department Official. And with that I would introduce our speaker, [Senior State Department Official], for remarks.

SENIOR STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL: Okay, so the reason why I'm going to do it on background is because it's extensive and highly technical in nature, so it just lays the groundwork.

I know a few of you traveled down for the fourth round of talks on the transition and reconciliation process in Venezuela, and it really hasn't gotten nearly as much attention as some of the other more higher-profile things on the economic side, the oil deals and et cetera. But I thought it was important to sort of lift the curtain a little bit and give you guys a view of exactly how we foresee this process playing out for the benefit of everyone involved.

So let me lay the groundwork. Some of this is - for some of you, you probably know this because you've covered Venezuela over the years and Latin America in general. For others this may be new, so I apologize if it's redundant for some of you.

But basically, like many of the countries in the Western Hemisphere that follow civil law and things of that nature, the courts are really the most powerful institution in many - especially for authoritarian regimes. They use the courts as a way to basically declare anything legal or illegal that they want and to determine all kinds of things in the country.

In the case of Venezuela, that is the Supreme Justice Tribunal, the TSJ as it's called. It has long been an instrument of the regime and Maduro, and 2015 really amped that up. In fact, it was the TSJ that ruled that the National Assembly was illegal. It was the TSJ that created the groundwork for a constituent assembly that replaced it with a new National Assembly. It's the TSJ that controls everything there. So, it is the most powerful institution. That's the first thing to understand.

The second thing is for elections in the country. The elections in the country are run by the CNE, which is basically the Consejo Nacional Electoral, the National Electoral Council. In Venezuela, that council isn't just your elections department. So, I live in [a U.S.] county and they run the elections. They put out the machines, they tabulate the votes. This council theoretically does that, but it does much more than that. It also decides which parties get to register and who gets to run. And that's how they disqualified María Corina, for example, and a bunch of other people, and Edmundo ended up being sort of like the default candidate because they forgot to remove him.

So, with that groundwork in place, let me go back in history a little bit as to why these efforts have failed in the past. If you recall that under the Biden administration, they negotiated extensively with the Maduro regime on new elections in 2024, and they reached an agreement on new elections in 2024. And as product of that agreement, the Biden administration gave the Maduro regime all kinds of concessions, including sanctions relief, but they also released the narcotrafficking convicted nephews of Cilia Maduro - Cilia, Maduro's wife. They released Alex Saab as part of that deal, all irreversible concessions that they made.

Venezuela and the Maduro regime then proceeded to have an election in 2024, but they had an election with the old TSJ, with the old CNE; in essence, with the existing infrastructure. You cannot have a free and fair election that is accepted by both sides and all sides in a country as long as that infrastructure is in place. So that infrastructure needs to be replaced. That infrastructure needs to be ripped out and replaced with something new. You can't have credible elections in that country without that in place.

And so those are the steps that we are endeavoring to take here as regards to these talks. So where are we right now on the talks? Let's talk about first the TSJ, which is the agreement they reached this week. Both the opposition, the 2015 National Assembly, and the essence - in essence, representatives of the PSUV via Jorge Rodríguez, the party in power, have agreed - each have appointed members to a committee. It is modeled [to have something like a] judicial nominating committee, and that is a committee of people that will study candidates and nominate 32 people to become magistrates of the TSJ, the 32 magistrates of that process, through a JNC.

The key to that was ensuring that the people who are on this committee, this selection committee or what have you, are legitimate people and not party hacks. And if you look at the list of people that both the governing party, the Maduro party or the Chávez party, and the opposition put forward, it is almost entirely law professors and people of significant repute, like they're not political actors per se, so that was a very positive development. That group is now supposed to meet, come up with a slate of 32 new magistrates for the TSJ, and it is the goal of this endeavor to have, before the end of this calendar year, meaning by mid-December, have a new TSJ in place.

Here's how it will work: The committee comes up with the 32 names, the 32 names are submitted to the National Assembly. Jorge Rodríguez has to get those names passed that the committee - the committee agreed on, both sides agreed on. And by the end of this year, before the end of this year, we should have a new supreme court for - it's not really like our supreme court, it's even more powerful in many ways, but in essence, we should have a brand-new TSJ in Venezuela.

The second thing that has to happen here, and it's happening concurrently - in fact, we're already beginning that conversation for the next round of talks - is we have to first reform the CNE, the electoral council, and then we have to replace its membership. And we're going to follow a very similar process here except that process will not require National Assembly ratification. We'll set up a similar committee of experts to nominate the names and members of the CNE, so that we'll have new members of the CNE, but we are also going to change, by mutual agreement both sides, they're going to change what the CNE is.

The CNE will now become basically a technical platform. It will remove all of the - all the political aspects of the CNE, meaning they're no longer going to be in a position to remove candidates from the ballot or decide who gets to run or who doesn't get to run. Their sole job will be equivalent to what our elections departments do in the United States in our respective counties in the 50 states and territories, and that is they're the people that put out the machines, count the votes, open the polling places, count the votes and report the results. And it will be a nonpolitical CNE.

Once those two things are in place - the new TSJ at the end of this year, the new CNE very shortly thereafter, and that work is already beginning - what should happen at that point is that then they will have to declare - Delcy will have to declare a vacancy in the presidency, a permanent vacancy. Right now they haven't done that. Once you declare a permanent vacancy, that triggers, under their exiting constitution, a six-month period for new elections. And the CNE, this nonpolitical new CNE, will then determine the date of that election and when it should happen and when it should be.

Here's the problem. If we don't have a new TSJ and we don't have a new CNE, we cannot have a credible election. We cannot have a new credible - we cannot have a credible election because the loser of that election is going to claim the other side cheated, or we can't have a credible election because the existing infrastructure that controls those two things will prevent a credible election from happening. So, you have to create the architecture for a credible election before you can actually call for one or have one.

But that is the goal here: a new TSJ before the end of this year; a new CNE shortly thereafter; declare the vacant - permanent vacancy in the presidency that triggers the six-month cycle for the presidential election. And that's - and then that election will happen run by the nonpolitical CNE and governed by a TSJ that you're not going to go to and basically annul the results of the elections because it's been compromised or politicized the way the regime used it in the past. That is the goal here.

Obviously, we need to use our leverage as a government over the interim authorities to ensure that this process keeps moving forward in a responsible way, but our goal here is to have an election that when it happens the losing side will say it was a fair election, we just lost, we'll go into opposition, and when you guys screw up the country we'll run in four years and retake power. I mean, that's the way these functioning democracies and republics should work.

If we did an election with the current infrastructure of that country - they know how to run - I mean, they have electoral machines. They can set up polling places and do another election next month, but it won't be a fair election, and it won't be a free election.

Added to all of that is the atmospherics. You can't really have a credible election in a country - even if you have a new CNE, even if you have a new TSJ, you cannot have an election in a country if political parties are not allowed to form and operate, if they're not allowed to campaign, if you don't have a free press that they can have access to, if you don't have the opportunities to access the airwaves of the country, if you don't have access to Instagram and X and whatever else they want to use on social media to communicate with voters and so forth, if candidates aren't able to move freely through the country.

So, irrespective of the talks but as part of the talks is the desire to continue to open political spaces. Now, I don't know if you guys have seen, but as an example, multiple - so for example, María Corina's - one of her right-hand people, her communication advisor, one of her chief strategists - she was holed up in the Argentine embassy like a hostage for a year and a half, and then it was facilitated for them to escape the country. She returned to Venezuela like a month ago. She flew into the airport, was processed through customs. She's operating openly in the country. She does press conferences. I saw her do national interviews on television in Venezuela. We need more of that. We need more of that because you can't have an election unless the political actors are able to express themselves without fear of retribution and arrest and things of that nature.

So that is really the desire here and why we want to build this out the way it is, because what we want is an election that leaves behind an enduring republic. Now, I would make two points.

Point number one. I challenge anyone to study, as I have and others have, the history of democratic transitions. And there is no example of a peaceful democratic transition, certainly in recent times. Almost every peaceful democratic transition has required you to work with some of the actual authorities in the country in order to get it. That was the experience after the Cold War. That's the experience in Paraguay. That was the experience in Spain. That was the experience in Portugal. That's been the experience in country after country.

That doesn't mean you want to leave the current authorities in place forever. It just recognizes that in order for transition to be peaceful you need the buy-in and the cooperation of the other side of the equation, especially people that control the security services of a country. And - if you want it to be peaceful.

The other way you can have a democratic transition is you can have a civil war. You can have people with guns fighting against people with guns, and then whoever wins that wins. But we would prefer not to have bloodshed and not have instability and not have civil war in a place. We would prefer the peaceful transition process, which is why we are required to, as a result, work with the interim authorities to make all of these reforms and to use the leverage we have to ensure that these reforms continue to move forward on a proper pace.

If we've been delayed by anything, it was by an earthquake that for about eight weeks sort of focused the country, both in Venezuela and in our response, to humanitarian response to that crisis, but nonetheless we are making good progress.

Now, those talks and these talks I believe with all of my heart, these talks are the first, probably last, and best chance Venezuela has had to achieve an enduring republic for not just for one election cycle but for the future.

Now, Venezuela faces a bunch of other challenges. I want you to envision for a moment - let's say we had an election in February, and let's just for the sake of argument say María Corina Machado is elected president of Venezuela, she takes over. What does she take over? She takes over a government all of whose institutions were built by the previous regime, all the security forces have been built for 30 years by the previous regime - meaning the security forces are entirely controlled by pro-Chavistas. The economy is in dire straits. The largest per capita - or percentage of GDP debt crisis in the world. These are massive undertakings.

So, you won't control the National Assembly, you won't control the security apparatus, and you face these massive challenges. And you could see how a government that's put in place without any of the elements necessary to govern could very quickly fail and the whole project could very quickly fall apart. That is why, when we talk about economics being important in all of this, that is one of the things that we truly believe. We would like to see some of these issues fixed, even as we're working on the political process, because if you want a democratically elected government to succeed, you don't want them to inherit an economic apocalypse that brings it down. Because you'll have an election, everybody will be happy, but a month later everyone's gonna be mad that there's fuel shortages, that there's electronic - that there's no electricity.

What happens when the security forces that are not loyal to the system decide they're not gonna follow orders from - no matter who got elected? They're not gonna follow their orders; they're not gonna follow through. Now Caracas once again becomes the murder capital of the Western Hemisphere, maybe the world; you have endemic crime problems. So, these are all very real challenges.

We're sort of facing that right now in Bolivia. We're facing it now in Bolivia where we have a new president, but he's being challenged by the fact that the security apparatus of that country and many of the other apparatuses of that country are products of Evo Morales' rule and aren't necessarily responsive to the directives of the elected leaders. So, in Venezuela, it would be exponentially worse.

So, when people talk about the need for economic reform having to accompany political reform, that is the reason. The reason is because if you want a democratically elected government to succeed, they can't - you can't leave them saddled with an economic calamity, because eventually no matter how happy people are, they had an election, they still want to eat. They still want to be able to pay their bills, and they still want the electrical power to not have - suffer from chronic blackouts. And they want to - they don't want to deal with high inflation, and they'll certainly be unhappy if the country's being overrun by criminals.

So, these things are important because our goal is not just to have an election. Our goal is to give Venezuela the best chance possible to having an enduring republic that can survive beyond just one election. And otherwise, you set yourself up for an experience like what happened in Nicaragua, where the Sandinistas ultimately returned to power after discontent with the non-Sandinista parties led to Ortega being elected. And now he's taken over and turned himself back into a dictator. So, we want to avoid that outcome as well.

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