Caracas Chronicles

At the modest home on 209 Woodland Drive in Plains, Georgia, the news had been anticipated for nearly two years. On November 19, 2023, they bid farewell to Rosalynn; now, it was Jimmy’s turn. He passed away at the age of 100 years, two months, and 28 days. James Earl Carter Jr., known worldwide as Jimmy Carter, was governor of that state between 1971 and 1975 and President of the United States between 1977 and 1981. These two offices he held for one term each. And although the latter led to his worldwide fame and influence, he will be best remembered for his later actions. Carter belonged to that odd line of former presidents who reached their highest peak after leaving office. In 2002 he won the Nobel Peace Prize “for his decades of tireless effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts”. 

His troubled years in the White House anticipated his work at the Carter Center. And if in early 1978 critics such as Noam Chomsky did not see “the Carter administration as engaged in any different trajectory” than its predecessors, the U.S. foreign policy did shift in favor of human rights. Carter brokered peace agreements between Egypt and Israel after a dozen days at Camp David. And he believed that the role of the United States with Latin America was not to continue with the cudgel of promoting military dictatorships, but to democratize and expand dialogue and commitments such as the transfer of the Panama Canal to its people.

Reality did justice to these ideals. At home, where the unrest inherited from the latter Nixon administration floated as a phantom, there were years of inflation and high fuel costs. Carter allowed singular reforms such as the mandatory use of seat belts and air bags in automobiles and the air transport deregulation that lowered the cost of plane tickets for the middle class, but his policy of energy efficiency and the call to consume less irritated many Americans. In Latin America, the dictatorships of the Southern Cone continued their atrocities. The U.S. hostage crisis in Iran was the endpoint of a presidency that at the time was seen as a failure. Jimmy Carter was defeated by Ronald Reagan on November 4, 1980. These were not the times for a pacifist farmer: the 1980s were the years of the smiling, ready-to-shoot cowboy.  

While President Carter was leading the US, Venezuela experienced the consolidation of two decades of democracy and the hype of the oil bonanza. He would get involved again with our country, leading the pro-democracy think tank he founded, but this time with a rich spectrum of lights and shadows.

The U.S. president visits “La Gran Venezuela”

President Carter made an official visit to Venezuela on March 28, 1978. That is, one year and two months into his term. 

In the diaries from his White House days, which Carter published in 2010, he said that with these visits he hoped that “the time of the ‘ugly American’ is over, and from the reception we received, apparently this is true.”

Upon his arrival in Caracas, he gave a speech in Spanish. He noted in his diary that the media review focused on the fact that it was “the first time a president [of the United States] has ever made a speech in a foreign country in a foreign language”. 

Then he recalls his meeting with former president and senator-for-life Rómulo Betancourt, who thought that the emphasis being placed by the U.S. government on human rights “is the best thing that’s happened in this hemisphere in his lifetime”. It should be mentioned that months earlier, in February 1978, Carter had sent a telegram to Betancourt congratulating him on his seventy years of life and fifty years in the political arena. There he expressed that “under your leadership, the era of democracy was inaugurated in Venezuela”, leading the country “to occupy the first rank among the nations of the free world”. 

The key event of Carter’s visit was the signing of the Maritime Boundary Treaty between the U.S. and Venezuela. Because, although it is not well known, our country has a border with the American superpower, basically through the sea that separates our islands from Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. It was the last year of the government of Carlos Andrés Pérez, who received his counterpart in the presidential office of Miraflores Palace and with a reception at La Casona. 

In his annotations, Carter recapitulates a meeting with Pérez in September 1977 in the United States, highlighting that he “has been helping us to relieve tensions concerning Caribbean development, Andean disputes on weapons, borders, access to the Amazon, access to the sea, international nuclear non-proliferation, and can—if he will—hold down OPEC price increases.” In a later entry, in June 1978, Carter comments on CAP’s grandiloquence in describing to him the Panama Canal agreements as the “most significant advance in political affairs in the Western Hemisphere in this century.”

The compassionate former president

Carter’s approval ratings during his presidency reached Richard Nixon’s levels at the time of his resignation. As a former president, his public image recovered significantly. Attached to a Christian faith cultivated from childhood, which he shared with his wife and partner Rosalynn, the couple reinvented themselves and founded the Carter Center. From this organization they went out into the world to work for the eradication of diseases in Africa, to mediate in international conflicts and to defend human rights, electoral guarantees and democracy in Latin America. 

With this commitment, Carter traveled to Caracas in February 1986 and visited former president and senator-for-life Rafael Caldera. Carter proposed to Caldera to get involved with his initiatives. In November of that year, Caldera participated in a meeting of the Carter Center at Emory University, Atlanta, writing a press article a month later about what was discussed there: “In a workshop, the spokesmen of the ‘academic’ sector proposed the creation of a Council of former presidents and former heads of government (democratically elected) to constitute a kind of moral instance, to watch over the best functioning of the democratic system and to act or mediate in those cases in which it could find itself in difficult situations”.

The 1980s in Latin America were dominated by war in Central America, the transition to democracy in the Southern Cone, and the foreign debt crisis, which mobilized the Carter Center to hold a conference at the end of March 1989 to discuss relations between the United States and Latin America. Former President Caldera and President Carlos Andrés Pérez, who less than two months into his new government was dead weight due to the events of the Caracazo, were invited on behalf of Venezuela. CAP and Caldera traveled together despite their contrasting visions. The Carter Center was thus a space to show the institutional unity of Venezuelan democracy.

“Accomplice mediator,” mocked or misunderstood?

The Carter Center began working in Venezuela in 1996, first to combat onchocerciasis, a disease caused by a worm and transmitted by flies which seriously affects vision and skin; then as an international observer in electoral processes. In 1998, Venezuelan democracy was celebrating its fourth decade and despite its imperfections and the last fifteen years of economic, institutional and credibility turbulence, the country was ready to hold its ninth consecutive presidential elections in freedom. This was the center’s first action in the country. Jimmy Carter met with the main candidates, visited voting centers in Caracas, and declared that with the election of Hugo Chávez he had seen a peaceful revolution. At least the latter was repeatedly emphasized by Chávez himself to give a more democratic aura to a “revolutionary process” that came to claim itself in the global Third Way, reformist and rooted in patriotic history and the fight against corruption.

The Carter Center continued as an international observer in the 2000 mega-elections and the presidential elections of 2006, 2012 and 2013, the latter in a non-exhaustive way and with a reduced delegation. Between 2002 and 2004, the country became polarized to an almost irreconcilable level, as Chávez embraced a radicalized discourse based on confrontation. Tensions escalated from December 10, 2001, when the government issued a pack of economic laws, until February 3, 2003, when the opposition ended an oil strike that failed in toppling Chávez.

The OAS and the Carter Center became mediators between 2002 and 2004, thus giving origin to the Table of Negotiation and Agreements. The way to deactivate the political conflict in Venezuela was the Revocatory Referendum. Chávez, with low popularity, was delaying the conversations, putting obstacles and appeasing, until August 2004, when it was no longer a recall, but a revalidation. 

The figure of former President Carter may have become an endorsement and a democratic veneer for chavismo. His declarations that “the electoral process in Venezuela is the best in the world,” although referring to its technical robustness, were repeated countless times by Hugo Chávez as a description of the political environment as a whole, as if Carter’s words meant there was no danger of authoritarianism in Venezuela. 

So there comes the great question: was Carter’s 2004 mission to force the ideal and reach an agreement at any cost? Did he have double standards in his idea of democracy? 

Or was he used by chavismo, which denies many of the principles that Carter himself defended? In 2004, all kinds of hoaxes began to be spread in Venezuela about the Carters. It was said that Chávez had given Rosalynn Carter a jewel with some indescribable precious stone extracted from the Amazon.

What happened was an expressed international willingness to appease chavismo and leave a clearer path that could result in guarantees of coexistence. Carter propitiated the resolution of the conflict between his fishing partner, the media tycoon Gustavo Cisneros, and Chávez. As an example, Venevisión, a television network that in 2002 supported strikes, protests and an imminent regime change, began to mold a new editorial line capable of gradually inclining the balance in favor of the supreme leader. While the interests of some of the powerful were respected, the possibility of democratic development in the country remained in second place.  

In the prologue to the book by Francisco Diez and Jennifer McCoy, Mediación internacional en Venezuela (2013), Carter made a brief account of those years warning that although Chávez continued winning elections “with the option to be continuously reelected” and the opposition won “important positions in regional and legislative elections”, the main challenge for the country was “to maintain the social advances of recent years and at the same time strengthen democratic institutions and protect the rights enshrined in the 1999 Constitution”.  

A part of the domestic public opinion lost respect for the former president and the Carter Center ended its work in Venezuela in 2015. Then they began to denounce the lack of transparency and refused to come as observers in 2021. In 2024 they agreed to attend with a minimal mission to the July 28 presidential elections. Two days later, in their official statement, the Carter Center informed that the elections did not comply with the “international parameters and standards of electoral integrity”, and therefore could not be considered democratic. Nicolás Maduro would respond that when Jimmy Carter was active such things did not happen.

A bittersweet legacy

Upon Chávez’s death, in his official statement, Carter acknowledged the late President’s leadership, but warned of “the divisions created in the drive towards change in Venezuela and the need for national healing”. At the end of September 2015, Maduro published a photo in his social media in which a smiling Jimmy Carter handed him his book: A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety (2015).

Jimmy Carter’s connection with Venezuela left a bittersweet taste when viewed from the local scale. It is difficult not to relate it to the irreparable fracture as a society and the destruction of its institutions and the sad question: was Carter instrumental to the anti-democratic project of chavismo? Beyond this particular episode, as a person, as a figure for his country and the world, Carter was a pioneer. He sought peace, reconciliation and respect within the framework of social justice. Jimmy Carter died a centenarian with faith in his hands and broken ends with a long life where death will have no dominion, paraphrasing Dylan Thomas, one of his favorite poets. To use his own words, taken from his book Always a Reckoning and other poems (1995): “I have passed on joined my maker, or gone to the Promised Land, but stating the lamented fact, in the best and gentlest terms, that I, now dead, have recently reduced my level of participation”.