What the US can do as Venezuela teeters

Well into the third week of a national strike pitting a determined but inchoate political opposition against the pugnacious Chávez, Venezuela slides closer to a repeat of turmoil that last April left 18 dead in street protests.

This time, however, oil workers have joined the general strike and have practically turned off the spigot, in a country that derives 70 percent of its income from oil. World oil prices are already climbing over the possibility of war with Iraq, and now, as the Venezuelan pipeline runs dry, US gasoline prices threatening to spike upward.

This is putting pressure on the US to enter the fray, but it's still trying to repair damage that resulted from a White House call last week for early elections to defuse the crisis. That call was widely interpreted as support for the opposition, and had Chávez wryly noting that such elections would require him to violate Venezuela's Constitution. This week, the White House backed away from that stance and said it supports a referendum on Chávez's presidency - without recommending a date.

Under the Chávez-engineered Constitution, a binding referendum on Chávez's rule could be held next August. The middle- and upper-class opposition - backed by the near total shutdown of the oil industry - wants new elections much sooner. But Chávez knows that would doom his "revolution," which today enjoys solid support only among the lower levels of the military and the poor.

Venezuela's crisis has been fed by a confrontational president who, in his zeal to knock down a power structure dominated by a small elite, has undone the institutions at the base of the country's democracy. Thus, institutions that might normally be called on to resolve a national crisis have either been gutted or turned into partisan players.

That's why most experts believe an outside party - such as the US, working with other countries in the region - will be necessary to defuse the crisis.

"The US approach to Venezuela has been at best incoherent and at worst counterproductive. But given our place and importance in the hemisphere, we have to do better," says Robert Pastor of the Center for Democracy and Elections Management at American University in Washington. "We need to ... work collectively [with the Organization of American States] to head off a disaster."

"Disaster" could mean as much as civil war - which would be alongside the decades-old conflict in neighboring Colombia, where the US pours in millions of dollars annually to help fight a left-wing insurgency and the drug trade that supports them.

That outcome is far from inevitable in Venezuela, analysts note, but is more likely if a bitterly divided country is left to fight things out on its own.

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