Some people never learn: Jennifer McCoy of the Carter Center promotes herself

I am dumbfounded to read an article of Jennifer McCoy at Al Jazeera where she actually sorts of offers her services to mediate in Venezuela. For those who do not know who she is, McCoy is the director of the Carter Center after Carter gave up direct involvement due to old age. She was participating a lot in the 2002-2004 dialogue fiasco of which she at least admits "The Carter Center, facilitated a seven-month negotiation that resulted in an agreement, though it failed to include an enforcement mechanism." My emphasis.

Since she brought it up, let's start with the rather nefarious role of the Carter Center then of which she is guilty in part (large part? mostly?) since she was the figurehead in quite a few stays in Venezuela. To get any credibility in Venezuela at this stage of the game she could start by some form of apology of having helped the Chavez regime get away with its first electoral fraud in 2004 and also, even worse, to have say little bit more than peep squeak on things like the "Tascon List" and other chavismo abuse of power in the decade that followed. In short, what I am trying to say again, that I said clearly in my open letter to the former president Carter, her help to the Chavez regime, willingly or not, is at the direct source of the troubles of today that she dares to write about as a diffident intellectual, good enough for Al Jazeera.

I am not going to retake the arguments I advanced in that open letter to Jimmy Carter: I am tired to rehash over and over what a fraud he has been vis a vis Venezuela.  I am just going to use excerpts of the Al Jazeera piece which proves that McCoy may not be as much a fraud as Carter, but she comes across rather heartless, unapologetic and disingenuous.

A main offense is that she compares Venezuela with the Tunisia and Egypt situation as if the realities of these countries had any link with Latin America. Not even this blogger who is prone to the occasional lyric excess has dared to go beyond a wishful call of a Venezuelan Spring, without elaborating further. Certainly there are some lessons about negotiations in Tunisia that could be used anywhere, but she would have more credibility with her words if she had recognized that her 2003-2004 participation had been in the end a big failure, and that she learned something out of it instead of blaming someone else by meekly writing "though it failed to include and enforcing mechanism". Did she not know about such needs then? Was she not already the heir of Carter, a faculty professor?

The other thing is that either her information in Venezuela, or her conclusions are biased or misinformed. Your choice.  She actually claims that Maduro dialogue attempt were genuine and that these were trashed when the students start protesting in February. She just needed to be more direct and say that poor Maduro was trumped. She is of course deadly wrong.

There is one part of the "negotiation" that Maduro team attempted and that was trashed duly in November when he sent his goons to ransack electronic stores to shore up his electoral support for the December election that seemed lost to him. Actually I am wrong, by June we already knew that the regime was not going to ease anything on its tight economic grip on the economy when Merentes overture petered as he soon was removed from the front line. The Dakazo of November was a mere codicil to the negotiations obituaries. How can McCoy ignore that? How can she ignore all the fake negotiations that Chavez offered in the last decade of which the one she was involved in was the mere first prominent installment?

There are more stuff that I could call her upon such as ignoring the electoral fraud of April 2013. But that would not be the first time that the Carter Center has failed to take an energetic position on that, so what else is new?

This is all a fraud and the Venezuelan opposition would be a fool to welcome back such "bate quebrados" who are going to help Maduro without even wanting to do it.  There are much better people, much more credible to mediate here. Heck, even Lula would be better because at least we know were he stands at, which is more than can be said for the Carter Center, at least in its Venezuelan applications which have brought us such misery.