This isn't just a matter of doing what’s right — it's a matter of doing what works.
Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó stands on a truck carrying humanitarian aid in Cúcuta, Colombia, on Feb. 23. By Jeremy Konyndyk March 1 at 11:50 AM Jeremy Konyndyk is a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development and teaches humanitarian field operations at Georgetown University. He served from 2013 to 2017 as the Obama administration’s director for foreign disaster assistance at USAID.
This is not necessarily easy: Aid can confer power, and political leaders inevitably try to align that power with their own aims. In Venezuela, National Assembly leader Juan Guaidó wants to harness it to advance his claim to stewardship of the country. For embattled President Nicolás Maduro, whose own mismanagement of the country has driven the economy to ruin, accepting aid would be an acknowledgment that his regime cannot satisfy people’s basic needs.
Conditions in Venezuela are beyond urgent. The national health system has collapsed to such a degree that parents must scour empty pharmacy shelves, black-market suppliers and WhatsApp groups to find basic medicines for sick children. Hunger is reaching such extreme levels that only 1 in 10 people is consuming enough food, and severe malnutrition is spreading. Not surprisingly, this has driven more than 3 million Venezuelans to flee the country.
Second, to depoliticize aid deliveries, the United States and other donors should cede leadership of the relief effort to more neutral players such as the U.N., the Red Cross and NGOs. This will require the Trump administration to look past its frequent antipathy toward the U.N. In 2015, the U.N. played a similar neutral-facilitator role when Iran sought to use aid shipments to undermine the controversial Saudi blockade of Yemen, prompting threats of Saudi retaliation.
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