Venezuela 2020: Rebuilding a Nation Table of Contents FROM YOUR DIRECTOR-GENERAL ....................................................................................................................... 2 FROM YOUR CHAIR .................................................................................................................................................... 3 FROM YOUR CRISIS DIRECTOR ............................................................................................................................... 4 COMMITTEE DESCRIPTION .................................................................................................................................... 5 WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT VENEZUELA ............................................................................................ 6 THE WARS FOR INDEPENDENCE .................................................................................................................................................. 6 BOLIVAR GETS INTO THE GAME ................................................................................................................................................... 6 THE RISE AND FALL OF THE CAUDILOS..................................................................................................................................... 7 THE PATH TO CHÁVES AND MADURO ........................................................................................................................................ 7 THE LAST FEW MONTHS (WHERE WE DIVERGE FROM REALITY) ................................................................................. 8 CURRENT SITUATION ............................................................................................................................................... 9 COLLAPSING HEALTHCARE SYSTEM ........................................................................................................................................... 9 FOOD SHORTAGES................................................................................................................................................................................ 9 REFUGEE CRISIS ..................................................................................................................................................................................... 9 POSITIONS .................................................................................................................................................................. 10 ENDNOTES ................................................................................................................................................................. 12 Princeton Model United Nations Conference 2019 1 Venezuela 2020: Rebuilding a Nation FROM YOUR DIRECTOR-GENERAL Dear Delegates, It is my privilege to welcome you to the Princeton Model United Nations Conference. My name is Justin Curl, and I am honored to be your Director General of Crisis Committees this year. I am a sophomore in the Computer Science Department with certificates in Statistics & Machine Learning and Engineering Management Systems. On campus, I am a member of the Model UN Team, the Princeton Debate Panel, and a volunteer for the Mercer County suicide hotline. This is my second-year staffing PMUNC, I was a crisis director for the Joint Crisis Committee last year. I had a wonderful experience last year and am excited to be back again staffing PMUNC this year. I am from Los Angeles, California. I am not excited for the cold that awaits us all come November, but luckily, we have the heat of lively competition and new friendships to warm our hearts at PMUNC. I first joined the lovely activity of Model UN in college, and I have had an amazing experience competing on the college circuit. I hope you do not let the thrill of competition to distract you from the chance to learn something from your fellow delegates and building strong friendships. Crisis committees are a unique opportunity to form relationships with the 12-15 other students in committee. These committees will push you to creatively combine your long-term strategy with short-term events, spinning each update to your advantage. Success in crisis will require delegates to think critically and quickly to persuasively respond to constant crises coming out of the back room. Constantly balancing the goals of individual delegates with the success of the entire committee, delegates in crisis represent Model UN and politics at its best. This year we have an excellent slate of topics lined up, including a committee analyzing Orwell’s Animal Farm in the context of the USSR, another addressing Venezuela’s humanitarian crisis, and another responding to 9/11 among others. Both myself and my chairs have been working all summer to lay the foundations for the best PMUNC experience possible. Please read through the background guide, start thinking about your arc, and get ready to have an amazing weekend of fun at PMUNC. All the best, Justin Curl Princeton Model United Nations Conference 2019 2 Venezuela 2020: Rebuilding a Nation FROM YOUR CHAIR Dearest Delegates, Well done! The conference hasn’t even started, but you’ve already begun your rise to power. As you read the following 13 pages, you will get a crash-course in the history of Venezuela and the craft of rebuilding fractured states. But before we get there, I’d like to give you a bit of context. My name is Bozhidar Stankovikj -- although I go by Bobo -- and I’m a senior at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School for Public and International Affairs. I study how governments can make better decisions, and what happens when they don’t. My Princeton experience is heavily intertwined with Model UN: PMUNC 2016 was my first exposure to crisis committees, and I loved it so much that I became the Chief of Staff for our 2017 Conference. That wasn’t enough, of course! I came back in 2018 as President of our International Relations Council -- the organization that runs the conference -- and chaired a committee on Yugoslavia. PMUNC 2019 will be my fourth and final time at a conference that has taught me an incredible amount. Of course, I’d like to go out with a bang. So, Olivia and I have crafted a committee that (we hope) will be challenging and will make you think not only about the ways to create crises, but how to meaningfully resolve them. To do well, we expect you to have read the guide and to come into the discussion with ideas on how to fix the problems we’ve laid out. While thinking on your feet is necessary and important, constructive solutions will get you much further in our eyes. It wouldn’t be MUN (or Venezuela) without a little bit of chaos, though, so feel free to try your luck through crisis, too. You will notice that this committee starts on January 2, 2020. We’ve provided you more than a century of Venezuelan history for context, but we have changed the few months preceding our start date to create an environment more conducive to problem-solving in Venezuela. It is crucial that you understand how we progressed from present day reality to the status quo the background guide has laid out for the beginning of 2020. We hope this committee will be a learning experience regardless of your prior experience with Model UN (or lack thereof!). So, if you have questions after reading the guide, feel free to reach out to me at [email protected] and I’d be happy to chat. Cheers, Bobo Princeton Model United Nations Conference 2019 3 Venezuela 2020: Rebuilding a Nation FROM YOUR CRISIS DIRECTOR Dear Delegates, Welcome to PMUNC 2019! My name is Olivia Ott, and I am honored to be serving as Crisis Director for the Venezuelan Crisis. I am currently a senior studying public policy at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and plan to graduate with a degree in public policy and a minor in Spanish in June 2020. Fun fact: Bobo and I actually first became friends after struggling together through a mandatory departmental class that required us to do “real” research. Who knew friendships could form over mediocre statistical analyses of U.S. Supreme Court data? Anyways, I was first introduced to MUN in high school, and have continued to compete as a delegate and Chair conferences on the college circuit with Princeton’s MUN team. This will be my fourth (and final!) year staffing PMUNC, and I have loved every minute that I have spent at this conference. I also can’t think of any better way to end my MUN career than by CD-ing a crisis committee with a topic as complex, challenging, and interesting as Venezuela. As Bobo mentioned, you will need to read the background guide to do well at this conference, and it is critical that you understand where and how history begins to diverge from reality prior to our committee’s starting point of January 2nd, 2020. While it wouldn’t be a crisis committee without semi-successful power grabs and convoluted schemes full of treachery, I encourage you to balance your creativity against creating constructive solutions, and will be looking for well thought-out and detailed crisis arcs. I hope that this committee will be fun for delegates with all levels of crisis and MUN experience! Please feel free to reach out to me at [email protected] if you have any questions about the background guide, this committee, or Model UN in general. I look forward to meeting all of you and foiling your crisis arcs throughout the weekend! Sincerely, Olivia Ott Princeton Model United Nations Conference 2019 4 Venezuela 2020: Rebuilding