LATIN AMERICA KEEPS GOING SOUTH / THE WALL STREET JOURNAL EDITORIAL

Latin America Keeps Going South

Biden fiddles while trouble grows in Mexico and Venezuela.

By The Editorial Board

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro delivers a speech during a rally, Caracas, Aug. 28. Photo: pedro rances mattey/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

There was a time when the defense of American values in the Western Hemisphere was an important U.S. national-security objective. 

But as trouble grows in Venezuela and Mexico, the Biden Administration is largely a spectator.

Nicolás Maduro is expanding his terror in Venezuela, despite having lost the July 28 presidential election to former diplomat Edmundo Gonazález Urrutia. 

The regime has rounded up more than 2,000 opposition demonstrators and leaders, who have disappeared into the country’s prisons. 

Twenty-seven protesters are dead. 

This week Mr. Maduro issued an arrest warrant for Mr. González Urrutia.

If Mr. Maduro believes he can stay in power, it might be because the U.S. is sending mixed signals. 

The U.S. seizure of the dictator’s plane in the Dominican Republic on Monday is good if largely symbolic news. 

But the U.S. Treasury has also issued licenses to more than 10 companies to operate in the country.

The largest is Chevron, which by the end of this year is expected to be pumping some 200,000 barrels of oil per day, 25% of the country’s output. 

Chevron’s contract with the regime is secret, but oil watchers estimate that in the last 18 months its production has generated some $2.6 billion for the regime.

The dictator may think the U.S. will eventually view him as legitimate. 

Team Biden can disabuse him of that by pulling Chevron’s license along with the licenses for six other oil companies and four American oil-service companies. 

In a global oil market of some 100 million barrels a day, fears of a price spike from less Venezuelan production are misplaced. 

A more realistic worry is the new migrant wave in the region, and into the U.S., that the survival of the regime is likely to generate.

Mexico is also slouching toward one-party rule without much objection from the U.S. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who leaves office Oct. 1, has vowed to pass constitutional amendments this month with strong majorities in the new Congress that was sworn in Sunday. 

His changes include a judicial overhaul that will end court independence, legal and economic priorities for state-owned energy companies and the end of independent regulatory agencies. 

This will undermine economic and political competition and the rule of law.

It will also violate the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which is crucial for president-elect Claudia Sheinbaum’s economic program built on attracting capital to make goods for the North American market. 

Investors will lose judicial security as the president’s Morena party takes control of the Supreme Court and sidelines private investment to compete with government firms.

Under the USMCA, the U.S. can seek consultations to insist on the legal certainty and level playing field enshrined in the agreement. 

It can also make clear that without such guarantees the USMCA is at risk. 

The lack of an independent judiciary also violates other agreements Mexico has signed on human rights and labor and environmental protections—all of which the Biden Administration claims to value.

Industry groups and investors are clamoring for help from the Administration, to little result. 

Perhaps Democrats are laying low ahead of the November election. 

In the meantime, trouble spreads on America’s doorstep.