Venezuela

The fightback
User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10590
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Venezuela

Post by blindpig » Mon Jun 22, 2020 1:34 pm

The Border Heats Up: This Is How Venezuela's War Goes Against Colombia's Paramilitaries
Mission Truth
Jun 21 · 5 min read

Image
Photo: Reuters

This week the Los Rastrojos narco-paramilitary gang failed to attack the Venezuelan army when it was passing through an area of ​​Catatumbo, a border municipality in Zulia state.
According recounts journalist Madelein García, the paramilitary cell attacked a column of vehicles of the Venezuelan army was passing through the bridge connecting Middle Caño Caño Motilona, two sectors of the aforementioned zuliano municipality. The combat lasted an hour and four members of Los Rastrojos were killed, said the journalist.

Image
Photo: Madelein García

The area where the clash between the Venezuelan military and the irregular forces occurred is part of the trails that connect Venezuela with Colombia, controlled by Los Rastrojos for fuel smuggling and human trafficking.
Regarding the latter, President Nicolás Maduro has been reiterative in alerting the threat that, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, Venezuelans are entering the country illegally without going through the proper epidemiological controls that the state has ordered to execute at the borders.
Probably the event on Wednesday is connected to the coup against Los Rastrojos on June 14, three days before, when the 12th Army Caribbean Brigade, which was in a patrol operation, dismantled a camp of the aforementioned paramilitary band in the same site, after a confrontation against its members.
At that time, ZODI Zulia reported the seizure of war material such as explosives, antipersonnel mines, AK-47 rifle chargers and grenades.

Image
Photo: El Pitazo

Since the national government ordered the mandatory social quarantine throughout the country, other events related to the irregular group have occurred in Venezuelan states that border Colombia, while health, police and military personnel have been deployed at the Comprehensive Social Assistance Points (PASI ) to attend to and detect cases of Covid-19 in the migrant population that is returning to Venezuela, in order to avoid a further increase in the number of infections imported from the neighboring country, which already exceed 1,500 cases.
Freddy Bernal, protector of the Táchira state, announced on April 24 the capture of Juan Montero Buitrago, chief financial officer of Los Rastrojos.
Bernal denounced that Buitrago "has an extensive record for smuggling gasoline, drug trafficking, and extortion." In Colombian media he is identified as the maximum leader of the gang in Norte de Santander, Colombia.
On May 20, Moisés David Contreras Santana, lieutenant of the paramilitary group in Coloncito, Táchira, was arrested and seized weapons and equipment for military use.
Ten days later, Bernal reported that three other paramilitary members of Los Rastrojos had been captured, during an operation to combat the mafias that are transferring people by illegal steps from Colombia to Venezuela.
2020: data on narco-paramilitary violence in Colombia
In recent weeks, clashes between irregular gangs have occurred in the Colombian region that borders Venezuela.
W Radio , citing the inhabitants of the town of Banco de Arena, rural area of ​​Cúcuta, reported on June 2 that there were several detonations and rifle shots, accusing Los Rastrojos and the Colombian guerrilla group ELN as the authors of the event.
The Colombian attorney general, Fernando Carrillo Flórez, denounced an increase in the forced recruitment of minors, pointing not only to guerrilla movements, but also to criminal structures linked to drug trafficking, kidnappings and homicides, acts that continue to be carried out in parallel to the emergency. currently in the country, forcing the forced displacement of communities away from the territories in conflict, although that implies the risk of getting Covid-19.
Among the armed groups that the head of the Public Ministry listed are the Rastrojos, the Urabeños and the Águilas Negras, all with open files on the war against Venezuela.
Despite the fact that the Peace Accords have been signed for four years, the Office of the Attorney General indicated that in 30% of Colombian territory, especially in rural areas, children and adolescents continue to be affected by the disputes triggered by paramilitarism and the drug trafficking.

Image
The victims of the war of criminal gangs grow in the interior of Colombia. Photo: Colprensa

Similarly, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), cited by El Espectador , revealed the worrying figures regarding the 43 mass displacements detected in Colombia so far in 2020; due to the clashes between illegal armed groups, 11,800 people had to flee their homes, while another 1,000 more did so due to threats.

The affected departments are Nariño, Chocó, Antioquia, Norte de Santander and Cauca. Furthermore, UNHCR mentions that in Norte de Santander there were more confinements due to the confrontations.
The threat of Los Rastrojos on this side of the border
The FANB has had to remain in permanent military exercises in this period of pandemic, even more so after the terrorist incursion of Operation Gideon failed.
The low intensity war of paramilitaries against the Venezuelan state does not give up despite the global health emergency.
In this sense, and as the Venezuelan president himself has denounced, it should not be ruled out that the transfer of Venezuelans by gangs is a deliberate action by paramilitary groups, in alliance with the Colombian extreme right, to damage the effective control that exists in the pandemic country.
A recent action that could be triggering the latest clashes with Los Rastrojos is the new gasoline distribution plan in the country, which, by cutting the waste on the input subsidy, would be affecting the interests of the mafias that smuggle gasoline.
The relationship of this criminal gang with the leaders of anti-Chavism who are leading the coup against Venezuela is obvious.
The images of Guaidó being escorted by Jhon Jairo Durán Contreras, alias “Menor”, ​​and Albeiro Lobo Quintero, alias “Brother”, who toured the world in 2019, became, that year, the main evidence of a series of investigations compiled by the Venezuelan government, where it is shown that, beyond criminal activities, narco-paramilitary cells have been incorporated into the destabilization scheme against Venezuela that the Casa de Nariño itself promotes.

Image

https://medium.com/@misionverdad2012/se ... 7a126adf63

Google Translator
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10590
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Venezuela

Post by blindpig » Tue Jun 23, 2020 1:17 pm

Image

60% of Venezuelans Returning From Brazil are Positive for Covid-19

June 22, 2020 orinocotribune Bolivar State, Brazil, coronavirus, COVID-19, migrants, Santa Elena de Uairen
Jun 219, 2020.- The governor of Bolívar state in Venezuela, Justo Noguera Pietri, reported in a press conference that 60% of the nationals who enter through the border with Brazil arrive positive. This was determined after applying the Rapid Diagnostic Test (PDR), the reason why every day a plane travels to Caracas carrying proof of the positive cases.

Noguera also announced that 1,092 people are currently contained in the Comprehensive Social Care Points (Pasi), who are provided with free of charge logistical attention, food, healthcare and accommodations, while they carry out the collective quarantine of fourteen days.

“All positive cases are contained in Santa Elena de Uairén, to prevent the vector that transmits the pandemic from reaching the rest of the country, everyone who enters through the health portal complies with this protocol.”

The governor called on citizens to know “the correct way to protect yourself from the pandemic is to use the face mask, for now there is no vaccine. China and Russia have an important advance, but while this is happening we should not expose the family on the street, we must protect ourselves,” warned Noguera.

Likewise, the governor explained that there are a total of 8 vulnerable indigenous communities, on the border with Brazil, that are treated to prevent the vector from propagating in the area of the indigenous peoples.

Finally, he announced that the newborn wing starts operations on Monday, inaugurated by President Nicolás Maduro at the Uyapar Hospital, Caroní municipality, after they finish sterilizing the areas, so that the mothers are cared for in the three new high-tech operating rooms, with a daily capacity of 100 patients.

https://orinocotribune.com/60-of-venezu ... -covid-19/

**************************************

Image

An Opposition Drunk with Hatred and Insanity Pushes Against the CLAP (Food program) Because it Sabotages its Sabotage
June 22, 2020
By Clodovaldo Hernandez – June 21, 2020

Children, drunkards and madmen have carried the fame of telling the truths that the rest of the people silence or disguise with masks and costumes. But the monopoly that the little ones had, the drunks and the crazies in this field of frankness fell apart with Twitter. Now there are many grown-ups, sober and sane people, who let loose every excess of sincerity!

For example, here is one of the thousands this week in Venezuela: Mr. José Toro Hardy (Venezuelan extreme right oil expert), who you know is quite old and one presumes is alcohol-free (at least when tweeting) and has use of his mental faculties, has told the great truth of the opposition’s feelings about the arrest of businessman Alex Saab (who helped provision the Clap program, arrested in Cape Verde a few days ago due to US plans to starve millions of Venezuelans). He wrote: “And now how are they going to do the Claps ?”

It is inevitable to imagine the dapper gentleman rubbing his hands as he glimpses that with Saab’s apprehension, the government food program will fail.

Toro Hardy’s question sounds like the sad story when the boy says, in the middle of a family reunion that his mom went to the hospital because his dad, once again, hit her, something that everyone knows, but everyone is silent about. Or like when the employee who had a few drinks tells the boss that everyone in the office considers him an idiot. Or like when someone who is crazy (or is feigning madness) sings things as they are to a powerful person and those present do not know whether to laugh or stay serious.

In this case, the reason why “escualidismo’ (anti-Chavismo) (said not as an insult, but as a sociological category) celebrates the capture of the indicated character is not because its members are particularly lovers of rectitude in the management of public affairs (if they were, they would have already kicked out the clique that directs them badly), but because they have faith that by removing him from circulation, they will harm the social program that, at least, has brought food to the Venezuelan people.

Many, many other human beings opposed to the Bolivarian government have that same “hope”, but they don’t dare to express it publicly so as not to appear as ruthless people who dream of giving a fatal blow to the Claps, no matter if it implies that there is more hunger and malnutrition in their own country.

The revelation implicit in Toro Hardy’s question leaves bare the plan that has been in place since the Claps were conceived and launched: this public policy must be destroyed because, to put it in words, it sabotages their sabotage, that is to say, counteracts the criminal strategy of bending the Venezuelan people with hunger.



It should not be forgotten that the Claps were born at the cruelest moment of the internal economic war, when all the factors of the business sector were orchestrated to make people suffer to the maximum, calculating that in this way there would be a social outbreak and the long-awaited change of government. The Clap model was surprisingly successful and literally saved many people from starvation, in addition to creating or regenerating a non-existent or stunted social fabric in communities, a dividend perhaps as important as the first one, seen in strategic terms.

The heavily subsidized food distribution policy has also been a battering ram against the next phase of the economic war, which came with unilateral coercive measures and blockade. The governments of the countries that are supposedly very concerned about the Venezuelan people have done their utmost to prevent the Claps from receiving imported food. They want to force a famine and then accuse the Venezuelan government of it and so justify a “humanitarian” invasion.



To attack the Claps and not appear publicly as potential genocides, the opposing factors (the US government and its European and Latin American satellites, corporations, international organizations and NGOs, Venezuelan right-wing parties) have resorted to an old trick, as the Super Agent 86 used to say: criminalize the public policy that they wish to annul, persecute those who make it possible and humiliate their beneficiaries.

The international persecution of any financial operation destined for the Claps required criminalization because otherwise it would not look good. It is not the same to say that a purchase of grains or cereals is prevented because it covers up money laundering from drug trafficking as to say that it is prevented to make the population of a country stop eating and thus impose a new government of their liking.

In order for criminalization to be said and repeated in the country and on a global scale, it obviously has the services of the most powerful media and social networks machinery of all time, capable of showing the attempts of a government to buy food for its population as a crime against humanity.

The effort to demolish the Clap’s policy (positive, beyond the criticism it deserves) is of such magnitude that certain media have even been created or kept alive with the sole purpose of crediting the smear campaign of criminalizing the participation of officials and businessmen, and also to fuel the refrain of mockery and contempt for those who receive the products.

Without much dissimulation, some of these media outlets, which claim to be independent, live on the money provided by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), considered the friendly face of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and say they count with the logistical support of the Colombian oligarchy, so concerned with the transparency of business and combating money laundering of bad origin … It would suffice to do an analysis of conscience and ask yourself if with such sponsors someone has moral authority to judge the businessmen who walk the tightrope.

But Alex Saab must understand that it is not a personal tirade. If we were to find a child, a drunkard or a madman who tells the truth without disguise, it would be clear that the roll of the national, international and anti-Chavista media (a childish opposition, drunk with hatred and insane) is not whether a businessman washes money or not in their activities. If so, they could not cope with so much work. Their role is to end the Claps so that hunger sets us free.

(La IguanaTV)

OT/JRE/EF

https://orinocotribune.com/an-oppositio ... -sabotage/

Google Translator
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10590
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Venezuela

Post by blindpig » Fri Jun 26, 2020 1:41 pm

The naval siege at the center of the US strategy against Venezuela
Mission Truth
Jun 25 · 6 min read



By Ernesto Cazal

Image
Tankers anchored off Maracaibo, Zulia state. Photo: Andrew Álvarez / AFP

The scenario of economic-financial-commercial suffocation that the United States government imposed on the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela is one more piece of the puzzle in the unrestricted war strategy it is carrying out against the country of the Caribbean Basin.
Specifically, it has repercussions on the navigation chart of ships that are from Venezuela or have commercial and other relationships with the state and private companies. To support such a suffocating agenda, the US Navy has a multiple deployment in all parts of the planet, which functions as a prominent mobile and military police for naval operations and military exercises of different types.
"By sea we can get to the place more quickly, stay there for longer, carry everything we need with us and we do not have to ask anyone for permission," reads the 21st Century Cooperation Strategy for the Naval Force of the Spanish Navy. .
The full-spectrum doctrine of the Pentagon provides for a Corsican patent for itself and for its most trusted allies, and a military restriction on everything that sails with flags sanctioned by the Treasury Department or that threatens in a military way its outlined plans, as well as those of the White House itself.
Venezuela has been harassed in recent years for this strategy, which, with the blockade dictated by Washington and the consequences it provokes, plus other operations in favor of "regime change", draw a fence on the high seas and on the shores of the Caribbean coast.
The main objective: the oil industry
Recently, the Reuters agency reported that oil tankers ready to be marketed "have been trapped" for almost two months on the high seas because "world refineries shun oil from the South American country to avoid falling into US sanctions. , according to industry sources, PDVSA documents and shipping data. "

Image
PDVSA's oil exports are Washington's main target.

At the same time that the Treasury Department is blacklisting ships and merchants who engage in the trade and transportation of Venezuelan oil, it is threatening to add more to its list of "sanctioned" entities.
Reuters cites the Refinitiv Eikon data:
"At least 16 oil tankers carrying 18.1 million barrels of Venezuelan oil are trapped in waters around the world, while buyers avoid them to avoid sanctions. That equates to almost two months of production at Venezuela's current production rate. ”

PDVSA is at the center of the American war strategy. Photo: Carlos García Rawlins / Reuters
The agency says that some of the boats “have been at sea for more than six months and have sailed to various ports but have been unable to unload. Oil cargoes are seldom loaded without a buyer. Those who are in the water without having anyone to buy them generally sell at a discount. ”
The financial burden on each oil tanker adds up to large losses as the daily delay in unloading crude continues. The cost of a ship that carries Venezuelan oil is at least $ 30,000 a day.
Oil companies that have PDVSA as a client have been unable to find a buyer due to unilateral coercive measures. "Even long-standing PDVSA customers are struggling to complete transactions that are allowed under sanctions, for debt repayment or food exchange," an executive told Reuters on condition of anonymity .
This is a critical situation for Venezuelan exports, at a time when most oil-producing countries continue to struggle to trade their high inventories in an oversupplied market.
All this helps the United States to reduce the appetite of many buyers for Venezuelan oil.
Basically what the Donald Trump government has achieved is to mount a naval siege on the high seas on the Venezuelan crude oil trade, preventing the state led by Nicolás Maduro from stocking up on foreign exchange to supply essential goods and services to the Bolivarian Republic and its population, while undermining the oil industry managed by PDVSA.
That goal was clear from the start, when Trump decided to issue an executive order last year that deepened the picture of economic, financial and trade "sanctions" against Venezuela. The latest events what they do is confirm the thesis.
A blow to Venezuela's commercial and technological cooperation
A month ago, when the first ships from Iran were crossing the Atlantic to the Caribbean coast to supply gasoline and technology to the Venezuelan oil industry, the United States spokesmen had threatened to prevent them from unloading through the harassment of the Navy to Iranian freighters.
But it is one thing to intimidate a single country and another to do it against two, especially if one of them controls the Strait of Hormuz, the main commercial oil artery in the world, where one in five barrels in the world pass through it daily. . That is why the freighters came to dock at their destination without problems beyond poorly executed psychological operations.
In this case, due to the emerging dynamics in which there is a rising bloc that challenges Anglo-imperial hegemony, effectiveness subordinated to Washington's interests in relation to the sanctioning strategy was not allowed.
But what happens with other countries and companies worldwide is a very different case. Take, for example, the Venezuelan crude freighters that set sail for Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia or Togo, countries where the US presence is very strong and have been unable to buy oil produced by PDVSA as a result of unilateral coercive measures by the White House and the naval surveillance of the Navy in those latitudes.

Image
Craig Faller, head of the Southern Command, meets with Jair Bolsonaro, president of Brazil. Photo: Southern Command

It is in these cases that coordination between the Navy and the United States Department of the Treasury is imposed, albeit informally.
Due to this strategy, just until February 2020, Venezuela calculated $ 116 billion in losses from the blockade.
Provocations
In view of the latest events, we can conclude that the much-announced naval blockade against Venezuela sponsored by the Trump Administration has been unofficially deployed. It no longer works frontally as in 1902 , in which German, English and Italian ships encircled the country then chaired by Cipriano Castro, or even as they did against Cuba in the 1960s, when the United States determined that island sovereignty it could not be erected in his "backyard".
A new phase of escalation in the naval blockade had begun in early April with the “anti-narcotics operations” deployed in the Western Hemisphere of the US Navy, opening space for large-scale psychological operations in the Caribbean and for the coordination of forces. and intelligence of the Southern Command with partner countries of the Pentagon, especially Colombia and Brazil.
In this context, the navigation of a US Navy destroyer ship near the Venezuelan coasts on Tuesday, June 23, must also be understood, which General Vladimir Padrino López, Venezuelan Defense Minister, describes as “an act of provocation ” .
Padrino López warned that if US ship operations occur in Venezuelan waters, there will be a "forceful" response from the Bolivarian National Armed Forces. "Do not dare with your warships to navigate in our jurisdictional waters, to exercise military operations," added the general.
Although provocations are a tactic that the US naval army often uses against its adversaries, crossing foreign maritime boundaries not only in the Caribbean but in other parts of the world (such as the South China Sea or the Persian Gulf itself) generally the generals Gringos authorize this type of operations to collect intelligence information and disturb the contrary. Under what objectives: military, commercial or even both?
Undoubtedly, the pressure of the Southern Command and its destroyers prowling around the Caribbean, combined with the strategy of the Treasury Department, draw a fence on high and on the shores of the coasts that puts the Bolivarian Republic on alert and economically injures the majority that we live in Venezuela.

https://medium.com/@misionverdad2012/el ... ed7800646a

Google Translator
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10590
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Venezuela

Post by blindpig » Wed Jul 08, 2020 11:18 am

Why the United States is Criminally Attacking Venezuela’s Gasoline Supply: “Without Fuel You Can’t Run Tractors”

July 7, 2020

According to a report issued by the United States Department of Agriculture, the US government is attacking the gasoline supply to Venezuelan aiming at its agricultural sector and so attacking food production, which would lead to the total collapse of the Venezuelan population under the guise of illegal sanctions.

In the report, written on April 5 of this year, analyzed by the agricultural engineer Clara Sánchez and quoted by the investigative website “La Tabla”, the US predicts a serious decrease in Venezuelan production of most of the basic food items, shortage of agricultural inputs, quality seeds, fertilizers and an inability to grant credits.

“Without fuel you can not make the tractors work,” she wrote.


“When the US tries to cut off supplies of gasoline to Venezuela, it also does it to bring down national food production, massively and fast in the year 2020,” the researcher explained on her Food and Power website.

In this sense, La Tabla reported that the persecution of PDVSA is evident in the report, given that the report indicated that “low (oil) prices and the scarcity of resources due to COVID-19 are expected to exacerbate the falls in production and the shortage of fuel and inputs to become unmanageable.”


“The report acknowledges that the current geopolitical environment in Venezuela is driving new business partners outside of US and its transnational corporations’ food power. Russia, Turkey and China have become important suppliers,” La Tabla writes, icing the work of Clara Sanchez.

“The US regime is aiming at starving to death millions of Venezuelans in a criminal and disgusting strategy to — according to their weird understanding of the world — provoke the exit of President Nicolas Maduro. They can not really see that the US is in decline and all these actions against Venezuela and many other countries only accelerate its inevitable decline,” an international expert said to Orinoco Tribune.

https://www.laiguana.tv/articulos/76348 ... ricultura/

https://orinocotribune.com/why-the-unit ... -tractors/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10590
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Venezuela

Post by blindpig » Fri Jul 10, 2020 1:39 pm

Why is Venezuela so important in the American presidential campaign?
Mission Truth
Jul 9 · 6 min red

Image
Donald Trump received Juan Guaidó at the White House in February 2020. Photo: Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

The US presidential campaign has Venezuela as a critical knot and inescapable point, both for the Republican candidate seeking reelection, tycoon President Donald Trump, and for his main rival, Democrat Joe Biden.
During the electoral journey, both have set not so different positions on Venezuela, thus giving it a privileged place as a thematic axis.
They agree that the country is governed by an alleged "dictatorship" and that, after succeeding in the presidential elections, they "will fight" for the "restoration of democracy" in the South American country.
The "coincidences" between the two candidates, which can be considered within the strategic logic and hegemonic scaffolding of the United States, also have particular condiments. Since the advent of the Bolivarian Revolution more than 20 years ago, the United States has never assumed a position so openly consistent in favor of dismantling Chavismo in Venezuelan politics as until now . This, together with other factors intrinsic to North American power, shape Venezuela's place in this presidential race.
The fight against "the troika of evil"
Trump has referred to Venezuela twice during two consecutive years in the State of the Nation Address, which brings together the Executive and the two houses of the US Legislature. It is the most relevant event in the institutional policy of his country, and earlier this year he proclaimed Juan Guaidó, present in the place , as "president" of Venezuela.
The magnate president has specifically referred to a crusade against socialism on American soil (in a clear reference to the emerging left wing in the Democratic Party) and on the continent. Similarly, he has referred to Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela as a “troika” that he intends to overthrow.
Through coercive and unilateral measures that it has applied against these three countries, Venezuela is where the "maximum pressure" of the White House lies.
Destroying Chavismo, then, becomes a strategic objective of Washington clearly in tune with the political ideology and the president's own narrative. Ideological issues have often been off the American campaign agenda since 1989, but Trump has revived them by creating a new enemy, a new "threat."
Joe Biden is not far behind and has subscribed to the same narrative coherence.
The political weight of Florida and its lobbies
The placement of the agenda against Venezuela as a showcase model for international relations and the exercise of American factual power for Latin America, has special electoral relevance for Republicans and Democrats due to the electoral characteristics of South Florida, a region capable of defining elections in said state and, in some cases, be decisive in presidential elections.
The influence of the Mayan lobbies originating from the Cuban diaspora, and now with the Venezuelan diaspora, is representative of the "Hispanic vote" in the "sunny states."

Image
The city of Doral in South Florida was built by "Latino" immigrants, among them wealthy Venezuelans and Cubans. Photo: Miami - PFS Realty

Beyond the electoral aspect, the economic weight of these and their growing prominence in the leaderships of these parties has translated into a historically outlined lobbying to formulate US policy with projection to their “backyard”.
These political gravitations are once again present. Senators Marco Rubio, Bob Menendez and in the recent past Ileana Ross-Lethinen, articulators of the siege against Cuba and Venezuela, are an expression of that “deep state” that, in a structured way, modulates the upstream agenda and end up being decisive for the approach to Washington's hemispheric policy.
Venezuela at the center of narratives
The United States has launched a centralized campaign in Venezuela like never before, manufacturing public opinion in that country to legitimize its economic blockade and to boost the possibilities of armed intervention.
Venezuela's consistent presence in the mainstream media is evidence of the shift to the Caribbean of the epicenter of US foreign policy and its forms of aggressiveness.
Hence, for both candidates, referring harshly against Venezuela and against President Nicolás Maduro is, in addition to campaigning, a matter of "national security", preservation of "democracy" and ratification of "values ”Americans in the face of their“ constructive ”role in the Western Hemisphere and in the world. Unmissable inputs in an American campaign.
This gives Venezuela a particularly relevant role as the one that the Americans (beyond the Hispanic community) had had the aggressions against Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria in the past.
Both Democrats and Republicans, but more especially the latter , have imposed the fallacious claim that Venezuela is a "narco-state", although its own security agencies dismiss it. They have placed the oil nation as a "terrorist" country , being a "threat" to US security. Therefore, these narrative elements, the evocations of nationalism and the role of the United States as a country "guarantor of global security" are perfectly consistent with a political campaign agenda.
In the US they just can't stop talking about Venezuela.
The oil and military lobbies at the forefront
The US strategic interest in Venezuela has its greatest economic strength over its energy reserves, the largest in the world with 340 billion barrels. The evident US interest lies in the subordinate relationship that Venezuela had with its transnationals for more than 100 years, a cycle that gradually ended first with the rise of Chavismo and now with the US blockade.
Venezuela is today for the US oil transnational companies a lost space that they want to recover . The change in the map of Venezuela's energy relations, today oriented towards China, India, Russia and the Petrocaribe countries, summarizes a break in the almost exclusive relationship that Venezuela had with the United States until 1999.
As is known, the oil transnationals have lobbies and financing mechanisms working simultaneously for both US parties, and this explains why the statements of Trump and Biden about Venezuela are usually identical.

Image
We must not forget that one former CEO of ExxonMobil, Rex Tillerson, was the chief diplomat of the Trump Administration, before Mike Pompeo. Photo: Gene J. Puskar / AP Photo

Both candidates demonstrate to transnational corporations their level of commitment to recovering lost space.
Oil scaffolding is as important as industrial-military scaffolding for the construction of an architecture of American domination of the world. The recapture of the main energy reserves in the world in favor of the United States is a key factor in redesigning the North American strategy against emerging countries that today dispute the United States for world leadership.
Venezuela is key both for US transnationals and for the US's own power structure vis-à-vis the world.
The necessary "victory" in the campaign roadmap
The fall of Venezuela is a shared objective for both candidates and both reflect it in a similar way in their speeches and speeches, despite the fact that Democrats and Republicans have been in different roles in generating the political and economic crisis that today lives the Caribbean nation.
Obviously the role of Trump in his capacity as president, and because of his roadmap for the dismantling of Venezuela, is the one who most hopes to reap the fruits of the "maximum pressure".
Political and diplomatic blockade. Financial, commercial and oil blockade. Subsequently, threats of the use of force, promotion of internal sedition and failed mercenary incursions have been the order of the day. But Chavismo still stands and the expectations of the tycoon president have been frustrated, so it is not unusual to have declared that it was not a crazy act to meet with President Nicolás Maduro.
Democrats, although affiliated with the "soft" strategy in the Caribbean, have actively validated from Congress the spurious "presidency" of Juan Guaidó since 2019, they have rarely questioned Trump for his failed attacks. Although the "Guaidó strategy" has a Trump-Pompeo-Bolton manufacturing, the Democrats also need it to work because they have supported it and have not made political opposition to Trump in such a fateful plan.
Although they are placed in different action roles against the Venezuelan critical knot, both Republicans and Democrats hope to capitalize on any scenario, any result and any form of onslaught that takes place and that involves the weakening or sedimentation of power in the South American nation.
Hence the high level of danger of the current US political campaign for Venezuela.
Both candidates need the situation in Venezuela to worsen and that is why they incorporate us into their campaign, together with the US speech that could "save" the oil nation from the chaos they have sponsored.
Once Venezuela has become a "campaign promise", the cycle of attacks against it does not end in November, on the contrary, a new stage could open with still unfathomable possibilities.

https://medium.com/@misionverdad2012/po ... cff1791342

Google Translator
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10590
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Venezuela

Post by blindpig » Sat Jul 11, 2020 1:49 pm

Image

The Impact of the Economic war on Venezuela
July 8, 2020
By Pasqualina Curcio – Jul 6, 2020

It would be impossible to count each and every one of the ways in which the war on Venezuela declared by imperialism has harmed the country. The aggressions that we, the Venezuelans, have experienced since 1999 have been not only economic; they have been psychological as well. There is no way to measure the consequences of the hate planted by the anti-democratic opposition, with its anti-socialist propaganda; it has extended to the point of burning people alive for being Chavistas. The outrage felt by the Venezuelan people when they see those who have sold out their native land while calling themselves Venezuelan is also immeasurable.

Having said all that, but focusing on the economic effects, we have brought up to date the calculations made in March 2019. Up to that point the economic war had caused losses that totaled $125,000,000,000. (125 billion dollars.) We have calculated the corresponding damages for the year 2019 as a total of $68,000,000,000. (68 billion dollars.) Thus, the total economic losses between 2016 and 2019 total $194,000,000,000. For Venezuelans, these 194 billion dollars is equivalent to approximately 16 months of national production. With this money we would have been able to pay our entire foreign debt, which is 110 billion dollars, according to the Central Bank of Venezuela. Or we might have had resources sufficient to import enough food and medicine for 45 years.

The break-down of these losses is as follows: 25 billion dollars corresponds to the money and material goods that have been looted from us, while 169 billion dollars represents what we have been unable to produce from 2016 to 2019 as a result of the attack on Petróleos de Venezuela SA (64 billion dollars) and of the attack on the Venezuelan bolivar (105 billion dollars.) John Bolton confessed in January of 2019 that, “We froze all the assets in U.S. territory of the state enterprise Petróleos de Venezuela SA (Citgo). Today’s measure totals $7 billion in assets blocked at this time. Plus, over $11 billion lost in export proceeds over the next year,”

According to the Ministry of Foreign Relations, the U.S. and its allies have looted 25 billion dollars from us. They disguise this as “sanctions” while others elegantly call it unilateral coercive measures, but it is nothing more than a barefaced daylight robbery and an act of piracy. About 5,400 million dollars are held in 50 banks, including the 31 tons of gold that the Bank of England has retained. The assets and dividends of Citgo, amounting to 18 billion dollars, are also included.

They have not only robbed us but, in addition, in January 2019, the U.S. State Department announced that they would turn control of the assets, property, and goods in bank accounts belonging to the Venezuelan government over to Guaidó and making him responsible for the administration of these resources. We would like to know just how many of these dollars have been spent to protect the people of Venezuela in these times of quarantine? What is very clear to us is that 200 million of those dollars were allocated for a contract with SilverCorp whose objective was to pay mercenaries to kill Venezuelans.

With regard to the gold held by the Bank of England, we must say that the bank is required to return it to its owner immediately upon request. Now it seems, according to the English, that the owner is Guaidó, who they say is the “interim president” of Venezuela. This is such a crude robbery that no one in their right senses would believe anything so absurd. The whole world knows that it is not Guaidó who is seated in the UN General Assembly, nor in the UN Human Rights Council, nor in the UN Security Council, nor in the meetings of OPEC. Obviously he is not seated in the presidential palace of Miraflores either, nor does he give orders to the National Bolivarian Armed Forces of Venezuela.

Is it Guaidó who is confronting COVID-19 in Venezuela and coordinating medical aid and protocols with the world Health Organization?



William Brownfield, ex-ambassador of the U.S. in Venezuela, admitted, “If we are going to sanction PDVSA, this will have an impact on the entire people, on the ordinary citizen. The counter-argument is that the people suffer so much from the lack of food, safety, medicines, public health, that at this moment perhaps the greatest resolution would be to accelerate the collapse even if it produces a period of suffering of months or perhaps years.”

The attack on Petroleos de Venezuela is not being done casually; it is a premeditated and precisely aimed action. Anything that affects the petroleum industry will have repercussions not only in the industry itself, but chiefly on the national economy and thus on the Venezuelan people.

The petroleum industry generates 95% of the hard currency that enters Venezuela as a result of exports. The decrease of these exports, whether due to a fall in the levels of petroleum production or by a decrease in petroleum prices, affects the influx of hard currency, and thus the imports of supplies, repair parts, machinery for national production. Petroleos de Venezuela is the catalyst for our domestic production.

The price of petroleum fell for 4 consecutive years for the first time in history, for a 65% decrease. In addition, the commercial and financial blockade against Petroleos de Venezuela, the difficulty or impossibility of getting supplies and repair parts, and the financial obstacles, among other reasons, have had an effect on petroleum production, which has decreased by 64%. – going from 2.8 million barrels a day in 2013 to one million in 2019. This has resulted in a 78% fall in petroleum exports, which went from 85 billion dollars annually in 2013 to 19 billion dollars in 2019.

Republican Virginia State Senator Richard Black admitted, referring to Venezuela,

“We demonetized their currency and, through the international banking system, we made the Venezuelan currency worthless and then we go and say: ‘Look how bad this government is, your currency is worthless.’ Well, it wasn’t them; it was us who made their currency useless,” (Sputnik 09-12-2019).

The attack on the Venezuelan bolivar currency, a main weapon of the economic war, not only induced hyperinflation and with this the loss of the buying power of the working class, it also shrunk national production. As wage earners see their buying power diminish due to rapid and disproportionate increase in prices, this also decreases demand for goods and causes a decrease in production by sellers.

Since 2013, imperialism has caused a criminal depreciation of the Venezuelan bolivar currency by 241,657 million percent, which has given rise to an increase in prices by 11,500 million percent from that year to this.

Each person can come to their own conclusions about what these economic losses of 194 billion dollars mean in terms of anguish, outrage, quality of life and lives of Venezuelans. Draw your own conclusions as well about the immeasurable level of consciousness and thus of resistance shown by the Venezuelan people who have confronted the enemies of their country with high morale and with the best of strategies; the union between civilians and the military.

https://orinocotribune.com/the-impact-o ... venezuela/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10590
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Venezuela

Post by blindpig » Mon Jul 13, 2020 1:27 pm

A quick look at the Neumann family: revenge of the rich
Mission Truth

Jul 10 · 6 min read



Image
Vanessa Neumann. Photo: Archive

In recent days, Juan Guaidó's emissary in the United Kingdom, Vanessa Neumann, has once again made headlines on the national scene.
This time the focus of attention is given by the death threats he made against President Nicolás Maduro through his social network Twitter and the cross reactions that were generated from there.
To divert attention, Neumann accused, without evidence, several journalists who defend Venezuela of integrating a kind of “transnational criminal network” and asserted that his irrigation analysis company, Asymmetrica, has sent the profiles of the journalists to the FBI and the US Department of Justice in an openly threatening tone.
In the past, Guaidó's emissary in the United Kingdom has also been a focus of national politics in Venezuela. In September last year , an audio was leaked stating that Guaidó must avoid the claim on the Essequibo to win the continuity of the support of the UK Foreing Office.
A few months ago, a report by Canadian journalist John McEvoy in The Canary newspaper revealed that Neumann's intention to withdraw Venezuela's claim on the Essequibo went much further. It was a much deeper collaboration to benefit the UK's long-term economic and political interests.
According to public documents obtained in the McEvoy investigation, Neumann and senior British government officials had installed a secret "reconstruction unit" to coordinate actions in the framework of regime change against Venezuela and to favor English companies in a post scenario. -Hit, who would get exclusive access to the Venezuelan market and its strategic sectors.
Neumann is an icon of the most extreme sectors of Venezuelan and continental politics: he falsely accuses Venezuela of having ties to Hezbollah, his company Asymmetrica has contacts in the structure of the US spy agencies and is a exponent of the hard line of the blow. It is consistent with what the ultra-right fanatics want to hear.
Guaidó's emissary also symbolizes the anti-Venezuelan features that have historically shaped the mentality of the oligarchy. Vanessa Neumann is the last link in one of the richest families in Venezuela, and her behavior fairly clearly describes her class consciousness without national attributes and the formation of her ancestry.
The Neumann family represents one of the largest economic groups in the country. In the Money Oligarchy , Domingo Alberto Rangel ranked the Neumans among the 12 main dominant groups in the Venezuelan economy, very close to Polar, the Delfino family and the Phelps in terms of accumulated wealth.

Image
Hans Neumann with Sofía Ímber. Photo: El Nacional

The family's chief is Hans Neumann (Vanessa's grandfather), a citizen of the former Czechoslovakia who emigrated to Venezuela in 1949. The historian Antonio García Ponce highlights that Hans and his family left the European country “because it was impossible to have them under communist domination of the Montana factory built by the father ”.
And of those muds, these muds: Vanessa's anger against Chavismo is related to her grandfather's ideological rejection of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, formed after the Soviet Union liberated the country from Nazi occupation.
Hans Neumann arrived in Venezuela with one hand in front and one behind. But two things were in his favor. Hans's uncle, Richard Barton, had made a small fortune in the United States and gave him a loan to set up a paint factory (Montana).
The financial support of the institutions of the military government in Venezuela at that time towards European immigrants was another key factor for the Neumann factory to increase its production capacity rapidly .
The next step was to enter the dynamics of the power groups already in the process of consolidation. Antonio García Ponce and Domingo Alberto Rangel agree that the businessman Eugenio Mendoza made the first exclusive orders to the Neumann factory, giving it a privileged place in the Venezuelan market. Contact with Mendoza prompted Montana to become a supplier to foreign oil companies and other large US monopolies installed in the country.
Oil renting and influence peddling with the inbred Creole oligarchy were its material bases of support.
That rapid rise shaped the famous Corimon Group , a corporation that as early as the 1950s produced not only paints but a variety of chemicals and industrial packaging. In 1979 it was listed on the Caracas Stock Exchange and in 1993 on the New York Stock Exchange (Wall Street), within the framework of a process of international expansion of Corimon: the group has a commercial presence through subsidiaries in the United States, Colombia, Mexico, Costa Rica and other countries currently.
Vanessa Neumann's grandfather was not only in business . As a wealthy businessman in a country devastated by poverty and misery, he knew that it was necessary to create ideological apparatuses that legitimized his wealth and fostered free-market ideas. In short, he financed the ideological instruments that would protect him.
Consequently, he injected money into the creation of the Institute for Higher Administration Studies (IESA), where technocratic cadres of neoliberalism are formed, and also to the media El Diario de Caracas and Tal Cual . In 1964 he created the Neumann Design Institute, gaining influence in the growing advertising and marketing business.
The arrival of Chávez to the presidency was seen by the wealthy Neumann family as a danger. And that intuition was coherent with respect to their class interests: the Corimon group would abandon the privileged position that it had, politically and economically, since the 1950s.

Image
Vanessa Neumann with falcon John Bolton. Photo: Twitter

This was portrayed by Teodoro Petkoff , his personal friend and beneficiary of his financial support, in 2000:
“I will never forget the answer he gave me, twenty months ago, in January 2000, when I explained TalCual's project to him as a quixotic contribution to the fight for the preservation of democratic spaces in the country. Only two sentences, separated by a period and followed: 'I am going to help you'. 'I want to help you'. Hans, of course, never thought of this as an occasion for profit. At this point in his life, this formidable company captain did not need new business. Plus, he knew he didn't have much life left. Once, naturally, he spoke of 'when I am missing' ”.
By then, the offspring of Hans Neumann (including Vanessa) was already living in the United States, integrated into prestigious elite universities to continue his business legacy and defense of the free market that had lost force in the new Venezuelan era opened by Chavismo .
Old Neumann, in one last breath, redoubled his support for Tal Cual (which Petkoff himself acknowledges), a media outlet that directly participated in the failed coup in April 2002 against Hugo Chávez.
Vanessa Neumann's anti-Venezuelan attitude, and her permanent vocation to surrender to the country, describes with great clarity the historical mischief of the rich against Chavism. And this is not due to the fact that its privileged position at the economic level has been disrupted, something that only partially happened in the case of the Corimon Group, still active in Venezuela, but because its ideas and values, as well as its figures, lost popularity. and attractive.
Vanessa Neumann seeks to rescue that legacy by force: to recover that kneeling country where her grandfather's name adorned streets, avenues and prizes of the ecosystem of cultural production; when old Neumann's ideas were the country's navigation chart and her widely recognized and applauded figure.
Losing that hurts much more than all the wealth accumulated in the shadow of rentierism and influence peddling with the Creole oligarchy.

https://medium.com/@misionverdad2012/un ... d5f9d34850

Google Translator
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10590
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Venezuela

Post by blindpig » Sat Jul 18, 2020 3:39 pm

Guaidó delegates the management of stolen money to Venezuela to two companies in a tax haven
Mission Truth

Jul 17 · 5 min read

Image
Juan Guiadó with the US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo. Photo: Twitter

The policy of dispossession of Venezuela's public assets orchestrated by the US government and concealed under the "legitimate" appearance of the fake government of Juan Guaidó, now acquires a "legal" form through outsourced channels.
In a new session without quorum, via digital channels and with the sole participation of deputies related to Juan Guaidó, the National Assembly (AN) fake of Venezuela agreed last Thursday to approve a process for hiring two firms registered in the United States to manage and management of the “funds recovered” by the “transitional government”.
The source of resources would be about 80 million dollars that are part of the assets of the Venezuelan State in US Citibank accounts and that were withheld, about 342 million dollars, which have been transferred by the US government to an account at the Federal Reserve from New York.
These 80 million dollars that are now part of the so-called "National Liberation Fund" created by Guaidó, would be managed and executed by the companies BRV Disbursement Co. LLC and BRV Administrator Co. LLC., Both registered in the US as private firms.
The announcement indicates that these companies will have a profit of 1.3 million dollars, in accordance with the contract approved by the wing of AN deputies that surround Guaidó.
This event sets a precedent for discretionary use and delegated to private firms, not registered, linked, or subordinate to the nation, with respect to the assets of the Venezuelan State.
This assumes the legal non-existence of the proto-state doors outside Venezuela led by Guaidó, which does not have a legal representation or financial structure of its own to execute the resources of which they are beneficiaries by US arbitration.
Resources without comptroller and with diffuse destinations
The dispossession modality that is carried out with these actions, passes through the delegation of Venezuelan resources to two instances, one diffuse or nonexistent and the other private.
The first of these is the Guaidó "government" itself, which has the nation's resources without being subject to any of the controlling powers on Venezuelan soil.
In other words, it is not subject to the Office of the Comptroller General of the Republic, nor to the Venezuelan parliament itself, beyond the minority entourage that surrounds the “president in charge”, which implies the absence of all transparency mechanisms and all regular channels provided for in Venezuelan law.

Image
New York Federal Reserve. Photo: Archive

Subsequently, the outsourcing and privatization of the execution of Venezuelan resources takes place through these actions, which are erected on a "contract" for which the parliament has no powers to apply, additionally, with companies that are not subordinate to the controlling institutions. of Venezuela and that, in fact, they do not recognize the legitimate government in office.
All this seems to shape a sophisticated form of dispossession of national financial assets, destined for a broth of corruption.
The supposed destiny proposed for the resources would be the reinforcement of "various programs" for the "liberation of Venezuela".
Although in theory some 35 million would be used to provide medical equipment to the country, it has also been public the intention to use these resources for the "support" of the deputies, the propaganda financing of the "transitional government" and the financing in the "Fight for democracy", among others.
It is essential to highlight that in this fraudulent management and without the regulation of resources, it also opens up the possibilities of financing terrorist activities in Venezuela, such as those that were thwarted in recent months through mercenary insertions on various flanks of the Venezuelan coasts.
Companies registered in a tax haven on US soil
The Venezuelan research site La Tabla recently revealed through the use of open information that the companies BRV Disbursement Co. LLC and BRV Administrator Co. LLC (Limited Liability Company) were recently registered in Delaware, USA.
Delaware is a recognized sanctuary for taxation and international money laundering in that country.

Image
Foto: The News Journal

According to La Tabla, these companies only needed to register an administrator (authorized agent) to represent the directors to guarantee absolute anonymity, taking advantage of all the Delaware legal incentives that have made it famous as a tax haven, since it protects the identities of those represented.
Consequently, such legal preferences leave the responsibilities for the administration of that money in a diffuse situation.
The specialized media in Expansión economy refers to Delaware as a financial enclave in which more than 1.3 million entities are registered, compared to a population that does not reach one million inhabitants.
The size of this tax haven accounts for the existence of hundreds of thousands of offshore companies registered there. A report by the Observatory of Corporate Social Responsibility of Spain, which analyzes the performance of Spanish companies and their evasive practices, found in Delaware an ideal place for these crimes, only possible because of their state legislation.
To illustrate this example more precisely, 285,000 companies were registered in a single Delaware single-story building, that is, in the same fiscal domicile.
60% of the groups in the Forbes 500 list had a company domiciled there. Among them was American Airlines, Apple, Bank of America, Google or Coca-Cola, the Observatory reports.
As additional information, it is worth noting that the formation of an open looting and corruption structure of financial resources and other Venezuelan assets abroad does not take place solely because of the discretion of the deputy Juan Guaidó. This new framework of situations is only possible due to the American legal and institutional scaffolding.
This power structure, which facilitated the execution of coercive and unilateral measures against Venezuela, continues to evolve and favors the construction of a para-state.

https://medium.com/@misionverdad2012/gu ... 9e4e809609

Google Translator
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10590
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Venezuela

Post by blindpig » Tue Jul 21, 2020 1:24 pm

Billionaire plunder to PDVSA reveals plot of transnationals with false government of Guaidó
Mission Truth

Jul 20 · 6 min read



Image
Foto: Getty Images

The month of the "resignation" of the lawyer José Ignacio Hernández to the fictitious attorney general of the Republic of Venezuela, assigned by Juan Guaidó in the framework of the attempt to usurp the legitimate functions of the Venezuelan state under the strategic aegis of Washington, is about to be completed.
In that span of just over a year, a series of fraudulent cases were uncovered in which José Ignacio Hernández was involved, always in favor of foreign corporations, injuring PDVSA, the national industry and Venezuelans in general. Hence, certain non-extremist opposition groups are part of those who accuse Hernández of corrupt practices.
The last moment in which the name of Guaidó's lawyer emerged was during the allegations of a plot with the head of the World Bank , David Malpass, to deliver Citgo to the Conoco Phillip company, made by Vice President Delcy Rodríguez.
Before that, José Ignacio Hernández had served as a witness in separate arbitrations of the Canadian miner Crystallex and the glass company Owens-Illinois, also against the country that he later appeared to represent.
Similarly, Hernández came to light in the chain of events that resulted in a London court ruling that legitimized the plunder of the United Kingdom of some $ 1 billion in Venezuelan gold frozen in Bank of England accounts.
For this corruption plot to rob the assets of the Venezuelan state, the Attorney General of the Republic, Tarek William Saab, issued an arrest warrant against the aforementioned transnational agent.
The case of Helsinge Inc.
In August 2019, I purpose of publication of PanAm Post showing legal documents on the fact became public knowledge brokering Jose Ignacio Hernandez in the defense of a group of 42 oil companies, centering on energy consultancy Helsigne Inc., accused of committing fraudulent actions with PDVSA officials for 10 years, including insider trading and manipulation of hiring processes.
The lawsuit was filed by the Venezuelan state in 2018 to obtain compensation for the damages, which are estimated at between $ 5 billion and $ 15 billion, according to the plaintiffs' data.
To know the link of the false attorney in this other chapter of corruption, you have to go back a little. In The Grayzone , the journalist Anya Parampil consulted the documents of the lawsuit and has carried out an investigative work relating the entire plot:
“As Hugo Chávez tightened state control over Venezuela's oil industry, laying off thousands of PDVSA and CITGO employees, a growing number of ex-industry apparatuses fled abroad. In 2004, two of these PDVSA rejects, Francisco Morillo and Leonardo Baquero, moved from Caracas to Miami, Florida, where they installed their energy consulting and trading company, Helsigne Inc. ”
Morillo and Baquero established this company in Panama in order to make it an intermediary between energy transnational companies and the contacts they had at PDVSA, as a result of their previous working relationship with the company. Lukoil Petroleum LTD, Glencore Ltd, Vitol SA and Trafigura AG and Colonial Oil Industries are some of the 42 oil and fuel trading companies that made these trade deals illegal.
A wide network of corruption was woven in which illegal contracts were negotiated by bribing state employees. The companies also obtained petroleum products at less than their actual costs, and in return sold premium services and supplies to PDVSA, such as petroleum solvents and light crude products required for the production of gasoline.
Basically, the fraudulent operation was carried out like this: the companies transferred the money to Helsinge and this part was used to pay bribes to officials to obtain the privileges that were then conferred on the companies.
Ramos Allup and other actors involved in the multi-million dollar scam
The corrupt plot highlights the access that Morillo and Baquero obtained to confidential PDVSA information that allowed him to know in advance the bids that the Venezuelan oil company was making and the offers of the competitors. How did they do it?
Luis Liendo, alias “El Nerd”, a computer worker at the state-owned company, cloned PDVSA's servers and “provided (Helsigne) remote access to the purchase, sale and offers orders presented by PDVSA's vice president of Commerce and Supplies” , explains Parampil after having examined court documents.
One piece of information to measure the cash flows subtracted from Venezuelan heritage is that Rene Hecker, manager of the Directorate of Commerce and Supply until 2013, received $ 430,000 in various payments made by Helsinge in 2004.
In mid-June this year, Executive Vice President Delcy Rodríguez recalled the ramifications of this case for Venezuelan opposition political actors. The vice president requested the Public Ministry to open an investigation to Ricardo Ramos D'Agostino, son of Henry Ramos Allup, for having been related to the Helsinge crime plot.

Image

Ramos D'Agostino joined the company because of his family's ties to Francisco Morillo and his ex-wife, Vanessa Friedman, a militant and financier of the Acción Democrática (AD) party. According to the aforementioned 2019 PanAm Post publication , Ramos Allup became Morillo's " political protector " while Helsinge, who was projecting himself as an alleged energy consultancy, was financially promoted by multi-million dollar scams to PDVSA.
The anti-Chavez media showed contracts where Ramos D'Agostino appears as Helsinge's contact to support the accusation against the AD leader.

Image

Returning to Hernández and the legal action
The lawsuit against the criminal scheme was filed in March 2018 through the PDVSA US litigation Trust in the Southern District Court of Florida, United States.

Image

That trust was established in 2017 with the authorization of the Venezuelan Oil Ministry and the Office of the Attorney General of the Republic to pay the procedural expenses, including the participation of the American law firm Boies Schiller Flexner, an article in The Table of August 2019 refers .
A few months before being appointed Guaidó's lawyer, Hernández was hired to offer his testimony (in favor of the accused counterpart) to the judge in the case, Alice Otazo-Reyes. His participation served to make the Florida court decide that the PDVSA US litigation Trust's claim was illegal because it had been created with Venezuelan state officials, in an argument similar to the argument made in the Crystallex case.
Hernández charged $ 350 an hour to defend the theft of Venezuela's resources by the 42 transnational oil companies.
Finally, on March 8, 2019, the Florida court issued its verdict: "Judge Otazo-Reyes, based on the testimony of Professor José Ignacio Hernández, found that the Trust Agreement was void under Venezuelan law."
The case is reviewed by anti-Chavista media to underline the participation of bribed Venezuelan officials, but denies those who served as organizers of the corruption scheme and the visible threads that evidently lead to the plan of dispossession programmed by Washington against the Bolivarian Republic.
Once again, the fabricated figure of the "interim government" of Guaidó and the trials in previous years of the National Assembly in contempt to replace the legitimate institutions of the state with figures complacent towards the corporate elites with interests in Venezuela make sense.
It is the reading that can be given to the statement issued by the parliament (in contempt) in 2018, accusing the (legitimate) attorney general of the Republic, “usurper”, to “disable” who could truly defend the interests of the country before the judicial attacks that that year worsened from the US courts.

https://medium.com/@misionverdad2012/sa ... 43a84e898e

Google Translator
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10590
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Venezuela

Post by blindpig » Thu Jul 30, 2020 2:26 pm

Between trails and rumbas
Mission Truth

Jul 29 · 7 min read



By Franco Vielma

Image
Disinfection operation in the popular neighborhoods of Caracas. Photo: Chronicle One

Recently we have appreciated from the highest spokesperson in the country, specifically that of President Nicolás Maduro, two phrases that are benchmarks in the struggle of Venezuela in the framework of the Covid-19 pandemic and that have been striking for their controversy and for their derivations .
In two different speeches, but marked by a tone of concern, the President called “for the love of God” to stop the “rumbas” and gatherings of family and friends, alleging that the study of detected cases showed that more than 70% of The community cases were due to irresponsible attitudes and relaxation of the population for these reasons.
Before that, he referred to those who were entrusted by dark elements on the border to enter the country through trails while being infected with Covid-19, as factors of expansion of the virus, but public exasperation for the word "bioterrorist" took the assertion out of context and It was extrapolated to anyone who crossed illegal passes, bypassing the PASI border health controls.
In effect, trails and paths are the explanation of the current evolutionary trend of the virus in the country, meaning the perforation of the epidemiological fence on a large scale that has protected the population from the pandemic.
The Covid-19 crossed the trails and went to the marrow of the neighborhoods, silently and other times putting together a party between family and friends.
During the first two months of this crisis the country barely accumulated just over a thousand cases and two months later the statistic is more than 16 times higher.
These events and the entire crisis are also the subject of political treatment. This has flats, many elements to review starkly.
Those who arrived and those who stayed
In the face of the rise of the pandemic and in the face of these causes, the public authority has called for the denunciation of the trochers and to stop the meetings. So there are those who deny the "police state" for it.
On the other hand, the word "bioterrorism", which although it has already been defeated and for which there was a public apology from the President, continues to resonate. She enters into a debate that defines the trocheros as migrants mistreated by the economy, by adversity and exclusion, a question that is true.
The adversity of the border conditions, and the increasingly large, but also increasingly insufficient capacity of the PASI, the wait on the internal and external flanks of the border, the great wave in return for the disaster in the "solids" The economies of neighboring countries, the exasperation, impatience, and harshness of this transit, but also the individual irresponsibility and indolence of many who cross, are also part of this whole plot.
Hence, the debate generated Manichean positions, between "good" and "bad". Among poor migrants who are persecuted in the trails "unjustifiably", and thus, simply, about the "bad government" that persecutes them. This created a gap in political common sense, as this moved to the preference of some poor and not others.
The migrant who returns and arrives in rags is poor. But also poor is the one who remained in his country, in his neighborhood, who has dealt with a thousand adversities in the blocked economy. It is also poor who stayed and to whom the virus reached the neighborhood, sometimes setting up the party. It is poor who sacrificed himself and his own and who is now struggling in a bed, for fortuitous reasons, due to the slips of some who returned.
Image for post
Photo: El Nacional
So, some of them are hurt by the poor, but others are not. Those who are only hurt by migrants, all because of the words that Maduro used, selectively forget about the others, because it is more important to stir up the broth of exasperation and politically directed emotionality than to see the situation as a whole.
Our political common sense, suddenly full of viscerality, forgot the highly effective management that the government and the population had of the crisis during the first months. We put it aside, because we simplify politics from the dimension of our emotions and not because of the harshness and fairness that the management of these circumstances demands.
The intricate paths of crisis management
In a crisis like the current one, we all want those responsible for the State to protect us effectively, but we are reluctant to the complex (and sometimes harsh) ways in which this has to be done.
On the other hand, criticism of the government for these situations, besides being easy and instantaneous, is sometimes quarrelsome and convenient. We are talking about the trocheros who arrived directly at the neighborhood, as if there were no modalities to attend migrants at the border, which, although not easy in the PASI, have served tens of thousands of responsible Venezuelans who have submitted to the controls.
Is it that perhaps the Venezuelans who passed through the PASI are not also mistreated and ragged migrants? Why do some seem more victims and others do not? Why our selectivity in creating "good" and "bad"?
For the national government, the most critical challenge in the adversity faced with this pandemic lies in sustaining the capacities and the institutional and political muscle to continue. There is no method to manage this health crisis, within a framework of economic blockade, external siege and internal exhaustion generated by these simultaneous crises.
This highly exceptional framework, like so many other times, represents a critical point in which the exceptional methods, created on the fly, will also be accompanied by the rhythms and moods of the population generated by the circumstances.
Image for post
Control point and health screening of the Venezuelan State on the border with Colombia. Photo: Orinoco Post
From the population, it is necessary to invoke new political common senses.
In this issue of trails and rumbas, let's understand that there are no preferential poor, everyone is important, every vulnerable life must be protected. Let us admit that despite the difficulty of border transit, it was always feasible to manage the encirclement of the virus at the border, which proved effective against having to contain the virus unleashed in many neighborhoods as it is today.
Caracas has now enabled 900 beds in the Polyhedron to serve asymptomatic patients. As is known, the Student Residences of Sabana Grande were also taken. More private hotels and other public buildings will also come to be occupied.
President Maduro called the church to offer its spaces (such as spiritual retreat sites and others) and they have already said no. But they will knock on the door. Said like this, let's see the situation by understanding the signals they send from the government, it is evident that Caracas is preparing in advance for a large statistical increase in cases that could be just around the corner.
All this plot of exceptionality, in the Caracas "full of coronaviruses" as the President referred to it, will generate new spasms, will generate new debates, will be accompanied by measures, some drastic, others benevolent, all necessary.
This whole framework of multidirectional pressures is going to question all the actors, demanding an indispensable cohesion. The population must protect itself and the state will have to protect the population at any cost.
But this exceptionality does not end certain things. To Covid-19, which we treat as the health crisis that it is, we must also give it the political treatment it deserves. Politics is everything.
In the population we must call for the political act of solidarity, conscience for the individual and the collective, which protected us so much in the initial months of the pandemic. Despite the wear and tear of the quarantines, the economic status, we must do it.
On the other hand, in state institutions it is urgent to assimilate that there is no loss of consistency between the management of the emergency and the revolutionary methods to do it. That, on the contrary, the methods to assume the circumstances must be revolutionary.
We are all urged by a common political sense where we can look at all the circumstances, with a panoramic view, with all its sections and events, in order to assimilate clearly the times that await us.
In this emergency, not everything is sordid and dark. Let us admit that despite the upward trend in statistics in Venezuela, we have done well in the face of this crisis. That the mortality of the virus is only 0.6% of the detected cases (about 16,571) and that as of today the discharge cases (10,195) far exceed the active cases. 62% have been discharged.
This implies that just as the waves of 500 and 600 cases reported per day have come, in a matter of two or three weeks, similar statistics of cases discharged per day will come. But to overcome the upward trend and degrade the virus to a minimum, it is essential to cut the proliferation pattern, right now, in more difficult circumstances than at the start of the pandemic.
It is necessary to avoid the wear and tear of the state muscle in the administration of medical attention, putting much more effort in containing the proliferation. Today these modalities are simultaneous and their paths are intricate. They are not pretty, they are not easy, they are not kind many times. But these dimensions were imposed by this crisis and so they must be maneuvered. In reality, this is usually the most arduous struggle for life.
Will we have the political common sense to assimilate it?

https://medium.com/@misionverdad2012/en ... e43b837a84

Google Translator
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

Post Reply