Venezuela

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Re: Venezuela

Post by blindpig » Thu Aug 06, 2020 1:49 pm

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Elliott Abrams Confirms to Senate Hearing That US is Still “Working Hard” to Overthrow Maduro in Venezuela
August 6, 2020 orinocotribune Elliott Abrams, Guaido, President Maduro, regime change, sanctions, Trump, Trump administration, US, Venezuela, white house
Admission was latest sign that high pressure campaign on Venezuela’s leftist government—including crushing economic sanctions—remains.

By Eoin Higgins, staff writer

The U.S. Special Representative to Venezuela Elliott Abrams told a Senate panel Tuesday that despite a number of failed previous attempts, the Trump administration is continuing efforts to foment the ouster of President Nicolás Maduro, elected democratically by the Venezulean people two years ago.

“Obviously we hope that [Maduro] will not survive the year and we are working hard to make that happen,” Abrams told members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

The comments by the the White House’s top envoy were the latest sign that Washington will continue to apply pressure on Venezuela after over a year of failed attempts to install opposition leader Juan Guaidó as president despite Maduro’s victory in the May 2018 election.

The Trump administration has recognized Guaidó as the nation’s rightful leader after the Venezuelan politician, then the leader of the National Assembly, declared himself president in January 2019.

Progressives and left-leaning lawmakers alike have decried the administration’s attempts to overthrow Maduro. In May 2019, as Common Dreams reported, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) told liberal podcast Pod Save America that “the idea that we would intervene militarily in Venezuela is literally unbelievable.”

“I will do everything I can to see that U.S. troops do not get involved in a civil war in Venezuela,” said Sanders.

CodePink executive director Medea Benjamin on Tuesday, noting that the coronavirus pandemic was keeping her out of the hearing room, condemned Abrams and the Trump administration for their campaign of sanctions and pressure on Venezuela.

“The sanctions the Trump administration is imposing are strangling the people of Venezuela in a form of collective punishment,” said Benjamin.



Featured image: Elliott Abrams, U.S. special representative for Venezuela, testifies during the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Tuesday, August 4, 2020. (Photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

https://orinocotribune.com/elliott-abra ... venezuela/

To be a 'patriotic American' is to sign up for this shit. God Damn Amerika.

Ya call Central Casting and request an 'Evil Undertaker' for a horror film and this is who they send ya.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Venezuela

Post by blindpig » Fri Aug 07, 2020 1:34 pm

The formula of the coup against Venezuela is exhausted: the US in a dead end
Mission Truth

Aug 6 · 7 min read

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President Trump greets Barack Obama and Joe Biden after being sworn in to the White House in 2016. Photo: Mark Ralston / AFP

When the Donald Trump administration made regime change in Venezuela a US foreign policy priority, it produced a strategy that, it thought, could accomplish its mission in just a few months. Reality has beaten that plan, with the "Guaidó project" being a major failure for the White House and one that is paying off today in Venezuela.
Said "strategy" consisted of the application of unilateral coercive measures, misnamed sanctions, as a mechanism to pressure the government of Nicolás Maduro and the Venezuelan population through the theft and freezing of financial, economic, commercial and property resources in the international arena.
Along with this, it was intended to leverage the figure of Juan Guaidó as the official ruler of Venezuela over the current government, under a narrative and acrobatic plot that falls by itself before the Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic. All with the aim of using the “interim government” as a spearhead for the kidnapping and persecution of assets abroad and trying to eliminate a political and stability scenario where the United States feels more comfortable to maneuver in its favor.
It is not by chance that the "Guaidó project" and the sanctioning policy of the White House is being criticized not only by the victims of Venezuela but also by other factors that demand a place in the American political center, specifically from the Democratic Party. The forthcoming presidential elections in the North are the ideal setting for certain sectors of that country's establishment to point their argumentative batteries against magnate President Trump.
Democrats in the middle
While Trump's foreign policy on Venezuela is exhausted by current circumstances, the Democratic Party takes advantage of the situation to undermine all the arguments that the Republican Party could use regarding the coup strategy.
The discursive stance of Democratic Senator Chris Murphy before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on August 4 was highly acclaimed, calling the practical stance of the State Department and the Republican government " diplomatic negligence ".
During the hearing, Murphy characterized and criticized the "Guaidó project", to the point that he accepted that last year the United States attempted to launch a military coup against Maduro that resulted in a "debacle" for the US strategy.
The Connecticut senator made it very clear that the designs of Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, Marco Rubio and Donald Trump on Venezuela have culminated in a "total disaster", with the government of Nicolás Maduro still standing and with a crisis induced by the blockade and embargo of the Venezuelan economy and finances by Washington.

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Elliott Abrams and Mike Pompeo, US Secretary of State. Photo: AP Photo

Last week, Argus Media released a draft of the official document on Democratic Party promises around Venezuela if Joe Biden, the candidate chosen by the party's establishment, succeeds in electorally defeating Donald Trump.
Democrats promise to "abandon President Donald Trump's Venezuela policy and focus on addressing the humanitarian needs of the Venezuelan people," says the document to be presented at the party's virtual convention this August.
An important aspect of the draft is that it does not specify whether the United States, under Biden's leadership, "would reconsider its recognition of the claim to power of the Venezuelan opposition leader, Juan Guaidó," a topic that cannot be ignored if we take into account that earlier this year the deputy, now a former Popular Will, was applauded by Democrats and Republicans on his visit to Congress.
Being Guaidó a product manufactured for the purposes of the strategy put together by the Trump National Security Council, a hypothetical Democratic recognition of his figure (of Biden winning the elections) would mean admitting again the strategy that they are criticizing as “disastrous”.
The pretense of changing US foreign policy on Venezuela by the antagonists of the current administration would have, always as published by Argus Media , a twist of 260 degrees.
"Democrats believe that the best opportunity to rescue Venezuela's democracy is through intelligent pressure and effective diplomacy, not empty and bellicose threats without ties to realistic political goals and motivated by national partisan goals," says the party document. .
In referring to “effective diplomacy”, a possible Biden government is likely to seek to take on even more aggravated international pressure on the mechanisms that have been activated to land a political scenario to the institutional crisis that Venezuela is experiencing, is the dialogue mediated by the Norwegian government (and some factors from the European Union) or the initiative launched by Uruguay and Mexico last year.

In an event on July 8, the Democrats presented the " Vision of the former vice president for Venezuela and Venezuelans in the United States, " in which it was learned that the only two issues on which both presidential candidates differ on the fate of Venezuelans are:

TPS or temporary protected status. Biden supports a bill to protect Venezuelan migrants from deportation that is being blocked by Donald Trump.

The border wall with Mexico. Biden promised that its construction would no longer be financed with the 601 million dollars looted to Venezuela via Guaidó.


Other groups bid for strategic change
There are other factions that, formally independent from the bipartisan establishment, have an interest in Chavismo ceasing to govern in Venezuela.
They are non-governmental organizations, foundations, and think tanks based in the United States that maintain constant coverage of the Venezuelan conflict and propose a different roadmap than the one taken by the Trump Administration. Always with the aim of supporting a "democratic transition", another name for regime change.
The Venezuela chapter of the Washington Office for Latin American Affairs (WOLA) has three researchers and analysts who, along with other actors who participate in the debates related to the country such as Francisco Rodríguez and Michael Penfold, have positioned a position contrary to the strategy of unilateral coercive measures.

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Geoff Ramsey is the Director for Venezuela of WOLA. Photo: Screenshot

Although they are actors related to the political field, the members of WOLA Venezuela do not belong to the US political class; rather, the purpose of your organization is to influence the decisions of the United States government .
On its website , it clarifies:
"WOLA promotes a peaceful and democratic solution to the crisis, supports policies that address the impending humanitarian needs of the Venezuelan people, and promotes the creation of greater protections for Venezuelan migrants and refugees."
Both the WOLA proposal and the promise of the Democratic Party on Venezuela share some discursive paradigms: the humanitarian issue and the migration agenda, especially in the United States.
What splits the strategy of the Trump administration and the "vision" of Biden of WOLA and Francisco Rodríguez is the use of "sanctions", whose destructive capacity on society is already well known by official reports and reports to the United Nations and other non-governmental organizations.
The institution based in Washington also proposes a " negotiated transition ", underpinned by the anti-Chavez takeover of the " democratic field ", and which must be supported by " active diplomacy ". These are other points that we can recognize in the democratic pre-electoral program.
Similarly, the Wilson Center, led by Michael Penfold as a “fellow”, maintains a similar line, promoting a “negotiated exit” from the government of Nicolás Maduro, accompanied by a criticism of the economic-financial-commercial blockade as a US foreign policy. .
In a recent interview , Penfold, an expert in public policy and strategic planning, declares that the “Guaidó project” comes to an end in Venezuela with the upcoming parliamentary elections, called under the agreements reached at the National Dialogue Table.
The IESA professor also believes that dialogue is the option to unblock the "institutional problem" in the Venezuelan state, and elections must be held, however the division in the opposition is a key point that, in his opinion, would cause a no recognition of the elections on the international scene.
For this dialogue to take place, Penfold accepts, there must be a prerogative that has been raised by President Maduro: the lifting of unilateral coercive measures by the United States. Only in that framework, he says, can a "transition" occur.
It is possible that some decision-makers in Washington take note of some strategic suggestions, but beyond a change of position, which the Republican Party is not willing to admit due to political costs in an electoral context, there is no shift that guarantees some stability to the Bolivarian Republic and its population, since regime change is always in the sights, under one form or another, even when elections are held within the framework of the Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic.
At this point, a turnaround in US foreign policy is only possible with a change of administration in the White House, however the Democrats do not grant various nuances to the Venezuelan strategy, beyond calling for a gringo "diplomacy" which, is true, in light of international law, it lacks coherent representation with Mike “We Steal, We Cheat, We Lied” Pompeo out front, in a dead end.
But we Venezuelans cannot be misled.

https://medium.com/@misionverdad2012/la ... 5f7f478657

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Re: Venezuela

Post by blindpig » Fri Aug 14, 2020 1:27 pm

CP of Venezuela, Popular Revolutionary Alternative: For a revolutionary way out of the crisis!
8/13/20 3:31 PM
Venezuela, Communist Party of Venezuela En Es South America Communist and workers' parties
Popular Revolutionary Alternative: For a revolutionary way out of the crisis!

Comuniqué



With a great effort of collective political construction, the below signed organisations have constituted the Popular Revolutionary Alternative (APR), an anti-imperialist and truly socialist alliance which points towards offering a new left-wing reference point for Venezuelans.

This initiative was born out of the necessity of building a political expression which offers answers to the diverse demands, complaints and struggles which the Venezuelan working class, rural sectors, communards, students and all the other popular sectors present. These demands include the high cost of living, low wages, uncontrolled price speculation, corruption, institutional decay, the systematic violation of the people’s fundamental rights, the criminalisation and persecution of struggles, landlord repossessions, and the national government’s adoption of regressive policies. In sum, in response to all of the calamities which the great majority face and which stem from the structural crisis of Venezuelan capitalism, US imperialism’s economic suffocation – which we firmly reject – and the government’s application of bourgeois policies of macro-economic adjustment.

We, the organisations which make up the Popular Revolutionary Alternative, manifest our deep rejection of the destabilising and coup mongering efforts of the Venezuelan pro-imperialist Right, as well as of the possibility that these sectors retake political power in our country. For this reason, we call for the massive participation of the people in the upcoming parliamentary elections so as to push forward a socialist political project.

The Popular Revolutionary Alternative looks to construct policies for the short, medium, and long term, which bring together the avid popular sentiments and responses to our multiple problems. We, who make up this alliance, are united in our commitment to establish a political proposal which guarantees the recuperation of the gains won under the government of Chavez, which sets out a path to follow alongside popular struggles and in the construction of a government of, and for, the workers.

From the Popular Revolutionary Alternative we ratify our most absolute loyalty to the people, its supreme interests, and the revolution above all other considerations or the political interest of the government or its institutions. At no point have we wandered from the path of the working class, the rural sectors, the communards, the militia and the popular sectors in general, and we strongly believe in the creative genius of the people to which we belong, and for whom today we demand a better quality of life and respect for our fundamental rights.

As such, we express our will to struggle against imperialist attacks, the blockade, and corruption, for a better quality of life and dignified labour conditions, in favour of worker’s and rural struggles and for the radicalisation of a vibrant popular and revolutionary democracy which has socialism as its strategic objective. Only through the organisation and mobilisation of working, rural and popular grassroots majorities will we be able to open the door to a better future.

We must renew our hopes!

For a revolutionary way out of the crisis!

Popular Revolutionary Alternative



Signed:

Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV)

Homeland for All Party (PPT)

United Left (IU)

Marxist Class Struggle Current

Revolutionary Work Party (PRT)

MBR-200

Autonomous Network of Communards

National Commitment (COMPA)

http://solidnet.org/article/CP-of-Venez ... he-crisis/

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Re: Venezuela

Post by blindpig » Sat Aug 22, 2020 1:07 pm

Guaido Taps Frozen Venezuelan Assets To Fund Opposition Plans

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Graffiti reading "Trump Unblock Venezuela" in Caracas, Venezuela. August 21, 2020. | Photo: EFE/Rayner Peña

Published 21 August 2020 (17 hours 7 minutes ago)

Over $300 million in seized Venezuelan public funds will be channeled to pay National Assembly politicians, private healthcare workers and multilateral bodies providing Covid-19 "humanitarian" assistance.


With the move, the U.S. government, which along with Canada and numerous EU countries, has seized up to $24 billion in Venezuelan government assets since early 2019, is seeking new momentum in its elusive goal of ousting Venezuela's democratically elected President Nicolas Maduro.

Despite openly distancing itself from opposition lawmaker Juan Guaidó over multiple failed coup attempts and embezzlement scandals, the Trump administration, in coordination with the Organization of American States (OAS), has granted a special license to begin initiating monthly payments of $100 to over 65,000 private health sector workers, as well two years of back pay to opposition lawmakers, the Washington Post reports.

The majority of these stolen funds held by the U.S. Justice and Treasury departments in special forfeiture accounts, $601 million has already been diverted to fund Trump's border wall with Mexico partially. Remaining funds, belonging to the Venezuelan government, its Central Bank (BCV) and PDVSA's U.S. subsidiary, Citgo, have been siphoned to fund the Venezuelan opposition, sent to Guaido's diplomatic staff worldwide and, in the case of a BCV Citibank account, transferred to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, denounced as a "vulgar plunder" to the tune of $342 million.


The Post also reports that the Trump administration plans to close a sanctions loophole that allows other countries to ship fuel to Venezuela, namely Iran, whose recent shipments have proven crucial given the impacts of the U.S. blockade and oil sanctions on the Venezuelan economy and people.

With a growing bipartisan realization that the Trump administration's unilateral coercive measures have failed to achieve their stated goals of ousting President Maduro, and have only served to shore up support in Florida for Trump's electoral aspirations while causing suffering and hardship for the Venezuelan people, this move is the latest in a series of illegal measures looting massive amount of wealth from poor and working Venezuelans and handing it over to Venezuela's right-wing elite.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Gua ... -0014.html
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Re: Venezuela

Post by blindpig » Fri Aug 28, 2020 12:58 pm

Venezuela must bet on the conuco in the face of the collapse of the capitalist agri-food model
Mission Truth

Aug 26 · 10 min read

By Eder Peña

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Photo: Archive / VTV

The emergence of the global pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes Covid-19, has revealed in detail the crisis of a global food system that is highly symptomatic in Venezuela under siege.
It has also served to encourage once again a debate that does not waver: between food security, which is based on guaranteeing access to food, its availability, use and stability; and food sovereignty, which is the right of peoples, their countries or unions of states to define their agrarian and food policy, without dumping against third countries.
The perverse cycle: how does Covid-19 enter the global food scene?
Confinement and border closure measures as prevention against Covid-19 have caused disruptions affecting both the supply and demand of food and the logistics of its distribution, which is serious in countries that depend highly on imports from long distances. This has forced governments to find the difficult balance between restrictions on mobility and guaranteeing access to both this common good and others, as well as energy and water.
For its part, global capitalism has used its addiction to crises to provoke compulsive purchases, speculation in the cartelized chains with basic products such as vegetables, making prices rise in the supply markets.
Due to a globalized system that produces wealth for few and poverty for many, the cycle of impoverishment - malnutrition (obesity versus hunger) - high population density - high mobility - contagion and death is accelerated.
According to the FAO report "Food Security under the COVID-19 Pandemic" prepared for CELAC , the main risk, in the short term, is not being able to guarantee access to food for the population that is in quarantine to avoid spread of the virus and that, in many cases, has lost its main source of income due to massive layoffs.

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Evolution of the prevalence of undernourishment in Latin America and the Caribbean as a percentage, 2000–2018, the recent increase is due to the effect of the “sanctions” that Trump and anti-Chavez have imposed in Venezuela. Chart: FAO

Meanwhile, inequality has stimulated that almost a third of total mortality at the regional level is due to non-communicable diseases such as cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and cancer (lethal risk conditions before the Covid-19) due to aging, globalization (Treaties of Free Trade and import tax), urbanization and the increase in obesity and physical inactivity.
In addition, the same FAO reports that almost one in four adults is obese and overweight affects 7.3% (3.9 million) of children under 5 years of age, a figure that exceeds the world average of 5.6% . Says Rob Vos , of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI):
"If people only consume this type of food [wheat, rice and corn], the risk of suffering adverse health consequences increases, as well as that of presenting symptoms in case of Covid-19 infection."
The increase in undernourishment in Latin America and the Caribbean has been driven by hunger in South America, between 2014 and 2018 it went from 19 to 23.7 million people, from 4.6% to 5.5% of the population, and now it concentrates 55% of the undernourished in the region.
In 2019, the region registered 18.5 million people in a situation of acute food insecurity due to economic and climatic factors concentrated in eight countries.
The weak sustainability of companies affects the level of employment, family income and access to food, which deepens as periods of economic inactivity lengthen. With people who can buy less because they have less income (11.6 million new unemployed are projected), high prices and a stagnation of social protection programs, poor households spend 70% of their income on food, which it makes their food security "especially vulnerable" to income shocks.
National agribusiness: between marginalization and rentier dependency
The last two decades of Venezuelan agrarian history have been marked by important material and symbolic transformations in which an agri-food model largely dependent on imports, the foreign market, and large food industries that promote pandemics , has shaped the diet of the population.
The not so new post-Gomecist identity, appropriate for an oil nation, stoned the agricultural past and erased from the local identity any non-oil way of thinking about ourselves.
With its foundation, John D. Rockefeller, owner of the Standard Oil Company, generated training, teaching and research programs supported by universities such as Cornell, Minnesota and Harvard in the United States. Aimed at the expansion of a modern and oil-based agriculture that cognitively and materially marginalized the smallholder peasants and conuqueros who represented "the backwardness" in front of the large-estate entrepreneurs supported by the scientific agrarian model, who represent development and progress in the field.
The supermarket chains, around the " oil cities ", offered a wide display of imported food from the United States and, together with the arrival of European migrants, there was a change in the Venezuelan diet that favored vegetables and cereals processed, agro-industrial products, and captured a middle class emerging in the midst of the post-war Great Acceleration of the world.
The agro-industrial model had public and private investment in cereals and dual-purpose livestock, highly technical to develop a "technological package" of imported inputs such as seeds, herbicides, pesticides and machinery that privileged an agricultural activity, now technical, dependent and formed by owners of medium and large areas.

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Global agribusiness has shaped the diet of the population, the Venezuelan is highly dependent both on technology and transnational cartels as well as on national oil income. Photo: Archive

Global agribusiness has shaped the diet of the population. The Venezuelan is highly dependent both on technology and transnational cartels as well as on national oil income.
This implantation fostered an image of technical-developed agriculture for the country large enough to maintain some companies, import of inputs, justification of income and territorial control, but small enough for the population to be dependent on imports, and the possibility that other sectors have access to the income from hydrocarbons.
A cocktail of overvalued currency, private capital, and state bureaucracy allowed food distribution to not depend on national agricultural production, which generated a moderate agro-industrial sector highly subsidized by oil rent as opposed to a very restricted and marginal agricultural activity.
As Venezuela has about 94% of urban population, and the rural population dedicated to agricultural production in the field does not exceed 3%, the deficiency of agricultural labor forced to resort to food security through the import of items essential and to expand highly technical industrial agriculture that replaces human work with mechanized work, all based on income from the exploitation of raw materials.
With the arrival of Hugo Chávez to the government, and the search for a reconfiguration of the state through policies of land distribution and agrifood sovereignty, transnational interests in agribusiness and local oligarchies entrenched in the national agri-food system were threatened.
The elites, who were beneficiaries of the oil rent for decades, unleashed the tensions that were triggered by the coup d'état of April 2002 and continued for the last 18 years until reaching the total onslaught of the American falcon, whose visible face is its President Donald Trump.
The other phenomenon that surrounds Venezuelan agriculture, beyond political tensions but that coincides temporarily, is the global environmental crisis. The growing usufruct, and justified within the maxim of progress (understood as necessary and inevitable), began a few centuries ago, however the expansion of the Western civilizing model, with its conceptions of life and its need to appropriate nature, was imposing itself on the entire planet from the Second World War.
The depletion of the planet in the last half century reflects alarming and evident realities not only in global climate change but also in the high rate of extinction of species, scarcity in access to fresh water, accelerated changes in land use and acidification of the oceans. Today it is known that for every dollar that is paid for an industrialized food, another 2 dollars must be paid in environmental and health damages.
Opportunity for "what has to be born"
The model that does not finish dying, but does not allow “what has to be born” to be born, has contributed to the depopulation of the countryside, forced displacement, the persecution of the peasantry and indigenous communities and, therefore, is an agent that produces poverty not only economic but social and cultural.
The narrative of progress, imposed through the Green Revolution, undertook the task of erasing images of Venezuela that fed on the conuco for centuries, the historical and regionalized diet and cuisine, agriculture as a family activity, the notion of closed cycles for the proper use of resources, measure and care, turning them into aspects that are denied, when not demonized almost viciously, as was the conuco.
Peasant agriculture is not only based on the sowing of various crops, but its seeds are local, with adaptations achieved by generations and represent a megadiverse historical and genetic mosaic, it also fosters a higher, more diverse and abundant local fauna diversity, protects it from its physical structure to its fertility.

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Peasant agriculture, based on local knowledge and seeds, favors biodiversity, protects both soils and balances in biogeochemical cycles, today it feeds 75% of the planet with 25% of the available resources. Photo: Archive

Today, a mine-country like Venezuela could benefit from lower agricultural import prices due to the effect of the pandemic recession , but the "sanctions" imposed from Washington and satellite countries, added to the low international prices of fossil fuels On which your income depends, they reduce our income and weaken the ability to import enough food in international markets. Likewise, substantial depreciations in the national currency lead to increases in the domestic prices of imported food.
The Venezuelan agribusiness model, subject to the ups and downs of income, with its continuous crises expressed in the refusal to delve into its own notion of "technological advancement" and its propensity to dependence, has given opportunity to peasant activity during the last decades .
The contribution of peasant agriculture to feeding the urban population is not negligible, the historical moment changed. Furthermore, scientific knowledge cannot deny the historical knowledge accumulated in the agriculture of other cultures.
The coronavirus crisis shows what is the essential work for the maintenance of life and, in particular, the fundamental role played by the agri-food sector, shows the limitations and risks of the capitalist model and the culture of rentier consumerism.
The pandemic and the measures adopted to contain it put in check the dominant patterns of food consumption, organized according to the rules of globalization, while eating local tubers, fruits, legumes and vegetables constitute a nutritional protection against Covid-19.
On the other hand, the "sanctions" are anchored in injuring not only the "right" to consume but also in violating the right to food and food justice and require promoting both local production and consumption in the current situation, as well as defending food sovereignty as a priority social objective. Bet on a more territorialized production in which local consumption generates benefits for the local economy and small and medium businesses.
The right to food and food justice are achieved by ensuring equity at all nodes of the food web, from production to consumption, through transformation, distribution and marketing to meet the immediate food needs of vulnerable populations. With the promotion and continuation of more efficient social protection programs, the deepening of fair and multipolar food trade, the maintenance of national supply networks and helping to develop the capacity of small farmers who, being 30% of the global population and with less than 25% of available resources, they reach local markets with 70% of the food that humans consume.
An alliance of conuqueros born in the middle of the war
Initiatives of organized popular sectors, such as the National Productive Alliance (ANP) born in times of war , began to be structured in 13 municipalities of the states of Apure, Barinas, Táchira, Yaracuy and Portuguesa, forming municipal productive tables where networks of corn producers are added, conuqueros, peasant councils and other groups to face the needs of infrastructure, supplies, industrialization, security, machinery, technical and legal support.
From these spaces the existing capacities are valued, put them in common and draw collective plans for each problem from their own capacities and possibilities. 7 thousand conuqueros have been organized nationwide, who planted rice, corn, beans and potatoes, on 11 thousand hectares. National, native seed, variety seed, not transgenic was used.

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Assembly of the National Productive Alliance (ANP) in Urachiche, Yaracuy State in 2018. Photo: CRBZ

Aníbal Montilla, one of its national coordinators, says:
“The conuquero plan implies the independence of the producers, since native seed is used and the planting is carried out organically. In this vein, it is a question of returning to our roots of original agriculture, and developing the natural production of all the components, for example, what is compost, fertilizers. This is how we give mother earth a break. The land is losing its fertility condition. We have to return the nutrients to mother earth, to be able to generate healthy and necessary food. And to also achieve agri-food sovereignty and independence: we cannot depend on the state having to provide us with seeds, inputs, and fertilizers. Relying on the state is wrong. The national petrochemical industry is almost paralyzed. So, from the National Productive Alliance, we offer the opportunity to produce without that dependency. A production that depends on the efforts of the farmers of the field ”.
This real alternative, emerged from the power of the people, faces the complex crisis of food production that Venezuela is experiencing, among the causes of which is the existence of mafias. It is vital that a new production policy arises from initiatives organized from the concrete need of small and medium producers.

https://medium.com/@misionverdad2012/ve ... ec70e4089c

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

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Re: Venezuela

Post by blindpig » Sun Aug 30, 2020 6:30 pm

Divisions and threats
Mission Truth
Mission Truth
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Aug 29 · 7 min read



By José Roberto Duque
Image for post
When denouncing the attempts at political division by the Venezuelan left, Maduro asserted that the hawk Elliott Abrams must feel very happy. Photo: AFP
If that entelechy called "unity" means that all the members of a current or trend advance in an unbreakable and galvanized block, with a unanimously agreed method and goals, then everything is divided in Venezuela. Institutions, unions, families, hierarchies, associations of all kinds. Chavismo and anti-Chavismo, government and opposition, everything has been or was born cracked, diversified and multicolored.
Even the brain of many individuals is divided into compartments that do not agree on the place in history where they should fight; in the schizophrenia of the times, there is plenty of people who think and speak from one perspective, but act (because they need to, or because reality is stronger than their dreams) in the opposite direction.
Take the previous paragraphs and replace “Venezuela” with “the world”: yes, it works too. Only that for a country, a people and a government besieged that simple "flu" that in other circumstances would be called merrily and meekly "diversity" can be harmful or deadly.
We have the most powerful enemy that can be found on this planet announcing that their mission is to enter our territory to kill and seize resources and institutions, and still, or suddenly, there are comrades who do not know where to shoot or are threatening to shoot inside the trench.
Chávez's primordial feat consisted in making a crowd impossible to amalgamate to walk in one direction; His project, unfinished or defeated by circumstances, was the unification of all tendencies around or under the direction or leadership of a single party of the Revolution. Both results (victory and defeat) were good news, both were the product of unprecedented and refreshing exercises that showed us to the world, naked and without masks, with all our nuances.
From this sidewalk one could be alarmed at a certain easily observable situation: the enemy has an advantage over us because their factions have a clear essential objective: to destroy us, to disappear us physically and as a historical current. That goal is a requirement for the achievement of others, which are what divide them: control the state and the country's resources, ally with the United States and other powers in the mission of predating and distributing wealth among corporations.
In this mission they cannot travel together because each party or power group wants the loot for itself and not to distribute it to anyone. The neoliberal paradigm demands winning the competition and the crushing of other competitors; you will only see the right-wing parties united when it comes to allying to defeat Chavismo. In an electoral process, the central objective is easy to bring together all the wills; problems come later. Defeated or triumphant we will see them again with knife in hand, and the tripping machine well oiled.
Does this behavior or way of functioning also work among us?
Personally, I have witnessed situations in which a certain harmful and disruptive goblin wreaks havoc on organizations or entities that deserved and needed greater harmony. Would it be better to tell him unity? For the purposes of what is revealed in this article, surely. I have seen directors of "divided" institutions: this group versus that other, each with their bosses and visible cards. When one of “theirs” proposes and launches to execute a plan or policy, the other group or clan is usually activated in an obstacle mode. Its mission becomes to sabotage or hinder the institutional plan until it becomes unfeasible in practice. The plan fails and that side feels victorious and triumphant: they hindered and destroyed the adversary's work.
It does not matter if the institution, the Revolution or the country were also injured: if we manage to make the adversary fail (who is also a revolutionary or Chavista and is supposed to push the car to the same place as us) then we win.
The worst thing about this strange logic is that there are a number of young people witnessing the routine and "learning" a lesson that will hardly be erased in the future: those boys are being told that this is called "doing politics." That politics consists of making action impossible for others, no matter what project falls.
It also falls into the category of "doing politics", with all the quotes of doubt and caution, ignoring or overlapping the fact that in all state institutions the germ and the anti-Chavista organization survive in many ways. There is not a single ministry or body where everyone is or feels committed to the construction of the Bolivarian project, and that includes the police and state security forces. The entities that possess the arms of the Republic, the Armed Forces first of all, are full of elements that have not hesitated to take up those weapons to shoot the government, the institutions and the people.
An Oscar Pérez came out of an institution of the Chavista government; It is absurd and irresponsible to pretend that this subject and his film companions were the last of their kind to remain in the CICPC and the rest of the police forces. A Figuera headed SEBIN and now lives in the United States protected by US intelligence; You have to be very distracted or malicious to pretend to believe that this guy did not leave his chips scattered in that structure. Even so, everything that the members of the CICPC and SEBIN (and now the FAES) do is attributed by groups, NGOs and individuals who are funny, to the government of Nicolás Maduro.
The thesis of unified Chavismo under a single and unanimous leadership is not viable. But this does not give an inevitable character, much less necessary, to the persistence of a dozen groups or clans in an attitude of effective or purely emotional blackmail. No new or "historic" party should claim for itself the ownership of a Revolution that has had its substrate in the people and in the ethical bond called Chávez.
Other binders: the central goal, which is the destruction of capitalism, and the construction of a form of organization-action different from that dictated by the hegemonies of capital.
They divide or divide us because we have different methods and surely rhythms that are difficult or impossible to synchronize. To get out of a city from its center to the periphery there are two possible ways: to circulate through its streets, to cope according to its obstacles and rules, or to arm oneself with a powerful machinery and to open through what is crossed a rectilinear and unstoppable channel from Plaza Bolívar to Tazón, without ever crossing or looking sideways (or backwards, which is where the story is supposed to be).
Those who propose for the violent liquidation of private property and the implantation of the dictatorship of the proletariat want to go from the center to the exit of Caracas, skipping and devastating streets, traffic lights, highways, people, mountains and structures. The acting Chavista government has decided to go to the exit queuing, stopping, turning aside when there is a closed street, avoiding gaps, respecting the alcabalas. Those of us who conserve from our youth the desire to obtain quick and obvious results despair. And maddeningly long and winding is the course of centuries-long history that has brought us here.
There is something that some defenders of “all or nothing seem to forget, and I want it to be for this afternoon”: among the trenches or conquests that must be defended there is a government, this acting Chavista government. The reason has been repeated a lot, and it will be necessary to return to it: because the Revolution can do good with this ally (sometimes ineffective and almost always clumsy, but ally) in power. If this ally is overthrown, the next government will not be the flawless and perfect revolutionary for which the "historic" parties yearn, but a murderous and devastating transnational structure that will take us back to the century when we were prostitutes and slaves of the United States. The revolution will have to continue but under conditions that those same "historical" ones are not prepared to face.
Even so, they persist in tasks and in scrambles of analysis that sometimes ignite and sometimes do not even fail: attributing to the government the massacre and disappearance of Chavista and revolutionary activists and militants, calling "concessions to the bourgeoisie" the necessary withdrawal movements on the battlefield, the searching and generalization of particular situations in order to convince the world that we are a failed project of society: the easy mechanism of laboratory propaganda is the weapon of groups and characters that without Chávez and without the Chavismo would not have been heard or read or ignored or anything, beyond their book clubs of Marxist classics.
On the role of the international "left" in the current Venezuelan moment, it will also be necessary to take more than one eye, in a separate work. The verification that there are campaigns supported by "left" factors, complementary or parallel to those of the imperial machinery, is another necessary act of recognition of the terrain. Know and understand that its main mission is also a form of blockade or isolation: to try to show that the government of Venezuela "is not from the left," and therefore deserves to be execrated and overthrown (by the right).
That they are here (and there) doing their job, and that they don't care if their intentions are shown, is an important signpost in the way of the struggles that lie ahead. The brigade of propagandists disguised as the "left" is a beautiful-looking apple that, when opened, reveals its rot. Better known milky than an unknown apple.

https://medium.com/@misionverdad2012/di ... e881db86b6

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The argument here is good, so is that of the communists & other dissidents. Tricky business and can only be judged with full information.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Venezuela

Post by blindpig » Mon Aug 31, 2020 4:02 pm

Citgo's Loot (Research)
Mission Truth

Aug 31 · 16 min read

By William Serafino

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Photo: RedRadio

Since Juan Guiadó's self-proclamation in January 2019, the Citgo Petroleum company has been at the center of an extended political, legal and narrative battle for control of its operations.
Some background
This subsidiary of the state-owned Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) in the United States is made up of three huge refineries with a processing capacity of 769 thousand barrels per day and more than 4 thousand gasoline distribution stations distributed in 30 states of the Union. Such figures give Citgo Petroleum a market value of over $ 8 billion , which has made it a highly coveted asset for years.
Even before Guaidó's leap into the void, Citgo was already in the crosshairs of the US government. On May 21, 24 hours after the victory of Nicolás Maduro in the presidential elections, President Donald Trump issued Executive Order 13835 with the aim of prohibiting the sale, transfer or use as collateral of any entity in the United States where the government Venezuelan had a stake greater than 50%.
Logically, the restriction measure was aimed at Citgo, but it was also aimed at blocking the external financing capacity of the Venezuelan state, drowning its income in foreign currency, as analyzed by a strong opposition economist at the time.
At the time, the move was interpreted as the first step in an official embargo on the company, a vision that ended up being confirmed later.
In August 2018, the legal offensive of the Crystallex corporation (where the lawyer José Ignacio Hernández, future “attorney” of Guaidó, was part of his legal team) won a position of strength in the Delaware Court by Judge Leonard Stark . The argument that PDVSA's shareholding control over Citgo made it an alter ego of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, favored the Canadian mining company's claim to collect an old lawsuit over Citgo Petroleum's assets.
In 2018, the US government not only made progress in taking control of the company from the Venezuelan state; Now there was a serious threat of permanent dispossession, which has acquired an increasingly dangerous validity in recent months given the action of Guaidó's fake attorney , who put Citgo on a silver platter to the same corporations with which he had worked years before .
A few days after Guaidó's leap into the void, during the first half of February , his supporters in the National Assembly appointed a new board of directors for Citgo and PDVSA Holding, going beyond the existing legal framework, headed by Luisa Palacios and Carlos Jordá, both linked to the US financial and oil sector.
The decision was taken as a practical step in the “asset protection” campaign, aimed at covering up the looting of national assets under the screen of the fight against corruption of the government of Nicolás Maduro.
Carlos Vecchio, appointed as Guaidó's emissary to the United States, moved forcefully and quickly. In March, he made a "formal" visit to Citgo to emphasize that the parallel government had effective control of the company.
Vecchio argued that, with the illegal change in directive, "we are not only protecting our assets, we are also preventing further destruction and losing the company."
To hide the gravity of Citgo's kidnapping, Vecchio used demagoguery to distract public opinion. The idea consisted of promising that Venezuelans would ultimately benefit: "All that money has to be used for more opportunities for economic and social development, which generates employment and can bring the minimum wage, not to $ 5 as it is right now, but to raise it much more to increase the purchasing power ”.
A spokesman for the US Department of the Treasury consulted by Voice Of America indicated, referring to the 7B license, that said measures on Citgo were intended to prohibit "any profit from returning to the illegitimate Maduro regime." From that moment, and as a complement to Executive Order 13835 of the previous year, Venezuela would not have access to the profits reported by Citgo, nor to fuel, spare parts and other supplies demanded by PDVSA.
Realignment of sanctions
On January 28, 2019, US Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin and then-national security adviser John Bolton announced PDVSA's inclusion on the Specially Designated Citizens and Blocked Persons List (SDN). in English), pursuant to Executive Order 13850, issued in November 2018.
The measure implied the definitive embargo of PDVSA and its subsidiaries, blocking any transaction with US companies and opening the way to fearsome secondary sanctions. Instantly, at least 9 general licenses were issued that allowed some operations blocked by PDVSA's designation, such as the extension of Chevron's operations in Venezuela, certain transactions with certain bonds and other Citgo marketing activities.
Of all these licenses , the 7B stands out, which allows Citgo to operate in the US market. With this instrument, which has been continuously renewed from 2019 to the present, Washington hinders the company's dividends from going to Caracas and, at the same time, "authorizes" Guaidó's team to maintain effective control of the subsidiary.
In other words, while maintaining the embargo situation, it favors a supervised administration of the coup plotters through the 7B license and others with similar characteristics .
Energy and financial boycott
As of today, the company is in a situation of extreme vulnerability, especially after Judge Leonard Stark determined, at the end of May this year, that Crystallex can collect its historic claim with the sale, under auction conditions, from Citgo refineries.
The legal setback was a catastrophic blow to Guaidó's “asset protection” management and especially to his fake attorney , José Ignacio Hernández, who weakened the defense of Venezuela's national interests by replacing the attorney general of the Republic in front of the American courts.
These events have generated countless reactions that have dismantled the little credibility that Guaidó had left. In parallel, the US government has intervened by modifying and extending some of last year's licenses to prevent Citgo from being auctioned as ordered by Judge Stark of the Delaware court.
Meanwhile the illegal Citgo management tries to feign normalcy. In February this year, as an "anniversary" for the kidnapping of the board, the new management issued a "performance report" which highlights the change in the company's strategic orientation and how it is part of the energy (and financial boycott) ) against Venezuela.
“We also take critical steps to improve the resilience of our operations by quickly and efficiently optimizing our crude portfolio, replacing Venezuelan crude with inexpensive crudes from Colombia, Mexico and Ecuador, and at the same time increasing our light crude runs in the United States. Low-priced light US crude now represents 48% of CITGO's total crude supply and 64% of total US Gulf Coast crude, ”the report states.
This change and replacement of supply routes has benefited oil companies both in the United States and in countries in the region that are commercial rivals of PDVSA and that have intelligently exploited US sanctions as an instrument of unfair competition and war. commercial.
The report also indicates that “These efforts have not only helped us better serve the US market, but have also allowed us to become a major exporter of refined products; in fact, exports now represent 25% of CITGO's total production ”.
In this way, the new Guaidó leadership has whitewashed the destructive US sanctions in the name of an operational readjustment of Citgo. So, while on the one hand Washington blocks and threatens ships, insurers and shipping companies involved in the gasoline trade with Venezuela, on the other hand Citgo increases its fuel exports at the expense of the shortage produced by the sanctions in Venezuela.
A New York Times report in 2018 indicated that Citgo sent Venezuela "around 29,000 barrels a day of refined fuels, such as gasoline." In addition, the US media adds, "Citgo (...) imports 175 thousand barrels of Venezuelan crude every day - almost one out of every five barrels that the country exports to the world -, which provides the left-wing government with dollars that it desperately needs."
In this sense, the substitution of purchases of Venezuelan crude not only hits the Venezuelan finances and PDVSA hard, but the 29 thousand barrels per day that were sent to Venezuela in 2018 are now very surely exported and the profits that it generates do not return to the country. A perfect model of looting and corruption.
In turn, by having Citgo under control, Washington exacerbates the blockade on fuels and the currency drought, the two main vectors of the economic war.
A recent report published in Reuters remarks that the gasoline shortage is due to the fracture of the natural relations between Citgo and PDVSA, its parent company, due to the US sanctions:
But these so-called exchanges with its main partner, Citgo, which is its refining subsidiary in the United States, were interrupted when the government of President Donald Trump sanctioned PDVSA in January 2019 as part of its campaign to oust President Nicolás from office. Maduro, ”says journalist Luc Cohen.
For the benefit of the holders
In that report, the Venezuelan Luisa Palacios was consulted, who currently serves as president of the Citgo board of directors by appointment of Guaidó. According to La Tabla , Palacios is part of an oligarchic family from Caracas and has worked for US financial institutions for a long time.
Palacios told the New York Times in 2018 that
"The integrity of Citgo as a company is at risk (...) I don't see how PDVSA can keep Citgo, because all of Citgo is compromised on one side or the other with different types of lenders, and disgruntled creditors are managing to affect its stability."
Palacios' marked interest in Citgo lenders has been imprinted on the performance reports of the new board.
“When we took on our role as board members last February, our first task was to put CITGO on a solid financial footing. During 2019, we successfully refinanced 70% of the aggregate debt of CITGO and CITGO Holding, managing to reduce the costs of CITGO Holding's debt by $ 220 million in 5 years ”, states the aforementioned report .
A more recent report states that the
"July 6, 2020, CITGO's Board of Directors approved the recommended dividend payment of approximately $ 63 million to its immediate parent, CITGO Holding, Inc., which was paid on July 29, 2020." A few days later, “CITGO successfully refinanced its 2021 Term B Loan with the product of a private offering of 7.00% senior secured notes due 2025. The offering of notes was oversubscribed, allowing CITGO to increase the offer to $ 1,125 billion and provide additional liquidity ”.
These reports establish a whole line of financial priorities for the new board of directors with respect to the final destination of the profits generated by the company.
Among the new priorities are indebtedness, payment to debt holders and the maximization of dividends that, paradoxically, are received by a “parent company” that is also controlled by Guaidó.
Carlos Vecchio's premise of using Citgo money to generate "more opportunities for economic and social development in Venezuela" has proven to be a sham. Luisa Palacios and Carlos Jordá, both on the cusp of Citgo's illegal management, have aligned themselves against the interests of Venezuela.
Helicopter money
An important organization within that gigantic network that is Citgo is the Simón Bolívar Foundation (FSB, hereinafter), a private non-profit foundation established in 2006 to provide medical assistance to a varied panorama of cases in Venezuela and also In U.S.A.
The organization, prior to the kidnapping of Guaidó, had stood out as a source of support for the medical care of children with cancer, who were covered for medical treatment, in addition to transportation and maintenance, in the United States.
After the illegal change of directive, this aim has taken a 180 degree turn. The FSB has become a source of income transfer to a galaxy of interests of various dimensions.
In March of this year, the illegal board of directors appointed by Guaidó appointed Mariela Poleo as president of the Simón Bolívar de Citgo Foundation.
Your profile on the Citgo website highlights that
“Poleo worked for more than 20 years at EQUINOR ASA (formerly Statoil) where he served in various global positions, including the Chief Financial and Control Officer (controller) for exploration in North America and development of offshore projects. In the different positions he has held, Poleo has overseen multi-billion dollar budgets, managing strategic planning, risk and financial analysis for large projects in North America, South America, Norway and Africa ”.
In early August this year, the FSB announced a $ 1 million grant to three international charities: AID FOR AIDS International, FOOD FOR THE POOR INC. and the Pan American Development Foundation (PADF).
According to the consulted report , AID FOR AIDS International would use the resources to provide "nutritional supplements" to 6 thousand children in Venezuela, FOOD FOR THE POOR INC. It would allocate its part to serve 36,000 Venezuelan migrants in Cúcuta, while the Pan American Development Foundation would provide 1.4 metric tons of medicines for 7,000 Venezuelans.
The grant given by the FSB seems too high for the requirements put forth by the selected charities:
The organization AID FOR AIDS was founded in 1996 and according to its official website it aims to provide medicines and retrovirals to people with HIV / AIDS. For that reason, it is curious that the grant obtained is based on the distribution of nutritional supplements, even though it is not the stated objective of the charity.
Adriana Cisneros de Griffin, president of the Cisneros Foundation and vice president of the Venezuelan business organization, is among the founding members of AID FOR AIDS. According to Poderopedia, María Eugenia Maury Arria, current wife of former diplomat Diego Arria , is the president of AID FOR AIDS, although the official website of the organization currently recognizes Laura Messina in the position.
In events of the organization, however, María Eugenia Maury can be seen sharing with Diego Arria and Laura Messina, showing her managerial place in the organization chart.

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María Eugenia Maury Arria. Photo: Aid For Aids

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María Eugenia Maury Arria and Diego Arria, at a fundraising event. Photo: Aid For Aids

On the other hand, the Pan American Development Foundation (PADF) was created in 1962 as an organization affiliated to the Organization of American States. It receives funding from the United States government and so publicly declares it. The center of its activity is located in Colombia, where it shows its cooperation with US institutions such as the anti-narcotics bureau and security agencies such as the Colombian Police.
Although the PADF presents itself as an organization with humanitarian purposes, data and investigations involve it in activities that are closer to the external interference propagated by Washington. According to a 2010 investigation by attorney Eva Gollinger, "one of the PADF programs, for which it received $ 699,996 from the State Department in 2007, was dedicated to the development of independent media in Venezuela" and journalism via “innovative technologies”.
And precisely in the record of public activities of the PADF you can see this orientation towards media initiatives. It has recently started a school for youtubers in Colombia and the tasks of "humanitarian aid" have only been reduced to the delivery of hygiene supplies to Colombian migrants returned from Venezuela.
There are no records that the delivery of “humanitarian aid” to the 36,000 Venezuelan migrants, which is why it obtained the FSB grant, is being carried out.

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Photo: Facebook / FUPAD
FOOD FOR THE POOR INC. It is one of the largest humanitarian organizations in the United States and has a strong Christian profile. The “humanitarian support” to Venezuela has been mostly declarative and its press records do not highlight a systematic activity, which raises broad doubts about the underlying reasons for receiving the FSB grant.
The organization acknowledges that it has worked for years with the United States Southern Command in the deployment of its "humanitarian" operations. Specifically, during the month of October 2018, it collaborated with supplies and personnel in the deployment of the USNS Comfort in Latin America in the context of the pre-war pressure against Venezuela.
On the other hand, the FSB has also announced the selection of 15 projects with a humanitarian profile that will receive a total of 475 thousand 343 dollars in donations. Let's review some of them:
The organization Engagement Foundation Group declares to receive donations and financing from individuals interested in providing supplies, food and medical supplies in Venezuela. Although she claims to have 500 volunteers with whom she has deployed "humanitarian aid" to migrants and refugees from various countries, including Venezuela. However, its activity log is rather small. The organization's management is in the hands of Valeria Viera (executive director), Constanza Viera (assistant executive) and Marta Viera-Blanco, relatives of the illegally appointed ambassador to Canada, Orlando Viera-Blanco.

Also featured is the NGO Chamos , founded in 2007 in the United Kingdom and dedicated to raising "funds to support and improve local programs dedicated to improving the lives of vulnerable children in Venezuela." The president of the organization is the Venezuelan Mariana Siblesz-Álvarez, who in July of this year participated in the seminar "Social development of Venezuela: beyond its borders", sponsored by the British Venezuelan Society and Chamber of Commerce.
Lala Lovera, executive director of "Share for a Life" (Colombia); Roberto Patiño, director of “Alimenta La Solidaridad”, and Felipe Muñoz, advisor to the Presidency of the Republic of Colombia. It was moderated by Peter West, president of the society.
In April 2019, Mariana Siblesz-Álvarez participated in an All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) event from the United Kingdom on Venezuela, where she shared with Guaidó's fake ambassador , Vanessa Neumann.
In a Facebook post from Chamos, he recorded the moment: “We are delighted to accompany Dr. Vanessa Neumann, Official Representative of President Juan Guaidó in the United Kingdom. We also want to express our gratitude to the Department for International Development of Great Britain for sharing their contributions to help the humanitarian crisis in Venezuela. "

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Mariana Siblesz-Alvarez with Vanessa Neumann. Photo: Facebook / NGO Chamos

The NGO Convite , for its part, is dedicated to the care of the elderly and carries out a set of training programs aimed at the development of public policies. The NGO is Venezuelan and was founded in 2006. Its director is Luis Francisco Cabezas, who in 2008 took a right to speak before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, in order to question the policy of care for adults seniors of the Venezuelan state. For Francisco Cabezas, Convite focuses its activities on "making visible the tragedy of the humanitarian crisis" in Venezuela.
The NGO Friends of the Children of Venezuela is a non-profit organization oriented to the delivery of medicines and hospital supplies in Venezuela. The NGO is directed by Andrés Caldera Radonski, who, due to the similarity in the surnames, could be connected with the opposition politician Henrique Capriles Radonski. In February of last year, Andrés Caldera Radonski on his Twitter account published a photo of Henrique Capriles with Juan Guaidó, showing his support for the ongoing coup agenda.
Some conclusions
Since the illegal takeover of the company, Guaidó's board of directors has oriented the company's profits not only towards obtaining new debt (“refinancing”), but also towards the delivery of “dividends” and pharaonic “humanitarian aid programs. ”In the form of grants and donations, while playing at the worsening of the gasoline shortage and preventing Venezuela from using Citgo resources to face the pandemic.
The delivery of subsidies and donations by the FSB is part of a discretionary and partial use of the money of the Venezuelan company, where most of the benefited NGOs and foundations have a direct or indirect relationship with the family network of political figures Venezuelan women (Diego Arria, Orlando Viera-Blanco, Henrique Capriles Radonski, Vanessa Neumann, etc.) who have bet on the regime change campaign against the Venezuelan government.
Is it a way to silence the criticism of a Diego Arria or to keep a Henrique Capriles in line?
The premise of partisan use of Citgo money takes on greater force given that most of the NGOs and foundations that benefit from FSB donations do not have a systematic activity of delivery of humanitarian goods in Venezuelan territory that justifies their selection to receive grants. Its base of operations, managers and volunteers are outside the national territory.
Precisely most of these foundations are based in the United States and Colombia, and are especially linked to institutions that support the coup against Venezuela such as the OAS and the United States Southern Command.
In this sense, the subsidies do not end in effectively helping Venezuelans in difficult situations, but rather end up liquefying in countries clearly aligned with the confrontational agenda against Venezuela.
This shift towards the politicization of subsidies has fractured the efficient program of expensive medical treatments that had been in place, and benefiting hundreds of Venezuelans, before the illegal takeover of Guaidó.
Most of the selected organizations do not solely carry out humanitarian activities. Even those that stand out the most are those dedicated to “making the crisis visible”, collecting donations and raising information about the “humanitarian crisis”. In short, these are organizations dedicated to politics.
The current Citgo administration reveals a “friend capitalism” scheme , where family and personal connections represent an effective vehicle to achieve a privileged position in the face of obtaining resources and business facilities.
Under these endogamous and influence peddling parameters, the Venezuelan bourgeoisie was born in the shadow of oil revenues in the first part of the 20th century. And with the takeover of Citgo he has returned to his comfort zone as the country struggles daily to stay on its feet.

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Re: Venezuela

Post by blindpig » Tue Sep 01, 2020 1:47 pm

Let's Tell Lies ...
Mission Truth

Aug 31 · 6 min read

By Jorge Arreaza Monserrat

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Republican hawk Elliott Abrams. Photo: Archive

In the Spanish-speaking world, there is a very peculiar children's song: “Let's Tell Lies”. Through the hilarious repetition of verses and a catchy melody, there is a succession of absurd situations that delight children. Comedy is an exercise where reality is alienated so that laughter is achieved.
The song made us remember what took place in recent days in the United States Senate, during a hearing of the ineffable Elliott Abrams -who despite greatly resembling a known villain of a children's program who unsuccessfully chases blue pixies, continues to be Donald Trump's macabre political operator.
That country's Senate asked Abrams for explanations in face of the inefficiency of this erratic strategy to achieve a change of government in Venezuela. The performance they carried out in the Senate goes beyond the limits of comedy in order to play the role of a tragedy of enormous dimensions.
It is a two-fold tragedy: on one side, because of the sad role of Mr. Abrams, with his eagle-like features, confronted by the accumulated defeats against Nicolas Maduro and the resistance of the Venezuelan people, stammering unintelligible excuses, making up magic words in an attempt to divert attention and guarantee the endeavor's success.
However, what is most worrisome is the tragedy that we see as all of the actors in this parliamentary performance are disconnected from reality. In order to make coherent and assertive decisions, one of the fundamental values ​​in politics is to start from truthful premises of the situations that make up the political game, the actors, the ideological reality, concrete reality.
Hollywood has made the world believe that the dominant elite in Washington has all the means to rely on truthful information on whatever issue you can imagine. Reality is quite different. Each of the Senators' interventions questioning Elliott, with his disjointed smile, resounded like that children's song, absurdity after absurdity, lie after lie, trying to draw the complex reality of the Latin American continent.
Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, surrendering any contempt for ridicule, displayed his ideological ignorance by questioning poor Elliott - who gazed in disbelief, always in defeat, not knowing quite what to reply - on the concern about substituting President Nicolas Maduro's socialist government with another by Guaido who, in his view, "is also a socialist and his party is recognized by the Socialist International." Unbelievable! He is convinced that the puppet created by the Trump Administration to plunder Venezuelan wealth whose only personal accomplishment will be obtaining a few crumbs and the scorn of the Venezuelan people; he who attempted to carry out a coup d'état and only managed to stain his shirt with green plantains; a firm enthusiast of empires, specially the North American one; that character, for Senator Paul, is a socialist.

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Senator Rand Paul. Photo: Getty Images

He would need to start by reading a bit about the real ideals of a philosophy that places the human being at its center, rescues people's dignity, doesn't sell out to the highest bidder, recognizes people's work and distributes resources equitably to achieve a dignified and gratifying life. It would be to his advantage to study a bit of history about Latin American popular struggles, the blood shed by the coca farmers in Cochabamba, the suffering of the Mother of Plaza de Mayo who still recall the ghosts of military indignity, the sacrifice of Chilean miners against the capitalist maelstrom of copper. Socialism, paraphrasing Che Guevara, is carried in one's heart to die for it, not in one's mouth to profit from it. This Senator is ideologically lost in space.
But the nonsense doesn't end there. New Hampshire Senator, Jeanne Shaheen, invoking the spirits of McCarthyism, complains to a beaten Elliott so that he promotes sanctions on Turkish companies carrying food to Venezuela. It is not enough with the suffering already felt by Venezuelans while confronting the blockade and the huge difficulties to acquire that which people need, Senator Shaheen also pretends that businessmen form other countries are also relentlessly persecuted for supplying food to Venezuela.
The Senator attempts against the most fundamental principle of humanity, but also against a value that her own capitalist spirit defends without looking back: free trade. In this case, she finally requested that Abrams deliver to her a list of Turkish businesses that would be subject to sanctions by Trump and his thieves; for her, people don't have the right to procure the possibility of food provisions, and the so-called free trade should always be limited to the approval of the United States and its capricious way of conceiving the world.
Finally, Senator Tim Kaine - who according to his Twitter profile - plays the harmonica in his spare time, ends the string of nonsense contained in this concatenation of errors from the US elite. In a tragicomic sentence of the world turned upside down, this brainy representative from the state of Virginia, indicates that Colombia must be contrasted with Venezuela as an example of a good democratic government.
Nothing more and nothing less than the country which exports drugs and violence to all the latitudes of the continent - specially to the United States which is the main consumer of Colombian drugs -, where the State is involved in, to say the least, in the dubious annihilation actions against its own population in the hands of irregular groups promoted by the government party itself. The country where the disappearance and murder of journalists and activists is so common that it has been normalized as a constant by public and published opinion.

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Protest for the Samaniego massacre that has shocked Colombia. Photo: EFE

Colombia, where paramilitary groups are created and trained to invade the sovereignty of neighbors. Colombia, the country whose reality pains all the peoples of Our America. To pretend to present Colombia as a role model can be labeled as the most insane ogre summoned by these Senators without thinking about what they are saying.
We acknowledge there was a notable exception among the Senators. The intervention of Democratic Senator Chris Murphy rendered a questioned Gargamel speechless. This Senator shamelessly exposed how his government has been behind every destabilization operation and action in Venezuela in recent years, all of them, by the way, in violation of Public International Law and of the Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.
Using the first-person plural, Senator Murphy was the discordant note of the evening. He didn't concentrate in lying or repeating ideologized narratives. He tried to prove how his government has unsuccessfully attempted to overthrow the Venezuelan government and labeled the strategy employed until now as failed. From his arrogant mouth, only truths came out about a policy built on false premises, disconnected from Venezuelan reality and destined to fail from the first day.

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Chris Murphy, Senator for Democratic Party, during the hearing in which he strongly challenged Elliott Abrams. Photo: Twitter

From Venezuela we could laugh in front of such an out of key song of lies and nonsense of this new aggression from the US Senate against our sovereignty. No matter how much it resembles a humorous script, it comes short of it the moment in which they express it with proud seriousness, inside the greatest halls of a State that acts as the clearest political expression of world imperialism. The utter failure of the maximum pressure campaign against Venezuela is totally incomprehensible. They know nothing about Venezuela, and even less about Chavismo and its historic, political and social role.
Their sources are fictitious, the information upon which decisions are made is not even inaccurate, it is false, absurd, and ideologized to the fullest. The Trump Administration has extended its Miami-oriented and Manichean script, its intemperate spiel and its irreflexive aggression, to large part of the extremities of his country's political body. But our conviction, with the truth and dignity, remains unwavering.
President Nicolas Maduro obtains new victories everyday against the offensive of the Trump Administration and the cataclysmic vocation of that caricature called Elliott Abrams.
They haven't succeeded against Venezuela and they won't be able to. The Venezuelan people not only resist but advances as well. It is unstoppable. It knows not about surrender. It knows how to struggle and win.

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Rand as outta touch as his namesake, the Dem in true form, out warmongering Elliot Abrams. What would the ruling class do without em?
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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blindpig
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Re: Venezuela

Post by blindpig » Wed Sep 02, 2020 2:00 pm

Tactic and strategy: a reading of the new presidential pardons in Venezuela
Mission Truth

Sep 1 · 7 min read

By Franco Vielma

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Roberto Marrero, from Juan Guaidó's team accused of terrorism, was one of those pardoned by the Venezuelan government. Photo: Manaure Quintero / Reuters

The political picture in Venezuela is presenting an accelerated evolution during these days, now, through the pardon that President Nicolás Maduro has made to more than 100 anti-Chavista leaders and activists who have been released from prison, or were being required by the Venezuelan justice and even some who declared themselves "persecuted" without criminal cases against, some abroad.
Taking the details of this measure for granted , it is evident that Chavismo is once again aiming to create zones of détente with the opponents, under a slogan of "reconciliation", but that it comes with the objective of mobilizing as many anti-Chavista wills as possible to the upcoming parliament elections.
The replication of the dialogue strategy with the opponents, such as the one carried out in 2017, this time has new peculiarities. It has happened behind the scenes, there are factors external to the country involved, it is in the midst of a strict economic blockade and frontal war threats and the party crisis is transversal and deep, due to an almost total fragmentation of the opposition, which makes the consolidation of agreements with a part of them.
Chavismo, on the other hand, has divided its opinion. On the one hand there is support and, on the other, stupor and indignation.
For Maduro, the bet is higher and is inspired by the results that this strategy generated in previous years, which gives it political viability. Let's explain the matter panoramicly.
The balance of previous distensions
In 2017, Venezuela was on the brink of a civil war and the opposition, in full force, promised to reach Miraflores by threatening national stability and trying to break the institutional framework.
Chavismo elected the National Constituent Assembly (ANC) to preserve the institutionality, but there were open and closed dialogues with the opposition. Its leaders, finding themselves plunged into a failed coup strategy, had to maneuver their return to politics. They demanded that the ANC be dismantled, Maduro did not give in, although he did in other items, such as the release of detained criminals.
These dialogues pacified the country, consecutive elections were agreed, and the pre-war and highly unstable scenario was diluted in regional and municipal elections that Chavismo capitalized in an indisputable way, giving Chavismo a governance that was unthinkable during the first months of that period. year.
The opposition that had won the 2015 parliamentary elections formidably, and was united in the violence of 2017, disbanded. The catastrophe was primarily narrative, as they promised a coup and tamed themselves in dialogues when they saw that their coup failed. His followers, disappointed, abandoned them. Then the shipwreck was translated into votes and we already know the results.
That strategy, of dialogues, liberations and elections, had other triggers in the medium and long term. The worst balance they reaped was their division, which has endured, despite Guaidó's imaginary coronation in 2019.
We already know the rest of the story, with the Americans openly steering what Mike Pompeo declared was very difficult to unite: the Venezuelan opposition.
It is known that Chavismo has had to calibrate its costs in deep politics, articulating strategies and applying, against many odds, concessions on the political board, yes, always exercising its dominant position and establishing itself in its center of political gravity . For Chavismo, dialogue works as a political mechanism and, today, indisputably, we continue to be beneficiaries of the results of that 2017 strategy.
The items on the board today
The movements that we see today have Henrique Capriles on the anti-Chavista side, who has now turned out to be an articulator of the parties and, in addition, of the releases and pardons that have taken place. This does not come from nowhere. Capriles took over the draft of what Guaidó allowed to cool on US orders, which is the roadmap from Oslo to Barbados.
In recent days, Josep Borrell, in charge of European diplomacy, affirmed that he was in dialogue with Chavismo and the opposition about the possibility of creating "new electoral guarantees", precisely so that part of the opposition today, added to the strategy of abstention, will to elections.
The chances that the G3 (the G4 without Popular Will) will go to elections have increased, precisely since the Venezuelan Episcopal Conference (CEV) called on the anti-Chavistas to assume a strategy other than abstention and resignation, a strategy that has proven to be unsuccessful in 2005. This did not happen by chance, the tactical boundaries of anti-Chavismo are so deep that the clergy reappeared in their role as political actor precisely to get away from Guaidó. Both Borrell's efforts and the position of the CEV are not at all disjointed.
All these moves on the board keep with them a bid of intentions and interests beyond the apparent and hollow phrases. A deepening of its antagonisms occurs in anti-Chavismo and it is taking place right now, it takes it as a carrion from the remains of Juan Guaidó.
These events take place through Capriles trying to establish herself as the leader of a captive and paralyzed opposition and, on the other hand, with María Corina Machado throwing the door in Guaidó's face to try to consolidate herself as the favorite of the Americans, or at least she tried to do so. before Elliott Abrams referred to his "magical realism" in a very short time.
In the internal dispute of anti-Chavismo, it is Capriles who is most likely to take hold. We have known since May that he has been working on that . He is the one who deals with the fury of the angry opponents, is bearing the costs, pursuing a greater objective.
But Capriles is not naive, nor does he act alone. It has behind the scenes with the support of other anti-Chavistas who do not want to place themselves as dialoguing in the open scene, since they are factors that understand the political cost of it, but also understand the unpredictable result of staying out of the electoral arena.
When the Americans decided to declare the next elections in Venezuela void in advance, they declared that Guaidó's "presidency" in the AN and, consequently, of the country, would be for "indefinite time." It is evident that many anti-Chavismo forces do not want to perpetuate Guaidó's imaginary presidency, much less want to be commandeered by Leopoldo López, who from the Spanish embassy intends to keep Guaidó as a remote control to captain them.
The tactical boundaries of anti-Chavismo also favor economic interests, to the point that only a group of deputies from Guaidó's entourage are the beneficiaries of the continuity of the current situation, that of an opposition that is projected into exile and that attracts resources in abroad, while an internal opposition is relegated.
The anti-Chavismo should respond hysterically against the pardons. We have seen it from the reactions of several of the beneficiaries and their garment ripping. It is logical that they do so, especially those who say that ignoring the pardons means continuing to ignore Maduro.
They do not want to expose themselves in public as domesticated, nor do they want to loosen up on the agenda of spicing up Guaidó and his flow of US dollars. So that other factor on the board makes perfect sense.
They are factors that fear being overwhelmed by the anti-Chavistas who will go to elections , so these narratives must be understood not as unidirectional attacks on Maduro: they are also attacks on those who dialogue and go to the electoral arena.
Tactic and strategy
One of the fundamental principles in any war is the recognition of the adversary. Let's look at that statement in depth. The recognition of the adversary does not start from the recognition only of his existence and of his strengths and weaknesses, but of the gravitations and conditions that he and the context impose. The exercise of politics would be very easy if it could be done only from the blows on the table and the viscera, but no. Doing Real politics (with a capital R) requires weighing costs, sometimes very high, to recalibrate the board.
The pardons that have taken place have been well received by Europeans, who are in a clear demarcation of the US agenda for Venezuela. This implies the breakdown of consensus between them and the US and opens up greater possibilities for recognition of the next elections.
The opposition consensus, artificially created around Guaidó, is openly broken. The reality and the cessation of the current parliamentary period reaches the anti-Chavez, as is inevitable the period from today until January. Faced with Guaidó, his failed strategies and a U.S. invasion that is not coming, it is clear that such a disaster inevitably pushes several parties into politics. This makes the détents that today have a foothold in the heated political scene indispensable.
Chavismo's objective, tactically, is that more sectors of the anti-Chavismo attend the elections to give them legitimacy, in order to maneuver their complaint for the dismantling of the comprehensive blockade against the country, in order to reconstitute the institutional framework and strengthen the parliamentary space as a component of governance, which would be its strategic objectives.
When Juan Requesens, who participated in the 2018 assassination attempt, is put into jail, it is clear that Maduro himself is the one who gives the most to achieve a higher objective. He is the one who sacrifices the most in his positions, to the detriment of his own right to justice, to go in favor of a regularization of the national political framework, to reach new consensus and to continue to sediment the blockade and the adverse factors that try to dismantle the nation. from abroad.
As rarely, these events demand a higher level of understanding, without outbursts and without viscera in the air, assuming that Venezuelan politics, due to its complexity, has taught us that there are no fortuitous events and, even less, free ones. That in politics everything is a bet and that to bet you have to place cards on the table.
If we remember, since 2017 we know that the tensions have served to gain ground, sometimes yielding "a lot", but gaining much more. This makes us suppose that more ads may come, some difficult to swallow and even more difficult to digest. But all this is also part of the picture of political exceptionality that we grapple with. Calculations, events, tactics, and strategy are what define political balances, and these remain to be seen.

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

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Re: Venezuela

Post by blindpig » Sat Sep 05, 2020 1:30 pm

The conuco challenges the agri-food capitalist accumulation in Venezuela and the world
Mission Truth
Sep 4 · 9 min read

By Eder Peña

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Studies have revealed that the smaller the farm size, the higher the productivity. Photo: IG Urgabox

The siege and blockade applied against the Venezuelan population is a palpable demonstration of how transnational capital seeks to ensure control of, for example, what we eat to achieve greater political control over the workforce.
To advance in this task, they inoculate the discourse of technological backwardness and racist or colonized expressions that denounce fundamental elements of the national culture such as the conuco.
The country mines: accumulation for few and dispossession for many
The problem of food dependency and insecurity in Venezuela contains as many edges as rentism has, since they go hand in hand. The extractive condition of agro-exports was imposed on Venezuela from outside and with internal complicity; it was a mono-producer of coffee and cocoa because that is how the international division of labor defined it.
Says the academic researcher and writer Mario Sanoja Obediente :
“The unredeemed Venezuelan people, excluded, believed that the political independence won in 1823 would effectively represent their definitive social liberation, but with the Third Republic the new form of latifundist oligarchy and, later with the Fourth Republic, the various expressions of the pro-imperialist neocolonial oligarchy they assumed and practiced the oppressive and reactionary role that had characterized their colonial oligarchic expression, blocking all attempts to modernize and democratize Venezuelan society ”.
Hence, the dependent and "food insecure" design does not come from a lazy population without initiative but from a model based on the looting of land from the Venezuelan peasant mass, including the incipient middle class of winemakers and small merchants, configured and executed through the liberal adjustment that the Law of April 10, 1834 meant.
With this legal instrument, Congress favored usurious behavior by moneylenders and bankers protected by the militaristic ruling class led by José Antonio Páez. This explains why the Guipuzcoana House was never burned physically or conceptually, also the causes of the Federal War that began in 1859.

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The Guipuzcoana house, the center of operations for the colonial rentier agroextraction, never disappeared from the Venezuelan oligarchic imaginary. Photo: Archive

When Zamora was assassinated and the Federal War ended in 1863, agrarian land ownership continued to be concentrated in a dominant social group that appropriated the best soils as happened during the Spanish colony, foreign trade in cheap raw materials opened with the Antilles, Europe ( Holland, England, France and Germany) and the United States.
Added to this was the concentration of industrial production that led to the transition from light industry to monopoly or financial capitalism dominated by heavy industry, metallurgy, machinery factories and the mining industry, hence what Sanoja calls the new engine. of capitalism: oil.
This did not reverse the concentration of land by the oligarchic minority, but rather the abandonment and looting of the workforce strained the mobility of the peasant majorities towards the cities while a relict remained working for the latifundistas in slave conditions or appropriated land. of low quality, resisting, sowing and raising under different forms of agricultural production, among them, the conuco.
If the conuco is backwardness, then what is progress?
A linear view of history is what allows us to speak of progress or backwardness. Under that logic, it could be said that having resorted to a method as old and effective as confinement or quarantine to face Covid-19 is delay. However, there is no other more efficient method, science is still testing vaccines and "the old reliable" called quarantine is just that: reliable.
A deterministic view suggests that evolution consists of "improving" indefinitely and that as a species we can make use of a pattern of knowledge called science so that this continuous "improvement" does not stop. Hence, the hegemonic discourse sees nature as something that can be controlled, where what is domesticated and controlled remains, and what is not, disappears or is described as "wild". This justifies individualism, the free market, and epistemic and factual racism.
In times when we reach a peak of everything , in which conventional sources of oil and, therefore, of energy have been exhausted, agriculture based on the intensive use of monocultures, fuels and proprietary technologies begins to take the form of non- crisis. only in the net returns but in its entire life cycle.
The concentrating logic of large estates is also applied to genetics, nutrients, energy, water, routes, and food prices.

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Monoculture based on high mechanization applies the concentrating logic of large estates to genetics, nutrients, energy, water, routes, and food prices. Photo: cocobowlz.com

Each of the steps in this cycle points to further depletion of human and non-human life itself. This is how the privatization of seeds, land grabbing ( land grabbing ), desertification, the use of transgenic burning fuels for transportation between long distances, depletion and pollution of aquifers, the overuse of inorganic fertilizers, deforestation to expand the agricultural frontier, food waste, abuse of biocides in both animal and plant production, hunger and obesity are effects of a life cycle that threatens it.
In contrast, family and community agriculture in its various expressions not only favors biodiversity in the landscapes in which it develops, but also contrasts with the hegemonic globalized accumulation model that turns us into mines.
Peasant production aims towards food sovereignty through the local production of healthy foods and the construction of mutual, non-patriarchal and respectful relationships of diversity in thousands of communities, organizations and peoples of the world.
If less is more, who feeds us?
In a macro-analysis carried out by researchers from Karnatak University of Dharwad, India, it was revealed that farms of less than 2 hectares (Ha) constitute 85% of the total farms operated in the world; the majority are in Asia (87%), followed by Africa (8%) and Europe (4%).
In Asia, China accounts for half of the world's small farms (193 million), followed by India.
Global trends indicate a decline in small farms in developed countries, while in developing countries there is an increase in small farms. Average farm size in Asia and Africa is 1.6 Ha, compared to 27 Ha in Europe, 67 Ha in Latin America and 121 Ha in North America.
Various studies carried out in India during the 1960s, 1970s and later years have revealed that the smaller the farm size, the higher the productivity, in accordance with what United Nations agencies conclude and despite the fact that some researchers they hold a contrary opinion.

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Productive patios combine the traditional sowing technique with the construction of social relationships other than looting and the exclusion of the other. Photo: IG Urgabox

One of the arguments against is that large areas could have higher production in relation to a lower investment of labor. In the case of Latin America, it would not be strange given the process of concentration in which the large landowners took for themselves the best lands with high-quality soils, better accesses and slopes that are not a major obstacle.
The concentration of both common goods (for example, water) and financial and energy resources in large estates increases inequality, while the distribution between different families is a direct benefit that reduces the levels of hunger, poverty and exclusion.
On the other hand, small farms have been the main basis for food security and employment in emerging countries, even facing threats in terms of exemptions from the global market system led by the World Trade Organization.
The agricultural footprint and efficiency in debate
The so-called “agroecological” methods, based on polycultures and small or medium-sized farms, have better performance in protecting the physical and biological health of the soil, as confirmed by the research carried out by the Bangalore University of Agricultural Sciences, India.
They are also more efficient in capturing carbon, avoiding greenhouse gas emissions and in capturing nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus, whose cycles in bodies of water are altered by the runoff of inorganic fertilizers used in conventional agriculture.
Studies carried out in 13 urban gardens in Sydney by the University of New England, Australia, found average yields of 5.94 kg / m2 - roughly twice the yield of typical Australian commercial vegetable farms, even when these systems used land from Efficiently, the economic and useful energy analyzes showed that they were relatively inefficient in the use of material and labor resources.

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Conucos escolar, a program implemented in Venezuela, educational experiences that promote urban gardens. Photo: wtcradio.net

The cost-benefit ratio showed that, on average, urban gardens had financial losses and the transformation of useful energy was one to three orders of magnitude greater than many conventional rural farms.
Productive patios in Venezuela report between 2 and 3 kg / m² while corn monocultures from transnational companies such as Monsanto or Pioneer yield 0.3 kg / m².
Although it is true that the conuco requires a greater investment of time and human energy for maintenance, it is also true that the time invested in producing food is more profitable than that spent in the transfer to large cities by majorities dedicated to the sector of services or underemployed in bachaquerismo or resale of subsidized food.
The Venezuelan agri-food dilemma points towards the commune and innovation
Venezuela presents a highly explanatory dilemma for the crisis of the global agri-food system, in the midst of the crisis produced by the international siege led by the United States government.
The Confederation of Associations of Agricultural Producers of Venezuela (Fedeagro), in the voice of its president, Aquiles Hopkins, declares that the Venezuelan agricultural sector (agribusiness) requires a minimum investment of 6 billion dollars annually and regrets that the Venezuelan fields are maintain "with a technological setback of at least 30 years."
On the other hand, in 2019 the National Productive Alliance (ANP), which articulated 7 thousand conuqueros, formed nuclei of seed growers and made progress in the creation of seed houses to guarantee a collection of 140 thousand kilos of seeds that would allow a threefold increase in the number of conuqueros to 21 thousand.
“We propose a totally different logic: to organize ourselves to obtain inputs from the state but mainly to organize ourselves to solve production problems among the producers themselves. This is how we advance in the National Productive Alliance, for the productive reactivation of the field ”, declared Ángel Betancourt, coordinator of the ANP.
Furthermore, communal organization, as an alternative to the political organization of the bourgeois state, seeks to build a new social fabric that truly allows the people to exercise their own power, more in something as key as food production.
An experience such as the Simón Bolívar communal city in Apure, a collective of eight communes, a pioneer in electing a self-government in 2008, is the result of a long organizational process led by the Ezequiel Zamora National Peasant Front that began in the 1990s.
Today it has 116 thousand hectares, 39 communal councils and 7 thousand 600 inhabitants. This communal city collectively produces various crops, including cereals, legumes, oilseeds, meat, milk and fruits.

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Comuneros harvest rice as a result of the organizational effort of communal councils and the local government, today they produce various items to ensure popular power through doing. Photo: crbz.org

In order to increase food sovereignty and security, President Nicolás Maduro has called for a debate on the relaunch of the Great AgroVenezuela Mission ( PDF ), which seeks
"Strengthen national food production at all its scales, through scientific, technological, technical, logistical, organizational leverage and a new financial architecture of peasants, fishermen and fisherwomen, aquaculturists and aquaculturists, agrourbanos and agrourbanas, as well as all the actors and sectors of the agri-food production chain guaranteeing Agrifood Sovereignty and protecting the country from the world food crisis ”.
The nine vertices of this Great Mission have as criteria the popular organization, the underpinning of science and technology, the territorialization around the Local Supply and Production Committees (CLAP), the monitoring and control from technological platforms and the Petro cryptocurrency as a financial pivot.
There is no possibility of going back to the past. The Venezuelan conuco cannot be used as a franchise because it is as unique as each community, traditions and history that develops it. It is not a panacea imposed from above but a culture that cuts through the essence of the Venezuelan struggle for political independence.

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

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