Venezuela

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Re: Venezuela

Post by blindpig » Tue Apr 12, 2022 2:37 pm

Venezuela Seeks Investigation by International Criminal Court (ICC) as to Whether U.S. Sanctions Constitute Crimes Against Humanity
By Ryan Swan - April 11, 2022 3

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[Source: venezuelaanalysis.com]

Adopted as part of regime-change operation, sanctions have killed at least 40,000 Venezuelans.

Economic coercive measures, commonly known as economic sanctions, are a means of coercive pressure through disruption of trade relations and economic isolation. The use of sanctions under international law is governed chiefly by Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter, providing that the Security Council may decide to enact a “complete or partial interruption of economic relations” in order to restore international peace and security.

Measures not authorized by the Security Council, or “unilateral coercive measures” (UCM), have become an increasingly common coercive tactic of the United States, which presently imposes sanctions on approximately one-third of the global population.

Since 2010, the United States has also been enforcing select secondary sanctions against international actors that maintain economic relations with sanctioned states. The adverse effects of these measures on civilian populations of targeted countries—“especially severe for vulnerable groups,” including “women and children”—have been repeatedly and unequivocally documented.

Issues surrounding the legality of UCM have largely centered around the question of compatibility with the United Nations Charter. One primary concern has been the claimed illegitimacy of sanction measures not authorized in multilateral fashion by the Security Council. Others alude to the problems raised by UCM in both the context of state sovereignty (principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of other states) and international humanitarian law (right to life, health and medical care set forth in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights).

The United Nations General Assembly has also voiced regular concerns about UCM. A resolution overwhelmingly passed 29 years in a row calling for the cessation of the United States’s “economic blockade” on Cuba is illustrative.

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UN General Assembly votes on resolution (June 23, 2021) demanding an end to the U.S. economic, commercial and financial embargo against Cuba. [Source: news.un.org]

On February 13, 2020, the government of Venezuela submitted a referral to the International Criminal Court (ICC) requesting an investigation into another possible legal frailty of the United States UCM—namely, whether such measures can constitute crimes against humanity pursuant to Article 7 of the Rome Statute. As recourse to economic warfare ramps up further amidst an intensifying new Cold War, pressure mounts surrounding the Court’s eventual decision.

Case Background
Venezuela has a population of more than 28 million. Since the 1930s, it has been a significant oil-producing state and is considered to preside over the world’s largest oil reserves.

Under President Hugo Chávez (1998-2013), a new national constitution was adopted which provided for the use of national oil revenues to improve social conditions. The United States responded to this shift in policy with an attempted, but ultimately foiled, coup d’état in 2002. Despite hostile relations with the United States and a series of anti-terrorism and anti-drug trafficking-related sanctions, the Chávez social programs achieved impressive results in improving the standard of living for the Venezuelan population. Poverty and unemployment rates dropped markedly and education standards and literacy rates steadily increased.

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Hugo Chávez (center). [Source: bbc.com]

Following the death of President Chávez and the election of Nicolás Maduro, the United States intensified its economic coercion. In March 2015, President Barack Obama issued Executive Order 13692, declaring Venezuela an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States” and providing for the blocking of Venezuelan assets.

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[Source: latuffcartoons.wordpress.com]

The Trump administration ramped up the financial pressure with Executive Order 13808 in August 2017, denying the Venezuelan government, including the state-owned oil company, PDVSA, access to United States financial markets. Executive Orders 13827 and 13835 followed in spring 2018, prohibiting transactions involving the Venezuelan government’s issuance of digital currency and transactions related to the purchase of Venezuelan debt, respectively.

President Trump issued Executive Order 13850 in November 2018 setting forth a framework to block the assets of, and restrict certain transactions with, any person deemed by the Treasury Department to be engaging in transactions with the Venezuelan government that advance its “corrupt purposes.” In January 2019, the United States, in a display of open contempt for democracy, ceased to recognize the government of President Maduro, instead acknowledging Juan Guaidó as interim President.

Strangulation of the Venezuelan economy escalated further in August 2019 with Executive Order 13884, freezing property interests of the Venezuelan government in the United States, prohibiting U.S. citizens from engaging in transactions with the Venezuelan government and authorizing financial sanctions and visa restrictions on non-U.S. citizens who assist or support the Venezuelan government.

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Donald Trump issuing new UCM against Venezuela in 2018. [Source: venezuelaanalysis.com]

Effect of United States UCM

All of the above-enumerated measures were enacted unilaterally by the United States government and have had a catastrophic impact on the Venezuelan economy, which has in turn precipitated a humanitarian crisis for the Venezuelan population.

In February 2021, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Negative Impact of Unilateral Coercive Measures, Elena Douhan, released preliminary findings on the impact of United States UCM on the enjoyment of basic human rights in Venezuela. Ms. Douhan notes that, before the imposition of UCM, Venezuela was committing 76% of its national oil revenues to the advancement of social programs. As a result of the monumental UCM-related drop in oil revenue (e.g., from $42 billion in 2013 to just $4 billion in 2018), the government is now unable to commit even one percent to the social programs.

The loss of these resources has led to a “devastating impact on the whole population of Venezuela” with basic human rights directly affected. These include the:

*Right to food—more than 50% of food consumption has been impacted by United States UCM, which led to one-third of the Venezuelan population becoming acutely food insecure;
*Right to water—water-related services have been significantly disrupted by United States UCM such that the average Venezuelan household has access to running water for only a couple of hours sporadically throughout a given week;
*Right to health—access to quality healthcare has been significantly disrupted by United States UCM, resulting in extreme shortages of medical staff and equipment; maternal and infant mortality rates have increased, as well as mortality rates from various diseases; and
*Right to education—United States UCM have resulted in a massive decrease in government funding for education, frustrating the ability of schools to procure staff and basic necessities, including meals for students; the situation has been further exacerbated by regular electrical and internet outages.

The severely beleaguered financial condition of the Venezuelan government has also inhibited its ability to provide basic health services amid the Covid-19 pandemic. In addition to its unwillingness to unfreeze Venezuelan assets to enable the purchase of Covid vaccines, the United States has also declined to donate vaccinations to Venezuela, citing concerns over a lack of Venezuelan “transparency.”

Claim
The Venezuelan referral claims that United States UCM constitute crimes against humanity under Article 7 of the Rome Statute. Specifically, the claim asserts that the United States UCM represent a widespread or systematic attack directed against the civilian population of Venezuela; that this effect is known to the United States; and that these UCM manifest themselves in punishable acts enumerated in Article 7—in particular, murder (Art. 7(1)(a)), extermination (Art. 7(1)(b)), deportation (Art. 7(1)(d)), persecution (Art. 7(1)(h)), and other inhumane acts (Art. 7(1)(k)).

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[Source: openasia.org]

The referral is novel in multiple respects. First, UCM have not previously been challenged on grounds that they violate international criminal law. Claims abound that UCM are inconsistent with the United Nations Charter, with principles of state sovereignty and with international humanitarian law, but their possible criminality has not been investigated.

Second, the ICC has not previously investigated a case alleging crimes against humanity emanating from policies enacted in one state, but executed on the territory of another. The referral advances the argument that it is accepted in ICC case law that “non-state actors” can commit crimes against humanity even where they do not control the territory in which they are operating. As such, there is no principled reason why “states” cannot commit crimes against humanity in territory which they do not control—i.e., the United States can commit crimes against humanity on the territory of Venezuela.

Third, the referral also raises a jurisdictional oddity. While Article 12 of the Rome Statute clearly provides jurisdiction over qualifying crimes committed on the territory of a member state party, the question arises where precisely the alleged crimes against humanity flowing from United States UCM occur. The referral acknowledges that the actual decisions to impose the UCM in question occurred outside the territory of Venezuela, but argues that the clear intent of the decisions was to have effects within its territory. Thus, the question of whether the ICC can exercise territorial jurisdiction over actions by a non-Rome Statute member state directed against the territory of a Rome Statute member state must be addressed by the Court and further raises the stakes in connection with potential implications of the referral.

Assessment of Venezuela’s Challenge

In addition to raising serious international legal concerns under, inter alia, the United Nations Charter and international humanitarian law, UCM cause significant and well-documented suffering among innocent civilian populations and are ripe for investigation under international criminal law.

The Venezuelan referral advances sound arguments that United States UCM can constitute crimes against humanity. It appears unequivocal that the United States imposes these measures, which appear to satisfy the criteria set forth in Article 7 of the Rome Statute, knowing full well their effects on the Venezuelan population.

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Anti-sanctions protest in Caracas. [Source: venezuelaanalysis.com]

Despite calls for the investigation of others when politically expedient, the United States has hidden itself behind its non-party status to the Rome Statute to avoid investigation of its own actions and has a history of unprecedented hostility toward the ICC.

In 2002, the United States enacted the American Service-Members Protection Act “to protect United States military personnel and other elected and appointed officials…against criminal prosecution by an international criminal court to which the United States is not part.” The Act authorizes the president to use “all means necessary and appropriate”—including conceivably force—to bring about the release of United States personnel detained by the ICC.

In June 2020, President Trump issued Executive Order 13928, taking the extraordinary step of declaring the Court’s pending investigation into United States crimes in Afghanistan an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States” and authorizing the freezing of assets of ICC personnel and placement of restrictions on their ability to travel to the United States.

The ICC has displayed a distinct wariness of confrontation with the United States, giving rise to credible concerns surrounding its impartiality. Upon taking office in 2021, the new Chief Prosecutor, Karim Khan, immediately brought controversy and renewed doubts of credibility on the Court with his arbitrary decision to “deprioritize” inquiry into war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by United States military and intelligence personnel in Afghanistan under the Bush administration and to, instead, focus selectively on infractions of the Taliban.

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Karim Khan [Source: icc-cpi.int]

The Court may well be tempted to skirt Venezuela’s requested investigation of the United States on technical jurisdictional grounds, but yet another dismissal of a sound case against the United States, all the while vigorously launching a new probe into Russian crimes in Ukraine, could further tarnish the ICC’s already suspect reputation.

Though the referral has unsurprisingly received little coverage in the United States, the stakes are indeed high. A decision to exercise jurisdiction and to proceed with investigation would set an unwelcome precedent for the United States—even if the chances of U.S. leaders actually standing trial is all but non-existent.

An investigation, and ultimate finding, by the ICC would cast concrete doubt on already dubious United States UCM and could possibly prompt a United Nations General Assembly request for an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice on the broader legality of UCM. At a time when its economic coercive tactics are coming to seriously jeopardize the global economy—and, accordingly, raise critical eyebrows around the world—the United States can ill afford an adverse ICC ruling. For the ICC, on the other hand, the referral presents an opportunity to show its courage and prove its impartial commitment to global justice.

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2022/0 ... -humanity/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Venezuela

Post by blindpig » Fri Apr 22, 2022 1:04 pm

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Communard Union congress. (Photo: Venezuelanalysis)


A milestone: Venezuela’s Communard Union stages its Foundational Congress
Posted Apr 21, 2022 by Chris Gilbert

Originally published: Venezuelananlysis on April 19, 2022 (more by Venezuelananlysis)

Among the many challenges in rural organizing are the merely physical ones: the distances that must be crossed. Producers in the countryside are by their very nature separated across a territory and must come together to debate, socialize, and plan. In Venezuela, the problems endemic to rural organizing are heightened by the gas crisis and the scarcity of auto parts. This meant that simply getting to the Foundational Congress of Venezuela’s fledgling Communard Union–staged in March of this year–was a real ordeal. Many arrived on the backs of trucks, enduring hours of tropical sun, car exhaust, and road rattle. “My butt fell asleep on the trip,” a smiling old man from the East of the country told me. Having made the odyssey in an open truck bed, he was evidently shaken but in good spirits. If the challenges were many, the stakes were also high. These people’s purpose in making the trip–whether arriving in ramshackle buses, trucks, and even walking when close enough–was to participate in an event that, despite its humble appearance and modest surroundings, may change the destiny of the country by bringing it back to the path of socialism.

Why build a league or union of communes? That is, what is the role of a commune in Venezuela and why try to unify them? Communes became important during Hugo Chávez’s last years when he developed a strategy of advancing toward socialism by using these grassroots spaces of self-managed production and substantive democracy as its basic cells. Since the president’s death, the communal project has faced numerous challenges, including the post-Chávez government’s rightward turn under the pressure of sanctions and hybrid war. Despite these challenges, commune-building goes forward in an almost miraculous way in the country, driven by grassroots bases whose commitment can be explained by a combination of loyalty to the former president, the pressing necessity to produce food, and their political consciousness. Sown across the country and without much support, Venezuela’s functioning communes are embattled outposts, weakened by their isolation. However, there have been attempts to build unity and coordinate these efforts. The most important of these is the Communard Union (Unión Comunera).

The urgent need to overcome the isolation of communes and accumulate forces in the popular movement is both the raison d’être for the Communard Union and explains the huge draw of its first Congress. Hosted in Lara state by El Maizal Commune, the Foundational Congress brought together–so the organizers said–almost 500 delegates from 48 communes. Since March is always dry and hot in this low-lying region, the organizers had a constant, more or less Sisyphean battle against heat and dust. To this effect, they initially seated delegates under the roof of El Maizal Commune’s machinery shed, before the event migrated to a huge thatched caney that had been expanded to provide shade for the participants. Despite the torrid atmosphere, the congress was kicked off with a great deal of “mística,” a passionate interchange of slogans, and the intoning of revolutionary songs. Among the slogans, the most common was “Commune or Nothing!” This slogan was also employed in an expanded form: “Commune or Nothing, that is the mission, as Chávez said in Golpe de Timón!”

Opening Words
El Maizal is the most powerful commune in Venezuela today, and it has played a central role in promoting the Communard Union. When its charismatic spokesperson, Ángel Prado, took the microphone to open the congress, he talked about how his commune has recently been through some difficult times. The idea of forming a union of communes emerged, Prado said, because a few years ago El Maizal found itself alone facing both the counterrevolution and what he calls the internal, reformist “fifth column.” For this reason, they began building a network of support with other communes and other Chavista groups in the country. One important step involved the “Argelia Laya” youth brigades that traveled the country under difficult conditions, connecting with incipient or abandoned communes and motivating their members. Overall, the work of promoting the Union has been going on for some four years–starting in 2018, when the country was shaken by violent right-wing street protests–and it has been very hard work.

Prado has recently been elected mayor of the nearby Simón Planas township, campaigning on the official PSUV ticket. I noted that in this initial discourse, he was emphatic that the Communard Union does not see the government as an enemy. While admitting that there were still debates on this subject, he said that the fledgling Union was committed to being just as constructive as it was critical in relation to the central government: to the degree that they criticize, they would also try to build something, construct an alternative. Instead of antagonism, Prado said, what is really at stake are different visions of the country: “The government has its plan, its interpretation of the Plan de la Patria [the Plan for the Nation that Chávez developed before dying], while we have our own interpretation of the Plan!”

In the revolutionary interpretation of the Plan de la Patria the communes have a central role. Communes can govern in Venezuela, Prado went on to say, but not if they are isolated one from another. In this sense, the first aim of the Communard Union is to defend the communards and their projects. Second, it will encourage new communes and communal initiatives. Prado added that he hoped that the Union would soon have its own school for educating members and also be able to send some people to other countries to learn, for example, about seed production or the use of agricultural inputs. In conclusion, Prado said that the most difficult task in these four years had been to overcome differences with fellow communes and build unity. In any case, they had finally succeeded in uniting people, and before us today–he was referring to the Foundational Congress itself–was the impressive result. He projected that the upcoming decade would decide whether the Bolivarian revolution would continue or not, and the Communard Union had an important role to play in that struggle.

Later speakers during the Foundational Congress’s opening day echoed Prado’s claims. However, some tried to push the envelope of radicalness and put alternative visions on the table. For example, Johann Tovar from the commune Luisa Caceres de Arismendi in Sucre state picked up on Prado’s reference to the next ten years. Yet instead of talking about tough electoral scenarios and the need to support the government, Tovar said he wanted to see a “communal republic” emerge in Venezuela. Another critical voice was Marta Lía Grajales from the San Augustin Convive initiative in Caracas, who said that the government does not represent the people: it does not call on them to participate any more. For this reason, it was all the more important that the Communard Union is now maintaining Chávez’s ideals and goals alive, because that is what people really want.

In these opening sallies, one can perceive some of the debates that form the shifting sands of Venezuela’s popular movement today. What is the relation to the government? Is it symbiotic, a kind of détente, or antagonistic? Should the communal movement aspire to replace existing state power and, if so, over what timeframe? The success of Venezuela’s communal movement depends in great measure on making sure that these differences are neither forcibly suppressed nor irreparably divide its ranks. In the opening presentations, one could also glimpse the complex relation to the state and government authorities that is central to Venezuelan political culture; this is a loose, open-ended, and even optimistic approach that predates the Bolivarian Process but was also reinforced during those two decades. A skeptic would say that this relationship is not so much complex, as improvised. In effect, the relation between the popular movement and the state in Venezuela eludes definitions, errs on the side of flexibility, and there are almost no red lines, but rather a push and pull that depends on the circumstances.

In side conversations with some participants, I learned that they felt this excess of flexibility and tendency to improvise the relationship with state power could spell the future downfall of the project, since the attempt to dance with the bureaucracy without any clear red lines, usually ends with the latter controlling and subordinating the popular movement and its projects. Without doubt, these claims have history on their side. Kindred movements in recent Venezuelan history have generally run aground for this reason. One only has to look at what happened to Chavismo Bravío; an attempt to regroup the Chavista left around 2017; the Ezequiel Zamora Revolutionary Current, a campesino movement that was born in 2005; and the Marcha Campesina, which emerged in 2018. These movements and projects, which were powerful in their time, have all tended to become coopted in one way or another, some even becoming appendices of the state and its official PSUV party.

Program and Statutes
In the late morning, I took a break from the Congress to walk around El Maizal Commune, thinking about both the positive aspects of deals with the government and also the negative sides of it, especially the slippery slope that can result from such collaboration. I was impressed by how El Maizal Commune’s infrastructure was in sparkling conditions that were completely unprecedented. Just six months ago, when I last visited, the grounds were decidedly underattended not to say scrappy. Now, however, newly-painted fence posts, a freshly-graded driveway, and improved meeting spaces spoke for new funding sources. The truth is that these improvements were made possible because of Prado’s recently-obtained position as mayor. Arguably, such material fixes go beyond just show: an air-conditioned office or a caney with electrical outlets for charging phones are surely not basic necessities, but they do demonstrate to people in a concrete way that communal projects offer the hope of an alternative modernity. That is to say, they are physical evidence that what is shared and socialist does not have to be backward in a technological sense and does not have to be a return to some premodern lifestyle.

The impact of a shining example in a community is something that Chávez understood very well and was often central to the projects he promoted in the heyday of the Bolivarian Process. For example, a modern children’s hospital, such as the Childrens’ Cardiologic Hospital, built for people who never had one in the past has the effect of making them raise their horizon of expectations. That poverty and dependency is not an inexorable destiny was an important lesson of these large projects, and the hope is that people who have had a modern hospital or school in their neighborhood will come to expect this as something they deserve, not as a gift but a right. After such experiences, people can become the motors of a revolution that has a high degree of irreversibility inasmuch as their expectations, their knowledge of their rights and of the existential possibilities that can be attained on a massive scale, become new benchmarks by which to judge all future governments and other state authorities.

Back in the newly electrified caney – a small version of this kind of shining example–Carlos David Vargas, a spokesperson for the Vencedores de Carorita commune in Lara, was at the microphone presenting the Union’s program. Called “our professor” by many of the communards, Vargas spoke at length and with an evident theoretical heft. The Union’s programmatic declaration was typical of Chavista documents in that it begins with a historical retrospective, in this case reaching back to the 1990s when Chavismo was born. That thirty-year perspective reveals that Chavismo is less about winning elections, and more about emphasizing the role of participation and democracy’s class content: the majority’s well-being. Chávez himself had called elections “festivals of political machinery” and had recognized that only popular power could transform the existing society and state. Seen in this way, the commune–with its social property and substantive democracy–was the principal and most lasting expression of the Chavista project. This is where the Communard Union’s historical mission comes in: its program would be to pick up this essential element of Chavismo (barely existing on the government’s radar) which also means recognizing the communal project as a not merely local initiative but also a national one. Regarding that national project, it involves ending the bourgeois state and replacing it with the communal state as the ultimate aim, with a federation of communes being projected as an intermediary measure.

It fell upon Juancho Lenzo of the Andean project Tatuy TV, affiliated with the Che Guevara Commune, to expound the Union’s statutes. He said that the aim of the project would be to create a nationwide political movement of communes directed at building socialism. It would also be an ecological and feminist movement, committed to Bolivarian socialism and internationalism. Among the values and principles that the Union espouses, according to Lenzo, many are expressed in El Árbol de las Tres Raíces (i.e. the values of Venezuelan historical figures such as Simón Bolívar, Ezequiel Zamora, and Simón Rodríguez). It would be a progressive, humanist movement, conscious of the African and Indigenous contributions to Venezuelan socialism. Regarding the criteria for entering the Union, these stipulate that, to be admitted, a commune must be real–that is it must do concrete work in its community–and be legally registered, though the latter was less important. Turning to questions of organizational structure, Lenzo explained that there would be a National Congress that convenes every four years (this was the first such meeting). There would also be a National Direction that included three militants from each region (Andes, Center, Center West, East, and Plains region), a National Council for Monitoring and Control, and a Disciplinary Council.

During the lunch hour, the unflaggingly energetic master of ceremonies, Carlos Rodríguez, had the idea of asking each delegate to give a brief introduction to their respective communes, and tell those assembled about the various productive projects they had going. One-by-one these delegates stood up to tell their stories: La Unión Commune in Barinas produces animal feed: Cinco Fortalezas in Sucre state produces sugar cane; El Milagro in Simón Planas produces textiles; Lanceros de Atures en La Miel produces black beans, textiles, baked goods, and raises pigs; Mariscal Sucre Commune in Sucre state is working with family production units; Armando Bonilla Commune has conucos (family subsistence plots); Luisa Caceres de Arismendi in Barcelona does trash collection; Benicio Aroca in Valencia has conucos and family plots; Sarare Commune in Simón Planas produces baked goods while raising animals…

The first day of the Foundational Congress closed, as the sun was going down in Simón Planas, with a unanimous show of hands in approval of the program and statutes and a cascade of cultural activities, the highpoint being a pair of visiting Italians who led those assembled in an animated singing of Bella Ciao. In the background, there were banners of participating organizations, including the MST, and also a freshly-printed one showing the Communard Union’s logo: a left-handed fist striking an open right-hand, which is a gesture Chávez frequently used to indicate a combative spirit. At last, some organizers took the stage. They had careful explanations about the logistics and lodging that had been prepared for delegates. Most important, however, the organizers had a surprise announcement to make: Jorge Arreaza, Chávez’s son-in-law, had just been named Minister of Communes and would be visiting the congress on the following day!

The New Minister Arrives
When the sun rose on the congress the next day, there was bubbling excitement in the air, with much debate and the hum of rumors circulating among the delegates. The announcement that Jorge Arreaza had been named Minister of Communes had been greeted with great enthusiasm by many of those present. They saw it as a validation of the Communard Union’s work. However, others were more skeptical and felt that Arreaza’s nomination and his blitzkrieg visit simply reflected how the government was concerned about any organizational project taking shape that is autonomous from the official PSUV party and hence potentially critical.

It should be pointed out that Arreaza is reputed to be different from most actors in the Chavista bureaucracy. He is understated and reserved, yet open to communication with the bases. Perhaps most important, however, is that the new minister is said to have lately gone through a kind of existential crisis and soul-searching process that has brought him closer to the country’s popular movement. The story behind Arreaza’s recent soul-searching is that for many years he lived in a virtual bubble, first as Minister of External Relations and then as Minister of Industry (even turning down supplementary pay that ministers receive because he was convinced that the problems of the country were relatively superficial and simply exaggerated by the media). The bubble exploded when Arreaza left the Ministry of Industry a couple of months ago to run for governor in Barinas state. Though he lost these elections, the contact with the people that the campaign involved and the awareness it brought of their suffering from both the blockade and governmental mismanagement, served as a kind of wake-up call. Since Arreaza firmly believes in socialism, he was deeply troubled. Nevertheless, after considerable reflection and reading (and in contrast to what most of the government thinks), he concluded that the commune is the way forward for Venezuela.

As the morning wore on without Arreaza arriving, the delegates assembled in the caney were led in the singing of revolutionary songs and exchange of slogans. This was not just a show of high spirits. In fact, the main organizers were meeting apart at this time to plan how they would manage Arreaza’s presence in the event. When the new minister finally showed up in his three-vehicle entourage, it was almost mid-day and the sun was bearing down. Ángel Prado came forward to mediate the situation. He took his time with an extensive introduction. Prado gave Arreaza a hearty welcome but, with some friendly backhandedness, pointed out that there were also two ex-ministers of the commune in the audience. He talked about the discord and disagreements these former ministers–Reinaldo Iturriza and Blanca Eekhout–had each had with El Maizal Commune while implying that there had also been disagreements among them. Despite the humorous tone, Prado’s intention most likely was to show those assembled that ministers come and go but the commune remains…

When Arreaza took the microphone, he was wearing a “¡Comuna o Nada!” t-shirt and had an El Maizal cap pushed down over his head. He tried to be as humble as possible, claiming to have been surprised when Maduro designated him Minister of Communes just two days ago. However, Arreaza was clearly thinking about how to manage and control the emergent communal movement. In this vein, he warned those present that if a right-wing government came to power, it could be extremely damaging to the commune and the communal movement. Further, he made a direct plea to the delegates: it was the role of the right wing to oppose the government but the popular movement, by contrast, should try to make itself heard–it should focus on putting forward proposals and projects! Arreaza also went on to point out that Chávez had had doubts about the concept of a communal state, thinking instead that it is the society, not the state, that should be communal. For example, Arreaza said, we should not imagine that the President of the Republic’s role would ever cease to exist, replaced by a system of communes!

Next, the new minister delved into a more theoretical register to support a conciliatory or at least careful relation to the state in the approach to communal construction during the socialist transition. In this vein, he made mention of Chávez’s idea that socialism should be built by creating injertos (grafts) in the existing society. According to Arreaza, this approach is implicit in István Mészáros’s Beyond Capital, a book dear to Chávez and key to his strategic thinking about socialism. There Mészáros describes how the Goethe family house was rebuilt from within, because building codes in Frankfurt at that time did not permit structures that overhang the street to be built any longer. This process of internal reconstruction was, Arreaza claimed, the way that communes should behave: rebuilding from within, without bringing down or destroying completely the state in its complex, organic relation to both wage labor and capitalist civil society.

The minister concluded on a personal note, referring to a few passages from Doña Barbara, Romulo Gallegos famous novel about the plains regions of Venezuela. He said he liked these passages, which his father had read to him as a child, because they point to the importance of voluntad (will or willpower). Gallegos had highlighted the value of perseverance in poetic language that referred to the Venezuelan plains as an open territory that is “a good site for effort.” Switching from father to father-in-law, Arreaza next reminded those present that Chávez himself had said that faith could move mountains, but willpower combined with strategy could move whole mountain ranges. (Whatever the paternal connections here, Arreaza was likely emphasizing willpower at this point, because the government and especially his ministry has very little money these days to offer the communal movement.)

With this, Arreaza wound up his speech. After the applause, there was a brief congratulatory discourse from Edson Bagnara, a representative from Brazil’s landless workers movement MST that has been helping build the union. However, Ángel Prado soon asked for the microphone again. He did so because a powerful historical precedent had just occurred to him for what the communards are doing in the present. His idea was that Simón Bolívar died in 1830 before finishing the emancipatory project that he had tried to promote. In that epoch, it had taken about thirty years before the revolutionary campesino leader Ezequiel Zamora and the subaltern classes in Venezuela managed to take up that project again in the Federal Wars (1860s). Now we are in a similar moment, Prado said, though the timeframes have been compressed: just nine years after the death of Chávez–in a period when a too-pragmatic government seems to have sidelined socialism as a program–the communards are picking up where he left off, reprising the emancipatory project and advancing toward socialism!

Jockeying for Positions
The Foundational Congress of the Communard Union concluded on the second day with the nomination and election of regional and national spokespeople. This process changed the dynamic of the meeting considerably. Now the open microphone and rousing discourses gave way to negotiations and hushed agreements. To name local spokespeople, participants divided into smaller groups according to the five regions. The methodology employed was to look for consensus but decide by majority vote if consensus could not be achieved. At this stage of the event, it was clear from the behavior of those in the groups–in addition to the short time frame allotted to these debates–that most of the decisions about who would assume a given post as spokesperson had been made previously (a pre-congress had been convened a few weeks earlier). Unfortunately, too, sectarism and power plays were operating just beneath the surface in some of the regional groups.

In this process of naming spokespeople, one can see some of the weaknesses and limitations of Venezuela’s emergent communard movement. Like the earlier-mentioned flexible attitude toward state power, this has much to do with questions of political culture. A given political culture, whatever its proximate causes, emerges and always has an intimate relation to the society where it operates, with its implicit playbook responding to the needs and often the contradictions built into that society. In Venezuela, a longstanding practice in political and social movements is to insist that there be widespread democracy and a certain level of horizontality but also quietly inject strong doses of top-down centralism to avoid chaos. These practices are at least a century old in the country, and they most likely derive from the relative lack of labor organization in its oil-extracting economy. Slow to change, they were clearly operating in the Union’s organizing procedures, with its reliance on pre-meetings and vertical interventions in the democratic decision-making process.

Thus, it is undeniable that the Communard Union repeats some of the same negative practices that allowed for the coopting and even collapse of prior movements. One could even argue that the failure to establish red lines with the government and the weakness of its internal democracy explain the absence of some important Venezuelan grassroots movements and communes in this project (La Minka, El Panal, Pobladores). However, these problematic behaviors are an almost inevitable part of Venezuelan political culture, and it is likely that all popular movements in the country in the near future will continue them. Further, it is important to recognize that recourse to these practices does not necessarily imply that the current movement is destined to succumb as earlier ones have. That is because the failure of prior campesino movements in the past decade was due partly to their scale–they did not reach deeply and widely enough into the country–and to the overall political conjuncture and balance of forces. Since both the political panorama and the scale of popular rebellion in Venezuela could change in the future, that in turn means that the Communard Union, despite its lack of red lines and despite its excessive centralism might become, one day, a revolutionary nationwide movement capable of putting a Chavismo committed to socialism–a Chavismo that promotes and relies on the commune–once again in a hegemonic role in the country.

https://mronline.org/2022/04/21/a-milestone/
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Re: Venezuela

Post by blindpig » Tue May 03, 2022 1:44 pm

CP of Venezuela, May 1st: Resisting the Neoliberal Offensive and Building the Alternative from the Working Class
4/28/22 3:05 PM

The Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV) salutes the national and global working class in its commemoratiom of the 136th anniversary of the heroic fight for the eight-hour working day, for eight hours of rest and eight hours of study and recreation. May 1st is our class's global day and is a permanent reminder to the workers of the world that the bourgeoisie and its regime of exploitation does not gift us anything: all our rights are won by struggling.

The working class of the city and the countryside in Venezuela is suffering the most aggressive onslaught against its economic, trade union and political rights in its history. There are no precedents in the history of our economic crises - provoked by the different forms of bourgeois state management over the Venezuelan dependent and rentier capitalist system - that have led to such dramatic effects on the rights of the Venezuelan working class.

Millions of Venezuelan workers have been forced to leave the country in search of better conditions in which to sell their labour force. Salaries and pensions have been pulverized, driving them to record levels of precariousness, and essential economic rights for workers' living conditions such as social benefits and collective bargaining agreements were de facto eliminated by private and public bosses with the endorsement and approval of the government of Nicolas Maduro.

The country is immersed in a crisis without parallel in its history, confirmed by the fact that the national economy has contracted by 80% over the last 8 years. The crisis has also been aggravated by multifaceted aggression of US and European imperialism. However, the consequences of this crisis are not being paid by those who provoked it.

Those who requested and promoted criminal imperialist sanctions against the country are today sitting down at the dialogue with the government and are participating in the dividing up of business dealings within the framework of the neo-liberal opening of the Maduro government. Businessmen from Fedecamaras, Conindustria, Fedenagas [Chambers of Commerce & Business, Industry, and Cattle Ranchers], and others who benefited from the capital flight of more than 300 billion dollars from the recent oil bonanza and who are responsible for the productive and technological backwardness of the industry and the national countryside, are now the heroes called upon to lift the country out of the crisis. On the other hand, the new bourgeoisie that accumulated its fortunes under the protection of government business dealings, influence peddling and corruption, is who is leading the liberal and privatizing opening up of the economy.

For the benefit of these businessmen, the government approves more tax exemptions, promises laws of economic opening up such as the Law of Special Economic Zones and the reform of the Law of Hydrocarbons, deregulates the labor market to cheapen the labor force and applies a fierce persecution and judicialization of union struggles.

The two fragments of the national bourgeoisie responsible for the current crisis - both the one that carried out a disastrous economic management from the seat of government, and the one that contributed to the worsening of the economic crisis by participating in the plundering of the oil income and later promoting criminal economic sanctions against the country; today are in full agreement to jointly promote a capitalist solution to the crisis that protects the interests of national and foreign private capital, to the detriment of the living conditions of the working families.

The mirage of this economic recovery that the government and right-wing opposition boast about, is built on the sacrifice of our country's working class of the city and countryside of our country. The current capitalist furor is based upon on the theft of workers' salaries, savings, social benefits and the abysmal reduction of state investment in the health system, education, transport, social security and public services.

It is not true that the signs of the current economic reactivation are due to a fundamental change in the Venezuelan dependent and rentier capitalism as the government claims. All the features that characterize this economic revival indicate that we are moving towards a deepening of rentierism model with greater dependence on imports and the destruction of the industrial apparatus. They are trying to deceive workers with an illusion of national economic progress based on the consumerist rage of the wealthiest strata of society, the proliferation of bodegones [exclusive shops with high-range imported goods] and the dollarization of the economy; while the oil industry is in a deep crisis, the national industrial apparatus is bankrupt, the universities are in decline, the public services are increasingly deficient and the economic, trade union and political rights of the workers are on the decline.

If anything confirms the appearance of current economic improvement, it is the parasitic character of the national bourgeoisie and its historical incapacity to undertake the task of overcoming rentierism through the industrialization of the country. Only the Venezuelan workers, constituted as a social class for themselves and in close alliance with the peasantry and popular sectors, will be able to carry out the deep changes required by Venezuela's society to leave our economic backwardness behind.

The neo-liberal turn of the government of Nicolas Maduro has made the hegemonic character of the bourgeois forces within the PSUV and the government ever more evident, and has exposed the falsity of their "socialist" and revolutionary discourse with which they intend to keep an important part of the working class, the peasantry and the popular sectors duped and neutralised.

Achieving the total independence of the working class from the influence and conscious or unconscious subordination to the interests of the two poles of the national bourgeoisie is a vital task ahead to be able to wage a frontal and mass struggle against the neoliberal adjustments being promoted by the pact of elites.

Our call to the workers this May 1st is to advance in their independence and class unity. While the bourgeoisie unites its forces to impose unbearable sacrifices on us in order to expand its profits, we, the workers of the city and the countryside, are obliged to unite and organise as an independent social class to assert our rights and aspirations.

The bourgeoisie and its government fear our unity and the transforming capacity of our struggles, that is why they attack the workers' movement, criminalise and prosecute the legitimate protests of the workers, imprison and violate the human rights of workers' fighters, make the creation of class-conscious unions impossible, silence all denouncements against employers' and governmental abuses against the workers and impose media censorship on the Communist Party of Venezuela and the class-conscious trade union organizations.

We cannot continue to allow further abuses and violations of our economic, trade union and political rights.

The working class must fight united against the neoliberal offensive of the bourgeoisie. Only together, organized and mobilized can we win our right to decent wages and pensions anchored to the basic food basket, the recovery of social benefits, the reestablishment of collective bargaining agreements, the defense of the right to union organization, the reinstatement of illegally fired workers, the immediate release of unjustly detained workers and stop the privatization of the oil industry, national strategic sectors and the handing over of public services to private capital.

In this sense, we salute the struggles for pensions, decent wages, and for the restitution of violated rights that have been taking place and that are led by: retired workers and pensioners, workers of

SIDOR and in general with workers of other basic companies, oil companies, public sectors, particularly in health and education. These struggles have been showing signs of incipient resistance that we must turn into a massive expression of the Venezuelan working class. We also salute the struggles of the workers in several private companies, such as in the transnational Mondelez (formerly Kraft) in its Barquisimeto plant. Likewise, we send our message of solidarity and encouragement to the unions and revolutionary organizations that are fighting an important battle against the criminalization and prosecution of workers who struggle or denounce.

We demand the immediate release of all workers unjustly detained!

It is fundamental to continue promoting and strengthening the line of unity of action of the workers, peasants and popular masses in order to defeat the neo-liberal policies and imperialist interventionism. In this direction our National Front of Working Class Struggle (FNLCT) and the Unified Workers Central of Venezuela (CUTV) are advancing in the unity of action with diverse trade union organisations and workers' movements of different ideo-political orientations. It is time to strengthen the class-based union organisation of the workers and to promote their national organic unity in the CUTV.

However, it is not enough to wage a mass struggle against neoliberal adjustment policies. Improving the living conditions of the working class in a stable and lasting perspective depends on a revolutionary transformation of the country that allows us to definitively overcome Venezuela's dependent and rentier capitalism.

The current deep crisis of national capitalism, aggravated by the illegal imperialist sanctions, has an alternative solution to that of the current liberal agenda that deepens the national productive backwardness and deteriorates the living conditions of the working people.

This alternative is the revolutionary project of the Venezuelan working class. Today more than ever, when the neoliberal precipice is presented as the inevitable and only way out of the crisis, we must defend and raise the revolutionary alternative that represents the seizure of political power by the Venezuelan working class and the construction of socialism-communism.

Struggle until victory with the working class in power!

Broad worker-popular unity to defeat the neoliberal plan!

Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV)

Caracas, May 1, 2022.

http://solidnet.org/article/CP-of-Venez ... ing-Class/
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Re: Venezuela

Post by blindpig » Wed May 04, 2022 1:50 pm

TRANSVERSAL TO THE POLITICAL AND THE GEOPOLITICAL

THE NEW SOCIAL CONSENSUS THAT GOVERNS THE VENEZUELAN ECONOMY
May 3, 2022 , 10:51 am .

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Amuay refinery, Falcón state, Venezuela (Photo: Natacha Pisarenko / AP Photo)

In recent days, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) published its economic projections for the region in 2022, highlighting the 5% GDP growth forecast for the Venezuelan economy.

The projection of the multilateral organization places Venezuela as the South American economy that will grow the most this year, as a result of a sustained recovery in oil production in recent months and an international context of rising prices of raw materials due to the war in Ukraine.

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Growth projections for 2022 for Latin America and the Caribbean (Photo: ECLAC)

By way of comparison, the projected growth of the Venezuelan economy, subjected since 2014 to a criminal regime of US sanctions that includes embargoes, illegal confiscation of public companies and suspension of the capital market and the international financial system controlled by the West, would exceed from Colombia, Argentina, Brazil and Chile, according to the agency's measurements.

The forecast made by ECLAC reinforces the general consensus on the economic reactivation that the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela is undergoing and that has been taking shape for some time. From global banks such as Credit Suisse or Barclays, to British financial services and consulting firms such as the EMFI Group or Wood Mackenzie, there is a convergence of optimistic opinions that take for granted that the Venezuelan economy has left the precipice of previous years and is heading towards a sustained recovery.

Politically, the wave of positive reports and projections regarding the economic development of the country constitutes a strategic dislocation of the narrative that has supported, for years, the classic way of interpreting the national political reality by the opposition and the United States.

In the first place, the institutions of the financial world that have recognized that the measures applied by the Venezuelan government have brought positive results, enjoy great legitimacy among the ruling elites of the parties, old and new, and their support bases in the middle class. . This has caused the story of the "humanitarian crisis", sustained by force, to lose validity in the face of a material reality that shows a significant improvement in terms of supply, consumption and expansion of access to culture and entertainment.

Second, the narrative of the "infeasibility of the model" of the Bolivarian Revolution, whose translation in recent years was based on portraying President Maduro as "incompetent" in relation to the management of the economy, in parallel to the execution of the strategy of general collapse promoted by the United States, has also lost explanatory efficacy in the face of the current moment, where Chavismo has taken the lead to resignify the social aspirations of peace, consumption and stability of broad layers of the population, as part of an update broader doctrine.

Beyond the surface, projections such as those of ECLAC indicate that, although the climate of confrontation and polarization promoted by the United States has notably diminished after the crystallization of a climate of political and institutional stability, won electorally by Chavismo, first in Parliament and then in the mega-elections last November, the battle for the framework of understanding of the moment the country is experiencing occupies a relevant place.

In this battle, the opposition, in its diverse range of shades and fragmented currents, has been stuck in an interpretive scheme that tries to fit the Venezuela of 2022 into that of 2017, where the story of the "dictatorship" and the "collapse " could still offer a mobilizing effect. The turn of the economic recovery, in addition to fading this story in public opinion, has shaken the floor of an elite of parties that understood Venezuela through open conflict and permanent insurrection.

By changing the economic variable, the political equation that supported it has also changed

Although still in formation, the new underlying majority agreement that seems to be weaving in Venezuelan society lies in preserving the political stability and social peace won so far, in exchange for a recovery of the country's material well-being that must continue to expand to stabilize in the future. weather. Hardly a political option, the USAID-branded opposition, which cheers any bad news about the country, or which demands that the sanctions not be lifted so that we return to the pit, could correctly interpret this new social climate.

But this disorientation is not exclusive to the right in its different forms.

The dogmatic left, anxious to take advantage of the crisis caused by the financial blockade to capture votes within dissatisfied fringes of Chavismo, ventured into the thesis of the "elite pact", "the betrayal of the legacy" and the "neoliberalism of Maduro". The approach, mobilized for electoral reasons, completely forgot the path traveled by the peripheral economies of global capitalism suffocated by imperialism, from the USSR in its beginnings to Cuba: the application of exceptional measures to attract national and foreign capital as a means of alternative financing. of the State and its social programs.

In this left, the image of the Venezuela of 2017 does not predominate, as in the case of the right, but that of 2007, so the attempt to make it fit into the Venezuela of 2022 is even more catastrophic. Hardly a political option that proposes a return to the deformed, decrepit and artificial capitalism that existed more than a decade ago can draw sympathy in the current circumstances.

For Chavismo, the mosaic of a multiform war, especially focused on precipitating a general economic collapse that would lead to regime change, has been the most important challenge two decades after its constitution. Fundamentally, the challenge arose from the fact that Hugo Chávez, who developed the geopolitical, international, ideological and cultural approach of the Bolivarian Revolution, in the absence of time on this plane due to the irruption of his death, left the economic area in a state of primary construction , where high oil revenues allowed an effective resolution of almost any problem.


A good part of the modalities for managing oil revenues disappeared when the war and the blockade intensified, leaving Maduro with the obligation to develop new guidelines for economic governance in a context of infernal resource restrictions, threats of invasion by the United States, paramilitary attacks and assassination plots.

The new political economy of Chavismo proposed by the Maduro government was based on a pragmatic understanding of the changes that were operating in the economic reality (the growing use of the dollar, to give an example) and the transformations that they would bring to the power dynamics in the country. The reforms in the foreign exchange market to mitigate devaluation by decriminalizing the dollar, the reduction of tariffs for imports with the aim of solving the shortage picture and the tightening of the legal reserve to mitigate inflation, were the first steps of a doctrinal update in what whose guiding principle was to reverse the social damage of criminal sanctions by generating alternative income to oil.

We could say that it was a grace period, a kind of NEP in a Venezuelan format, in which the Venezuelan government replaced the gap in oil income with an injection of private capital, with the aim of expanding tax collection, financing the Comprehensive Care for the Victims of the Economic War and recompose oil production.

The ECLAC figures, but previously the projections of Credit Suisse and other institutions, certify that the new modalities of economic management of Chavismo have been effective.

With these measures, Maduro not only changed the power dynamics that had historically prevailed in the Venezuelan economy, characterized by dependence on petrodollars from the State, but also re-educated the private sector in a new way of dealing with wealth through competition. and investment, in a renewed understanding of its role as a productive entity for national development.

While Chavismo takes the pulse of the country, it incorporates the new aspirations for peace, recovery, and stability into its story, and develops lines of political mediation with increasingly broader social and power factors. However, many seem to obsess over their own state of denial.

https://misionverdad.com/venezuela/el-n ... venezolana

Google Translator

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US No Longer Refers to Guaidó as Interim President
May 4, 2022

Caracas, May 3, 2022 (OrinocoTribune.com)—On Monday, May 2, the United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken stated via his Twitter account that he spoke with former deputy Juan Guaidó and reiterated the US regime’s support for the Venezuelan people’s fight for “democracy”—in this case a euphemism for the overthrow of the elected president, Nicolás Maduro. Notably, Blinken did not refer to the former deputy Guaidó by the title of “interim president,” as Trump’s administration habitually did.

“I spoke with Juan Guaidó to reiterate US support for the Venezuelan people as they seek to restore freedom, democracy, and prosperity to their country,” Blinken wrote. “We remain committed to the success of Venezuelan-led negotiations as the best path for a peaceful return to democracy,” in a new attempt to revive the failed US strategy to oust Maduro.


Guaidó responded with the following tweet a few hours later: “I spoke with Secretary of State Blinken about the importance of international support to confront Maduro and authoritarian regimes. We Venezuelans resist a dictatorship and fight to achieve free and fair elections, the support of the free world is key to achieving them.”

In actuality, Juan Guaidó has never had substantial public support in Venezuelan politics. Since 2020, after the failed mercenary operation known as Operation Gideon, his small base of support dwindled to microscopic levels.

“The US is trying at all costs to exit this failed regime-change operation,” said Orinoco Tribune’s Editor Jesús Rodríguez-Espinoza, “and for this reason they set up the February meeting with President Maduro. Now, many Latin American and Caribbean countries are following the lead of their master, and they are not calling Guaidó ‘president’ anymore, as the European Union stopped doing last year.”

“One could wonder if they are going to invite Guaidó to the Summit of the Americas,” Rodríguez-Espinoza added. “Anything could happen, taking into consideration the lack of integrity of US foreign relations. Meanwhile, they proposed the idea of a Venezuela-US meeting in Trinidad and Tobago, but a few days later the suggestion was denied by a second-rank Department of State official. Who knows what they are going to do? The reality on the ground is that Guaidó and the political parties that joined the failed regime-change operation are nowhere to be seen in Venezuela, they were not even capable of agreeing on a single event for May Day, despite the fact that they have been trying for weeks to turn up the heat with protests on the streets, and of course failing precipitously again.”

No meeting scheduled in Trinidad and Tobago

Also this Monday, Brian Nichols, Undersecretary of State for Latin America and the Caribbean, said that there is no meeting scheduled at this moment between the US regime and Venezuelan government officials in Trinidad and Tobago, contrary to the report published by The Economist on April 23.

“There will be no such meeting,” said Nichols in an interview with Colombian news outlet NTN24. “We are interested in promoting a return to the dialogue table in Mexico, it is very important for us. And also the release of the US citizens detained in Caracas, that is a priority. But we don’t have a meeting planned right now.”


Thus, US officials continue with the same script calling for political negotiations in Mexico, known as the Mexico Talks, while within Venezuela, Chavismo and the opposition already began broad negotiations in January.

The Venezuelan government delegation to the Mexico Talks departed from the negotiations after the illegal extradition from Cape Verde to the US of the Venezuelan diplomat Alex Saab. Venezuela also incorporated opposition actors from Democratic Alliance, the opposition group that won a significant number of governorships and municipalities during the 21N mega-elections, into the dialogue.



Featured image: Former deputy Guaidó and fugitive Leopoldo López during their failed coup attempt on April 30, 2019. Photo: Twitter.

https://orinocotribune.com/us-no-longer ... president/

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On Venezuela, Only Hawkish ‘Dissent’ Allowed
RICARDO VAZ


Another NATO war means a media establishment in a propaganda frenzy once again. Corporate media outlets have cheered Washington for throwing fuel to the fire in Ukraine, with some demanding that the administration escalate yet more (FAIR.org, 1/28/22, 2/28/22, 3/18/22, 3/22/22). Be it through their choice of pundits, or their own reporters haranguing White House officials for not sending enough weaponry, one thing is clear enough: Elite media will only criticize official foreign policy for not being hawkish enough.

When it comes to Venezuela, corporate journalists have historically had little to criticize, given Washington’s “maximum pressure” regime-change efforts (FAIR.org, 12/19/20, 4/15/20, 1/22/20, 9/24/19, 6/26/19, 5/1/19). However, a recent unexpected trip by a high-level US delegation to Caracas to meet with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro opened the spectrum of opinion ever so slightly. Besides the traditional bias and dishonest coverage, a familiar pattern emerged: Just like with Russia/Ukraine, the only allowed criticism of official policy comes from the right, demanding that the US be as extreme as possible in dealing with its “enemies.”

Media to Guaidó’s rescue
Venezuela's opposition presses U.S. to hold off its consideration of oil imports[/b]
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“Political winds shifted against any proposal to ease the US sanctions,” Reuters (3/22/22) reported–as though hostile media coverage wasn’t part of those “political winds.”
The early March talks, which broached subjects such as sanctions relief and Venezuela resuming oil supplies to the US, were soon discontinued after backlash from hardliners. But they had one clear loser: US-backed self-proclaimed “Interim President” Juan Guaidó, who was “sidelined” (Washington Post, 3/11/22). The Jeff Bezos–owned paper reported that the “notable leader” was left out of the plans (though his “notable” status is very dubious at the moment—AP, 3/2/22). The Post article acknowledged further down that the opposition figure “has little practical authority in the country and little influence outside.”

However, in Guaidó’s hour of need, corporate journalists came to his aid, treating as newsworthy that the hardline oppositionist was “angered” (Miami Herald, 3/7/22) or “astonished” (El País, 3/10/22) about not being informed of his Washington bosses’ plans in advance.

Efforts to prop up the fading politician included the oft-repeated lie that he is recognized by “more than 50” (Washington Post, 3/9/22) or “almost 60” countries (AFP, 3/7/22), which was true in 2019. The current number, based on a recent UN General Assembly vote to recognize the credentials of the Maduro government, is 16 (Venezuelanalysis, 12/8/21).

Soon after, news outlets gave Guaidó the floor to “press” the White House against dealing with the Venezuelan government, as well as to warn oil corporations such as Chevron to not pursue increased activity in Venezuela and “stick with democracy” (Reuters, 3/22/22), which in this instance stands for unconstitutionally replacing an elected president with a legislator whose term expired in 2020.

A Guaidó aide even asked, “What’s the value of the commodity of freedom?” Given how cheaply US officials and their media stenographers bring it up, not that high.

Reuters went further than most in the damage-control operation, telling readers more than two weeks after the fact that “the US officials met Guaidó after attending the meeting with Maduro.” The claim is very dubious, given prior reporting that the opposition frontman and the US delegation “didn’t meet face to face” (Washington Post, 3/11/22). Given Guaidó’s communications policy, which prompted him to boast of a phone call with Slovakia’s foreign minister, it seems unlikely he would host a White House delegation and stay quiet about it.

Inventing ‘hostages’
Hostages for Oil From Venezuela?
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Wall Street Journal (3/9/22): Easing sanctions against Venezuela “would reward a rogue regime for taking American hostages with little energy benefit.”
The one “consequence” of the surprise Caracas summit was the release of two detained US citizens, Gustavo Cárdenas and Jorge Fernández. Cárdenas was one of the “Citgo 6” oil executives sentenced in 2020 for corruption, whereas Fernández was arrested in 2021 after allegedly entering the country illegally from Colombia while carrying a drone.

Outlets were happy enough to echo the administration’s claim that the two had been “wrongfully detained” (Al Jazeera, 3/9/22) and were used as “political pawns” (BBC, 3/11/22), but not so much to offer details on the corruption charges brought against the Citgo 6. Certainly none connected Fernández’s drone arrest to the assassination attempt against Maduro in August 2018, which used explosive-laden drones brought in from Colombia.

Some went even further by referring to the imprisoned US citizens in Venezuela as “hostages” (CNN, 3/16/22; Wall Street Journal, 3/9/22). It seems no crimes can be committed by US nationals in countries deemed evil by Washington.

Similarly apologetic were the references to Luke Denman and Airan Berry, former US Green Berets serving 20-year sentences after taking part in Operation Gideon, a failed paramilitary/mercenary invasion of Venezuela. Despite their own confessions and public statements by Gideon organizer Jordan Goudreau confirming their involvement, the two former soldiers are only “accused in a plot” against Maduro (Washington Post, 3/6/22; CNN, 3/8/22).

The Washington Post brought up the case of Matthew Heath, a “former Marine who was arrested while traveling along the Caribbean coast of Venezuela,” without noting that he was caught with heavy weaponry and explosives (Venezuelanalysis, 9/14/20).

An overdose of Rubio
Venezuela could be a fill-in for Russian oil, but critics fear aiding another strongman.
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The New York Times (3/8/22) quoted Sen. Robert Menendez (D.-N.J.) as saying the US “risks perpetuating a humanitarian crisis” by lifting sanctions that have killed over 100,000 Venezuelans.
To the extent that the media establishment was willing to entertain the possibility of Washington engaging with Caracas again, it did so on its familiar dishonest, US exceptionalist terms. As such, corporate pundits (NPR, 3/13/22; Financial Times, 3/13/22; Washington Post, 3/11/22) weighed the pros and cons of dealing with an “authoritarian” government. Others called it “autocratic” (Guardian, 3/14/22; Financial Times, 3/12/22; CNN, 3/8/22). The New York Times used both (3/8/22).

Laying down the law, Western journalists wrote that, in order for negotiations to proceed, Biden wants “progress toward restoring democratic governance” (Bloomberg, 3/10/22) and Maduro must “set aside his authoritarian impulses” (AP, 3/10/22), thus establishing both the Venezuelan president’s dictatorial tendencies and the country’s lack of “democratic governance” as background facts.

Likewise reheated were the unsubstantiated “fraud” claims concerning Maduro’s 2018 reelection (New York Times, 3/8/22; AFP, 3/7/22; Reuters, 3/6/22; see FAIR.org, 5/23/18), and the evidence-free “narco-terrorism” charges (BBC, 3/13/22; New York Times, 3/8/22; Washington Post, 3/11/22; see FAIR.org, 9/24/19). Reuters (3/22/22) ridiculously accused the Venezuelan president of “dragging his feet toward new elections” when the country’s constitution stipulates they be held in 2024.

But the most remarkable aspect of coverage was that the US politicians asked to weigh in on the Biden administration’s calculations were invariably foreign policy hawks. CNN (3/8/22) cited no less than five US politicians criticizing the rapprochement and the possibility of sanctions relief. The most featured by far was Sen. Marco Rubio (R.–Florida), who got to ramble unopposed about “narco-dictators” (Washington Post, 3/6/22; Bloomberg, 3/30/22; Financial Times, 3/13/22; Newsweek, 8/3/22).

No corporate outlet sought the opinion of those US representatives who in the recent past have strongly called for sanctions relief because of their documented impact on the civilian population (Venezuelanalysis, 8/14/21, 6/17/21, 2/11/21).

The sanctions script
Whether to lift or relax sanctions imposed on Venezuela in recent years is—leaving aside the Guaidó charade—the key decision facing Washington. Multilateral bodies and human rights rapporteurs have decried the measures, which have led to over 100,000 deaths, according to former UN Special Rapporteur Alfred de Zayas.

Despite a growing consensus demanding their removal, corporate media have stuck to their routinely dishonest coverage of sanctions and their consequences (FAIR.org, 6/4/21). A key misrepresentation across the board (CNN, 3/8/22; BBC, 3/11/22; Bloomberg, 3/10/22; Financial Times, 3/6/22, 3/13/22; Reuters, 3/9/22) is that sanctions against Venezuela’s oil sector only began in 2019.

In fact, the first key blow against the industry came in August 2017, when state oil company PDVSA was shut out of global credit markets. Studies on crude output pinpoint a sharper drop beginning at this point, and $6 billion in lost revenue in 12 months. The seminal report by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) also begins with the 2017 sanctions. Whether a concerted effort or lazy copy-paste, saying that the measures began only in 2019 is a disingenuous way to claim that Venezuela’s economic collapse has nothing to do with US sanctions.

Viewing the sanctions debate though the prism of US imperial interests, corporate journalists will state baldly that the deadly measures are meant to “force Maduro” from power (Washington Post, 3/6/22; Financial Times, 3/6/22); Washington’s right to do so is never in question. As such, Biden changing course is presented as a “gamble” at best (Bloomberg, 3/15/22) or a “strategic blunder” at worst (Wall Street Journal, 3/7/22). The argument against sanctions is that they are “counterproductive,” because they are “ineffective in reducing the power of the government” (Forbes, 3/24/22). Regime change remains openly the goal.

Readers are assured that sanctions were “intended to help restore Venezuelan democracy” (Guardian, 3/6/22) or “bring reform” (Washington Post, 3/9/22). Nowhere to be found are details of the devastating harm these unilateral measures inflict on the civilian population. Consequences, from lost crops to resurgent epidemics, are out of sight and out of mind.

Faced with the White House contemplating changes (even for the wrong reasons) to policies that have brought tremendous suffering for ordinary people, corporate media opted to obfuscate the sanctions’ impact, present the debate in the most US-exceptionalist terms, and platform the most hardline positions. In this way, the media establishment manufacture consent for silently killing Venezuelans.

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Re: Venezuela

Post by blindpig » Thu May 05, 2022 2:56 pm

WHERE ARE THE ENTHUSIASTS OF THE "SANCTIONS" AGAINST VENEZUELA?
May 4, 2022 , 2:52 p.m.

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President Maduro contemplates the march called in Caracas for International Workers' Day. May 1, 2022 (Photo: Reuters)

There are fewer and fewer supporters of the unilateral coercive measures that the United States maintains against the vast majority of Venezuelan economic actors, whether state or private.

If at first there were those within the second sector who argued that "sanctions" were a good pressure mechanism to force a regime change in the government of President Nicolás Maduro, today many of them take stock of the negative effects that the economic blockade , financial and commercial has had in their companies, confirming what has always been said in Chavismo from a national position, and that is that the fence violates the fundamental rights of an entire country, and not only attacks a political leadership.

VENEZUELAN BUSINESSMEN ADMIT TO BEING HIT BY SANCTIONS

Recently, the economist Víctor Álvarez shared a series of data that are part of his Economic Pedagogy project. In the publication, he exposes the consequences of the US sanctions on Venezuelan private companies, reflected in the closing of accounts or the difficulty in making international transfers, accessing financing and operating with banks, financial agents and foreign suppliers, for give some examples.

The investigation is based on a consultation carried out with spokespersons for private companies in Venezuela. The most outstanding data is about their perception of the impact of the sanctions: 63.6% declare that their companies have been affected by the US measure.

Much more than half (57.6%) of the economic actors consulted in the private sector say that they have "had difficulties making international transfers to suppliers and clients", which is not surprising, taking into account the many occasions in which that the Venezuelan State has denounced the same situation, with the aggravating circumstance that in the latter case, the obstacles to paying make it impossible for all Venezuelan citizens to access fundamental goods and services, whether in the area of ​​food, health, transportation, etc.

The private sector also identifies over-compliance with sanctions as one of the biggest problems in interaction with the international financial and trade system. This implies all the actions that external providers take to avoid negotiating with Venezuelan companies, even when they are not directly related to the government, for fear of reprisals from the United States Department of the Treasury.

In this sense, we must remember the words of the United Nations special rapporteur, Alena Douhan, who in her preliminary report on the situation in Venezuela already warned of this phenomenon:

The Special Rapporteur stresses that the application of extraterritorial jurisdiction to nationals and companies of third States for cooperation with public authorities, nationals and companies of Venezuela, and the alleged threats to said third States, is not justified under international law and increases the risks of over-compliance with sanctions. The Special Rapporteur notes with concern the reported threats to private companies and donors, partners and humanitarian organizations from third countries.

According to Álvarez's investigation, as a result of said overcompliance with the sanctions, 63.6% of Venezuelan private companies have had to comply with additional requirements to prove the origin of the funds before foreign banks; 42.4% have experienced delays or deferrals of orders for products and services; 39.4% have been subject to closure of international accounts and 36.4% have recorded cancellations of purchase orders for raw materials.

COMPLAINTS THAT SOUND FAMILIAR

Again, each of these remarks is all too familiar. For years, Venezuelan institutions and public companies have been suffering from them and exposing them to the world.

One of the cases that resonated the most was that of the obstacles imposed by the Portuguese bank Novo Banco (mostly owned by US private capital) to prevent the Venezuelan State from accessing part of the 1.7 billion dollars that it has frozen. abroad to buy vaccines and medicines in the framework of the covid-19 pandemic. The financial transaction was blocked even though the Pan American Health Organization was serving as an intermediary for Venezuela.

Now the private sector admits it, most likely because it is certain of the inefficiency of sanctions as a strategy to unconstitutionally leave the government of President Maduro. In addition, it must be made unsustainable to continue to bear the obstacles and high costs of doing business internationally.

Álvarez 's publication concludes with some recommendations by the former president of Fedecamaras, Jorge Botti, to correct what they call "collateral effects" of the sanctions. Before, Botti admits that the world is no longer unipolar and that the members of the growing list of national economies currently sanctioned by the United States and the European Union collaborate with each other to be able to carry out financial operations through alternative channels to the system controlled by the dollar. .

Among the recommendations that former President Botti makes, he highlights that of asking the high command of the United States Government, specifically the White House, the State Department or the Treasury Department, to give a clear message "about the desire to relax sanctions" and that they recognize that there has been an "unwanted effect" of the sanctions on the private sector. "I think that would send a message to all economic actors and we have not seen that," says Botti.

The other two recommendations have to do with the desire to prevent Venezuelan private companies from being subject to over-compliance with sanctions.

THE DEMANDS OF THE MADURO GOVERNMENT ARE IMPOSED: LIFT THE BLOCKADE

The spokesmen of the private sector are arriving late to a mediation that the government of Nicolás Maduro has been running almost from the moment the economic war against the country began. This 2022 in particular, Venezuela managed to resume contact with the United States and establish an agenda of talks under its terms, after spending three years disarming the artificial government of Juan Guaidó, the mainstay of the White House's set of strategies to delegitimize Venezuelan institutions and that served as justification for the sanctions.

Negotiations with Washington gained strength when the latter was affected by the rise in fuel prices, a product of the war it is leading against Russia, and required exceptions on the Caribbean front to receive oil supplies.

Although the undersecretary for the Western Hemisphere, Brian A. Nichols, denied this, The Economist says that the Biden Administration will hold a meeting with the Venezuelan government in Trinidad and Tobago to continue talks on lifting sanctions. The publication maintains that Vice President Delcy Rodríguez and Foreign Minister Félix Plasencia would attend the meeting, and that another topic of discussion would be the reopening of the US embassy in Caracas.

Whether or not the meeting is held, we must bear in mind that it was the US government that sent a delegation in March to propose energy agreements to President Maduro, and it is the US government that recently told Juan Guaidó that the negotiations with the Venezuelan head of state are "the best way to return to democracy".

Changing the economic landscape of Venezuela is no longer just a critical issue for the Maduro government. The complaints of private Venezuelan companies and the pressure of US officials in the negotiations show that there is no way to continue sustaining the sanctions regime for long.

https://misionverdad.com/venezuela/dond ... -venezuela

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As the empire is showing weakness and badly needs the oil perhaps it's time for the Bolivarians to stop playing footsie with their capitalists. Previously that would probably have been unwise, inviting more pressure, sanctions and perhaps military intervention. But this might be a good time to start getting serious about socialism.
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Re: Venezuela

Post by blindpig » Tue May 10, 2022 2:13 pm

SAMANTHA POWER AND HER USAID CLAWS
THE FLIGHT OF A HUMANITARIAN FALCON OVER VENEZUELA
May 7, 2022 , 12:33 p.m.

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An official who has been key in the militarization of human rights directs "humanitarian assistance" to Venezuela (Photo: Andrew Kelly / Reuters)

The first year in charge of the United States Agency for International Development (Usaid) for Samantha Power has stood out for a silent readjustment of the strategy against Venezuela. However, some features of her performance are appreciated, beginning to string together a pattern of actions that have been developed in her other political responsibilities.

TRAJECTORY OF A HIGH-FLYING BIRD OF PREY

The Democratic official, who called herself a "humanitarian hawk," taught at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government as "Practice Professor of Global Leadership and Public Policy," was a 2003 Pulitzer Prize winner for her book A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide and also served as a senior adviser to Barack Obama.

In the orbit of the former Democratic president as permanent representative of the United States in the UN Security Council in 2013, the diplomat was the trigger for the process of perfecting "humanitarian" intervention as a favorite weapon for regime change.

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Samantha Power participated in the government of Barack Obama, who in 2016 alone ordered the detonation of more than 26 thousand bombs in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan (Photo: Yahya Arhab / EPA)

She has been considered the leader of the "liberal hawks", the other side of a coin that they share with "neoconservatives" in promoting the interventionism of the "American Empire". In addition to the pure supremacism of these, the fuel of her interventionism is human rights, whose industry mobilizes navigable amounts of millions of dollars. During her Senate confirmation hearing, Power proclaimed, "This country is the greatest country on Earth. I will never apologize for America!"

Before, during the 1990s, he was part of the media constellation that participated in the disintegration of Yugoslavia and even worked as a sports journalist for CNN, an international information television whose newsroom housed members of the 4th Psychological Operations Group from Fort Bragg. .

Later he was part of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace as an assistant to Morton Abramowitz, who was administrator of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), assumed as the legal face of the CIA. He also founded the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, funded by former businessman Gregory C. Carr's foundation and by Lebanese-Saudi Rafic Hariri's foundation.

In 2001, she was a consultant to the International Commission on Intervention and Sovereignty of States, created by Canada, where the notion of "responsibility to protect" (R2P) was incubated under the idea that, in order to prevent massacres such as those in Srebrenica or Rwanda , the UN Security Council would have to intervene when there is no longer a State.

He was active in other interventionist organizations such as the International Crisis Group of the Hungarian-American oligarch George Soros and the Genocide Intervention Network, which has been renamed United to End Genocide.

Along with her mentor and husband, Cass Sunstein, they formed what populist journalist Glenn Beck called "America's most dangerous couple." They play the good cop (her) and the bad cop (him) regarding the issue of human rights and "they are capable of defending anything and the opposite with the same ardor, as long as it is useful to their interests," writes the analyst Thierry Meyssan in a synopsis of Power's career.

In his book The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir , published in 2019, Power writes about how he nearly blew himself up on his own fiery self-esteem while reporting from Bosnia in the 1990s.

Just over a year ago, Joe Biden appointed her as USAID administrator, describing her as "a leading voice for principled and humane American engagement in the world, bringing the international community together and working with our partners."

CHAMPION OF HUMANITARIAN MILITARIZATION

The trajectory of Samantha Power is a didactic and powerful example of the militarization of the human rights discourse , in her book she argues that the United States stepped aside during the genocides of the 20th century, citing what happened in Bosnia and Rwanda as examples. In this regard, attorney Chase Madar states:

"' Why has the United States stood by so indolently?' he asks. Power concedes that there has been 'modest progress in responding to genocide.' it is to courageously defend the presence of our armed forces to prevent human rights catastrophes, their active commitment to what the jargon of the elite that controls foreign policy calls 'humanitarian interventions'".

However, in his work he did not allude to a topic that is current today: the genocidal impact of unilateral coercive measures. Already in those years Power ignored, for example, whether the thousands of Iraqi deaths attributable to US economic sanctions in the 1990s should be considered genocide.

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Even when the United States launched the invasion and war in Iraq, Samantha Power never considered the deaths from sanctions and bombing as genocide (Photo: Ahmad al-Rubaye / AFP)

Madar refers to the hundreds of thousands of East Timorese killed by Indonesia, the 200,000 Mayan peasants killed in Guatemala during the civil war, and the Indonesian communists in 1955-1956, all sponsored by the United States. The same rapacious "humanitarian" argued in 2013 that "the United States must take humanitarian principles seriously and act decisively to combat genocide and other human rights abuses." But she points out that her ability to persuade other nations to follow her example on these issues has been terribly affected by the Iraq war and the variety of excesses committed in the name of the "war on terror."

Together with Hillary Clinton's assistant, Jeffrey Feltman, he was engaged in the preparation of the "Arab spring" in the National Security Council, they sought to overthrow the Arab secular regimes (Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria and Algeria), whether or not they were allies of the United States, to put the Muslim Brotherhood in power.

Power also supported the Clinton-Feltman-Petraeus-Allen clan to fight Russia, Iran and Syria and has successfully defended the US-led "springs" NATO wars in Libya and Syria "to stop the next Rwanda".

Last March, he was in Miami, Florida, where he spoke with journalists from Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela about the "importance of press freedom," as well as with leaders from Miami's business community to discuss the engagement of the private sector in Central America. .

As has been notorious in recent years, a large part of the disbursements of the regime change operation in Venezuela have had the corporate media as recipients, so the option to deepen this strategy of mass media intoxication and instruction is clear. of a file against Chavismo in charge of the Venezuelan government.

INTENSIFYING THE ORGY OF HUMANITARIAN FUNDS

USAID is for Power a perfect position to wield foreign aid as a cudgel to beat governments into line behind Washington's dictates, which she understands as an endless campaign to stop genocide and defend human rights.

In 2021, a report ( PDF ) from the USAID Office of the Inspector General criticized the performance of that agency during the Trump administration, stating that the political objectives of said administration constantly interfered with the response to the regional humanitarian crisis caused by the "political collapse " from Venezuela.

He also questions the efficiency of "humanitarian" actions under Trump's leadership, noting that of the 368 metric tons of aid that USAID's Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance and Office of Food for Peace sent to the border Colombia in 2019 (at a cost of $2 million), only 8 metric tons (2%) were actually delivered within Venezuela. The rest of the humanitarian aid supplies, some of which were stored in a warehouse guarded by the Colombian military on the outskirts of Cúcuta, were distributed within Colombia or sent to Somalia.

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In 2021 alone, Samantha Power disbursed 40% of "humanitarian" funds in up to 17 Latin American countries (Photo: Usaid)

The report also found that the Trump administration used foreign assistance from the United States to shore up support for the interim fake Juan Guaidó, who would not have been held accountable and has been accused by his own anti-Chavismo co-religionists of diverting up to 500 million dollars . It should be noted that Guaidó also manages funds from Venezuelan public companies abroad, including CITGO Petroleum Corporation and until recently Monómeros Colombo-Venezolanos, but until now he has not presented accounts on the use of those resources to anyone.

But nothing, or almost nothing, has changed after Trump's diplomacy; In any case, it has deepened. On March 23, the USAID published an information sheet with data on the expenses that have been made by both the Humanitarian Assistance Office of that agency and the Population, Refugees and Migration Office of the Department of State of the Department of State.

The aforementioned document refers to "the serious shortage of food and medicine that has led Venezuelans to flee to Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, and also to Argentina, Mexico, Panama and Caribbean and Central American countries" as the justification for more than 1.6 billion dollars that have been disbursed in 18 countries in the region between 2017 and 2021. Venezuela itself is included, where just under 10% of the funds, 158 million, have been spent on the line "executing partners" (Implementing Partners or IP's).

Almost 40% of the aforementioned expenses were spent by the Biden administration during 2021 (655.1 million dollars) and the largest disbursements have been allocated to international agencies such as the UN Refugee Agency (Acnur) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the same ones that have demonstrably inflated the numbers of emigration from Venezuela.

Samantha Power's USAID has added to the migratory narrative the operations carried out by the Bolivarian National Armed Forces on the border with Colombia, saying:

" An increase in violence between non-state armed groups along the Colombia-Venezuela border in early 2022 led to civilian casualties and displacement, increasing humanitarian needs among Venezuelan migrants."

The reality is that the number of internally displaced persons in Colombia is much greater and significant than that caused by the eviction of the groups called Tancol by the Venezuelan government.

These agencies, whose joint special representative for Venezuela is the operator Eduardo Stein ( also linked to the R2P doctrine ), launched last December a plan of 1.79 billion dollars to "satisfy the needs of Venezuelan refugees and migrants and their communities reception in 2022".

A highlight in 2021 was the development of concrete actions such as the signing of the agreement with the executive director of the United Nations (UN) World Food Program, David Beasley, which involved the constitutional government of President Nicolás Maduro and a sector of the diplomacy of the United States that until now had been faithful to the Guaidó plan.

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Samantha Power not only continued but amplified the narrative of Venezuelan emigration with stagings in the Darien (Panama) and the Rio Grande (United States) (Photo: File)

Synergistically with the continuity in the massive media intoxication, Samantha Power will continue in the orgy of "humanitarian" funds that will serve to strengthen governments of the right and left that position themselves against Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua.

Meanwhile, the actions of the "humanitarian" hawk led by Power and USAID have focused on extending the narrative of the Venezuelan diaspora to areas such as the Darien jungle (between Panama and Colombia) and the Rio Grande, and for this they have activated some on stage that mobilize the attention of both the Central American countries and the US public itself.

As in the case of Iraq, Power will not consider genocide or a crime against humanity the more than 30,000 deaths caused by unilateral coercive measures since his ally Obama declared Venezuela an "unusual and extraordinary threat."

The double role of Samantha Power as a "driver" of human rights and as a tireless advocate in favor of the war does not bother her and she is just beginning for Venezuela.

https://misionverdad.com/investigacione ... -venezuela

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Caracas Marches with Russians Celebrating Victory Day, President Maduro Salutes 77th Anniversary of Nazi Defeat (Photos)
May 9, 2022

On Saturday, May 7, the triumph of the Soviet Union over Nazi Germany was commemorated in the Venezuelan capital with the traditional march of the Immortal Regiment, during which Russian citizens carried portraits of relatives who fought against Nazism in the Great Patriotic War, as Russians call the Second World War.

The symbols of the Soviet Union came out on a sunny Saturday in Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, to celebrate the day the Red Army defeated Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany troops.

“We are in Caracas celebrating this beautiful party with our Venezuelan brothers, a victory party, a party for the entire community for our future, to remember our ancestors who fell in the fight against Nazism,” Russian ambassador Sergei Mélik-Bagdasárov told Sputnik.


Every May 9 is celebrated as a “holy day” in Russia and most of the countries of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), where crowds commemorate the total surrender of Nazi troops on the night of May 8, when in Russia it was already May 9.

“I came to celebrate the victory of the Russian people, a valuable people who fought for almost four years at a cost of almost 30 million dead,” Russian citizen Nina Nikonova told Sputnik. For Nikonova, today, unfortunately, history repeats itself. “The Russian people have the responsibility to fight fascism” today in Ukraine, as they did 77 years ago, she added.

Like Nikonova, dozens of Russian citizens living in Venezuela participated in the march of the Immortal Regiment, a traditional celebration that the Russian people carry out every year in about 90 countries.

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Nina Nikonova, a Russian citizen residing in Venezuela. Photo: Hernan Cano, Sputnik News

“My grandmother lived in a town where Hitler’s troops passed by, and the stories she told me were horrific, they were barbaric,” Nikonova said. “What they did to the civilian population was horrendous. And today Russia is fighting in Ukraine to exterminate Nazism and fascism.”

For this Russian citizen, who has lived for more than 40 years in Venezuela, the hatred unleashed in the West against Russians in the world, and the censorship against Russian media, must come to an end, because “the most important thing is that peace returns.”

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Wearing Soviet insignia, the Russian community in Caracas celebrated Victory Day. Photo: Sputnik/Hernán Cano

“Luckily I live in a country with a lot of democracy, in Venezuela, and everything is fine here,” said Nikonova. “But I do not agree with the Hollywood-type lies against us, with the Russophobia, the censorship of athletes. Life and peace must be respected.”

“Victory of humanity”

The march of the Immortal Regiment went to the Los Próceres walkway, in the south of the capital city, where significant civil and military celebrations are held in the Caribbean country, and was led by the Russian ambassador to Venezuela, Sergei Mélik-Bagdasárov.

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A banner with the famous photo of Soviet soldiers raising the Soviet flag over the Reichstag in 1945, seen at the march. Photo: Sputnik/Hernán Cano.

Accompanied by his peers from Belarus and Venezuelan diplomatic authorities and political leaders, Mélik-Bagdasárov placed a floral offering on the monument to Venezuelan hero Francisco de Miranda, and stressed the importance of May 9, not only for the Russian people, but for all of humanity.

“A very important day, the day of the victory of the USSR and its allies, the day of the victory of justice, of peace, the victory of humanity over evil,” said the Russian diplomat. “We all know the name of that evil. It’s called Nazism, fascism, and other anti-human ideologies.”

Mélik-Bagdasárov highlighted the presence of Venezuelan diplomats and deputies at the march, thanked the Venezuelan government and people for their support in Russia’s fight against fascism, and recalled that “here we also have evidence of Nazism, fascism and racism that we have to overcome.”

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“Here we are accompanied by our dear deputies, by our dear Venezuelan brothers, the Foreign Ministry and other government agencies,” said the diplomatic representative of the Russian Federation in Venezuela. “I thank you all for coming, because with this march of the Immortal Regiment we commemorate our ancestors who rose up to fight against fascism and Nazism.”

The Venezuelan Vice Foreign Minister, Rander Peña, called for the recognition of history, and described today’s conflict in Ukraine as a renewed version of the struggle against Nazi fascism: “What 77 years ago the heroes of humanity born in Russia crushed, which was fascism, today those heroes again, renewed, with the heroic charge that runs through their veins, they battle again. And today’s battle against fascism was the same battle 77 years ago.”

The Soviet Army “liberated the whole world”

Valery Rodin, who along with his family arrived in Venezuela 28 years ago, told Sputnik in an interview: “On May 9, 1945, the Soviet Army freed the whole world from fascism, that is what we celebrate today, and we are thanking all those who fought to achieve that great victory.”

This Russian compatriot marched with a poster of his father-in-law, who during the Great Patriotic War operated a tank in the ranks of the Red Army, and of his uncle, of whom Rodin had no photo because he disappeared in 1941.

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Valery Rodin, participant of the March of the Immortal Regiment. Photo: Sputnik/Hernán Cano

“Contemporary fascism, which is rearing its head today, is a deep pain for me,” said Rodin with tears in his eyes. “With deep pain I see what is happening today in Ukraine. It is a great suffering, because part of my family lives there, and that has us very worried.”

Asked about his opinion on the Russian military operation in Ukraine, he answered categorically: “We are there to defeat fascism. Of course I support the policy of President Vladimir Putin and I hope that soon we can win again.”

President Maduro salutes Victory Day
The President of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, congratulated Russia on the 77th anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany. Through his Twitter account, the head of state stated that Venezuela celebrates, alongside Russia, this important date for the freedom of Europe and the world.


“Venezuela celebrates the 77th anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany, in the Great Patriotic War,” wrote Maduro. “We embrace the Russian people and President Vladimir Putin, heirs of the men and women who liberated Europe and the world from the Nazi-fascist threat that today intends to resurface.”

This Monday, Russia celebrated 77 years since the victory against Nazi Germany with the traditional parade of Russian troops, held in the Red Square in Moscow.

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Re: Venezuela

Post by blindpig » Fri May 13, 2022 1:55 pm

VENEZUELA GAINS GROUND IN THE FACE OF BIDEN'S HESITATION
May 11, 2022 , 10:15 a.m.

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On April 22, the US government's ban on companies in that country importing Russian oil came into force. Several oil companies, including US-based Chevron, have jointly petitioned the Joe Biden administration for permission to resume their oil exploration and production activities in Venezuela. Since then, senior White House officials have been making contacts with the government of President Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, albeit in an erratic and diffuse manner.

On the contrary, the Venezuelan president continues with the same position as years ago, which is none other than to establish solid channels of dialogue to end the economic, commercial and financial war.

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Sanctions against Russia have deprived the United States of a huge oil market. In this context, the Biden government has looked to Venezuela to "dialogue" (Photo: File)

Who is benefiting from the new scenario? It is a rhetorical question; however, it is never superfluous to put the evidence on the table. On this occasion, we turn to a recent article by Steve Ellner, a retired professor from the Universidad de Oriente in Venezuela and associate managing editor of Latin American Perspectives. In the text, he examines the vacillations of the Biden administration and the places where the Maduro government has gained ground.

CONTRADICTIONS IN THE WHITE HOUSE

Washington's first official contact with Venezuela this year occurred in March. And it happened in the context of what we mentioned at the beginning, the military conflict in Ukraine, the sanctions against Russia and the impact on the US oil sector. The decision to send a high-level delegation to Caracas caused a violent rejection in the anti-Venezuelan lobby that make up the Florida Congressional bloc. Senators Marco Rubio and Rick Scott, joined by Senator Bob Menendez, led the reaction, says Steve Ellner.

Several weeks after that event, The Economist stated that the Biden administration is planning to hold a meeting with representatives of the Venezuelan government in Trinidad.

"Shortly thereafter, however, US Deputy Secretary of State Brian Nichols denied the report, stating that the only issue discussed at the March meeting in Caracas related to Venezuelan democracy. The comment contradicts a earlier statement from the White House that the March meeting discussed 'global energy security,'" says Ellner.

The academic points out that the centrist wing of US politicians see the path taken by Joe Biden as something benign and correct, since it appears to be moving away from "the threats and military actions used by Trump." That perception is reinforced by the attacks Biden has received from the Florida congressional bloc, who allege that the current administration is using sanctions as a bargaining chip "with an illegitimate dictatorship to produce more oil." Congressmen also question Biden for the tacit recognition of the Maduro government that this implies, and the consequent abandonment of Juan Guaidó's artificial government project.

What does Biden have in mind with the change in policy in Venezuela? It's hard to know precisely, adds Ellner. Unlike Obama's case with the negotiations with Cuba, President Biden has not put his cards on the table, perhaps due to lack of will or inability.

Ellner agrees with Brian Winter, vice president of the Council of the Americas, who at the time of the first delegation that traveled to Venezuela, said: "Until we know precisely what the Biden administration is trying to achieve, it will be difficult to assess to what extent point this detente can go away".

WHAT THE REST OF THE REGION HAS DONE

The shift in the political strategy of the United States in Venezuela has allowed several countries in the Latin American region to relax pressure against Caracas or not feel threatened to defend it. This is the case of Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador and Mexico.

Brazilian Foreign Minister Carlos França said: "At a time when the United States is considering making an exception to the embargo on Venezuelan oil exports, it seems to me that we can think in terms of reevaluating the issue of diplomatic relations."
The presidents of Argentina and Ecuador, Alberto Fernández and Guillermo Lasso, held a joint press conference in which they addressed the issue of Venezuela. Fernández defended his government's decision to reestablish diplomatic relations with the Maduro government and invited other countries to do the same. Lasso welcomed the negotiations between the US and Venezuela, while saying that his government is considering reestablishing diplomatic relations with Caracas.
After the State Department declared that it did not see possible the participation of Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua in the Ninth Summit of the Americas, Mexican President AMLO urged Biden that "all the countries of the Americas [receive] an invitation, without excluding to nobody".

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Argentina and Ecuador want to restore diplomatic relations with Venezuela (Photo: Presidency of Argentina)

Steve Ellner writes about it:

"This wave of opposition to the ostracism of Venezuela is going to be difficult for Washington to contain, especially in light of the electoral victories of the left and center left since 2018 in Mexico, Argentina, Bolivia and, more recently, Chile and Honduras. The progressive candidates are scheduled to win in the upcoming presidential elections in Colombia and Brazil.

MORE THAN OIL: THE REASONS FOR DIALOGUE WITH VENEZUELA

There are two objectives that the Biden government wants to achieve by lifting one of the more than 500 "sanctions" against Venezuela. One has to do with access to Venezuelan oil, which is necessary in the midst of rising prices for the item on an international scale, and the other is related to the possibility of influencing the foreign policy of the Maduro government.

Juan González, a Washington adviser who headed the US delegation that was in Caracas, already said that the sanctions against Russia are designed to have an economic impact on nations economically linked to the Eurasian country. Regarding Venezuela, Washington offers a negotiation that will reduce the impact in exchange for it suspending its cooperation with Russia.

In his article, Ellner cites the BBC and the Financial Times to confirm the strategy. The first concludes that the spaces for dialogue established are an "attempt to change the political loyalties of Venezuela" and the second says that the reason for those is "to cajole Maduro to move away from Moscow's embrace" and to take a position " neutral" against the Russian operation in Ukraine.

Similarly, Ellner shows a fragment of the statements by Congressman Gregory Meeks, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the United States House of Representatives, which coincide with what was indicated by the two British media: "recommit to Venezuela (. ..) serves to distance Venezuela from the malign influence of Vladimir Putin."

Bloomberg News proposed that any step toward lifting the blockade and normalizing relations between the two countries must be conditional on Venezuela's willingness to suspend military collaboration with Russia and "accelerate market-oriented economic reforms." On the other hand, according to the media, Washington would not have to stop recognizing Guaidó.

Further on, Bloomberg notes that engaging with the Maduro government, "unpleasant as it may be," is essential to protecting US interests and destroying Russian influence in the region.

At the end of his article, Ellner concludes that:

"Biden's bargaining strategy has a lot in common with Trump's threats and actions in favor of regime change through military force. In both cases, the will of Venezuelans and their suffering are ignored. What makes the current situation even more despicable is that the negotiating chips were previously designed to get Venezuela to review economic policy and now there is an additional objective, namely a change in foreign policy.

However, bargaining is not giving the expected results. Until now, Venezuela has not been forced to sacrifice any of its principles as a Republic and even so it is perceiving some advantages of the decrease in hostilities in the economic and diplomatic spheres.

https://misionverdad.com/venezuela/vene ... s-de-biden

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Re: Venezuela

Post by blindpig » Sat May 14, 2022 2:26 pm

How the imperialist system works, and how Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution resists it

A Venezuelan sociologist explains how the imperialist system is built on a murderous, savage capitalism, and how Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution has resisted it, based on Hugo Chávez’s concept of 21st-century socialism.

ByMaría Páez VictorPublished2022-04-29

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This article by Venezuelan sociologist María Páez Victor is based on her presentation at the webinar “Imperialism and the Western Left” organized by the Geopolitical Economy Research Group and International Manifesto Group on April 24, 2022.

There are many characteristics of imperialism, but essentially it involves the desire and the ability of one nation to overpower, dominate, and or persuade other nations to act in the best interests of the empire’s own aims.

Imperialism is not a new phenomenon, but today it can be said to involve a new colonialism. This brand of colonialism does not necessarily take over militarily large tracts of lands of peoples or nations, but seeks to destroy the sovereignty of established states, weaken them, and impose a tutelage over them, in its quest of natural resources, advantages and hegemonic power.

Moreover, today there is a new way of waging war has been added to military war: hybrid war, which is economic, diplomatic, legalistic, mediatic, and equally lethal.

There is only one empire in the world right now; it is the United States of America, and it is intent on remaining so, on being the one hegemon, the one superpower, with the help of its firm allies in Europe and Canada.

The United States is the only nation that has approximately 800 military bases across the planet. It has the largest armed forces in the world, and is the number one arms manufacturer and seller on Earth.

War has been its main instrument and business, for most of the 20th and now the 21st century. Consequently, Washington’s foreign, diplomatic, economic, and financial policies are no longer different from its military objectives.

The US private and the public spheres have largely combined with the militarization of its foreign policy, and this cloaks a profound class struggle, domestic as well as international, counting on the formidable power of corporate media.

Empires have always tried to mask their military power with their “auctoritas” (authority): the narrative façade about the empire’s worth, quality, superiority, and benevolence. This provides an apparent reason for its domination of other peoples and nations.

Empires cannot hold their power just by force alone, as that would be prohibitively expensive; they need to convince other nations to submit. An empire does this through its ideology, its superstructure, that masks, upholds, and promotes its military infrastructure.

US society – historically, culturally, and psychologically – is seeped in racism, which is an integral part of its hegemonic ideology.

Yet today, Washington has lost a great deal of its hegemonic aura, after a slew of failures and lies, such as the “domino theory” of the Vietnam War or the claim of non-existent “weapons of mass destruction” that was used to try to justify the invasion of Iraq.

The US government’s series of futile wars, endless coups d’etat, interferences in other nations’ governance, and trashing of international law when it suits it has not helped either.

In other words, the ideology of the US empire has worn thin. Whether Washington likes it or not, a multipolar world is emerging, and the empire’s rationalizations are not so believable any more.

Savage capitalism: an anti-democratic system dominated by finance
The economic system of imperialism is capitalism, which is in a present stage referred to as corporate capitalism, but which Venezuelan revolutionary leader Hugo Chávez called “savage capitalism“ (capitalismo salvaje). Washington is its main exponent.

This system is characterized by a preponderance of corporate finance and speculation. It is only marginally geared towards producing and satisfying citizens’ needs; labour and its representatives have been undermined and marginalized.

The corporate market largely determines political decisions in this system, thus undermining democratic institutions such as parliaments, political parties, law, and judicial power.

We are witnesses to corporate unrestrained power, which has led to widespread inequality and political polarization, as economist Thomas Pickety most clearly pointed out in his 2013 book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century“.

Domestic auctoritas is also fractured within the USA. Author Chris Hedges even considers that the United States is today “in the last stage in the emergence of corporate totalitarianism.”

Finance capitalism adds nothing of value to the real economy; it is a casino capitalism made possible by degrading the institutions that guard the common good: education, health, unions, even law.

There is an inherent contradiction between the single-minded search for profits of the corporations, and the protection of the social common good, most especially, the democratic good.

Corporations are not democratic entities; they defy real democracy and dominate nation-states. Their power meshes with that of the US empire. In other words, you cannot disengage corporate power from imperialism.

Resource colonialism

A reality often overlooked is that today’s main industries – weapons, energy, and telecommunication – cannot exist in a financial vacuum. They need specific natural resources from the extractive industries, such as petroleum, lithium, rare minerals, coltan, and other ores.

The great economic power is largely concentrated in the Global North – the USA and its allies – but the grand bulk of the absolutely essential natural resources are in the South.

Thus a new colonialism has emerged, camouflaged with all sorts of smoke and mirrors: “free trade” (that is not free), promises of “trickle-down” investments (that never trickle down), and supposed “humanitarian interventions” to protect human rights (only some of them).

Global North governments claim to help countries in the South develop (only where convenient to their enterprises), to teach other nations about the supposed “rule of law” (based on their rules), and even to promote NGOs to purportedly protect democracy and the environment (while these organizations act as spies and saboteurs).

Venezuela is a case study. There, from 2002 to 2012 alone, CIA cutout the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) gave $100 million to create 300 NGOs opposed to the Bolivarian Revolution launched by President Chávez.

We are also witnesses to an uncontrolled expansion of corporate capitalism which euphemistically or cynically is referred to as “progress”. It is necessarily predatory.

This system’s insatiable consumerism, rampant industrialization, and appalling individualism have catastrophically injured the natural world, polluted land and waters, caused climate change, increased species extinctions, and depleted biodiversity.

It is leading us to the sixth extinction, if not stopped.

Natural resources seem to be viewed as the property of the North, not the South where they are found. This divide is profoundly eurocentrist, classist, and racist.

A shocking example was the 2010 European Commission report on critical raw materials for the EU, which, in a matter-of-fact- bureaucratic vocabulary, unashamedly defined environmental risk as “the measures that might be taken by countries with the intention of protecting the environment and by so doing endangering the supply of raw materials to the European Union.”

The people most severely impacted by this natural resource devastation in Latin America are the rural campesinos and the indigenous peoples.

US imperialism’s top target: Latin America

Because of its natural resource richness and its strategic geographical position, the most important area of the world that the US empire believes it absolutely needs to dominate is Latin America and the Caribbean – not Europe, not Canada, not Asia, not Middle East, not even Russia or China.

In this region, the USA has carried out roughly 90 coups d’etat, destablization campaigns, or invasions since 1900.

Virtually every progressive leader or reformer in Latin America has been threatened to be killed, opposed, or deposed by Washington. The victims among the people are countless.

Atilio Boron, a distinguished Argentine intellectual, points out that there are no Monroe Doctrines for any other part of the world, except for Latin America.

Washington considers the region its “backyard” – or as ignominiously Biden has said, trying to soften the insult, the US “front yard”.

The farce of the USA being any sort of “defender” of Latin America from European threats, as the Monroe Doctrine spouts, was shown to be a lie when Washington backed the UK’s colonialist war against Argentina over the Malvina Islands (Falklands).

The last word on imperialism belongs to revolutionary Che Guevara, who stated that “it is the nature of imperialism that makes men into beasts, that turns them bloodthirsty animals, that are willing to slit throats, to kill, to destroy the last image of the revolutionary, of the supporter of a government that has fallen under his boot or that fights for his freedom.”

El Che warned that “imperialism cannot be trusted for a minute, not even a little bit.”

There are too many examples to cite, in Latin America, Africa, Middle East, and even in the less powerful nations of Europe, where they have all felt the boot of empire on their throats.

Socialism of the 21st century

The opposite of imperialism today is the movement of Socialism of the 21st Century. It is the hope for the future of Latin America, and the world, against the savagery of imperialism.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez was re-elected for his second term in 2006 by an overwhelming majority who voted for his electoral promise of building what he called Socialism of the 21st Century, as the basis of the Bolivarian Revolution.

The instrument of this revolution is the PSUV, the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, which is formed by many smaller parties and grassroots organizations. It is not just a government party.

Many figures on the Western left, in the USA, Canada, and Europe, have claimed for years that Venezuela’s revolution is not truly socialist. These armchair revolutionaries have too often disdained the Bolivarian Revolution because it did not “fit” with their narrow eurocentric theoretical framework.

Some mistrusted Chávez because he was a military man; others ridiculed him because he was an acknowledged Catholic; and yet others on the left have gone so far as saying Venezuela did not really have a revolution because its revolutionaries did not take up arms outright and kill the capitalists.

When speaking on panels about my homeland Venezuela, I have been confronted various times by those who want to see blood on the ground – not their blood of course, but somebody else’s.

They have said to me that because it was not born by taking up arms, like the Cuban Revolution, Venezuela’s is not truly a revolution.

In one of these occasions, I had the great honor of sitting next to the consul general of Cuba, who whispered in my ear to pay no attention to such nonsense, as if Fidel Castro and El Che had wanted to kill their compatriots, as if they had thought killing was the cornerstone of a socialist revolution.

The principles of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution
Venezuela’s revolution does include the analysis of Marx and Engels, but not exclusively so, because it is also based on Venezuela’s indigenous communitarian traditions, and on the principles of its revolutionary liberator Simón Bolívar.

These Bolivarian principles were sovereignty, egalitarianism, repudiation of slavery and imperialism, and regional Latin American integration.

The Bolivarian Revolution is also nurtured by other Venezuelan heroes, incorporating Simón Rodríguez’s views on education, or Ezequiel Zamora’s on land reform.

The genius of Hugo Chávez is that he was able to articulate a socialist ideology that was rooted in Venezuelan cultural and political history. Before that, socialist and communist inroads had been weak because they were seen as a foreign thing, Northern, theoretical, and alien to the history, culture, and cosmology of ordinary Venezuelans.

The Bolivarian Revolution is also humanistic and spiritual, inclusive, and respectful of indigenous cosmologies. It is inspired by Liberation Theology.

The Bolivarian Revolution is likewise participatory and democratic, as it gained power through the ballot box.

It does not follow the patterns of the revolutions in Russia, China, or even entirely in Cuba. It is its own thing. The Venezuelan people recognize it as “their” socialism.

The goals of Venezuela’s socialism are to obtain the health and happiness of a people who can exercise self-determination without foreign pressure, to rid racist and classist elites of political power so that the people have power both through democratic representation and through the exercise of participatory democracy in communes, collectives, and communal councils.

Chávez proclaimed socialism after the fall of the Berlin Wall, after the dissolution of the USSR, after the rumors that history had come to an end. In this way, Chávez showed the world that socialism was not remotely dead.

This flew in the face of those who, while professing socialism, were looking for the illusion of a “third way”.

Let us count the ways how revolutionary Venezuela is.

A quick comparison with the policies espoused by Marx in the Communist Manifesto, when considering the changes that time and history have brought about, shows a remarkable parallel with the policies and gains of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution:

*state-owned factories and instruments of production
*land reform and agricultural improvements
*raising the working class into a ruling class, to “win the battle of democracy”
*creating a national bank
*establishing a graduated income tax
*establishing public transport

Two of Marx’s proposed policies that have not been implemented in Venezuela are a centralized means of communication, which would not be accepted today in view of the human rights to freedom of speech, and the prohibition of inheritance rights. But many the fundamental policies considered by Marx are in full view in Venezuela’s revolution.

Venezuela’s victories
Venezuela has asserted its sovereignty over its natural resources, taking over control from elites and international corporations. This set a regional example of independence, which Washington considers a threat to its hegemony, especially given that Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world and the second-biggest gold fields.

Under the Bolivarian Revolution, Venezuelan society underwent a strong social transformation. This began by redefining the state itself, with a new constitution, anchored in the concepts of human rights, both individual and social rights, including the rights of indigenous peoples, the rights of women and children, and social rights to education, health, and a protected environment.

Venezuela has wrestled power from the comprador class, the supremist elites, the upper classes that had ruled for decades and drove their people into abject poverty, while wasting the equivalent of 15 Marshall Plans worth of wealth on corruption and illicit enrichment.

The revolution has reduced not only poverty but also inequality.

Venezuela’s participatory democracy does recognize private property, but also state, communal and social ownership. It also enshrines the communal state of communal councils and communes. These are not add-ons, but part of state power.

And these new forms of participatory democracy are truly distinct from the representative democracy and bourgeois state created by a market capitalist society, which is eminently individualistic and competitive.

The welfare state was designed to temper, to soften the market. But corporate capitalism declared war on the welfare state, and with much success.

Socialism bolsters the policies that preserve the common good.

Venezuela has carried out effective land reform, transforming agriculture to the point that today the nation has relatively more food security, and is even exporting food for the first time in 100 years.

This is due to the masterful policies of President Nicolás Maduro, who has steered the country through the illegal US sanctions that have almost destroyed the economy and killed 100,000 Venezuelans.

The Venezuelan working class has been the backbone of the productive invigoration of the economy.

President Maduro is referred to as “the worker president”, as he drove a bus for nine years in Caracas, and has strong links to and understanding of the working class and the unions.

President Maduro’s measures to diversify the economy, to implement an effective internal revenue system, revigorated the economy and battled inequality. He has successfully gotten rid of hyperinflation and made Venezuela a stronger more viable country.

Venezuela’s GDP is estimated to grow by an astonishing 20% in 2022, as calculated by Swiss bank Credit Suisse. This is after losing 99% of government revenue due to illegal US sanctions, according to the top UN expert. That is quite an extraordinary achievement.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, grassroots organizations, the communes, and communal councils, united with the PSUV and public health institutions to protect the people.

Due to illegal US sanctions, medical supplies and masks were sometimes unavailable, and vaccines were denied to Venezuela, but it was still very successful at controlling the pandemic, especially in the context of the region. Venezuela was eventually able to get vaccines thanks to the solidarity of China, Russia, and Cuba.

Disingenuous criticisms rooted in eurocentrism
While not demeaning for a second the very positive and brave, heroic struggles and contributions of members of the oldest political party in the country, the Communist Party of Venezuela, the fact is that it never achieved a significant popular following in or out of elections, because it was not rooted in the people’s profound sense of history, their culture, traditions, and spirituality.

The Bolivarian Revolution on the other hand was able to accomplish all of this, while also making clear the class struggles and dynamics of capitalism.

To its admirable merit, the Communist Party of Venezuela has supported the PSUV in particular in its struggles against imperialism, even when the party did not fully agree with Bolivarianism. This is a shining example of solidarity that the international left should learn from.

Domestically, many who proclaim to be on the left and who criticize the government and President Maduro are in fact armchair theorists who use the excuse of “self-criticism” to simply oppose a government and a movement which has rejected them and their advice, as they have been very far from the grassroots and real links to the people.

These criticisms are cheap as these figures bear no responsibility in feeding and nurturing a population, not to mention facing a formidable foreign power. They invariably end up becoming darlings of the right.

Venezuela does not think that it has already “arrived” at socialism; it considers this to be a process, a road that it must go down until the entire bourgeois state has been transformed.

Much of the Western left, on the other hand, has had reservations from the very beginning, if not openly criticizing Venezuela’s brand of socialism. The reasons are ugly, tainted by cultural determinism and even racism.

Firstly, there is eurocentrism. For many Northern leftists, anything that deviates from Marx and Engels, or any other Northern socialist movement, is not the “real thing”.

This is actually quite ironic, if not knee-slapping funny, in view of the fact that none of these Western theorists or activists have actually been able to carry out any socialist revolution in North America or Europe. Yet they think they have the right to point out to the “lesser” beings in Latin America what is real and what is not, and that they have got it all wrong.

Secondly, the foreign critics of the Bolivarian Revolution are often ignorant of the Venezuelan culture, specifically its political culture. And I suspect that this is a willful ignorance that is also tainted with racism.

They have not fully understood that there is not one road to socialism, but many; that Venezuela revolts at the thought that it has to pattern its revolution on one unique pattern, on a foreign strategy that would force it to give up its identity and its own idiosyncrasies.

As if these accomplishments were not enough – as if Venezuela’s heroic triumphs against illegal sanctions, paramilitary attacks, sabotages, assassinations, coup attempts, and demonization of the hybrid war were not enough – just consider the enemies that have lined up against Venezuela: the US empire and its allies, the international banking system, the international media, and all the fascist organizations of the world.

They do recognize a revolution when they see it. Why can’t much of the Northern left?

Despite such formidable challenges, Venezuela has prevailed and triumphed. Venezuela today is more unified, stronger, more economically viable, and a more politically determined nation on the road to socialism. So Venezuela must be doing something right.

The choice could not be clearer: Will the world continue to give a free ride to a devious, amoral, predatory imperialism? Or will the freely chosen, revolutionary socialism of Venezuela, which feeds, shelters, heals, clothes, inspires, and defends its people, be given the international recognition and solidarity that it deserves, as a road to hope, peace, and justice in the world?

Venezuela’s answer is the same as Cuba’s: Venceremos! We will prevail.

https://multipolarista.com/2022/04/29/i ... 49a157471d

Um, the Communist Party of Venezuela might take issue with this article....

Issues of tactics should be subject to criticism and analysis. Despite 48 pages in this thread I feel inadequate to make judgement, I ain't there.

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Survey: Only 9% of Venezuelans Back the Opposition
May 11, 2022

A recent poll shows that opposition support among Venezuelans has fallen to just 9%.

On Monday, May 9, the director of the pollster firm Hinterlaces, Óscar Schémel, released the results of a poll according to which the Venezuelan opposition only has 9% support among the people of the country, and former deputy Juan Guaidó’s support has fallen to 4%.

The poll also found that a lack of leadership and proposals, as well as corruption, are among the reasons for the opposition’s low numbers. “Venezuelans have enough experience to identify the oppositions’ weaknesses,” said Schémel.

Schémel discussed the poll numbers during the television program 360° broadcast by Venezuelan state media Venezolana de Televisión, and stressed that “the entire opposition leadership has to change.”

He also pointed out that, politically, the revolutionary Chavista forces have made progress, and an added factor is that the people believe that the government, led by Nicolás Maduro, is better prepared than the opposition to tackle the economic issues of the country.

In a study conducted in 2019 for Hinterlaces by polling firm Monitor País, the Chavista administration had a 32% preference, while the opposition as a whole had 16%, and 53% of the people contacted for the study had said they did not sympathize with any political group.

https://orinocotribune.com/survey-only- ... 49a157471d
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Venezuela

Post by blindpig » Wed May 18, 2022 2:11 pm

VENEZUELA TAKES WASHINGTON TO THE FIELD OF DIALOGUE AND NEGOTIATION
May 18, 2022 , 5:33 am .

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The Bolivarian Government gains a tactical advantage, forces Washington to reconsider its policy of aggression and recognize that the dialogue devised by President Maduro is the only possible framework for negotiation (Photo: Evan Vucci / AP)

SHORT SUMMARY

This Tuesday, May 17, in a publication by the Associated Press (AP), it transpired that the Joe Biden administration authorized a partial relief of the illegal "sanctions" that fall on Venezuela and its oil sector.

The AP information was later confirmed by Juan González, senior director of the United States National Security Council for the Western Hemisphere, and also by the executive vice president of the Republic, Delcy Rodríguez, who stated in the afternoon:


This measure announced by the United States translates into allowing the Chevron oil company to negotiate directly with Caracas the restart of oil exploitation operations in Venezuela, through a license intended for that purpose, in exchange for the resumption of the negotiation process. in Mexico, paralyzed after the kidnapping of the Venezuelan diplomat Alex Saab, a member of the dialogue table, in mid-October 2021.

CHEVRON'S LOBBYING

There are several movements that have forced Washington to take this step, which implies the reconsideration of its policy of aggression against Venezuela and the recognition of a disadvantaged situation marked by the global rise in oil prices due to the escalation of coercion economy against Russia.

First, the interests of Chevron itself. The oil company, taking advantage of the space for negotiation opened up by the trip of a US delegation to Caracas last March, increased its commitment to pressure inside the White House for a partial lifting of the punitive measures against PDVSA that would allow it to operate in the country.

The Wall Street Journal confirmed these pressures at the time. The company offered to double Venezuelan oil production in a short time, which would allow the United States to replace at least 700,000 barrels a day of crude oil of Russian origin that no longer enter the North American energy stream after a ban imposed by the White House . .

Chevron's pressure seems to be having results, however, a unilateral lifting of the coercive measures that allows it to restart its operations in Venezuela would bring with it unbearable political costs for Biden, especially in an election year with the midterm elections next November.

To avoid them, Washington has covered up its maneuver as an "act of good faith", whose apparent objective is to resume dialogue in Mexico, an alibi with which it seeks, through a narrative of support for the negotiations, to dilute its urgent need to access the Venezuelan oil. What confirms this interested calculation is that the first step taken in March with the trip to Caracas occurred in parallel to the prohibition of importing Russian crude oil and gas.

In this way, pressured by the circumstances, Washington uses the dialogue table in Mexico as a mechanism to save political costs that allows it to process a partial lifting of the "sanctions" against the backdrop of the negotiations with the Unitary Platform.

Washington's move also outlines the position of tactical advantage that the Bolivarian government has amid the current upheaval in the world economy, where Venezuelan oil, disconnected from the U.S. refinery circuit from 2017 onwards, is now in demand by the Biden administration. in an attempt to rebalance the energy map of the empire.

ANIMAL FARM: ANTI-SANCTIONS CONVERGENCE

At the beginning of last April, the so-called Civic Forum , a platform that links NGOs, activists and people from the business world, met with President Maduro at the Miraflores Palace. The meeting was interpreted as a challenge to the leading role of the remastered Unitarian Platform that represents the opposition in Mexico.

The fury of the G4 worsened days later with the sending of a public letter addressed to President Biden, in which 25 opponents linked to the media and private companies demanded the lifting of the "sanctions" due to their negative impact on the welfare of the population.

Both events resonated in national politics and unbalanced the Unitarian Platform, which saw itself without initiative and with the monopoly of the anti-Chavista agenda taken away for several days. The riot, however, had a greater impact: it became clear that the US policy has lost support in the opposition ecosystem, which makes its continuity an unsustainable fact in the medium term.

There is a political and social convergence against Washington's coercive measures that forces Biden to review immediately while dissatisfaction and distances grow. Proof of this is that the Unitarian Platform denied that it had requested "relief" from the oil sanctions, as indicated by AP.

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TUMULT IN THE MATCH

A few days ago, 18 congressmen from the Democratic Party, located in the far left wing of the organization, sent a letter to the US president where they demanded an unconditional lifting of the unilateral coercive measures against Venezuela and to continue the dialogue with Caracas.

The sequence of events and positions against "sanctions" in a matter of a few weeks have been a headache for the White House, since the rebellion at the Civic Forum farm and the "letter of the 25", now adds the clash within the ruling party in the United States itself.

The current quagmire in which Washington finds itself makes it unfeasible for the United States to increase sanctioning pressure, and this implies the global failure of the strategy of regime change through economic, financial and commercial warfare.

CONTEXT: SUMMIT OF THE AMERICAS AND THE CHINA FACTOR

The widespread claim in the Latin-Caribbean region and the bet of various leaders not to attend the IX Summit of the Americas due to the exclusion of Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua, also poses a challenge to the authority of the Biden administration, which is exposed to an inconsequential summit if it maintains this position, as has already been analyzed in this forum .

The step taken regarding Venezuela coincides with a relaxation of the restrictions on remittances, tourism and visas imposed by Trump against Cuba, which was recently approved.

The United States seeks to extricate itself from this scenario of hegemony and authority vacuum by recalibrating its foreign policy on the continent, pivoting on the central triangle of power of ALBA, under the well-known game of soft power , where the pro-human rights narrative, infiltration through NGOs and covert destabilization maneuvers protected by "citizen" and "civilian" figures replace direct attack.

The Biden administration understands that US influence in the economy, trade and investment in the Latin American region is being undermined by China, which is gaining ground with assertive strategic partnerships and a type of bilateral pact that does not condition the benefits of economic integration on a relationship of vassalage and geopolitical subordination to the American style.

Therefore, the bet now continues to be on the appeal of liberal American values, currently cannibalized by the identity drift led by the Democratic Party to counter China, divide the region and realign countries geopolitically, through methods culturally capturing postmoderns that may even be located in the progressive bloc.

The step taken by Washington with respect to Venezuela, in sync with the movement towards Cuba, must be evaluated within that idea of ​​readjustment of the continental profile , where the axis of gravity passes through soft assimilation in accordance with the agenda of anthropological dissolution of the Davos Forum .

THE IRANIAN KEY: PROVISIONAL CONCLUSIONS

Also, recently the Iranian state company National Iran Oil Engineering and Construction Company signed a 110 million euro contract with PDVSA to repower the El Palito refinery, in Carabobo state, in a sign of deepening the strategic alliance between both countries that have their respective oil sectors attacked by the United States.

The deal is key in light of the diplomatic plot to revive the nuclear deal in Vienna, the development of which has been stalled by the United States. This maintains in force the illegal restrictions that prevent Iran from trading its oil internationally normally, however, in early April, the Islamic Republic asserted that its production capacity returned to the standards prior to former President Trump's "maximum pressure" strategy. in 2018: more than 3 million barrels per day.

The important thing about this is that the alliance between the two countries allows Venezuela to access supplies, technological equipment and triangulation schemes for the commercialization of its oil, avoiding the actions of the US economic, financial and commercial war.

The normalization of these mechanisms over time has undermined the impact of the blockade, and now they acquire greater force in a context of high oil prices that helps Venezuela to continue consolidating its internal economic recovery. Both countries work in an alliance of cooperation and prolonged resistance adapted to a temporary extension of the imperial blockade and embargo.

This is of vital importance, since the offer made by Washington, the "gesture of good faith" for some unwary, may lose its attractiveness to extract important concessions from the Bolivarian Government. This is where the agreement with Iran has a fundamental relevance in the movements reported this May 17.

The Bolivarian Government is tactically in a position of advantage in the negotiation, and can take advantage of it to broaden its demands by taking Washington towards its terrain. With the sanctions machine in the process of wearing down and overheating, the Biden administration has a lot to give up in terms of real power and only symbolic aspects to gain.

https://misionverdad.com/venezuela/vene ... egociacion

Google Translator

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US Steps Back Some Sanctions Against Venezuela

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President Nicolas Maduro | Photo: Miraflores

Published 17 May 2022 (17 hours 58 minutes ago)

The U.S. Treasury Department issued a limited license to allow U.S. oil company Chevron to negotiate potential future activities in Venezuela, a senior official of Joe Biden's administration told reporters Tuesday.

"Treasury, with guidance from the State Department, issued a limited license authorizing Chevron to negotiate the terms of possible future activities in Venezuela. It does not allow them to enter into any agreements with PDVSA or any other activities involving PDVSA (Petroleos de Venezuela) or the Venezuelan oil sector. So, fundamentally, what they are doing is just allowing them to talk," he added.

There has been a rapprochement between Washington and Caracas in recent months on the energy issue.

Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro confirmed that he held a meeting in Caracas on March 5 with a delegation from Joe Biden's administration.

The White House said at that time that, for the time being, it is not considering buying oil from Venezuela. However, it indicated that energy security was discussed during the visit of its delegates, among other issues.

The Venezuelan oil industry, since 2017, has been the target of unilateral and illegal sanctions that prevent any transaction with companies using the U.S. banking system.

This is the first time since the rupture of relations in 2019 that both governments confirmed that they held conversations on the energy issue. This fact occurs amid the crisis between Russia and Ukraine, which has caused an abrupt rise in crude oil and its derivatives.

In response to the measures, Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodriguez took to Twitter and said:

"The Bolivarian Government of Venezuela has verified and confirmed the news published to the effect that the United States of America has authorized U.S. and European oil companies to negotiate and restart operations in Venezuela.

The world knows that Venezuela has taken its first steps on the road to economic recovery through its own efforts, denouncing and overcoming the illegitimate sanctions and the inhumane blockade. Our people are proud of the work and achievements of recent times.

Venezuela hopes that these decisions of the United States of America will initiate the path towards the absolute lifting of the illegal sanctions that affect all our people.

The Bolivarian Government of Venezuela, attached to its profound democratic values, will continue to tirelessly promote fruitful dialogue in national and international format."

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/US- ... -0011.html

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BOOK REVIEW BY MARK T. ESPER, FORMER PENTAGON CHIEF
THE MILITARIZATION OF TRUMP'S POLICY ON VENEZUELA: A SUMMARY
May 16, 2022 , 12:33 p.m.

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In his memoirs on his period as Secretary of Defense of the Donald Trump administration, Mark T. Esper recounts events that shock the Venezuelan population, and in the Global South in general, and which in turn confirms the reports of extraordinary threat that represents the United States over the sovereignty of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.

Under the title A Sacred Oath , Esper lavishes details of his work as head of the Pentagon from June 2019 to the November 2020 elections. Although, on the international level, he focuses on Washington's hybrid conflict against Iran and China, in its memoirs, offers some scenes in which issues related to Venezuela were decided or not decided.

In the third chapter, he directly mentions the efforts carried out by the US Navy in the Middle East through Operation Sentinel (Operation Sentinel) so that Iranian or Venezuelan ships were "arbitrarily intercepted on the high seas."

It specifically refers to the evasion of the oil embargo and naval blockade that the United States imposed on Venezuela and Iran; The Pentagon managed a military approach in which it tried to prevent relations between the two republics to trade and exchange technology related to the oil industry at a raw moment of coercive measures provided by the White House led by Trump, who considered the two countries allies as a direct threat to the US hegemonic plans of his administration.

Esper also mentions that Venezuela was always one of his concerns in the fifth chapter of his book. Let us remember that during the period that he was in charge of US military policy, there was a boom in the kidnapping of Venezuelan assets in North America and Europe under the celebrated mantle of the "interim government of Juan Guaidó", today in disgrace.

But in chapter 11, "Desperate Measures" ("Desperate Measures"), he expands extensively on Trump's policy regarding the Bolivarian Republic.

Although he tries to make a poor characterization of Chavismo and the country that it refounded, he admits that Guaidó "proclaimed himself interim president according to the national Constitution" (a truth followed by a lie) and that "Trump had focused on Venezuela from the first days of his administration, with his sights set on the use of military force to overthrow Maduro", this last issue was always in full view of everyone but which the extremist sectors of the opposition connected to the North American establishment consecutively denied.

Also, he refers that Trump never said why "it was so important" to overthrow President Nicolás Maduro, although he infers that it was a way to obtain Venezuelan oil reserves, collect monetary funds and votes in his favor in the future. We already know how it all ended.

Then, he specifies a meeting he had with John Bolton's successor on the National Security Council, Robert O'Brien, and Mike Pompeo (Secretary of State) on December 12, 2019, in which there was talk of taking "new steps about Venezuela".

Indeed, Trump's inner circle had held meetings, Esper says, in which "military options" were discussed, including the interception of Venezuelan oil tankers on the high seas, which he himself understood "had the potential to escalate in a warlike conflict", and "a show of naval force in the Caribbean", without referring to further details.

Within the National Security Council, however, the military options with the greatest impact were discussed, promoted by O'Brien himself and Mauricio Claver-Carone, senior director for the Western Hemisphere of said entity, who wanted to ascend politically within the community. Cuban-Venezuelan woman in Miami, according to the witness.

Esper says that, according to Trump's opinion, Guaidó seemed "weak" compared to Maduro's "robust" and "strong" position. In fact, the then magnate president had made a better impression on Fabiana Rosales, Guaidó's wife, than the "interim" himself. Laughable beyond.

However, during successive meetings in the White House, proposals were discussed to overthrow the Bolivarian Government with military options at hand, after other measures of hybrid warfare had failed in recent years.

One of them was a military attack on the José Antonio Anzoátegui Industrial, Petroleum and Petrochemical Complex, located in the north of Anzoátegui state, of strategic importance for the Venezuelan energy industry, with a view to national production and export. It was, according to Esper, a tactical operation, rather than a strategic one.

This was proposed by Roberto O'Brien on June 9, 2020, due to the problems the Pentagon was having intercepting oil tankers traveling from the Persian Gulf to the Caribbean seas.


But, according to the memoirs, Esper and other officials rejected the idea because it supposed a subsequent agglutination of forces around the Venezuelan Presidency in defense of national sovereignty. There was no consensus and they moved on to other ideas, such as cyber operations to the digital systems that control the infrastructure of the local economy and irregular warfare, which did take place, although without the claimed success.

In fact, Esper boasts of having met with Guaidó and his team in February 2020 to propose something more "strategic". We are going to quote him because he also has other components to comment on:

"I decided to put some more pressure on Guaidó and his colleagues about their ability to organize an expatriate force in Colombia. Apparently some 4.5 million Venezuelans had fled the country, many of them crossing the Colombian border to the west and the south to find refuge there.

"'If some of them could be trained and equipped by the United States,' I asked, 'would they really be willing to fight?' "I didn't want to take on this mission, but it seemed more feasible and acceptable to me than some of the options proposed by O'Brien and the National Security Council. In my mind, of course, I thought his real answer was that 'it would be much more easy and fast if the United States did it for us.' 'Okay,' I said, 'I understand. But putting that aside, Mr. President, would your people fight?' high degree of confidence.The failed uprising of the previous April [2019] came to mind.

when our eyes met, his face immediately went blank. Something was up."


It was Operation Gideon, which was carried out on May 3, 2020, yet another failure within the military strategy supported by the White House and with the direct participation of the Venezuelan extremist opposition, grouped in Voluntad Popular, and Colombia. uribista as a beachhead.

It should be noted that what Esper told clearly shows how US officials discuss coups, military operations and plans to destroy a sovereign country with the greatest impunity. There will be no international court or multilateral instance that brings justice to abuses of this type, and the Western media will not make any complaint about this type of action.

But it is also necessary to read more carefully that Esper mentions that the Voluntad Popular, in their meeting with the heads of the Pentagon, wanted the United States to invade Venezuela militarily and make Guaidó President. An objective by delegation worthy of the political sons of Leopoldo López, who is in Madrid after having escaped from Venezuelan justice in 2019.

In the same excerpt from the memoirs reproduced here, it is insinuated that the "special operation" was directed directly against President Nicolás Maduro. Operation Gideon, as it was denounced at the time, had the objective of committing assassination, based on the proposals of the South Florida lobby via Claver-Carone and the Guaidó trio, Julio Borges and Carlos Vecchio. And with the collusion of the US government, confirmed by Esper.


But the testimony does not end with the discussion of those plans and their corresponding failures. The naval blockade on the coasts of Cuba and Venezuela was proposed by O'Brien and Claver-Carone, even though this was an "act of war under international law," says the former Pentagon chief. Although this option fell off the table "because it was absurd", it is interesting to understand the dimension with which from the White House one idea after another took place that would lead to a conflict on a larger scale in the Caribbean basin in order to win votes and money in favor of a tycoon turned president of the United States.

It is noteworthy that, despite the unilateral coercive measures taken by the Donald Trump administration against the oil industry of the Bolivarian Republic, including the seizure of CITGO's physical assets, the confiscation of PDVSA accounts in foreign territories and the imposition of of rejecting all financial and commercial dealings with the Venezuelan state company, both the Pentagon officials and those of the National Security Council, the latter in Esper's opinion too belligerent, sought other possibilities to destroy the Venezuelan energy structure and infrastructure, being so important for the monetary income of the State and, therefore, of the entire society.

Seen this way, both the detention of oil tankers and the naval blockade and other measures taken and/or discussed in the White House bear that sign, so the fate of US actions must be understood not only to overthrow the government of President Nicolás Maduro but also to destroy the Bolivarian Republic as an existential entity, including its population regardless of political color. As has been denounced too much: the objective is the entire country, not just one sector.

All of this was confirmed by Mark T. Esper, who in his position was able to be a witness and a first-hand actor of everything that happened regarding Venezuela in the White House. His testimony, although he tries to impose a supremacist vision of US politics, helps to glimpse the motives and the ways in which Washington had been conspiring in recent years with the sole purpose of destroying a country for political gain, militarizing its foreign policy and giving rise to measures that are not optimal but dangerous for the existence of any other nation.

This is how a declining empire and its anti-national acolytes react.

https://misionverdad.com/venezuela/la-m ... un-resumen

Google Translator

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Venezuela Confirms US Authorized Oil Corporations to ‘Negotiate & Restart Operations’
May 18, 2022

The Vice President of Venezuela, Delcy Rodríguez, confirmed this Tuesday, May 17, that the US government authorized US and European oil companies to “negotiate and restart operations” in the South American country, amid a complex package of sanctions imposed by Washington against the Venezuelan people for over a decade.

“The Bolivarian government of Venezuela has verified and confirmed the news published to the effect that the United States of America has authorized US and European oil companies to negotiate and restart operations in Venezuela,” Rodríguez wrote via Twitter.

The senior official pointed out that her country hopes that this type of US decision “starts a path for the absolute lifting of illegal sanctions” that affect the Venezuelan population.

Rodríguez added that the international community is aware that Venezuela has achieved an “economic recovery with its own efforts” despite the illegitimate sanctions and the inhumane blockade imposed against the country by the US, the European Union, and other allied governments.

“Our people are proud of the work and achievements of recent times,” stated the vice president, who wrote that the Venezuelan government, “connected to its deep democratic values, will continue to tirelessly promote fruitful dialogue in national and international formats.”


What had the media said?

Prior to Caracas’s confirmation, the AP news agency reported—according to statements by senior US government officials who spoke on condition of anonymity—the changes that Washington would apply with respect to sanctions, and announced that the Biden administration will allow Chevron Corp. to negotiate its license with the state-owned Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), but not to drill or export oil of Venezuelan origin.

Other news agencies, including Spain’s EFE, citing a high-level official from the Biden administration, reported that during a call with journalists, Biden confirmed the lifting of Chevron’s ban on negotiating with PDVSA, and that the relief from sanctions seeks to try to reactivate the dialogue between the opposition and the Venezuelan government.

“I want to clarify that the government is doing this in response to the talks that are taking place between the regime and the interim government (of Juan Guaidó),” the official commented, repeating Washington’s old worn out script. Sanctions relief would also include the removal of some Venezuelans close to the government from the list of individuals sanctioned by the US.

For its part, The Wall Street Journal, in an article by its editorial board entitled “Biden’s dance with a Latino dictator,” published on Monday, referred to movements that US government and the Democrats would be advancing, with the aim of reestablishing relations with Venezuela and President Nicolás Maduro.

In the text, the Wall Street Journal quoted the Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who last week, in one of his morning press conferences, said that “there was already an agreement with Venezuela for a US company to extract one million barrels a day.”

“This is good for Venezuela, it’s good for the US , it’s good for the world,” added the Mexican president, while criticizing the US’s failed policy of illegal unilateral sanctions..

With conditions

Last March, a rapprochement between the US and Venezuela began. That month, a US delegation was received in Caracas by President Maduro, who described the meeting as “respectful, cordial” and “very diplomatic.”

After the meeting, Venezuela released two US prisoners: Gustavo Cárdenas, convicted of embezzlement, conspiring with a state contractor, and for conspiracy to commit a crime; and Jorge Fernández, accused of terrorism.

In addition, following the meeting the spokesperson for the US State Department, Ned Price, stated that Washington would “review” some sanctions policies, but under certain conditions.

“We will reconsider some sanctions policies if, and only if, the parties make significant progress in the negotiations led by Venezuela in Mexico, to achieve the fulfillment of the aspirations of the Venezuelan people for a true, authentic democracy,” Price commented again, repeating the familiar US script.

For his part, the then Venezuelan Foreign Minister, Félix Plasencia, said that Caracas would be willing to cooperate with the US with regard to oil trade, as long as “the sovereignty and legitimacy” of the government of Venezuela are respected.

“I hope they respect the sovereignty and legitimacy of my government,” Plasencia said. “President Maduro is the sole and legitimate head of government of Venezuela. We can do a lot together in the oil trade by convincing them to respect that.”

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

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Re: Venezuela

Post by blindpig » Tue May 24, 2022 2:18 pm

US Lawmakers Admit: US Sanctions a Lead Cause of Suffering in Venezuela
RQORINOCO MAY 16, 2022

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18 U.S. congressional lawmakers have called for a lifting of sanctions on Venezuela in a letter to Joe Biden, saying the policy has not only “failed to improve the situation” but has served to “exacerbate the humanitarian situation.”

“It is clear that broad sanctions have failed to achieve their aims. In light of this, and the dire human costs incurred, we urge you to lift all U.S. financial and sectoral sanctions that exacerbate the humanitarian situation, though without hindering or delaying the urgent action needed to transition the U.S. economy off of fossil fuels” reads the two-page statement, dated May 10th.

The statement also commends “recent efforts toward constructive engagement with the government of Venezuela” attributing the recent talks to the freeing of two U.S. citizens who’ve now been repatriated.

“The easing of sanctions would mark a critical step forward in the process of engagement and diplomacy that your administration has initiated and could contribute to the resolution of the political crisis and improve the well-being of the Venezuelan people. We are grateful for the steps that you have already taken to advance dialogue with the Venezuelan government. Now, we urge you to see them through.”

Congressional democrats go on to blame Trump for the hostile policy towards Venezuela despite that Latin America policy has at best maintained, if not worsened, since the start of the Biden administration.

“the policies pursued under the Trump administration not only failed to improve the situation in Venezuela, they significantly exacerbated it. Attempts to foment a military uprising, threats of armed intervention, the termination of all relations with Maduro and his allies, and the imposition of far-reaching sanctions served only to deepen Venezuela’s political crisis,” the letter elaborates.

Though this tragedy is the result of various factors, numerous studies have shown that U.S. sanctions have been one of the leading causes. And these impacts are not born equally: broad-based sanctions are widely known to disproportionately harm women and girls, as well as other vulnerable populations including people with disabilities or chronic diseases and Indigenous populations.”

Lawmakers, who’ve long kept silent, fell short of repudiating all illegal unilateral coercive measures, like the ones being leveled against Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua and several other countries.

Arizona Representative Raúl Grijalva and Illinois Representative Jesús Garcia led the appeal.

The full statement can be read here. https://grijalva.house.gov/wp-content/u ... Garcia.pdf

https://orinocotribune.com/us-lawmakers ... venezuela/

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Esper admits terror plotting against Venezuela
May 15, 2022

Trump’s Secretary of Defense, Mark T. Esper, dropped numerous confessions about the plotting against Venezuela which took place under the previous U.S. administration in his recently released memoir.

What follows are some of the details of the Trump administration’s coup and terror conspiring with the Venezuelan far-right opposition, which Esper elaborates in A Sacred Oath: Memoirs of a Secretary of Defense During Extraordinary Times. Venezuela’s Ambassador, Permanent Representative to the UN, Samuel Moncada, outlined Esper’s admissions in a Twitter thread, which we’ve adapted into an article.


President Maduro’s assassination was discussed at the White House in the presence of Guaidó, Borges and Vecchio. Mauricio Claver-Carone was part of the plan similar to the planned assassination of Haitian President using Colombian mercenaries. However, in Venezuela, it failed.

On February 5, 2020, Trump received Juan Guaidó, Julio Borges and Carlos Vecchio at the White House to discuss the invasion of Venezuela and the assassination of President Maduro.

There were two meetings; in the first one, Trump asked Guaidó directly, “What if the U.S. military went down there and got rid of Maduro?” Guaidó replied, “Of course we would always welcome U.S. assistance.”

However, Guaidó also said that Venezuelans in Colombia wanted to “take back the country themselves”. Defense Secretary Esper thought he understood that Guaidó was asking for help for an invasion with mercenaries coming from Colombia, but he misunderstood.

Esper asked Guaidó: “would your people really be willing to organize, train, and fight?” After beating around the bush, Guaidó: “yes, they would”.

For Esper, the answer was weak and “didn’t sound reassuring”. They moved on to a second meeting.

Trump’s National Security Advisor, Robert O’Brien, continued to evaluate direct military actions by the U.S. during the second meeting and Guaidó, Borges and Vecchio accepted the ideas. Esper again pressed Guaidó with the notion of invading from Colombia.

The Defense Secretary asked again: “If some of them (Venezuelans) could be trained and equipped by the U.S., would they really be willing to fight?” Esper said that Guaido and the rest never gave a clear answer except to say that the plan would be complicated and take a long time.

In his mind, Esper actually understood what Guaidó, Borges and Vecchio were saying: “It would be so much easier and quicker if the U.S. would do this for us.” They were calling for a U.S. military invasion of Venezuela.



Esper would ask a third time: “ok, but putting that aside, Mr President, would your people fight?” There was no clear answer. Esper took it as confirmation of what he already believed: that the Venezuelan opposition would fight “until the last American” if the U.S. offered to send troops. (It’s unclear what “people” Esper was referring to since the far-right opposition was never able to command over troops and was found to be employing mercenaries in Colombia.)

Guaidó, Borges and Vecchio discussed direct U.S. military invasion (preferable), mercenary invasion from Colombia (complicated) and went from a large scale to a special operation against President Maduro. They discussed the assassination of the President of Venezuela.


On that point, a Venezuelan who was not Guaidó (Borges or Vecchio) said: “We have some plans you [the U.S. government] know we are working on, they’re just not ready yet” with a quick reference to Florida.

As he finished the sentence, he smiled, and made eye contact with then senior director at the U.S. National Security Council, Mauricio Claver-Carone.

Claver-Carone was described by Esper as the person who was “pressing the hardest for military action”. He knew of the secret plan by Guaidó, Borges and Vecchio to assassinate President Maduro. The U.S. government did know what was in the works.

Esper, however, claims to have been unaware of what Guaidó and Claver-Carone were preparing. He asked CIA Director Gina Haspel who replied that she didn’t know, but would find out what it was all about. Esper thought, “If she and I weren’t knowledgeable of any special operation by the opposition, then who was?”

Three months after Guaidó’s meeting, “Operation Gideon”, a plot to assassinate President Maduro with a group of mercenaries trained and equipped in Colombia was attempted and foiled.

Secretary Esper concludes that the Venezuelan opposition’s inability to take out President Maduro is what led Trump to see Guaidó as “weak,” unable to replace President Maduro, whom he saw as “strong.” Trump looked down on Guaidó because they went begging for U.S. troops to invade their own country—while Maduro was fighting the invasion.

Not long after, U.S. authorities would propose a terror plot on a Venezuelan oil refinery.

On June 9, 2020, National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien proposed a military attack on the José Antonio Anzoátegui Petrochemical and Industrial Complex in a meeting of the National Security Council. Esper himself, who was at the meeting, confesses it.

Their tactical objective was to cripple Venezuela’s oil economy to achieve the strategic goal of overthrowing President Maduro and imposing Juan Guaidó as head of government through chaos and popular unrest.

It would be executed with either an airstrike on the oil complex or an amphibious assault with special U.S. naval troops. The act of war would comply with the continuous calls for military action that Trump, along with Mike Pompeo, had demanded since 2017.

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Secretary Esper, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mr. Milley and CIA Director Gina Haspel all agreed that the attack was a counterproductive act of war which would unite the people in support of President Maduro.

The group didn’t endorse the military attack and instead proposed cyber operations (attacks on the digital control systems of the economic infrastructure) and covert operations supported by the U.S. but executed by the Venezuelan opposition within Venezuela.

General Milley also proposed irregular warfare operations (e.g. Nicaragua’s Contras) executed by Venezuelan mercenaries trained in Colombia. This idea was presented to Guaidó several times during the meeting with Trump at the White House on February 5, 2020.

https://kawsachunnews.com/esper-admits- ... -venezuela
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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