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Re: Venezuela

Post by blindpig » Wed Mar 20, 2019 6:41 pm

Ricardo Hausmann’s 'Morning After' for Venezuela: The Neoliberal Brain Behind Juan Guaido’s Economic Agenda
While online audiences know YouTube comedian Joanna Hausmann from her videos making the case for regime change, her economist father has flown below the radar. His record holds the key to understanding what the U.S. wants in Venezuela.

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Ricardo Hausmann speaks at the “Us and prosperity” conference organized by the Rafael del Pino Foundation on June 7, 2017. in Madrid, Spain. (Rafael del Pino Foundation/Creative Commons)

By Anya Parampil - MintPress News
Mar 14th 2019 at 1.29pm

If you’ve followed Venezuela-related news on social media, you’ve undoubtedly stumbled across a video released by comedian Joanna Hausmann in which she promises to tell you, “What’s Happening in Venezuela: Just the Facts.” Despite a title designed to instill confidence in the uninformed viewer, upon closer examination the “facts” presented in Hausman’s video hardly stand the test of reality.

Hausmann, for example, attempted to pass off dubious assertions that Venezuelan opposition leader “Juan Guaidó is not right wing,” and that he “did not just declare himself president” of the country. She also claimed that President Nicolas Maduro “made up” the National Constituent Assembly, neglecting to mention that that governing body was clearly defined in the country’s 1999 Constitution, which was ratified by 71.8 percent of the country through a democratic vote.

Hausmann’s performance ended with a teary-eyed appeal for sympathy: “On a personal level… my father is exiled from going back home.” For a video dedicated to “just the facts,” Hausmann’s rant omitted an especially pertinent piece of information: her exiled father and the rest of her family are no ordinary Venezuelans, and are, in fact, key players in the bid to bring down the elected government.

Much of Hausmann’s script echoed talking points outlined by her father, Ricardo Hausmann, in a 2018 article ominously entitled “D-Day Venezuela.” The piece amounted to a plea for the U.S. to depose Maduro by force, with Hausmann arguing that “military intervention by a coalition of regional forces may be the only way to end a man-made famine threatening millions of lives.”

But Ricardo Hausmann is much more than a prominent pundit. He is one of the West’s leading neoliberal economists, who played an unsavory role during the 1980s and ’90s in devising policies that enabled the looting of Venezuela’s economy by international capital and provoked devastating social turmoil.

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Ricardo Hausmann attends the World Economic Forum on Latin America in Rio de Janeiro, April 16, 2009. (Ricardo Moraes / AP)

Ricardo Hausmann attends the World Economic Forum on Latin America in Rio de Janeiro, April 16, 2009. (Ricardo Moraes / AP)
Hausmann emerged among a group of neoliberal economists gathered around the Instituto de Estudios Superiores de Administración (IESA), a private university in Caracas. They came to be known in Venezuela as “the IESA Boys,” a not-so-affectionate reference to the Chicago Boys who were imported into Chile from the University of Chicago in 1973 to devise shock-therapy policies for Augusto Pinochet and his military junta.

The popular rejection of the IESA Boys’ agenda began with the Carazao of 1989, a massive revolt that consumed the capital of Caracas when poor and working-class Venezuelans rioted in protest of an IMF package that mandated harsh austerity. Thousands of dead civilians and three years later, Hausmann entered government to impose more shock therapy on the most vulnerable Venezuelans, making the rise of Hugo Chávez as president in 1998 practically inevitable.

While unknown to most Venezuelans, Hausmann remains a key player in his country’s tumultuous politics. During a talk at the World Affairs Council of Greater Houston in November 2018, he eerily predicted Guaidó’s self-proclaimed presidency, telling the crowd “the international community is now focused on the idea that… January 10th is the end of the presidential period of Nicolás Maduro.”

“On January 11th, Nicolás Maduro will not be recognized as… the legitimate president of Venezuela,” Hausmann anticipated. “I think that’s an important date.”

On January 11th, when Juan Guaidó declared his preparedness to become president of Venezuela, the Harvard professor’s prophecy was fulfilled.

Almost two months later, Guaidó appointed Hausmann to serve as his representative at the Inter-American Development Bank. This was perhaps the best signal of what lies in store for Venezuela if Guaidó and his benefactors in the Trump administration achieve their goal of regime change. Hausmann’s return to power spells the restoration of the IESA Boys’ agenda, bringing neoliberal austerity back with a vengeance. A detailed look at his history is a preview of what lurks on the horizon for the poor and working-class Venezuelans whose lives improved the most throughout the era of Chavismo.

The wreckage of the IESA Boys
The neoliberal Venezuelan economist Juan Cristóbal Nagel described the neoliberal economics plan he favored for his country during the late 1980’s as “your basic Washington Consensus recipe.” Nagel said the plan consisted of the following ingredients: an end to price controls on basic goods and subsidies for gasoline; the privatization of state utilities; a decision to float the country’s exchange rate; and the lowering of tariffs. The recipe was popularly known as “El Gran Viraje,” or the Great Turn, to radical free-market capitalism.

While campaigning for Venezuela’s 1988 presidential elections, Carlos Andrés Pérez of the social-democratic Acción Democrática Party (AD) slammed the International Monetary Fund as a “neutron bomb that killed people but left buildings standing.” Immediately upon taking office, however, Pérez filled the IMF’s toxic economic prescription for Venezuela’s ailing economy, accepting a massive loan that completed the “Gran Viraje.”

The reforms led to a 30 percent hike in bus fares, announced in February 1989, prompting masses of workers to flood the streets in cities nationwide to publicly reject the bitter pill Pérez was forcing down their throats. Pérez opted to violently suppress the uprising, known as the “Caracazo,” declaring a national emergency and deploying the military to extinguish the revolt. By the time the it was over, anywhere between 300 to 3,000 people were dead, with piles of bodies discovered in mass graves outside of Caracas, the casualties of execution-style killings.

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Residents of Petare, in eastern Caracas, bring down the bodies of two men killed during the Caracazo on Feb. 28, 1989. (Fresso / AP)

Ricardo Hausmann entered Venezuela’s government under Pérez, serving as his Planning and Finance Minister from 1992 to 1993 while sitting on the board of the country’s Central Bank. Hausmann has claimed that he was at Oxford University when the Caracazo erupted, though he had already made his mark on the government’s economic policies.

“Hausmann will tell you that he was abroad at Oxford during the Caracazo rebellion,” says George Ciccariello-Maher, author of We Created Chávez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution.

“While this may be true” explained Ciccariello-Maher, “[Hausmann] had already spent years in a number of government positions going back to the mid-1980s, and as a key ‘IESA boy,’ spreading neoliberal doctrine from his professorship at the Institute.”

Indeed, before Pérez tapped Hausmann to serve as planning minister, the economist had worked also as a professor at the IESA.

“It was a classic bait-and-switch,” said Ciccariello-Maher. “Pérez had just been elected using anti-neoliberal rhetoric, but he immediately appointed an IESA-dominated cabinet and did the opposite.”

In his book Windfall to Curse: Oil and Industrialization in Venezuela, economist Jonathan Di John wrote that “Pérez was greatly influenced” by IESA academics, characterizing them as “an elite group… who had no party affiliation and were champions of radical, neoliberal reform.”

According to Di John, this group initiated “rapid liberalization reforms,” specifically in trade policy, including reducing the maximum tariff “from 135 percent, one of the highest in the region, to 20 percent by 1992.” A year later, that rate would fall to 10 percent. In other words, Pérez, Hausmann, and the “ISEA Boys” had opened up Venezuela for a free run by multinational corporations while gutting whatever was left of the welfare state.

In 1994, Hausmann received his golden parachute with a post as chief economist for the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington. This institution, which claims to “improve lives in Latin America and the Caribbean” by providing “financial and technical support to reduce poverty and inequality,” is just another mechanism for imposing the Washington consensus. The U.S. controls 30 percent of the bank’s voting power over financial decisions even though it is not situated in Latin America, where the bank is supposed to do its work. Meanwhile, all 26 Caribbean and Latin American member states carry only a 50 percent sway over the bank’s decisions.

While Hausmann perpetuated his brand of neoliberalism from Washington, a movement was building in the barracks and barrios of Venezuela to exert popular control over the economy. It was led by a charismatic military man named Hugo Chávez.

Revolt against the austerity agenda
During the late 1980s, as Lt. Col. Chávez watched the wholesale ravaging of his country’s economy by foreign capital, he formed a cadre of populist officers called the Bolivarian Revolutionary Movement 200. In 1992, Chávez led the officers in an attempted military coup against the government of Pérez, hoping to ride the wave of popular resentment for the neoliberal policies enforced by Hausmann and his fellow IESA boys. Though he initially failed, Chávez captured the mood of the Venezuelan public, including sectors of the middle class, and emerged as a national folk hero.

Even mainstream U.S. media conceded that Chávez had a point. At the time, the Washington Post identified him as the leader of a popular movement challenging Perez “for not instituting a viable democracy and stewarding an economic program that has not served the country’s poor.”

In contrast to the Post’s contemporary coverage of Venezuela, which reads like an information-warfare campaign on behalf of the anti-Chávez opposition, the Post at that time freely conceded public dissatisfaction with the IESA reforms: “Many people around Caracas banged on pots and pans today and shouted out of their windows in support of the rebels,” the paper noted.

It added:

Venezuela, the third-largest producer in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries cartel, has been wracked by unrest. Critics accuse the government of not distributing oil riches to the public, citing corruption as a cause.”

For its part, the New York Times reported:

The coup attempt followed violent protests and labor unrest arising from a growing disparity between rich and poor in Venezuela. The Government has admitted that only 57 percent of Venezuelans are able to afford more than one meal a day.”

The Guardian also described the military insurrection as a popular insurgency against the ruthless austerity program of Pérez’s IESA Boys:

The underlying cause of the military unrest is undoubtedly the widespread social discontent. When he came back to power three years ago, President Pérez was expected to repeat the expansionist policies of his first term of office in the late 1970s when Venezuela was one of the richest countries in the developing world, enjoying the easy wealth brought by its huge oil reserves.

But Mr. Pérez overnight adopted the liberal economic policies dominant in most of the Western world. He cut back heavily on government spending, opening up the economy to market forces and international competition.”

Across the board, mainstream media identified the economic program imposed under the watch of Hausmann and his colleagues as the force driving Pérez’s unpopularity. Though Chávez failed to take control of the state in 1992, calling for his comrades to lay down arms following his failed revolt, he declared that “now is the time to reflect,” promising “new situations will come.”

“The same month that Chávez led a failed coup against the Pérez government, Hausmann officially joined the government as planning minister,” recalled Ciccariello-Maher, adding:

It’s not clear to me whether it’s better to have been in charge when the government instituted a brutal neoliberal reform package, or to willingly join that same government after it had massacred hundreds, if not thousands, who resisted the reforms.”

Six years later, Chávez won democratic elections for president, convening a national assembly and referendum to rewrite the country’s constitution and alter the character of the Venezuelan state in a dramatic fashion.

By this time, Hausmann and his wife, Ana Julia Jatar, who also served in the Pérez administration, had left for high-flying careers Washington, where Hausmann took over as Chief Economist at the Inter-American Development Bank. While her husband worked at the bank, Jatar was a Senior Fellow at the Inter-American Dialogue, a think-tank primarily funded by Chevron, the Ford Foundation, USAID, and her husband’s employer.

In 2000, Hausmann took a professorial job at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, watching and waiting for an opportunity to return to power in his home country.

“Neoliberalism is the path to hell”
Back in Venezuela, the Bolivarian Revolution ushered in by Chávez provided an antidote to the IESA method that had produced so much social damage to Venezuela’s majority.

“The Bolivarian Revolution was an indirect response to neoliberalism, born of mass resistance in the streets,” claims Ciccariello-Maher, observing that while “in power, it remained largely faithful to that mission.”

Ciccariello-Maher added that “it would be difficult to exaggerate the impact Chavismo has had on Venezuelan society,” because for the first time in its history “oil was put at the service of the people. …Most important, however, the poor – so long excluded – became ‘protagonists’ in the political life of Venezuela, and active participants in local direct democracy.”

Chávez moved to nationalize not only the country’s prosperous oil resources, booting ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips from the field, but also centers of agricultural production, telecommunications, and mineral mining. Considering Venezuela sits atop the largest oil reserves in the world, as well as sizeable gold stocks, this achievement was no small feat.

In his 1998 inaugural address, Chávez cited Pope John Paul II as having described capitalism as “savage,” using the words of His Holiness to highlight the social damage left behind by Hausmann and his colleagues. Chavez declared:

It is savage that in a country like ours more than half of preschoolers are not going to preschool. It is savage to know that only one out of every five children who enter preschool, only one in five finishes elementary school. That is savage because that is the future of this country.”

In 2002, just one month after facing down a U.S.-backed coup attempt, Chávez addressed a conference in Madrid declaring “neoliberalism is the path to hell.” Unlike Pérez, Venezuela’s new leader would not sell out his promise to reject the IMF’s austerity agenda.

The Hausmann clan versus Chavismo
During the Chávez era, the Hausmann family was not content to sit on the sidelines and watch him build a “21st-century socialism.”

Joanna’s mother, Ana Julia Jatar, assumed a position as executive director of Súmate, a U.S.-backed “civil society group” formed by right-wing darling María Corina Machado in order to “build democracy” in Venezuela.

In 2003, Súmate received $53,400 from the National Endowment for Democracy “to work on referendum and general electoral activities,” according to a U.S. diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks.

The initiative represented Jatar and Machado’s attempt to remove Chávez from power through popular recall. Yet the public rejected the referendum by a whopping 59 percent margin, in results certified by the Carter Center and Organization of American States.

Seeking to defend his wife’s failed project, Ricardo Hausmann co-authored a paper that he insisted “open[ed] the door to… hypotheses of fraud” marring the vote. His argument was thoroughly rebuked in an extensive study issued by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, which determined Hausmann and his co-author, M.I.T’s Roberto Rigobon, “provide no evidence of fraud.”

Súmate’s subsequent efforts to label the vote as fraudulent were also rebuffed in a comprehensive report released by the Carter Center, which concluded: “the Aug. 15 vote clearly expressed the will of the Venezuelan electorate.” The Carter Center concluded that it “did not observe, and has not received, credible evidence of fraud that would have changed the outcome of the vote.”

Despite Súmate’s failures, President George W. Bush welcomed Machado to the White House in 2005. In the Oval Office, Bush heralded her efforts “to defend the electoral and constitutional rights of all Venezuelan citizens” and monitor the country’s elections.

Sociologist William I. Robinson told Venezuelanalysis that Súmate was part of “a full-blown operation, a massive foreign-policy operation to undermine the Venezuelan revolution, to overthrow the government of Hugo Chávez, and to reinstall the elite back in power in Venezuela.”

Such elites include multiple members of Joanna Hausmann’s clan.

“My extended family, they go out on these protests,” the YouTube comedian declared in her video. “My uncle is in jail for simply being a journalist.”

That uncle is Ana Julia’s brother, Braulio Jatar, and he was not “simply” a journalist, but also a lawyer and businessman jailed not for “journalism,” but rather for extortion, fraud, and other financial crimes.

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Ana Julia Jatar and her father, Braulio Jatar Dotti. (NotiEspartano)

Ana Julia and Braulio were the children of Braulio Jatar Dotti, who served as Secretary for Parliamentary and Municipal Affairs in the ruling Democratic Action party while it was engaged in a violent battle against the armed Revolutionary Left Movement.

The independent Chilean news site El Desconcierto described Braulio Sr. as having been “in charge of eliminating the leftist groups” in Venezuela at the time. In 1963, he literally wrote the book on how to disable the “extreme left” and guerillas. It was called, “Disabling the Extreme Left and the Corian Guerillas.”

Hausmann’s power play for “opening up the oil industry”
Fast forward to 2019, and Joanna Hausmann sits comfortably in her New York City apartment, complaining that “the Venezuelan economy is a disaster in a country that sits on the world’s largest oil reserves.”

Meanwhile, Joanna’s father, Ricardo, has been barnstorming the U.S. to drum up support at elite think tanks for a coup he clearly saw on the horizon. During his November 2018 address to the World Affairs Council of Greater Houston, which functions as a roundtable for U.S. oil executives, Hausmann laid out his agenda for “the morning after” regime change.

The economist called for an end to the Bolivarian government’s policy of investing oil wealth into Venezuelan society, stating his support for “private investment in the oil industry without PDVSA participation.” In fact, Hausmann imagined “the opening up of the oil industry” as a top item on the new government’s agenda.

The selection of Ricardo Hausmann to serve at the Inter-American Development Bank by Guaidó’s U.S. handlers demonstrates how central neoliberal economics are to his own administration.

“This is about people,” Joanna Hausmann insisted at the end of her YouTube performance; “this is about people wanting to take their country back.”

Those people include her family, and they are not your average Venezuelans.

Anya Parampil is a Washington, DC-based journalist. She previously hosted a daily progressive afternoon news program called In Question on RT America. She has produced and reported several documentaries, including on the ground reports from the Korean peninsula and Palestine.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Venezuelanalysis editorial staff.

https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/14382

Quite simply class warfare, but capitalist media cannot & will not admit it.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Venezuela

Post by blindpig » Thu Mar 21, 2019 1:18 pm

US Imposes New Sanctions as Venezuelan Government Denounces Takeover of Diplomatic Offices
Trump warned that the “toughest sanctions” have yet to be imposed.

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State-owned mining company Minerven gold processing plant. Minerven has become the latest target of US sanctions. (Ultimas Noticias)

By Ricardo Vaz
Mar 20th 2019 at 3.45pm

The move blocks all eventual assets in the US in which Minerven and Perdomo hold more than 50 percent of shares, and also blocks all US persons and companies from dealing with them.

“Treasury is targeting gold processor Minerven and its president for propping up the inner circle of the corrupt Maduro regime,” Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin said in a statement.

Minerven operates in the eastern state of Bolivar and is part of the state-owned basic industry conglomerate Venezuelan Corporation of Guayana (CVG). It owns several gold-processing plants and produces gold bars from both state-run and small scale independent mining operations.

Venezuela sits on the world’s second largest certified gold reserves and has sought to increase mining operations in the so-called Orinoco Mining Arc in the east of the country. However, these mega-mining projects have also drawn criticism for their social and environmental impact on the biodiversity-rich region.

Reuters had reported on March 14 that Uganda was investigating its largest gold refinery for allegedly importing US $300 million worth of gold from Venezuela. The African Gold Refinery confirmed that the gold had originated in South America but denied any wrongdoing.

Sanctions from the US, Canada and Europe have seen Venezuela look for alternative partners for gold refining operations, with Turkey chief among them. Financial sanctions, which have hampered all transactions and blocked Venezuelan accounts abroad, have also seen Caracas increasingly turn to gold as a source of hard currency to fund imports. These operations have also been targeted by Western governments, with the Bank of England refusing to repatriate an estimated $1.2 billion of Venezuelan gold.

The US Treasury Department has also targeted Venezuela’s oil sector, the main source of export revenue, with a de facto oil embargo imposed January 28 that will cost the country an estimated $11 billion in export revenue in 2019. UN human rights expert Idriss Jazairy said in late January that “economic sanctions are effectively compounding the grave [economic] crisis,” adding his concern that the unilateral measures “are aimed at changing the government of Venezuela.”

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Trump and Bolsonaro met in the White House and set sights on Venezuela (Reuters)

US President Donald Trump reiterated on Tuesday that “all options are on the table” regarding Venezuela, including a military intervention, warning that the “toughest sanctions” have yet to be imposed. US officials have floated the possibility of imposing “secondary sanctions” on non-US entities that trade with Venezuela, mirroring the sanctions regime imposed on Iran.

Trump’s statements came during a visit by Brazilian right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro to the White House. Trump announced he would appoint Brazil as a non-NATO strategic ally, opening the door to military agreements and joint operations. For his part, Bolsonaro expressed his admiration for Trump and endorsed the plan to build a wall on the US-Mexico border. Venezuela was also a recurring theme during the former army captain’s US tour.

“We need to solve the Venezuela issue,” Bolsonaro said in a speech at the US Chamber of Commerce, “We are counting on US support to achieve that. There is a lot we can do together,” he went on to say.

Venezuelan authorities reacted on Tuesday evening, with Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza issuing a statement rejecting the “dangerous declarations” by Trump and Bolsonaro and denouncing threats to peace in the region.

Bolsonaro’s visit coincided with an announcement by US State Department spokesman Roberto Palladino that two military attache buildings in Washington DC and the consulate in New York City were taken over by representatives of self-proclaimed “Interim President” Juan Guaido, and that the Trump administration was "pleased to support these requests."

In response, the Venezuelan government denounced the “forceful and illegal” occupation of its diplomatic offices in US territory. The Foreign Ministry said in a statement that it reserved the right to take “corresponding reciprocal actions” on Venezuelan territory.

US solidarity movements mobilized in reaction to the break-ins, with a picket outside the Manhattan consulate stopping a celebratory gala from taking place, and Code Pink activists sleeping in the Washington DC embassy to prevent it from being occupied.

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Protesters rallied outside the Venezuelan consulate in Manhattan after it was occupied by Guaido's representatives. (People's Dispatch)

The takeovers come just days after opposition leader Juan Guaido announced over the weekend that efforts to oust the Maduro government were entering a “new phase” with a nationwide tour.

“Very soon, when we have visited and organized every inch [of Venezuela] we will go to Miraflores [Presidential Palace] and reclaim what belongs to the Venezuelan people,” he told a crowd of supporters in the city of Valencia on Saturday, dubbing the tour “Operation Freedom.”

Guaido also urged his supporters to “talk nicely” to public officials and members of the armed forces in order to persuade them. He had announced a “phased strike” in the public sector last week but no more information has yet been made public.

The opposition-controlled National Assembly, which has been in contempt of court since 2016, approved on Tuesday an “amnesty” bill that would allow military officers to keep their posts and ranks should they choose to back Guaido’s efforts in ousting the Venezuelan government. US officials reacted on social media, urging the military to take Guaido’s offer of amnesty, with Florida Senator Marco Rubio tweeting that “it only gets worse from here” and National Security Advisor John Bolton saying that “U.S. sanctions can be removed if you do the right thing.”

For its part, the Maduro administration has indicated that a cabinet reshuffle is imminent with Vice President Delcy Rodriguez tweeting that President Maduro had asked all high ranking officials to make their posts available for a “deep restructuring.”

No further details are known at the time of writing, with some popular movements seizing the opportunity to demand a radical reorientation of government policies, using the hashtag “New Faces and Radicalization” on social media (#CarasNuevasYRadicalización).

https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/14396

It is class warfare and that is what must be driven home.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Venezuela

Post by blindpig » Sat Mar 23, 2019 1:20 pm

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Blackout in Curacas
Impacts of electrical sabotage: an insider’s view
Posted Mar 21, 2019 by Eds.

Originally published: Mision Verdad by Bruno Sgarzini (Translated by Francisco Domínguez) (March 13, 2019) |
The following article, translated from Misión Verdad, is slightly modified from the original to improve readability. —Eds.

On Monday, President Nicolás Maduro reported that the electricity attack, which interrupted service in most of the country, consisted of four phases:

A cyber attack on the computerized system at the Guri Hydroelectric Power Plant, which directs and self-regulates the entire process of generation and distribution of the country’s main plant. “The screens were black, the driving map was lost. That’s how we spent more than 36 hours,” said the president.
Another attack on the computerized system of the driving brain of the state-owned electric company Corpoelec located in Caracas. “It was also blacked out, annulled, dead,” explained the president about these cyber-attacks that originated in Houston and Chicago.
A third attack against the distribution lines through mobile devices, digitalized from the United States, which caused electromagnetic overloads. “They were positioned on the transmission towers and on the large cables to knock down the transmission in order to interrupt and reverse the recovery of the system,” he said.
The burning down of electricity substations such as those that occurred in Prados del Este (Baruta), Acarigua, El Hatillo, among other obvious attacks against the electricity system. These type of attacks focused, by all possible means, on preventing the last stretch of service recovery from occurring with normality.

This Tuesday, March 12, the Minister of Communication Jorge Rodriguez denounced that the gas supply of the Tacoa thermoelectric plant, in Vargas state, was cut off in order to provoke an explosion that could have generated dozens of deaths. “Tacoa could have supplied Greater Caracas after the sabotage, but it was damaged by this explosion,” the minister said shortly before detailing another serious attack on a transmission tower in Zulia at the time service was restored on Monday 11.

SYSTEM CHARACTERISTICS, VULNERABILITIES AND THE CASCADE EFFECT
Pablo Varela, former advisor on Renewable Energies and Planning at the Ministry of Energy, explained to Misión Verdad that Venezuela’s electricity system is currently vulnerable due to several factors:

One is the growing difference between what it needs to maintain it, given the constant price rise of its inputs and equipment, and oil prices that since the 1980s have not been able to match both figures. This generates a structural situation in which an electricity system created as of the “first world” is maintained with the ups and downs of raw materials sold by a peripheral country, now blocked from the financial markets.
As a consequence there is another factor: the maintenance of the system is structurally affected by the economic crisis, and acts of corruption, which in the case of thermoelectric plants, aggravate the situation.
And finally, the size of the system that with a stretch of more than 20,000 kilometres, including the distribution spider’s web, makes it difficult to protect from attacks and sabotage.
According to Varela, this reality means that deliberate sabotage can have effects such as cutting off the supply throughout the country, if adequate resources are available to the saboteurs. In his opinion, in this way it is possible to induce a situation of paralysis, in synchrony with attacks against the generation, transformation and distribution of electricity. Or simply to promote a “disorder” that generates a cascade effect that expands the damage caused. Especially if one takes into account that the level of failures in areas such as transformation and distribution is between 40% and 60%, a very high level according to the technician.

“Venezuela, as a country besieged by a form of modern warfare, is vulnerable to this type of attack at a time when, moreover, for several years there has been systematic sabotage of the electricity system,” Varela says. In that sense, one of the many attacks against the system remembered by Varela is that of September 3, 2013, when there was a deliberate failure in a Guri transmission line that left 15 states without service, as Misión Verdad reported that year.

The opposition blamed the cut, at the time, on a fire allegedly caused by the lack of cutting and pruning of vegetation, according to a statement from the Democratic Unity Table (MUD), coincidentally deleted from its website. In December, close to the mayoral elections, a new fault provoked in the same line 765 would occur again in almost the same way seeking, again, to leave more than half of the country without electricity.

In this context of repeated attacks against the system, Varela considers that events like these can leave the system more vulnerable and worse than before they happened. According to him, this situation makes it possible to expect other similar sabotages, exactly as Minister Rodriguez stated this Tuesday.

GUAIDÓ, HIS HYPOTHESIS AND THE DIAMETER OF AFFECTATIONS
On Sunday, Juan Guaidó, after trying the conspiracy sabotage thesis, he blamed the blackout as in 2013 on a vegetation fire that had affected the three 765 kilowatts lines between the Guri and the Malena and San Geronimo substations. The ‘self-proclaimed’, again, argued that this fire was caused by the lack of cutting and pruning in the area.

According to Guaidó, the fire “reheated these lines through which passes more than 80% of the energy that goes to the centre of the country,” which would have generated a rejection of the excess load in the Guri turbines and thus caused the power cut.

Varela states that, although technically this is possible (that failures in the towers affect the turbines), it is difficult to consider this thesis as true because the transmission towers near the hydroelectric dam have a high altitude, which makes it quite unlikely that there is vegetation that grows at that height. In his opinion it also seems implausible that the Corpoelec electric linemen, in charge of checking the state of the towers, had not detected, if that were the case, the need to cut the vegetation to prevent any type of fire that would affect the line.

Another weak point of this story is that if a fire had occurred, as Guaidó points out, there would be photos and videos that would corroborate this version. “It would be impossible not to have seen it,” he says.

According to Varela, in addition, if the theory of the fire were true, that would not explain either that the any breakdown of the Guri would leave without supply all of Venezuela, given that it is not true that it supplies more than 80% of the country. The expert affirms that, in reality, the Guri is the source of approximately 60% of the energy to all Venezuelans, while the remaining 40% comes from the thermoelectric plants and other sources of supply.

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The Guri dam, at Bolivar state. Photo: El País.

These are not the only lies detected in Guaidó’s version, because it was José Aguilar, an anti-Chávez electricity technician, who denied that the Guri was run on an analogical system instead of a computerized system vulnerable to hacking, as he stressed in his press conference on Sunday the 10th.

RICARDO DURÁN’S WORDS AND SABOTAGE AS A SYSTEMATIC POLICY
In 2011, journalist Ricardo Durán, assassinated five years later by a group of Polichacao officers, revealed that the technological system of supervision, control and data requisition (SCADA), used as the distribution brain of Guri and Corpoelec in Caracas, is 50% vulnerable to hacking, according to work carried out by the Venezuelan state. Unfortunately, this system, used worldwide in industries and electricity companies, had been acquired in 2010 from the Canadian subsidiary of the Swiss company ABB, one of the pioneers in this type of software.

In the same year of Durán’s investigation, Dyllon Beresford, a security analyst at NSS Lab Researcher, along with independent researcher Brian Meixell, suspended a conference entitled “Chain Reactions: Hacking SCADA” at the TakeDowncom hackers’ event held in Dallas, United States.

The suspension was due to a request from Siemens (the company that created the system) and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security not to reveal vulnerabilities in the system that may put at risk critical infrastructure such as dams, hydroelectric plants, oil refineries and power plants. According to The Washington Times, researchers planned to publish how they had created a cyber weapon similar to the Stuxnet virus, which in 2010 attacked the SCADA system of Iran’s nuclear facilities, to show its vulnerability.

In this context, Durán identified in 2011 the main point of electricity sabotage in the distribution, was through the manipulation of Corpoelec’s computers. He cited as an example the arrest of a company worker at the La Mariposa plant, Miranda state, charged with blocking the distribution system to the central region, which caused up to seven daily power cuts in this area.

This deliberate technical disruption also occurred that year in Aragua, when one of the state’s four substations was overloaded so it brought about the blocking of the system and generated power outages due to poor energy distribution. In that connection, Durán recalled that after the nationalization of Electricidad de Caracas, the majority of employees from Gente de Petróleo hired people responsible for the sabotaging PDVSA, under the modus operandi of letting in those who had signed in favour of the recall referendum against Chávez in 2004.

The systematic policy of electricity sabotage, on the other hand, between 2008 and 2012 alone, accounted for 11 of these episodes among which there were cable cuts, lack of screws, fires, among many other episodes. Since Chávez’s death, in pre-electoral periods or of political tension, the attacks [have intensified] reaching…[a peak] during the street violence and barricades of 2014 and 2017, when the electricity system was attacked during Leopoldo Lopez La Salida (the Ousting) alone on more than 10 occasions.

In this context, the burning of substations and explosions in power plants during the last “blackout” are not new at all because they fit into a pattern of behaviour similar stretching back several years.

The difference with previous incididence is that, with an accumulated economic crisis, aggravated by the blockade and now the oil embargo, the electricity infrastructure is highly vulnerable to an attack and a subsequent cascade effect in the rest of the system, as Varela affirms when referring to the lack of alternative energy sources and the high level of failures in transformation and distribution.

That is why it is easy to foresee that Washington’s strategy is aimed at taking advantage of this vulnerability seeking, once again, to disable the electricity service in such a way that critical nodes in the country’s life are immediately affected, such as the water supply, the health system, telecommunications and oil production, among other areas.

After all, it is obvious that the current cycle of sanctions, together with sabotage and different forms of pressure, are intended to lead Venezuela towards a collapse that will make it inevitable that the country will fall into Washington’s hands. For now, according to Elliot Abrams of the State Department, the White House will increase the pressure against the Bolivarian Republic “especially now that there is no electricity”.

Translated by Francisco Domínguez.

https://mronline.org/2019/03/21/impacts ... ders-view/
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Re: Venezuela

Post by blindpig » Sun Mar 24, 2019 5:28 pm

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Venezuela Builds Health Sovereignty, in Defiance of the US Government
March 24, 2019 orinocotribune 0 Comments medicines, US Imperialism, US Sanctions
22/Mar/2019.- On March 20, president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela Nicolás Maduro visited Jipana, a large automated warehouse in the state of Miranda. Built with the cooperation of Chinese experts, Jipana – made up of five warehouses across Venezuela – has the capacity to store and distribute 100% of the antibiotic, hypoglycemic, hypertensive and analgesic needs for the tens of thousands of free community clinics that make up Mission Barrio Adentro, as well as all of the anti-malarial, anti-retroviral, anti-parasitic and contraceptive needs of the Mission’s nationwide ambulance service.

While at the warehouse, Maduro called for the launching of the “Pharmaceutical Engine,” a plan of production and distribution “to guarantee that U.S. imperialism cannot have an impact on our medicine, on the health of the Venezuelan people.” He appointed Dr. Henry Ventura, the director of the Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM) in Cuba, to head the Engine, and tasked him with preparing an import substitution plan for the active ingredients that Venezuela has had to buy from abroad in order to produce the medicine its people need.

While the Maduro government has long-planned to build a sovereign pharmaceutical industry, the need for such a goal was made even more clear last month, when the Trump administration withheld $5 billion in U.S. loans that were to be used by Venezuela to purchase active pharmaceutical ingredients.

Maduro also called on ministers Tareck El Aissami and Aristóbulo Istúriz to form a workteam to establish a fixed pricing system for pharmaceutical goods, backed by direct subsidies to the poorest Venezuelans. “A tremendous effort is being made so that free quality health care reaches the workers, and the people in general,” he added.

Maduro made sure to point out the international alliance that gives Venezuela the ability to build health sovereignty. “We have a deep alliance with our comrades in the Republic of Cuba, with the Cuban health missions, an alliance with China, Russia, India and now with the World Health Organization.”

http://orinocotribune.com/venezuela-bui ... government

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

Maduro: US Retains $5 Billion for Medicine Purchases

USA withholds 5,000 million dollars of funds from the Government of Venezuela for the purchase of medicines, the Venezuelan president accused.

“The criminal nature of the sanctions of the blockade on the Government by (the US President) Donald Trump against Venezuela, against all Venezuela, is the persecution they are doing against medicines , they have kidnapped from us 5000 million dollars to buy medicines in the world”, Nicolás Maduro affirmed on Wednesday when announcing an agreement for the production, distribution and import of medicines with the World Health Organization (WHO).



During the visit to a drug factory in the city of Charallave, in the state of Miranda (north), the Venezuelan leader also praised the “tremendous effort” made by the Bolivarian nation to provide free and quality health services in order of “being able to overcome all the aggression” coming from the White House.

Maduro accused Trump of causing the shortage of medicines in Venezuela to justify the introduction of his supposed humanitarian aid .

“Donald Trump, you are responsible for one of the most criminal measures against a people of the world; boycott all our medicine acquisition attempts and then he comes and say they are willing to give “humanitarian aid”. Hypocrites, cynics and frauds,” he said.

The Venezuelan head of state is assured, however, that the South American country “has enough availability to cover at least 70 percent of the internal needs” in terms of active ingredients and surgical medical equipment, and said that it will cover the rest of its demand by importing medical items from Russia , China, India, Iran, Turkey and Belarus.

Since last January 23, when coup leader Juan Guaidó, head of the Venezuelan National Assembly (AN) – in contempt since 2016 and controlled by the opposition-, proclaimed himself, with Washington’s backing, “interim president” of Venezuela, the US has spared no effort in trying to overthrow the legitimate government of Maduro.

The US coup plot includes sanctions and the freezing of Venezuelan assets in the United States and other countries.

Venezuela denounces Washington’s support of the coup in the Caribbean country as “concealing” the “desire to seize the rich natural resources of Venezuela .”

https://orinocotribune.com/maduro-us-re ... -purchases
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Re: Venezuela

Post by blindpig » Mon Mar 25, 2019 1:11 pm

Excellent video from Eva Bartlett of demo in Venezuela 3/16/2019



Personally adverse to videos but this works.
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Re: Venezuela

Post by blindpig » Mon Mar 25, 2019 3:49 pm

Venezuelan Gov't Delivers 2.3 M Houses Despite Economic War

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Some of the housing units delivered by the Venezuelan state. | Photo: Twitter / @PresidencialVen

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro delivered Thursday 2.3 million houses to working-class Venezuelans as part of the government's Great Housing Mission Venezuela.

From the Cuartel de la Montaña in the capital city of Caracas, the head of state led the delivery ceremony in the northeastern state of Lara and unveiled the historic milestone for the South American nation. "We reached the 2 million 300,000 houses and we are heading to 3 million homes," he said.

Maduro also stressed the accomplishment was despite international attacks against the Venezuelan economy through economic and financial sanctions that affect Venezuelan imports and exports.

"Nothing and no one stopped us, nothing and no one will stop us, facing difficulties we continue to build the homeland," Maduro told Venezuelans.

The president explained that by 2019 he will deliver some 700,000 additional homes, meeting the goal of three million. "Decent homes awarded to the people," he said.

The next homes will be assigned through the Ceret de la Patria, or Homeland Card, a state-regulated mechanism for accessing social programs, especially for Venezuelan who need it most.

In addition, Maduro announced the approval and expansion of the credits granted by the Popular Housing System for the improvement, construction, and acquisition of housing. President Maduro recalled that the 2018 Plan de la Patria, the government Plan with which he was elected in May, includes the commitment to build and deliver some five million decent homes.

Housing is an internationally-recognized human right.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Ven ... -0009.html
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Re: Venezuela

Post by blindpig » Mon Mar 25, 2019 4:35 pm

Venezuela Crude Exports Hurt By U.S. Sanctions, But No Imminent Collapse
Mar. 22, 2019 9:30 AM ET

MARKETPLACEHFI Research
(14,673 followers)
Summary
US crude imports from Venezuela hit zero last week.

Venezuela crude exports are moving lower, but there's no collapse.

The volume is simply being shifted to China and India, so a swift regime change in Venezuela is unlikely.

This is really bad news for US refineries as the heavy crude shortage worsens.

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Welcome to the hurt but not dead edition of Oil Markets Daily!

Venezuela crude exports are being impacted by the US sanctions. EIA also reported that US crude imports from Venezuela hit zero last week.

Image
Source: Kpler, HFI Research

This is somewhat expected as Venezuela exports to the US will likely drop close to zero by April, so US crude storage balance will have lost a steady ~3.5 mbbls per week going forward.

But if you thought Venezuela's crude exports would collapse because of the sanctions, then you have to think again.

Image

While the data shows that Venezuela's crude exports will move to sub ~1 mb/d for March, and exports to the US will gravitate towards zero. The volume is simply being shifted from the US to China and India.

Image

You can see that China is now taking a proportionally larger percentage of Venezuela's crude exports. As a result, it won't matter if US applies another layer of sanctions on Venezuela, because China and India will likely continue importing Venezuela crude.

https://seekingalpha.com/article/425048 ... t-collapse

bolding added. Them ol 'unintended consequences'.They proly thought this would be over by now.

The capitalists always underestimate us, we should not overestimate them.
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Re: Venezuela

Post by blindpig » Thu Mar 28, 2019 11:26 am

Trump: ‘Russia Has to Get Out’ of Venezuela
Trump told reporters he would “fix” Venezuela.

By Ricardo Vaz
Mar 27th 2019 at 10.41pm

https://venezuelanalysis.com/NcWM

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Trump met Fabiana Rosales, wife of self-proclaimed “Interim President” Juan Guaido, and reiterated that “all options are open.”

Caracas, March 27, 2019 (venezuelanalysis.com) – US President Donald Trump addressed the Venezuelan political crisis on Wednesday, issuing warnings against Russia and vowing once more that “all options are open.”

“Russia has to get out,” Trump told reporters during a White House meeting with Fabiana Rosales, wife of self-proclaimed Venezuelan “Interim President” Juan Guaido, who is currently in the US after visiting several Latin American countries.

Trump added that situations like Venezuela “should never have happened,” and promised to “fix it,” pledging full support for Guaido. The US was the first to recognize Guaido after he swore himself in on January 23. Repeatedly calling on the Venezuelan military to oust Maduro, US officials have imposed successive rounds of harsh economic sanctions, including an oil embargo. Both governments severed diplomatic ties on March 12 following unsuccessful attempts to downgrade embassies to interests sections.

Trump’s comments come as the US House of Representatives unanimously approved three bills concerning Venezuela ton Monday. The first bill is meant to restrict exports of crowd control equipment, including tear gas and riot gear, while the second urges Trump to provide up to US $150 million in humanitarian aid. The third bill calls on the State Department and intelligence agencies to assess the “threat of Russian influence” in Venezuela.

The bills were promoted by conservative South Florida Democrats Donna Shalala, Debbie Mucarsel-Powell and Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Two Russian military airplanes landed in Caracas’ Maiquetia airport on Sunday, carrying equipment and 100 servicemen, including General Vasily Tonkoshkurov, chief of staff of Russian ground forces. Russia, which is one of Venezuela’s main arms suppliers clarified that mission was intended to fulfil technical and military cooperation contracts. Moscow had previously sent military aircraft to Venezuela in December as part of bilateral defense accords. Russia has voiced opposition to what it terms a Washington-led regime change operation in Caracas.

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro announced on Tuesday that a high-level meeting between Venezuela and Russia is set to take place in Russia, with more than 20 agreements on economy, trade, energy and education to be signed.

The strengthening of bilateral ties comes as Venezuela suffered its second major power outage in less than a month this week, after what authorities denounced as a “double attack” against the electric grid that left most of the country without power.

Electricity started to be restored to most of the country, with a new setback occurring on Wednesday morning, from which most states had recovered at the time of writing. The western state of Zulia remains the only one that has been mostly without power since Monday evening. Labor and school activities were suspended on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday as authorities work to stabilize the electrical supply in order to reactivate services like the Caracas Metro.

Opposition leader Juan Guaido held a meeting with supporters and press on Wednesday to offer more details on what he calls “Operation Freedom.” Echoing Trump, Guaido stressed that “all options should be on the table,” while reiterating his call for the armed forces to support his efforts at ousting the Maduro government.

Guaido called for protests against the electricity problems around the country this weekend, with locations to be announced later, and for a “dry-run” of “Operation Freedom” to be held on April 6. He stressed that communication and organization were key elements of the operation, but offered no further details as to what the dry-run entails.

Speaking in Venezuela’s National Assembly on Tuesday, the opposition leader warned that problems in access to electricity and other basic services would be exacerbated as long as President Nicolas Maduro remained in power.

“There will be no solutions to the problems of electrical supply while [Maduro] usurps functions in Miraflores [presidential palace], there will not be water reaching [people’s] homes and much less domestic gas,” he declared. “We are going to accelerate the necessary internal pressure.”

Venezuelan authorities had previously revealed what they claimed was evidence of Guaido’s involvement, along with other right-wing leaders, in a plot to contract foreign paramilitaries to execute targeted killings and acts of sabotage in the country. Guaido’s chief of staff, Roberto Marrero, was arrested last week and accused of direct links to the mercenaries. Lawyer Juan Planchart was also arrested on Sunday for his alleged role as a financial intermediary.

https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/14407
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Re: Venezuela

Post by blindpig » Fri Mar 29, 2019 1:34 pm



Some of the commentary strays into liberal 'otherhandism' but the documentation makes it more than tolerable.

When will we see the American masses infused with revolutionary fervor like that?
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Re: Venezuela

Post by blindpig » Sat Mar 30, 2019 2:13 pm

China provides 65 tons of medical supplies for Venezuela
CGTN

Image
A plane loaded with 65 tons of medicines and medical consumables provided by Chinese government arrived at Simon Bolivar International Airport in Venezuela's capital Caracas on Friday, according to Xinhua News Agency.

Li Baorong, Chinese ambassador to Venezuela, delivered the medical supplies to the Venezuelan government.

"With mutual trust and sincerity, China and Venezuela are good partners in win-win cooperation. As the two countries gradually deepen mutual political trust, both leaders reach consensus on taking China-Venezuela comprehensive strategic partnership to a new level," said Li at the delivery ceremony.

In September, Chinese naval hospital ship Peace Ark provided quality medical services for local people during its maiden visit to the South American country.

Referring to the visit, Li said medical and health cooperation is a major part of the pragmatic cooperation between China and Venezuela.

"Representing Chinese people's friendship to their Venezuelan counterparts, the medical supplies will contribute to the social welfare and people's well-being in Venezuela," said Li, adding that China believes Venezuelan people can achieve an independent peaceful and stable development and China will try its best to provide assistance and support in the future.

Tareck El Aissami, Venezuela's minister of industry and national production, expressed thanks for China's medical supplies at the delivery ceremony. "The strategic cooperation between China and Venezuela brings well-being to both people. Venezuela will further enhance pragmatic cooperation in different areas with China and implement the consensus reached by both leaders."

Source(s): Xinhua News Agency

https://news.cgtn.com/news/3d3d514e7949 ... index.html
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