2019 opens the curtain and quickly the country is slipped into a new operation of regime change that synthesizes and accumulates the most destructive aspects of the previous ones.
Violence and hostilities, as in any war, again began with the speech and as always in order of authority and dependence: from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, through the Lima Group, to finally end in the assumption of the deputy of Voluntad Popular Juan Guaidó as president of a National Assembly in contempt.
From there, the thick lines of the confrontation landscape in which the local political cycle will unfold in the first semester of the year, between trends of fracture and recomposition of the Venezuelan society itself and with the determinations of a geopolitical and civilizational crisis that, with the acceleration of the conflict between the United States and China, puts us as spectators and stars.
In the strictly national scenario, the boxer has not entered to fight yet. When it happens in the next days and weeks, we will have a clearer picture of the current correlation of forces, at least, for this first semester of the year, to which inexorably we will have to add the geopolitical tension after January 10.
The global picture of the Venezuelan question
Venezuela in recent years has challenged the usual patterns of cause and effect, making the nearest future almost always unforeseeable. In recent times a period of instability has been woven together, where unexpected and dangerous chains of events can change the situation from one moment to the next, while what is planned becomes less and less significant in order to project the long term.
To show a button: again the National Assembly and international platforms subordinated to Washington are unaware of the Venezuelan government. Although this is happening now in a political context of greater geopolitical tension, and without a doubt with disruptive agendas operating behind but more alarmed than usual, it is unpredictable to know the magnitude and virulence of the new regime change operation that is under way because of the urgency of the American planners.
There is improvisation in all the scales of the organization chart of the aggression against Venezuela, and nobody knows for sure if the phases of the planned thing will culminate successfully. They also operate in a blind street and without concrete management of all the variables at stake, and that is where the scenario spreads of danger because it makes it possible to feel the brutality of an unexpected event that turns the circumstances.
Do not forget: they already tried it with the frustrated assassination on any given day last August without there being a visible Coup D’Etat plot.
The element that cause this absence of compass are unquantifiable. One of them, which can be analyzed because of its relevance, is linked to the historical novelty of our time: living a gigantic transition and rupture of the current global world order and its governance project, but in the midst of the material and psychic tear of neoliberal globalization that prevents the consolidation in time of any system of rules of coexistence. Never before, in so little time and with so much violence, so many interests, rages, frustrations, existential disorders and delusions, had accumulated and entered into contradiction under an apocalyptic premise. Its name is “global civil war” and it crosses both the elite and 99% of the population.
Because of its historical conditions and singularities, Venezuela receives the impact of this wave of tensions without a model of its own country that can metabolize them and orient them towards a brake of disintegration. This draws the historical and spiritual framework of the ongoing war.
But it is precisely from there that the strategic objective of the new attempt to change the regime is revealed: the intensification of the siege so that the country does not have time, calm, order, nor material and physical resources to build a new social and economic pact where protect yourself and reinvent yourself in the face of global turbulence. Overthrow Chavismo before its next reinvention: the logic of the war’s operation since 2013.
In this sense, the challenge of the Venezuelan project also goes double. Faced with the sanctions that press all our economic contradictions to the extreme, and in parallel, in the face of the international political war that handles the times in a suicidal manner, it postpones that the accumulated experience be invested in our urgent national reconstruction.
Thus, the overthrow of the government presented under legal traps that always conceal the antipolitical options in the background, in turn expresses the push of global power to dissolve us as a continental political experience. And Maduro is his symbolic loot.
Disbalance and dependence: the National Assembly moves to Washington
The sequence of events that led to the deputy Juan Guaidó to ignore the Venezuelan government since assuming the presidency of the National Assembly, brings us closer, with more clarity, to the reasons and consequences of the defeat of the anti-Chavez leadership. Although its own merit is not denied in this process, the state of uselessness in which the anti-Chavez leadership was left after color revolutions failed, very well administered later by Washington to favor its litter of professional mercenaries trained by USAID and NED against the moderate sectors, it has allowed the transfer of control to the international board to be automatic and painless.
This was certified by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s visit to Brazil and Colombia to coordinate the next steps of diplomatic harassment against the country, the subsequent translation of that line of action and others in the Lima Group’s communiqué and its port of arrival in the ventriloquist of the moment, Juan Guaidó, who without offering resistance and simulating a kind of imprint of the civil society, moved to the National Assembly the agenda of a coalition of foreign governments.
Although its moral stature is quite small and known, to the point of reducing a sovereign power of the Venezuelan State to a office status of the US State Department, what happened could not have been otherwise. The opposition’s handicap in the electoral field as a result of its Oedipus complex to the United States, the absence of a national leadership and the reduction of its base of support, has made the subordination to foreign instances their only guarantee of existence in the country’s political board.
The legacy of Julio Borges of transferring to the United States and the European Union the thick lines of economic-financial and diplomatic pressure against Venezuela, which claimed the Lima Group as his own, is now reversed against a Guaidó who must administer a white elephant with different supranational leaders who proclaim different orientations and ways to conduct the confrontation with Chavismo.
That weakness was manifested in the terrible balance that made calling from the rostrum of speakers to the formation of a “Transitional Government” that “will not depend exclusively on Parliament”, among other juggling such as announcing the “usurpation of Nicolás Maduro in the Presidency “, but evading if the scenario will be resolved with himself simulating the inauguration of the State’s first magistracy.
Guaidó must undertake an impossible task in a very short fraction of time: internally, keep enthusiastic the brave bar of “Team Almagro” that preaches direct intervention and other opposition tendencies, very weakened today, who opt for negotiation by appropriating in its way of the statement of the Group of Lima. Externally, consequently, it must sustain the support of the government of Iván Duque and the request for a clash of powers requested by Washington.
The finitude of Guaidó will be marked by that pressure of agendas of different levels, strength and financial readiness, operating under the consensus that the political promise of the Vargas state [he is Deputy for Vargas State] must be sacrificed, or at least eroded as much as possible, while the factors accumulate of economic, financial and institutional pressure that will make viable and “urgent” a preventive military intervention. That is to say, the definitive phase of securitization of the Venezuelan conflict, which will depend, yes or yes, that this drift is imposed under the promotion of local litigation as a threat to the security of a specific political entity (Colombia or the United States) or “international”, used as a propagandistic resource the effects of migration.
The operations of false flag, “humanitarian crisis” of laboratory, simulation of armed confrontations or the formation of mercenary groups, will be key to reach that point. The porosity of the Colombian-Venezuelan border is emerging as the base of destabilization selected for its characteristics and injured tissue.
Lima Group: cartography of a supranational semi-government (Creole Libyan format)
There are different ways of observing the latest communication from the Lima Group. Because of its extravagance, it represents a political operation aimed at frightening Chavismo by making look as their own and presenting as novel tactics diplomatic and financial warfare that have been running for some time by the United States and the European Union. The extensive, hurried and aggressive tone used has to do with covering the absence of Mexico.
Because of its violence, it implies a navigation chart to legitimize any insurrectional action aimed at breaking the Venezuelan Constitution. Due to its previously acquired commitments, it is assumed as international platform of the interests of ExxonMobil in the oil of the Guyanese Essequibo, when questioning the legal expulsion of an exploration vessel by the Venezuelan Navy a few days ago. Due to its heterogeneous composition, it offers a platform of contradictory political options (overthrowing Maduro and asking for elections at the same time, for example) that will add greater rivalries to the opposition leadership, perhaps affecting some positions within the Lima Group depending on how the situation develops.
But for its purpose, the Lima Group abrogates a set of powers and faculties of the State that pursues the tutelage of Venezuelan institutions. From its demand to the transfer of the executive power to the National Assembly, the designation of the elections of May 20 as illegitimate, to the exhortation to block international trade with Venezuela and the recognition of the “Supreme Court in exile”, the interest to monitor and supplant the national institutions and the political-electoral will expressed by the majority of the population is expressed.
An aggression that is not finalized only in the diplomatic sphere because it is a communiqué, but seeks to interfere in the concrete institutional practices of the Venezuelan State, which are basically, like those of any other State, the management of its foreign trade, the self-determination of its legal fabric and to conduct its electoral processes, the protection of its territorial integrity and the safeguarding of the authority of its public powers.
Symbolically, the Lima Group abrogates a kind of supranational authority by establishing as legal and legally binding what comes of its criteria, and not what is imposed by the Venezuelan Constitution reaffirmed by its population in each electoral process. In the public discourse and with the material support of the National Assembly, the Group tries to reconfigure the Venezuelan sovereignty as an extension of theirs.
This undermining and harassment of the anatomy of the Venezuelan State, relying on the National Assembly, does not correspond so much with the method of the clash of powers of 2015, but it took a step forward by configuring a base of international recognition for the emergence of a parastate . The closeness to the Libyan format is immediately recognizable, both because of the symbolic language of the “usurpation” that made possible the intervention of NATO, and because of the use of the narrative of the transition, which camouflages the discourse of the civil war in the background , to pressure a country to be divided between two states, competing for authority, international legitimacy and administration of the nation’s resources.
No format to be exported keeps all its original design, it is always subjected to the new conditions where it is put to the test and to the modifications that its variables provide. In that sense, the sanctions aimed at blocking access to the country’s international trade by the Venezuelan government, coupled with harassment and travel bans against senior officials of the Republic, have sought to create a relative void of state functions that, now, in the face of new circumstances, it could propose its impersonation through a “Transitional Government” laboratory.
The crucial difference between the format and its adaptation to Venezuela is that in Libya the “National Transitional Council” had a paramilitary army of terrorist extraction and had achieved control of a large part of the country before its international recognition. In the Venezuelan case, the international phase matured without this variable of factual power because of the capacity of detection and destructuring of mercenary groups by the Venezuelan State.
Another color revolution? Projections, geopolitics and reorganization of antagonisms
But beyond what was planned and initially calculated, with all the mixture of semi-direct and camouflaged formats and interventions that are proposed, this new attempt to change the regime requires the activation of the usual anti-political options (mercenary violence, professional, false flags , street confrontations promoted by trained vanguards, etc.) that give nuance of reality to the story of the end of Chavism and the “new government”.
The question of whether they are possible is not in their feasibility per se, because economic sanctions represent an incentive to social discontent that can be employed by articulating (and financing) disaggregated sectoral protests that manage a common sense of generalized conflict.
The key issue is whether anti-Chavism has a sufficiently solid, animated and mobilized mass base with which to maintain an environment of tension and violence long enough that it requires the maturation of international conditions, or at least the necessary to accompany it the economic-financial and international pressure towards the objective of fracturing the Venezuelan government. It is impossible to project a definitive answer, however, the experience of two color revolutions in less than five years give us as a warning element a stage of preparation of conditions, ranging from the installation of a sophisticated story to the gestation of a leadership that will assume the vanguard, which for now shows no signs of maturation.
To this is added, product of the sanctions, a reconfiguration of the political and social antagonisms of the Venezuelan society that today places the daily economic difficulties as an axis articulator of the scale of priorities of the population and of the demands of the political actors. To the pain of “Team Almagro,” Venezuela’s political contradiction is not “Freedom vs. Dictatorship,” but “Salary vs. Sanctions.”
In such circumstances, Chavism has been able to build a social block for economic recovery by translating that agenda beyond Chavismo itself and placing economic sanctions as the main obstacle. The opposition, identified with sanctions and seen as an ally of the business community that keeps the economic situation under control, faces the problem of overcoming its leadership crisis and mobilizing a population that has its daily subsistence as a priority.
Precisely, for that accumulation of reasons, it is probable, more than a traditional color revolution, a fact of shock that summarizes the phases, accumulates sufficient pressure at different scales and triggers international, institutional and political clashes that favor the supremacy of the opposition in the marking of times for the definition (always violent in the paper and in practice) of the conflict.
The defection of the judge of the TSJ, Christian Tyrone Zerpa, seems to be an example to follow of the blows of effect that seek to compensate, in this first stage, the mobilization that they need in the street. It seems that, also, that will be the motive of the next actions in the institutional field: to intensify the harassment, the fear and the promotion of defections in order to give physical body to the story of the transition and the “definitive break of Chavism”.
The intensification of the financial blockade against the country and its terrible consequences does not correspond to a forecast, but to a permanent reality. It favors the opposition because it promotes discontent and its ability to articulate it politically, but at the same time, and it is the main effect that marked 2018, is that it consolidates the government’s contingency plans such as the CLAP and the Carnet de la Patria. It strengthens its connection with the primary needs of a large part of the population, which in its way also generates a sense of predictability and certainty that contrasts with the sacrifice they ask the population because Juan Guiadó wants to be president, Antonio Ledezma wants to return from exile, Diego Arria needs to recover his farm and Mike Pompeo wants to receive an applause from Trump for overthrowing Maduro.
However, there is a part of the landscape that will not depend on us, and is that of geopolitics. Between the trade war, the probable global debt crisis for this year, the conflict over Taiwan and the South China Sea, the confrontation between the United States and China has increased to levels that seem unmanageable. For Trump, the destiny of the United States as an imperalist nation will be resolved in the clash with China, and for this both sides lead an enormous bifurcation of the world economy that is dividing the world into great blocks of economic, financial and geopolitical influence, exclusive and mutually excluding.
2019 will be a key year for this sharing of world power, where Latin America within the objectives of the United States must finish aligning to feed with its natural resources the flourishing of the North American industry. The route is the militarization of resources and the fight against corruption as strategic options to dethrone states, governments and political figures that envision China as a geopolitical ally.
In this context, the importance of Venezuela, as a basis of support and as a point of tension between the resurrection of the Monroe Doctrine and the multipolar order, while being described alone, is the fundamental reason that the United States, the Group of Lima and its local mercenaries disguised as politicians try, once again, to break all the rules of the game and the political coexistence in the country, with the aim of closing the indecipherable Venezuelan front that has been resisting for more than 200 years, to its own form and with his own disaster, to die being a slave in his own homeland.
Source URL: Mision Verdad
Translated by JRE
