Hugo Chávez, president of Venezuela (1999-2013). and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of Iran (2005-2013). Photo: EFE.
In a recent interview with Jyotishman Mudiar of India & Global Left, respected geopolitical analyst Ben Norton provided an in-depth explanation of why Venezuela has been targeted for regime change by US imperialism since Hugo Chávez was elected to the presidency in 1998.
“Venezuela is the poster child of everything the US empire fears,” said Norton during the interview, “a revolutionary project that is not only trying to seek sovereign control over its natural resources and kick out US multinational corporations, one check… The second box being checked is that Venezuela has always been, since the revolution, a key voice in Latin American regional integration. The third check is that Venezuela has tried to integrate Latin America with Asia and Africa as part of a larger Global South project. The fourth check is that Venezuela, in particular, has very close relations with both China and Russia and military cooperation, not just economic and political cooperation… So the US has been desperate to try to destabilize and overthrow the Venezuelan government for many years.
“This is yet another attempt, and the strategy that Trump is now using is this nonsense about drugs, which is completely absurd. Look at UN data of leading experts on the global drug trade. They say that Venezuela has negligible drug production. The biggest producer of cocaine in the world, is Colombia, Venezuela’s neighbor, which historically has been the closest US ally in the region, which historically has been dominated by right-wing, very conservative oligarchic regimes. For the first time ever in Colombia’s history, right now, since 2022, they have a left-wing president. For the first time ever. There had been left-wing presidential candidates who were assassinated in Colombia’s history. So, Gustavo Petro, the current president, is the first ever left-wing leader, and the US has also been backing coup attempts against him, especially Marco Rubio, who hates Petro and is constantly attacking him publicly. But Colombia, everyone knows, is the global epicenter of cocaine. The vast majority of cocaine production in history has come from Colombia and, at a lower level, from Peru and Bolivia. And Ecuador plays a key role in the transportation of cocaine. Right now, Ecuador is governed by a US citizen, Daniel Noboa, who is the son of the richest billionaire oligarch in Ecuador, a relatively poor country, but the richest billionaire—he personally owns ports—and it is very well documented in Ecuador that Noboa Sr., the oligarch, uses his private ports in order to export cocaine in banana crates… The US is ignoring all of that because Ecuador is now closely allied with the US under this US puppet, who is a literal US citizen, who was born in Florida. It is crazy that Latin American countries allow US citizens to be their president.”
Venezuela: the larger context
In addition to speaking about current developments and today’s geopolitical landscape, Norton provided a detailed review of Venezuela’s recent history, describing precisely why the country is in the crosshairs of US imperialism and in the headlines of legacy media outlets once again.
“It is part of a larger context,” explained Norton, “and this is related to the US attempt to assert hegemony over the Western Hemisphere. Politico, the major US media outlet, published a story based on a leaked copy of the National Defense Strategy that is allegedly being considered by the Pentagon, which used to be called the Department of Defense. It now has been renamed as the War Department, which is the original name before World War II. And the war department, allegedly, in this new national defense strategy, says that its top priority is the Western hemisphere, is reasserting control over the region, and really, what we are seeing is this attempt to bring back the neocolonial—the old-school colonial—Monroe Doctrine. This is a 200-year-old colonial doctrine from 1823 in which the US government essentially said that Latin America is part of its imperial sphere of influence. When people claim that Latin America is Washington’s so-called backyard, this is this very colonial mentality, and we actually saw, during Trump’s first term, that numerous top officials in the US government invoked the colonial Monroe Doctrine, including Mike Pompeo, who was CIA director turned secretary of state, and also John Bolton, who was the neoconservative war hawk who was Trump’s national security adviser. And let’s not forget that during Trump’s first term in 2019, the US launched yet another coup attempt in Venezuela—one of many which I can talk about—and in this coup attempt in 2019, the US tried to impose a little-known right-wing opposition politician in Venezuela as the so-called president. His name was Juan Guaidó. Guaidó had never participated in a presidential election, so it was completely undemocratic and absurd, yet the US recognized him as the so-called interim president of Venezuela. And the US forced many other countries, primarily in Europe, but also right-wing governments in Latin America, to also recognize Guaidó as part of a concerted coup attempt. The Wall Street Journal reported at the time, in 2019, that the Trump White House had planned this entire operation with right-wing multi-millionaire oligarchs in Venezuela, including Leopoldo López, who is a very far-right figure from one of the wealthiest families in Venezuela. That coup attempt failed, obviously. Still today, Nicolas Maduro is the Constitutional president. He’s still in Miraflores, the presidential palace in Caracas.
Oil and the origins of the economic war against Venezuela
“That coup attempt failed,” Norton continued, ”but as part of that coup attempt, Trump massively expanded the sanctions on Venezuela that had already started under Obama. Trump expanded those sanctions into a full-on economic embargo, like the US blockade on Cuba, which has gone on for over 60 years in blatant controvention of international law—every year in the UN General Assembly, almost every single country on earth votes to condemn the illegal US blockade of Cuba. Even all of Europe votes against it, and the only countries that vote to support it are the US and Israel consistently for over 30 years. Similarly, the Trump administration used that same strategy of economic suffocation against Venezuela, and it massively hurt the Venezuelan economy because Venezuela has been a petro state for a 100 years—well before the revolutionary leader Hugo Chávez was even born. Venezuela has been a petro state, and imagine what would happen in Saudi Arabia if the US put a blockade on Saudi Arabia and tried to prevent it from exporting its oil. It is very likely that the Saudi monarchy would collapse in a week or two. The fact that the Venezuelan government has been able to hold on is a testament to the fact that the revolutionary process started by the previous president, Hugo Chávez, still has a lot of popular support… Now, the US has backed many coup attempts in Venezuela going back decades—in 2002, 2014, 2017, 2019—and now they are backing yet another coup attempt. And of course, part of this, one main reason that a lot of people talk about, which is not insignificant, is the fact that Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world. It it used to be a cash cow for major US fossil fuel corporations like Exxon that were exploiting Venezuela’s oil, and Hugo Chávez, the revolutionary leader, kicked out the US fossil fuel companies, and he fully nationalized the oil industry in Venezuela, which is run by the state-owned company PDVSA.”
Venezuela’s key role in the multipolar world
“Since the revolution began under Hugo Chávez in 1999,” detailed Norton, “Venezuela has always been a very progressive force in the region in pushing for Latin American regional integration against US hegemony, which is very important, but also in deepening south–south integration and cooperation. Chávez recognized that from when he entered office in Venezuela in 1999. He wasn’t talking about socialism at that time. He was a left-wing nationalist, but he launched the Bolivarian Revolution influenced by Simón Bolívar, who was the general who led the war against Spanish colonialism, freed South America from the Spanish Empire, and created the modern nation states in South America, including Venezuela, Colombia, and Bolivia. So Chávez was influenced by this revolutionary legacy of Bolívar. Originally he was not talking about socialism. He was influenced by this anticolonial legacy, and he was a left-wing nationalist, but it was the US-backed coups, especially in 2002, and the attacks on his government, his democratically elected government, that kind of radicalized him and moved him more toward the left, and he began talking about 21st century socialism. The point is that Chávez, even before his socialist turn, always recognized the importance of Venezuela in building a multipolar world. In fact, in 1998, the year of the presidential election that Chávez won, he gave a famous speech in Caracas in which he talked about the importance of building a multipolar world.
“Now, if you listen to some people today talk about this this multipolar project, they usually attribute it to China and Russia, but it is very important to emphasize that other parts of the Global South, including, especially, left-wing forces in Latin America, have also been talking about this for decades. Chávez, back in 1998, and Lula de Silva, in his first two terms as president of Brazil, in the 2000s, was also talking about the importance of multipolarity. The Latin American left has made this a significant priority. Of course, Lula was one of the architects of BRICS in 2009, back when he was still president of Brazil, and Chávez was very much part of this movement, in particular, under his leadership in Venezuela from 1999 until his death in 2013. He was really the first Latin American leader who really allied closely with China because, for the historical reasons of the Sino–Soviet split, and especially after Nixon’s trip to China in 1972 … the vast majority of the Latin American left leaned much more toward the Soviet Union, especially Cuba, although Cuba has since had very good relations with China. But the Latin American left, for the most part, in the so-called Sino–Soviet split, in the so-called anti-revisionism argument, most of the Latin American left were condemned by the Maoist forces as ‘revisionists,’ in scare quotes. Obviously, I have a lot of problems with that argument, but the reality is that most of the Latin American left did not have a very positive view of China. It was really Chavez and then, after him, Rafael Correa in Ecuador, who really began looking more toward China. There are academic studies that look at Venezuela’s agreements with China, and they just exploded. The number of agreements signed, the bilateral agreements signed between Venezuela and China just exploded exponentially under Chávez, and this has continued under Maduro.
“So Chávez played a very important part in deepening the integration of Latin America with China and, of course, Russia. The Soviet Union—and also after the overthrow of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Russian Federation—maintained very close ties with the Latin American left and has remained a close partner of Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and other countries in Latin America. Venezuela has also been a major target of the US because of those relations and also [because of its relations with] Iran. A lot of people, if you think about it simply ideologically, it does seem a little strange. Superficially, you might say, well, Iran is an Islamic republic. It has a religious orientation. Socially, it is kind of conservative, although people often underestimate the progressive economic policies, the strong welfare state in Iran, and the redistributive policies—in particular, the social programs, public housing, these kinds of things… When Ahmadinejad was president of Iran and when Chávez was president, they formed a very close friendship and partnership. Superficially, people say it is kind of weird that the Islamic Republic of Iran allied so closely with the Latin American left, but then, you also see Iran’s foreign policy, which is very much anticolonial—kind of what used to be called third-world nationalist solidarity with the global south, with Latin America and Africa.”
Where the energy sector and multipolarity meet
“Venezuela also became very close to Iran,” Norton continued, “and the partnership with Iran was also very significant because after the US imposed heavy sanctions on Venezuela, Iran provided a lot of technological assistance to help repair and modernize Venezuela’s oil industry because, as I said, Venezuela has been a petro state for a century, well before the revolution began under Chávez in 1999, and in Venezuela’s oil industry, all of the technology was from the US. All of it.
“The US began imposing sanctions on Venezuela, starting under Obama in 2015. Obama signed an executive order in 2015, declaring Venezuela to be an extraordinary threat to US national security, which is completely absurd, obviously. I mean, do people think that Venezuela is gonna bomb the US? It’s complete nonsense. But this was the justification legally needed to impose unilateral sanctions without the approval of Congress… The economic war really accelerated under Obama in 2015, and Venezuela was no longer able to to buy technology to repair and update its oil infrastructure, which really started degrading. So between the sanctions and the inability to modernize its oil infrastructure, Venezuelan oil output collapsed, and Iran actually played an important role, along with Russia and China as well, which have significant oil industries, state-owned oil industries. Those three countries, but in particular Iran, played a key role in helping to repair, update, and change a lot of the actual capital investment in the fixed capital formation, fixed assets in Venezuela’s oil industry.
“The point is that Venezuela has this left-wing revolutionary project, and they started talking about socialism, building Latin American unity, and creating institutions like the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, CELAC, and including ALBA, the Bolivarian Alliance, which is an attempt to build an economic block in Latin America that eschews the US dollar. Venezuela and Ecuador were the two biggest countries that were selling their oil in other currencies, and they even created a new Latin American currency to try to get off the dollar, which was called the Sucre, named after another South American anticolonialist who fought against the Spanish Empire. They were at the cutting edge of things that are now very hotly discussed issues today in the 2020s: dedollarization, multipolarity, south–south cooperation. Chavez was trying to do this 20 years ago. He was very much ahead of his time.”
Ben Norton is a US-born journalist and geopolitical analyst. He spent years living in Nicaragua and currently lives in China. Norton founded the Geopolitical Economy Report (formerly Multipolarista). The entire interview with India & Global Left can be viewed on YouTube. In the lengthy discussion, Norton provides additional context regarding US imperialism in Latin America.
Featured image: xxxxx
Special for Orinoco Tribune by Steve Lalla
OT/SL/JRE
Steve Lalla
Steve Lalla is a journalist, researcher and analyst. His areas of interest include geopolitics, history, and current affairs. He has contributed to MR Online, Counterpunch, Resumen LatinoAmericano English, ANTICONQUISTA, Orinoco Tribune, and others.
