A grocery store in Caracas during the pandemic. Photo: X/@ElUniversal/file photo.
By Lallan Schoenstein – Aug 12, 2024
Defying news of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s election victory, verified by the U.S. National Lawyers Guild, among many others, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken issued a press release on Aug. 1 which stated:
“Given the overwhelming evidence, it is clear to the United States … that Edmundo González Urrutia won the most votes in Venezuela’s July 28 presidential election.”
Following the White House statement, the U.S. media reported:
• CBS News: “U.S. Recognizes Opposition’s Edmundo González As Winner”;
• New York Times: “U.S. Recognizes Maduro’s Rival as Winner”;
A week later, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller, speaking in a press conference, retreated by offering a conflicting version of the U.S. position on the election:
Question: “Is the U.S. ready to recognize another interim president, similar to what happened earlier with Guaidó?”
Miller: “No, that’s not a step that we have taken as of yet.”
CBS, the New York Times, or any other U.S. corporate media did not report on that press conference. Despite the overwhelming evidence of a fair and transparent election, the U.S. government has still refused to recognize President Nicolas Maduro’s election.
They reported that they would not recognize the result even before the election. Many attempts were reported on election day to disrupt and discredit the secure electronic voting system. There was even a mysterious cyberattack that stalled the process.
Having lost the election, the opposition immediately began violent attacks to incite terror and confusion. They attacked symbols of the Venezuelan Revolution: schools and health centers in working-class areas, public bus stations and buses, offices of Chavista communes and parties, and statues of figures who had set the Bolivarian Revolution in motion (including a statue of Chávez as well as the Indigenous Chief Coromoto). At least two militants of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) – Isabel Cirila Gil from Bolívar state and Mayauri Coromoto Silva Vilma from Aragua state – were assassinated, and other Chavistas, police, and officials were brutally beaten and captured.
Every day since the election, hundreds of thousands of Chavistas have taken to the streets of Caracas and elsewhere. In each of these marches, the chant “no volverán” – they will not return – reverberated amongst the crowd. The oligarchy, they said, will not return.
Far-right politicians Edmundo González and María Corina Machado campaigned in opposition to Maduro’s government. A quick look at the background of the latest cast of U.S. puppets shows why they lost the election.
Carlos Ron, Venezuela’s Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs and president of the Simon Bolivar Institute, spoke from Caracas on Aug. 7 in a People’s Forum broadcast titled “Venezuela’s Fight Against Coups, Sanctions & Hybrid Warfare.” Ron discussed the ramifications of the U.S. sanctions and the attack on Venezuela’s elections.
“First of all, when you try to look for the program that Gonzalez ran on, well – you can only find an English version and then you see that it’s proposing to privatize the oil industry which is not a small thing. Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world.” Think of the need of the hyper-militarized U.S. economy for fossil fuels to engage in global warfare. There’s no bombers that fly on solar energy.
“Then there’s the case of María Corina Machado, the U.S. choice for a presidential candidate. Machado hasn’t been eligible to hold public office since 2015. The main reason was her appeal for sanctions against her own country in 2014. As a member of the National Assembly, she allowed Panama to set her up as a permanent Panamanian representative before the Organization of American States so that she could ask for sanctions against Venezuela. This is illegal under the Venezuelan Constitution.”
A report in Orinoco Tribune on Aug. 4 outlined Gonzales’ diplomatic career. From 1979 to 1985, under the regime of Venezuelan puppet ruler Carlos Andrés Pérez, Edmundo González worked in the Venezuelan Embassy in San Salvador. As an embassy official, he participated in the United States’ Plan Cóndor counterinsurgency project to eliminate revolutions across Latin America. In El Salvador, the aim was to destroy the Salvadoran popular armed revolution.
According to former FMLN Commander Nidia Díaz, during the late 1970s and early 1980s, the conspiracies to capture, torture, disappear, and kill revolutionaries and their sympathizers were planned in the Venezuelan embassy in El Salvador. During that period, the Salvadoran armed forces and the death squads killed 13,194 civilians, among them St. Óscar Arnulfo Romero, archbishop of the Catholic Church of El Salvador, and four nuns of the Maryknoll order.
The opposition program
The Gonzales/Machado campaign program was a program for privatization, returning expropriated property to the oligarchy, importing exploitative capitalist enterprises, and cutting back on social programs. It was the neoliberal fantasy that they were unable to sell to Venezuelans despite the economic hardship caused by the U.S. sanctions.
Carlos Ron said that when a government invests in social programs that transform society to improve life, nobody will support a neoliberal platform. During the last 25 years, Venezuela has gotten rid of illiteracy. Because of its relationship with Cuba, Venezuela was able to bring Cuban doctors to inner cities and to rural areas to provide people health care for the first time in their lives. Venezuela, one of the harshest and most unequal societies before the Bolivarian Revolution when Hugo Chávez took office as President in 1999, became one of the most equal societies.
When U.S. sanctions on Venezuela caused food shortages, the country turned to its own agriculture. Today, a country that had imported 80% of its food is now producing the food that it needs locally. In most cases, the food is healthier because they can’t import the U.S. pesticides and chemicals that make food production more dangerous for consumption.
In a sign that Venezuela is recovering from the hyperinflationary crisis beginning in 2017, brought about by U.S. financial and trade sanctions, the Central Bank (BCV) published a report showing that monthly inflation in July was 0.7%, confirming the trend toward price reduction.
Sanctions are warfare
On July 25, the Washington Post released the results of an investigation titled “The Money War: How four U.S. presidents unleashed economic warfare across the globe.”
The Post report reveals that Presidents Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden have placed some form of sanctions against a third of the countries around the world. “The United States is imposing sanctions at a record-setting pace again this year, with more than 60 percent of low-income countries now under some form of financial penalty, according to a Washington Post analysis.”
“Sanctions on Venezuela, for instance, contributed to an economic contraction roughly three times as large as that caused by the Great Depression in the United States.”
After the U.S. proclaimed Gonzales the winner, Panama’s President José Raúl Mulino followed suit and met U.S. General Laura Richardson of U.S. Southern Command. He proposed a regional summit of presidents who might support this intervention. Unsurprisingly, many countries in the region rejected Mulino’s proposal point blank.
“No country has the right to ‘foment actions’ that are not within the framework of respect for the self-determination of peoples,” said the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America, or ALBA, whose members include Antigua and Barbuda, Bolivia, Cuba, Dominica, Grenada, Nicaragua, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and Venezuela. In a statement, the organization described Panama’s proposal as “interventionist,” with the aim of destabilizing Venezuela or even fomenting a coup in the country.
President Maduro defends his country
On Aug. 3, President Maduro said that if the U.S. government and its partners continued to intervene, Venezuela would give the oil and gas blocks that have already been signed over to the U.S. and other Western companies “to our allies in the BRICS.”
The BRICS nations have invested much in Venezuela’s oil and gas sectors. Venezuela and Bolivia want to join BRICS. Maduro said that the grouping, which includes Brazil, Russia, China, India, and South Africa, offers interesting economic opportunities.
China and Russia were among the first countries to congratulate Maduro on his election victory.
Russia has a long-standing military partnership with Venezuela. The Smolny training ship of the Russian Baltic Fleet docked in Venezuela’s La Guaira port on Aug. 5 as part of a “working visit.” The ship’s crew attended a wreath-laying ceremony at the Bolívar-Chávez Plaza and other events. The visit comes just weeks after two Russian military ships, including the Admiral Gorshkov—the most advanced frigate in the Russian fleet—anchored for four days at La Guaira. Venezuelan Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López said the visit was intended to strengthen military-technical cooperation between Caracas and Moscow.
US financial giants and the opposition
One significant supporter of the opposition candidate revealed the hidden support of millions of U.S. dollars for an electoral coup. The Carter Center, which, until this year’s elections, found nothing to fault with previous elections, is no longer an independent observer.
Its current CEO, Paige Alexander, who was appointed after Venezuela’s previous election, comes from USAID/CIA. She has also served on the board of the Free Russia Foundation.
Now, just a few of Carter Center’s list of sponsors include the U.S. State Department, USAID/CIA, Belgium, the U.K. Development Office, Pfizer, Open Society, Coca-Cola, the Gates Foundation, the Turner Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Walton Foundation.
Proving that social media is a potent political weapon, Elon Musk—who had said of Bolivia, “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it”—weighed in on support for the overthrow of the Venezuelan revolution. On Aug. 8, President Maduro declared, “X out for 10 days! Elon Musk out!” He announced his decision to ban the social network temporarily and accused its owner of using it to promote hatred and violence after Venezuela’s presidential election.
Should Venezuelans Accept the Opposition’s Claim that Maduro Lost? A Response to Alejandro Velasco
On Aug. 6, Maduro publicly deleted the WhatsApp messaging app (owned by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta) during his weekly TV show and urged supporters to switch to Telegram.
A report by the New York Times on Aug. 4 gave a clue to the financial heft of foundations. The Gates Foundation’s resources dwarf those of most other big global foundations, and its annual budget exceeds that of the World Health Organization.
“Not unlike an undulating octopus, the foundation has its tentacles in a variety of global issues… With offices scattered across the globe, it has built an enormous—and sometimes invisible—network of ties with governments, multilateral institutions, corporations, countries, universities, and nonprofits.
“In 2019, the foundation — whose influence, size and practices had already invited criticism about its approach being neocolonial, antidemocratic and too reliant on the idea that technology can solve all problems, reflecting Mr. Gates’s view.”
Despite all the powerful imperialist attacks wielded to sabotage its revolution, Venezuela’s people continue to build their society. They have spoken out to defend their progress.
