Flags of Venezuela, United States, and Norway, with the symbol of NATO superimposed. Photo: Graphic by Al Mayadeen.
By Sergio Rodríguez Gelfenstein – Nov 3, 2023
The circus presented by the United States and Norway, its NATO ally, with respect to Venezuela marked a turning point on October 17 when an agreement was signed between the government and the opposition.
The circus is related to the ridiculousness of negotiating outside Venezuelan territory (in Mexico and Barbados) only because there is no US embassy in Venezuela and the US needs to closely control its Venezuelan employees who “negotiate” on its behalf. When has it been seen that two legal parties to a conflict in a country have to negotiate abroad when neither of them is clandestine or persecuted and when there is no war going on in the country?
The need for dialogue between Venezuelans in Mexico and Barbados is an expression of the deep distrust Washington has for its Venezuelan cronies whom it needs to “control closely.”
The purpose of this “negotiation” was to ratify, in order to give a legal framework to what was already agreed in the real negotiation, which is the one held discreetly and confidentially between the government of Venezuela and the government of the United States. The latter asked to keep it secret while deciding how to “sell” to its public opinion that it is dialoguing with a government which it characterized as a dictatorship and which it swore to defeat in any way, considering that “all options were on the table.” Washington asked Caracas to keep in reserve what had been agreed upon until the “best moment” to make it public. That time came, however, earlier than the Biden administration had anticipated.
At this point, the United States could already confirm that its whole arsenal of instruments used to overthrow the Venezuelan government failed thunderously. Let us see:
- They tried to fracture the armed forces.
- They carried out a coup d’état.
- They carried out an invasion by sea.
- Another invasion by land from Colombia.
- They carried out a drone attack to assassinate President Maduro and members of the government and the military high command.
- They allied with organized crime and drug trafficking to destabilize the country.
- They carried out several waves of terrorist attacks and sabotage against the public infrastructure.
- They imposed over 930 unilateral coercive measures (wrongly called sanctions) against individuals and institutions of the country.
- They unleashed a furious media campaign of lies to misinform about what was happening in Venezuela.
- They falsified the number of migrants that they themselves produced with their wave of sanctions and aggressions in order to maximize the profits “that business” produces, building a fable about it, without caring in the least about the pain of those Venezuelans who were forced to leave their land.
- They blocked international financial transactions.
- They founded the Lima Group, the only international organization in history created to overthrow a government.
- They sent their warships to the Caribbean Sea to block trade, preventing the arrival of medicines and food to the country.
- They ordered their satellite countries to withdraw their ambassadors from Caracas. They themselves closed their embassy in Caracas while they ordered groups of criminals to occupy ours in Washington by force, violating the most elementary norms of international law.
- They forbade Western laboratories to sell COVID-19 vaccines to Venezuela.
- They mobilized neighboring countries to exert military pressure on Venezuela’s borders.
- They artificially manipulated the Venezuelan currency, the bolívar.
- They indiscriminately sanctioned the Venezuelan national energy industry, especially PDVSA.
- They sent hundreds of millions of dollars to finance internal subversion, which produced dozens of victims through practices only compared to those of the Nazis and the Zionists today in Palestine.
- They invented a fake president.
- They stole with impunity Venezuelan companies, airplanes, and refineries, as well as other assets abroad to hand them over as booty to their Venezuelan employees doing the job entrusted by Washington.
…and they failed. All these actions are documented and can be the object of study for those interested in knowing what has happened and is happening in Venezuela.
Having exhausted all these weapons, they intend to create a new Guaidó, but now trying to give a legal appearance to the procedure. At the international level, given that the new progressive governments of Colombia and Brazil have refused to take part in the US-led actions against Venezuela, they are using the weak regime of Guyana, led by an elite with a neo-colonial and creeping mentality who has betrayed the nation’s great founding leaders: Cheddi Jagan and Forbes Burnham, to create an international conflict aimed at justifying a military action under the leadership of the Southern Command of the United States Armed Forces, thus serving the large Western energy transnationals.
Despite having discovered that the Venezuelan opposition, besides being an expression of mediocrity and shameful ignorance, have lied to them for years announcing “the imminent fall of Maduro,” the United States—just as in Ukraine and “Israel”—clings to interventionist and interfering practices, supporting forces that represent the most retrograde philosophy in the country. The US’ attachment to an outdated cold war logic has been more powerful than its quest to understand a reality that is heralding the birth of a new world.
But that is not the reason why the US negotiated with Venezuela. They have no qualms about squandering US taxpayers’ money through an uncontrolled hemorrhage in an attempt to stop the course of history. There are two sides to this apparent rapprochement with Venezuela. First, the deep economic crisis, particularly in the area of energy that is besetting the United States.
It should be remembered that only two weeks after the start of Russia’s military operation in Ukraine, a US delegation, the highest level in over a decade, arrived in Caracas, headed by Juan González, the White House national security advisor.
Hidden behind an alleged interest in freeing some US citizens imprisoned in Venezuela, the real purpose of the visit was to open doors to establish a line of communication with Venezuela at a time of uncertainty regarding the scope that the conflict in Ukraine could have.
But what they could have foreseen fell short. The sanctions against Russia boomeranged and are affecting the victimizers more than the victim. A report from last week shows that the strategic oil reserve of the United States is at its lowest level since 1983. The truth is that today they have less than half of the crude oil they had in reserve 10 years ago. At the moment, that amount to 350 million barrels. To give you an idea of what that means, in the last two years, Biden released 270 million barrels from the US reserves in order to lower prices.
They could not do that today. That is why they need Venezuela’s oil to flow unrestricted in the global market. This is the first reason that explains the reason for the negotiations.
Venezuela’s Government Delegation Signs 2 Agreements in Barbados to Resume Peace Talks
The second logic on which the US government is acting is the way in which they can sell to their public that, as I said before, they are negotiating with the “dictatorship” they swore to destroy. As is well known, US public opinion is ignorant, manageable and manipulable and only matters as a vote-producing machine. However, if it does not work for that purpose, it can also be manipulated to accept a fraud like the one that occurred in the US presidential elections in 2000 when Al Gore was robbed of the election due to an agreement between the elites and the institutions of power.
The Biden administration is trying to sell its negotiations with the Venezuelan government in such a way that, sustained by the organic stupidity of that public opinion, this situation, which is political in nature, can be transformed into an electoral one, and that is a problem for the US administration. These two factors accelerated the negotiation process in Venezuela.
Therefore, the US forced the Venezuelan opposition to go to Barbados and accept everything that the Venezuelan government proposed because everything that was proposed had already been previously agreed between the governments of Venezuela and the United States. The opposition was not given the chance to express its opinion, only to comply. That is why the issue of political disqualifications was not discussed. As usual, once again, the United States used and then disposed of its lackeys, whether individuals, organizations or countries, when these no longer serve them. Just ask Guaidó.
Now, Washington is selling it in such a way that it seems that, to the extent that the Venezuelan government and the opposition agreed, there is no point in maintaining the sanctions because they achieved their objective of forcing Maduro to give in. Everything is false, it is the other way around. Washington reached an agreement with Caracas and ordered the opposition to abide by it.
The assertion that Maduro gave in is obvious that to some extent, politics, if it is to be carried out within the framework of the representative democracy that prevails in Venezuela, obliges the parties to give in on something. But what has not been negotiated is sovereignty, territorial integrity, the will of the people to defend their future, and in that, Venezuela has had in President Maduro a firm defender. We cannot speak of yielding in pejorative terms. On the contrary, yielding is a symbol of greatness, and of power. One yields in tactical matters while being firm and immovable in the defense of strategic objectives. This is the essence of successfully carrying forward the long-term goals that lead to the revolutionary transformation of society.
For this, it is necessary to know how to build the correlation of forces necessary to produce the changes, and in the midst of a brutal imperialist aggression, this process is slow and difficult. The Venezuelan government has yielded in negotiating with the democratic opposition because it is a constitutional mandate.
Reaching agreements in favor of the country and the people is not negative. On the contrary, it is what all Venezuelans want. However, the terrorist opposition that is now trying to create an artificial leader by deceiving the people and that also questions the sovereign interests of Venezuela in the Essequibo region have no capacity to debate, only to abide by what is dictated from the North.
The people of Venezuela resisted and triumphed, showing once again that victory is the prize of those who fight and do not kneel. This is what we learned from Bolívar and Chávez and this is what sustains us to face and win the battles of the future wherever they are fought: at the negotiating table or in the battlefield.
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
OT/SC/JRE
Sergio Rodriguez-Gelfenstein
Sergio Rodríguez Gelfenstein, a Venezuelan international relations expert, Gelfenstein was previously Director of the International Relations of the Presidency of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, his country’s ambassador to Nicaragua and an advisor for international politics for TELESUR. He has written numerous books, among them “China in the XXI Century – the awakening of a giant,” published in several Latin American countries.
