Venezuelan far-right opposition politicians María Corina Machado (left) and Edmundo González Urrutia (right) at a political event. File photo.
By Geraldina Colotti – Sep 22, 2024
“It has never mattered to us if some European fascists vote for a resolution without any value against the sovereignty of Venezuela.” Thus, with the dignity and pride of one who feels himself heir to the Liberator Simon Bolivar, the president of the Venezuelan National Assembly, Jorge Rodríguez, commented, during an international press conference, on the decision of the European Parliament to “recognize” as “president-elect” of Venezuela the extreme-right former candidate Edmundo González Urrutia.
The reaction of the alternate ambassador of Venezuela to the UN, Alexander Yánez, was in the same tone, when he defined as a “ridiculous pamphlet” dictated by Washington the statement with which, in the Human Rights Council, 40 countries “denounced Nicolás Maduro.” In a subsequent statement, Venezuelan Foreign Affairs Minister Yvan Gil condemned the attempt to resuscitate the failed Lima Group, initiated at the time of the previous self-proclamation by Juan Guaidó in 2019.
It is grotesque that the person who led the conduct of the Human Rights Council was the foreign minister of Argentina, Diana Mondino, the spokesperson of Javier Milei who daily applies the “chainsaw” on the basic rights of the Argentinian people. It makes no sense for the representatives of European countries to define a declared and confessed coup leader like María Corina Machado as “the leader of the democratic forces.” It is significant, however, that the magnate of digital platforms, Elon Musk, has received Milei with great fanfare and has now presented an award to the extreme right Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. All, evidently, great defenders of democracy. And equally “democratic” are the threats pronounced by the head of Blackwater, Erik Prince, to prepare mercenary “surprises” for Venezuela, as in fact has happened, despite the deafening silence of the European media.
However, even more symptomatic of the short-circuit prevailing in European countries is the vote of the “left” (liberal and imperialist) against Venezuela in the European Parliament, cast even by its representatives supposedly more sensitive to the defense of “rights.” One such example is MEP Carola Rackete, elected by the Green and Left Alliance (AVS), who not only voted in favor of Venezuelan neo-fascism but also in favor of Ukrainian neo-fascism, joining those who approved the use of European weapons directly on Russian territory.
Several environmentalists and members of the European left voted in favor of the war, together with the right-wing Popular Party of Spain and the liberals. However, the representative of the Italian right-wing bloc The League, Matteo Salvini, spoke against the use of European weapons on Russian territory. Nevertheless, he made that statement as a spokesman for those companies that have their interests in Russia, and certainly not against the interests of the military-industrial complex and NATO that directs it.
It is worth remembering that the environmentalist Rackete was elected by the Italian pacifist left for opposing the xenophobic policies of Salvini (now on trial) and for saving migrants in the Mediterranean Sea that has turned into a marine cemetery. She is proof of how distant Chávez’s voice is when he rightly affirmed: “We need to change the system to change the climate.”
This is a short-circuit that, while old and new fascisms advance, favored by the anomie imposed on the younger generations, reveals the “war pacifism” of a “left” without horizon, and brings back to the present the Marxist debate of the last century, which Venezuela renews.
However, in order to impose a new metaphysics, useful for the dominant system, facts and real responsibilities must disappear. And so, as the Venezuelan government lamented at the UN, the 27 victims of María Corina Machado’s “comanditos” have been disappeared, while complaints of alleged human rights violations attributed to Maduro multiply.
What they are trying to reactivate at the UN is the so-called Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Venezuela, approved in 2019 by the Human Rights Council after being promoted by the now defunct Lima Group which had “recognized” Guaidó, with the support of the Organization of American States (OAS).
This fact-finding mission is a group of three international “experts” who do not report to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and express non-binding opinions, decided by an office in Panama. The mandate of the group (renewed three times) expires in September, and now a false legitimization of Urrutia’s ridiculous self-proclamation 2.0 is needed.
It will be a difficult farce to mount between now and January 10, when the legitimate president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, will be sworn in before the parliament. That same parliament whose president, Jorge Rodríguez, was recognized by Urrutia when he wanted to leave the country and take refuge in Spain.
Where will Mr. Urrutia take office, in a luxury room of the “government of Narnia?” Will Guaidó put a marzipan presidential sash on the self-proclaimed successor? Now, from Madrid, thrown by the coattails by the coup extremism of his team, the former candidate is making disjointed statements that embarrass the Spanish diplomacy itself, that Spanish diplomacy that was witness and guarantor that the whole operation of González Urrutia’s departure took place in a relaxed atmosphere, with a bottle of whiskey offered by the Spanish embassy in Caracas.
The videos and documents shown by the Venezuelan government bear witness to this but, in the media, instead of observing the merit, there is a discussion as to why they were disseminated … Respect for bourgeois legality only counts when it is necessary to line the pockets of Washington’s valets.
It is worth asking why this is happening, why Venezuela is periodically pushed to the center of the world stage, becoming a hot topic even for those who cannot even find it on a map. It is convenient for the future of the popular classes to decipher the interests hidden behind manipulated information that seeks to undermine facts and reason.
A first element should arouse suspicions: the media space used, in Europe, to attack Venezuela as opposed to the space dedicated, for example, to Ecuador (sunk in an abyss of economic crisis and political criminality), to Argentina (where the “chainsaw madman” tramples all rights every day), or even to other big countries like Brazil and Mexico, where a noisy and violent extreme right is trying by all means to overthrow democratic governments, using a scheme that is being repeated in Colombia.
Yet, instead, it is the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela that emerges as the quintessence of all evils: at least since it assumed that name almost 25 years ago, after a National Constituent Assembly that, in 1999, brought a new constitution based on “participative and protagonist democracy” and national independence, with a broad guarantee of powers, in the spirit of the Liberator Simón Bolívar.
Previously, the massacres perpetrated by the governments of the Fourth Republic, appreciated by the US, were narrated in a few lines. And why did everything change after the election of Hugo Chávez as the president of Venezuela (December 6, 1998)? The progressive former military officer of indigenous origin immediately catalyzed the fiercest hatred, unleashing the supremacist attacks that, in Europe, would fully explode only a few years later, and which are now in full swing, with the advance of the fascism of the third millennium.
The figure of the Comandante has reactivated the old fear of the ruling classes against the wretched of the earth who organize themselves. A fear renewed later by the election of the former bus driver, Nicolás Maduro, at the head of the Bolivarian nation, and by a collective administration headed by the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV). A burning slap in the face of the local oligarchy and a specter hovering over the victorious bourgeoisies in European countries.
It hurts that Bolívar’s “barefoot army,” mestizo and anti-hierarchical, has become “the army of all the people,” similar to the one built by Ho Chi Minh, and has so far defeated all kinds of attacks and flattery. It burns that this army defends the sovereignty of the country and not the mercenary interests of US imperialism.
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The manipulated information on Venezuela, spread in Europe, indicates three elements that question and unmask the true nature of bourgeois democracy.
In the first place, by targeting a country that possesses extraordinary resources, fundamental for a capitalism in structural crisis, the attack on Venezuela unmasks the real interests that drive imperialist wars, sometimes defined as “humanitarian.” For having exposed them, giving names and surnames, the founder of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, almost died in prison. And after years, he could only get out at the price of being subdued, and of having “recognized” the system that he had unmasked.
That Bolivarian Venezuela proudly claims its sovereignty in the face of an imperialism that submits European governments to NATO and to a European Union (of capital and finance), which in turn submits the economies of the member states, is an unbearable truth: a truth to hide and distort by deploying all the power of the ideological apparatus of control.
And here lies the second element, the second unmasking that produces the “truth of Venezuela,” as President Maduro often says. A truth denied, distorted or discredited, as we are seeing after the presidential elections of July 28. Let us talk about another important chapter of the systemic crisis of capitalism, the crisis of the “democratic” institutions that sustain it, both at the level of international and national organizations, emptied and demolished on the basis of the war economy and the society of control that is its correlate.
Take, for example, Italy, a country under the umbrella of NATO, its gendarme in the Mediterranean and one of its main strongholds in Europe. Since the 1980s, since the defeat and demonization of the extraordinary cycle of struggle of the 1970s, in which the popular classes tried to “do as in Russia” and build “one, one hundred, one thousand Vietnam” as Che said, the parliament has been deprived of its decision-making authority by decree.
With the passage from the First to the Second Republic (with which the Italian bourgeoisie changed sides by resorting to the courts), a neo-authoritarian involution was thus “normalized,” which ignored people’s decisions (referendums and pacifist demonstrations), to the point of modifying the Italian constitution: because it repudiated war and fascism, when wars were wanted, calling them “humanitarian,” and because it prohibited the reconstitution of the fascist party, but fascism had to be “whitewashed,” to the point of bringing it into government, without calling it by its name.
The use of institutional artifices as weapons to undermine the popular will is very evident now in France, where the extreme right is governing although the majority of the votes went to the radical left. What would have happened if instead of Emmanuel Macron there had been Chávez or Maduro? And what about the genocide in Palestine, the so-called “targeted assassinations” carried out by the Zionist regime and the Pentagon, terrorism with impunity, when a country of the Global South is prevented from even making a defensive reaction?
And what about the “sanctions” unilaterally and illegally imposed on countries not aligned with Washington, but not imposed on the Zionist regime despite committing a genocide of these proportions and the violation of all UN norms and resolutions? Meanwhile, on behalf of the EU, Ursula von der Leyen traveled to Ukraine to deliver to Zelensky not only a new package of European weapons and a green light to use them on Russian territory, but also to transfer to his army Russian assets “frozen” in the EU.
The same mechanism was used against Bolivarian socialism, by stealing its gold deposited in British banks. A gigantic violation of international legality, carried out on the basis of the artifice of “recognizing” a character not elected by the people but “anointed” by the United States as “interim president of Venezuela.” A normalized and refined mechanism, because the bourgeoisie always treasures the highest point reached in the repression of the popular classes, while at the same time it dedicates itself to destroy historical memory, to prevent the people from using in their benefit the experience of past revolutions.
And so, as we see in Palestine with the policy of the colonists to impose new occupations, the same is happening with Venezuela. In view of the ridicule and failure of the previous “self-proclamation,” they are now trying to “legitimize” another one by inventing a false electoral victory, giving the impression that there was a Chavista fraud against Edmundo González, the puppet candidate of the coup leader María Corina Machado.
A lie that is only possible at the cost of ignoring, as the European media did, the extraordinary street demonstrations in favor of the reelected president, Nicolás Maduro. Only at the cost of ignoring that this same scheme, now used by the Venezuelan ultra right, is the one used by the fascist international that operates in the US, Latin America and Europe: in Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Colombia, etc.
And here lies the third element, which refers to the great monopolistic concentration of the media, the counterpart of economic concentration. A point that highlights the formidable short-circuit that has occurred at the ideological level, as a consequence of a semantic bombardment on a global scale, carried out in the name of the “fight against the two totalitarianisms” (nazism and communism).
A trap that has imposed a “democratic” totalitarianism, based on metaphysics and censorship. All in the name of “pluralism” and “freedom of expression,” useful above all to deny the fierce asymmetry inherent in the contradiction between capital and labor, and between peoples and imperialism, and to impose the mantra that there are no alternatives to capitalism.
A short-circuit favored by the circularity and horizontality of social networks and platforms, which nevertheless conceal their proprietary interests, their omnipresence (with big data) and their objectives linked to unbridled consumption and social control.
A circularity and gratuitousness that would only be possible from a global governance of resources, the fruit of popular power and the ideals of equality and social justice, and not from the pursuit of profit. A vision of the world that would lead to increasing the advantages of global communication in favor of the development of mankind and not its destruction as is happening through the use of artificial intelligence for military purposes or to induce new addictions.
The more capital globalizes and markets are interconnected, in spite of their endemic conflict, the more it determines the fragmentation of the productive fabric and the fragmentation of the labor force, hindering the necessary project of a new unity of classes. The more capital ignores limits and frontiers, the more it raises them to the infinite masses of human beings, victims of the gigantic war against the poor that the system has unleashed, and that prevents us from uniting against the common enemy.
The more the war hegemony led by NATO imposes itself in Europe, extending its imperialist tentacles against Palestine, Russia, China and that part of Latin America which, like Venezuela, shares the ideals heroically defended by Cuba or Nicaragua, the more necessary it is to paint a world upside down and impose an adequate narrative.
It is in this triple key that we can understand the chain of existing complicities, at the European level, against the “truth of Venezuela,” and the rubber wall against which all evidence bounces to establish rights and wrongs, on the basis of a real democracy, peace with social justice and the common good.
(Resumen Latinoamericano – English)
Geraldina Colotti
Geraldina Colotti was born in Ventimiglia and has lived in Paris for a long time. She served a 27-year sentence for her militancy in the Red Brigades. Colotti is a journalist and writer, an expert in Latin America, and in charge of the Italian edition of "Le Monde Diplomatique".
