Venezuela Under Attack: 7 Notes on the Electric Shock
Between the afternoon of March 8 and the early morning of the 10th, Venezuela was the victim of a new sabotage attack, the largest in its history, at the Guri hydroelectric power station, which left without electricity at least 80% of the population, with the aim of undermining any attempt by the Venezuelan Government to achieve the stabilization of the economy and stop the insurrectionary situation that the United States and its dolphins like Juan Guaidó are trying to complete in our country.
1. The preparation of the shock. Prior to the sabotage that shook the whole of the National Electric System, leaving without light much of the country during the last two days, several movements and statements announced that they would resort to brute force action.
The falsely epic return of Guaidó lasted less than expected in theaters, before the arrival of the “interim president” there were no critical defections in the FANB (Army) that mixed with a generalized social revolt installed in Miraflores to exercise power. That round of recovery (his glorious arrival in Maiquetia), after the defeat of February 23, the day he took for granted the entry of “humanitarian aid”, did not have an effect beyond the temporary frenzy of the media. As a result, Guaidó returned to the uncomfortable starting point of two months ago. Weathered by the defeat of February 23 and without concrete actions of presidential command to catapult it internally, the orchestration of the following operations would be entirely on account of the United States.
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An excited as usual Marco Rubio, announced hours before the blackout that “Venezuelans will live the most severe shortage of food and gasoline”, letting you know that he was aware that some kind of shock would arise in the next few hours. For its part, the Russian government issued a statement warning that “the United States is preparing a backup plan that tries to introduce illegal armed groups in Venezuela in order to carry out sabotage and subversive activities.” The ongoing dirty war was aired by both sides of the geopolitical conflict over Venezuela.
Rubio’s self-fulfilling prophecy became a reality in a widespread blackout that had an expanded impact on the banking network, telecommunications and vital public services of the country (hospitals, water supply, transportation, etc.), permanently hindering its operation and paralyzing the routine activities of the population. In short, an undercover attack on the gravitational center of the Venezuelan electricity system, planned to exacerbate social and economic unrest, refloating the narrative of “humanitarian crisis” and “failed state”, with which they hope to reactivate the crippled leadership of Guaidó.
But this tendency to appeal to antipolitical and unconventional war options when political resources do not work, is neither new nor recent (just remember the continued electrical attacks when the 2014 and 2017 color revolutions went into ebb). In his way Bloomberg insinuated as much in his latest report. The wear and tear of Guaidó, his inability to lead a process of more or less serious transition. clears the ground so that attacks like those of the Guri, armed violence, irregular, the war of sabotage in the Nicaraguan Contra style, become alternatives “legitimate” and “urgent” to confront Chavismo. Trump’s delegate to Venezuela, Elliott Abrams, the father of the mercenary war against Nicaragua in the 1980s, has extensive knowledge of these forms of war.
2. Embargo and sanctions: weapons of mass destruction. To the historical vulnerabilities of an electricity system dependent on income from oil revenues, a fierce policy of financial sanctions has been added that has diminished the capacity of public investment in strategic branches of the State. The Venezuelan money seized by the United States is counted at 30 billion dollars. Using the “parallel government” of Guaidó as a tool, it has left the country without liquid resources with which to deal with the difficulties that stimulate sanctions. Meanwhile, Guaidó uses the money seized, according to him, to opaquely cancel some interest on the foreign debt.
The national electricity system has been under attack due to an explosive mixture of divestment fueled by the financial blockade, loss of specialized technical personnel due to wage depreciation and systematic sabotage operations, the latest put-into-effect when the political offensive is recovered by Chavismo. Chris Floyd, author of the book The Empire Burlesque was right in designating financial sanctions as a “holocaust”: the use of this weapon of mass destruction in countries like Iraq, Iran and Syria, reveals that the damage to critical infrastructure is similar to an intense bombing campaign with cruise missiles.
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THE BLACKOUT IS AN EXTENSION OF THE EMBARGO AGAINST VENEZUELA
In this regard, the blackout is an extension of the embargo against Venezuela, the US policy of restricting imports, blocking accounts and impeding access to liquid money in the international financial market and in its own oil market, prohibiting the payment of exports to Venezuela. The blackout is also a metaphor for the state of siege in which the country is maintained and how the financial blockade, which hinders the use of money to recover an already weakened national electricity system that supports the country’s oil and economic activity, is the substitute for the arms of war.
3. The modality of the cybernetic coup and crime against humanity. At first, and this is what Guaidó would say with his call for a “national strike” last Tuesday in front of some public administration unions, an action of force would come to precipitate that announced paralysis. The modality of manufacturing a situation of collapse, as when the Credicard payment platform , in 2016, canceled its system to interrupt all the commercial and economic activities of the country, this time it was executed by expanding its impact radius.
And is that the burden of stress and discontent that is sought to induce in the population, as a fuel to stimulate a situation of generalized anarchy that could somehow be channeled into violent protests in favor of Guaidó, indicates that the strategy of chaos (through cybernetic and artisanal sabotage focused on critical infrastructures that make the country work) is used as a massive shock tool with the objective of wearing down the population. The operation is not only about electric warfare, its consequences cover all the routine activities of Venezuelan society, which is hindered in access to food, hospital service and basic communications.
A crime against humanity seen in the light of the Statute of Rome and international law, while seeking the physical destruction of a population group using as weapons of war the basic elements of their livelihood.
Marco Rubio and Mike Pompeo reacted in a joking manner to the blackout, imprinting a burden of humiliation and sadism that accurately reflects the motivations and bottom strategy of the coup against Venezuela: as the “Guaidó plan” fails in its objectives to reach the fracture of the FANB that deposes Maduro, the civilian population (without ideological discrimination) amounts to a victim of the first order of the continuous covert military aggression that the United States leads.
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This cybernetic blow against the national electrical system implies a de facto military aggression, an extension of the one that occurred on the Colombian-Venezuelan border on February 23.
4. It is not an end in itself: conditions for irregular warfare. Since the arrival of Guaidó, his projection in the media has become marginal. This premeditated reduction of its visibility, contrasts with the increasing weight it has in terms of the orientation of the regime change, the Southern Command, John Bolton, Marco Rubio and Mike Pompeo. In this sense, the harmful effects of the blackout fit perfectly with the narrative of “humanitarian crisis”, under which the Southern Command and the Venezuelan ultra right, since 2016, mobilize the “urgency” to activate a “humanitarian intervention” device to neutralize the prohibition of the United States Congress, the Security Council of the UN and the pragmatic consensus for the non-intervention that has taken place in Latin America.
However, the blackout as such is not an end in itself. At an operational level, it seems rather, especially because the blackout generated the interruption of the electrical system, which is a maneuver to sharpen the country’s vulnerabilities and measure the military response capacity of the Republic’s defensive systems to an irregular and mercenary military action; this would take advantage of the context of information blockade to cover up armed incursions, its operational map and those directly responsible in the field.
SEEK TO GIVE CONCRETE PHYSICALITY TO THE “HUMANITARIAN CRISIS”
Therefore, at the level of the theater of operations of the war against Venezuela, the blackout is translated into the generation of a diffuse and confusing panorama that would favor the execution of false flag operations, paramilitary incursions and other violent actions that precipitate a state of generalized commotion, which can be presented as the triggering event of a preventive military intervention, either to “stabilize the country because of the humanitarian crisis” or to “save Venezuelans from a failed state situation” in “humanitarian crisis”. In that narrative framework, Julio Borges, Antonio Ledezma, Juan Guaidó and the cabinet of the war against Venezuela in Washington, shake hands and work together under the doctrine of controlled chaos of American imprint.
With the blackout they seek to give concrete physicality to the “humanitarian crisis”, not only at the propaganda level, but taking advantage of the human losses and complications of different order that the sabotage operation has generated.
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5. Characteristics of the aggression. This time there was no attack on substations or electric transmission lines, as had been tried on different occasions before, according to the CIA sabotage manuals against the Sandinista Nicaragua of the 1980s, already declassified.
It should be noted that the software used (called Scada) in the Automated Control System (SCA) that operates the engines is created by the canadian ABB corporation, which has not worked in the country for years. This ABB company, which in Venezuela worked as an ABB Trilateral Consortium (ABB Venezuela, ABB Canada, ABB Switzerland), designed a Guri modernization project at the end of the last decade (2009), during the government of Hugo Chávez, in which they describes in depth both the system attacked and the basic organization of the Guri dam.
The geopolitical analyst Vladimir Adrianza Salas, in an interview with TeleSur , relates the attack to the consortium. He explained that the Guri reservoir “requires a control system that is technically called ‘scada system’, which is nothing else than a system of supervision, control and data requisitioning that allows, from a computer perspective, the control of all the operational elements. If you sabotage this, you sabotage the operation, but to sabotage this you need two things: either you must have access from the outside or you must have internal complicity to modify the processes”.
Precedents of this type are found in countries attacked or directly pressured by the United States, such as Iraq and Lebanon, where the blackouts have been systematic and consecutive, one after another for tens of hours. The “replicas” in the interruption of the energy supply would respond to these sequences of offensives that have already been experienced in other contexts of asymmetric and irregular warfare.
The creation of hacker armies and cyberwar materials by the CIA and the NSA has been documented by this rostrum: we reviewed a documentary explaining the origin of the Stuxnet virus, which should point to the corridors of these agencies of US intelligence. This instrument of cyber attack was aimed both at sabotage in nuclear research facilities in Iran and in order to install a circumstantial scenario that could lead to an attack on Iran’s automated national electricity network (system analogous to that of Guri), in case of declared war between Washington and the Islamic Republic.
President Nicolás Maduro, in the evening hours of March 9, assured that this is the largest attack against Venezuela in the last 200 years, after the attack on the national electricity system on an intermittent basis it lasted 60 (to 70) hours
THE SOCIAL CODES AND COLLECTIVE AND SOLIDARITY HABITS OF 2002-2003 WERE SEEN THESE DAYS AND NIGHTS
6. Stop recovery trends. The blackout occurs amid trends in the recovery at different scales, at the economic level, a fall in prices for sensitive foods has reduced the tension at the beginning of the year, while financially the restructuring of the foreign exchange market has managed to contain the variables of induced inflation: the increase in the price of currencies in the black market. These tendencies have favored the political stability of the country, in the midst of non-conventional aggression and threats of military intervention, taking away from Guaidó not only the convening power, but the ability to maneuver to capitalize on the widespread malaise caused by the sanctions.
Thus, the blackout seeks to curb these trends of social, political and economic recovery, aggravating through a widespread boycott the means of payment, access to food and hospitals and the normal development of Venezuelan society. Similarly, the aggressiveness of the attack aims to weaken the country’s oil and industrial production.
7. The conscience of the country (remember 2002-2003) and the push for intervention. As in 2002, the Venezuelan population has experienced a generalized hard test. A sabotage operation aimed at precipitating a generalized chaos that puts the health and nutrition of the people at risk, the country’s economic activity, its telecommunications and our most basic routines, takes us back to the landscape of oil sabotage in 2002- 2003, where the opposition of that moment, the same ones that manage an intervention with the United States and Colombia, executed a state of siege paralyzing the oil industry.
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The reaction of the population, psychologically attacked in recent years in order to stimulate a civil war that allows intervention, has been adverse to the calculation of sabotage. Calm has been imposed, the use of portable stoves in the buildings and neighborhoods for cooking, the mobilization of the physical resources of the country to address the most pressing emergencies; but above all the generalized vocation of the country not to fall into a provocation that seeks to lead to a civil and armed confrontation. Violence was defeated as in 2002-2003, that landscape that marks our contemporary history today offers the lesson that after a trial of fire overcome, where the brutality of the coup is of massive impact, the cohesion of the people is reaffirmed.
At the close of this publication, Juan Guaidó tries to channel the impact of the blackout to “declare an extraordinary emergency” in the National Assembly, because according to him “it was time to take the step”, flirting with the idea of using the Constitution to legitimize a military intervention. Precisely in this orientation as a way to close the cycle of sabotage, it can be seen that the end of the blackout attempts to create the conditions of anarchy, chaos and absence of vital services, to press for a “humanitarian intervention” on Venezuelan soil, with the approval of the National Assembly and the “coalition of Latin American countries”, ready for an action of force, which is being put together by John Bolton.
That pressure, however, is specific and staggered. Before the arrival of the technical mission of the High Commissioner of Human Rights, the blackout will seek to be channeled towards a fattening of the record of the “humanitarian crisis” in Venezuela, which well-organized and promoted in the media, could result in a change of positions at the regional level, of the same UN, of the US Congress, on the “urgency” of a “humanitarian relief” action requested by the “parallel government”.
A maneuver that lowers the curtain on Guaidó, who is the prisoner of an ill-conceived plan and dependent on the chain of command of the cabinet of the war against Venezuela in Washington, must be sacrificed in order to open the way to war. Imagine him enough of a convincing sacrifice, it’s a political use of a lever of state power, in this case the National Assembly, to legitimize a foreign military intervention. A suicide accompanied by sectors of the ultras of Caracas, direct sons of the first Spanish colonizers, who cry for the activation of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) that destroyed Libya, Kosovo, Iraq, and other regions that the United States has plundered to maintain its power status.
But the blackout must be another lesson, and must force us to look at the social codes and collective habits and solidarity that emerged in 2002-2003, our weapons as a historical and spiritual community available to maintain the thread of life of our homeland’s story.
Translated by JRE/EF
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