Venezuelan National Assembly President Jorge Rodríguez (left) during the 6th episode of Maduro Podcast, hosted by President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady and National Assembly Deputy Cilia Flores, January 26, 2023. Photo: Presidential Press.
The president of the Venezuelan National Assembly, Jorge Rodríguez, said that the last few years have been very difficult for Venezuela and the country has been torn between the aggression from the opposition and the calls for dialogue by the government.
He made this comment on Friday, January 26, in the sixth episode of Maduro Podcast, hosted by the president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro. Rodríguez was a guest on the show and shared with the president his views on the difficult years of resistance of the Bolivarian Revolution.
“I do not know if anyone else in the political history of this continent called their adversaries and enemies to dialogue, as President Chavez and President Maduro have done,” said Jorge Rodríguez.
President Nicolás Maduro, reflecting on this point, commented that “Venezuela is the country that has made the most efforts to peacefully resolve the political situation,” but the process has always been torpedoed on orders from Washington.
Rodríguez commented that during his term as minister of Communication and Information, the government made 20 complaints about attempts against national peace between 2017 and 2019. “Attempted assassination, arms theft, electrical sabotage, attempted coup d’état, attacks against revolutionary leaders, etc.,” he enumerated.
“There have been dialogues in secret, in public, during the pandemic, the Dominican Republic’s effort with [Spanish ex-President] Rodríguez Zapatero and [former Dominican] President Danilo Medina,” Rodríguez referred to the dialogues that the Venezuelan government has held with the extreme right opposition. “We were going to sign that agreement, and at that moment Julio Borges’ phone rings, it was [former US Secretary of State] Rex Tyllerson and [former Colombian President] Juan Manuel Santos, who told him, ‘Don’t sign that because we have another plan.’ Then they [opposition delegates] arrived under the influence of alcohol to say that they would not sign that agreement and thus Julio Borges destroyed the agreement before the 2018 presidential elections.”
Dialogue with the United States
Rodríguez recounted that the Venezuelan government was contacted by the Trump administration in 2019 and “they asked for a safe channel to hold a meeting, and they sent us Mr. Elliot Abrams, who had done dirty work for the government of Ronald Reagan.”
“The first part of the meeting was on a Caribbean island, and Abrams said that the whole country was going to feel like a shredder that was going to pulverize all, that was on April 29, 2019,” Rodríguez recalled.
“It was a meeting where we said some very harsh things to each other,” he continued. “We went to lunch, and then the gringos arrived very happy saying that we had messed with a power, that they were not going to allow things like this to happen in the continent, they were happy, because they already knew that the next day the banana coup with Guaidó and Leopoldo López was going to happen, which also failed.”
Battlefield as experiments of multidimensional warfare
President Nicolás Maduro reviewed the conspiracies and attempts against peace that Venezuela has suffered during the last 20 years.
“The economic war in all its forms during these years, the internal political war, the psychological war to take society to a level of confrontation, schizophrenia: what they—the opposition—call in their dogfighting manuals, I always found that concept horrible… used to terrorize countries,” expressed President Maduro.
In this regard, Jorge Rodríguez stated that Venezuelans “have been subjected to experiments on all forms of multidimensional warfare, which is also very economical to the US, because it does not cost the US army any casualties, because the war, above all, is carried out against the mind, psychology, and customs of a society.”
He added that these are strategies that have been applied in the “Color Revolutions” in the Middle East and Europe, or in the operations carried out during dictatorial periods in countries such as Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, as well as in Central America during the 1980s.
“In Venezuela they have failed thunderously although they have tried again and again,” highlighted the parliamentarian when detailing that only during the period of 2017-2019 the Venezuelan government made at least 20 substantiated complaints of serious acts against the stability and peace of the Republic, among them: assassination attempt against President Maduro on August 4, 2018; training of mercenaries in paramilitary camps in Colombia; psychological warfare operations; sabotage against the Venezuelan electricity supply system; attempted assassination of leaders of the Bolivarian Revolution; attempted takeovers of military posts; theft of weapons in military units; and coup attempts.
The National Assembly of 2015, paid by the US
“The extremist opposition had five years in the National Assembly,” commented President Maduro about the only election that the opposition won in the last 25 years. “They won with deception, with a psychological operation of queues… they created the queues, they disappeared products from the market, and they created the narrative, the false illusion that they were a solution. They had five years with all the power of the National Assembly, and those five years were when a political sector has done the most damage in the history of the 200 years of the Republic.”
During that time the then president of the National Assembly, Juan Guaidó, declared himself as “interim president” with US backing, and unleashed a series of illegal sanctions and coup attempts that harmed the entire Venezuelan society.
“There has not been anyone in political life that did as much damage as the oligarchy, as this mafia, as this gang of extremists, it is impressive,” emphasized President Maduro.
Jorge Rodríguez detailed that “they had 25,000 people who were being paid by the Assembly payroll, and nobody knew where they came from, and they were also paid with money given by the gringos, because all the deputies of that legislature of 2015-2020 received payments according to the importance the US gave them.”
Rodríguez pointed out that the level of impunity and disaster created by the Guaidó gang is “barbaric.” “Guaidó signed a contract with some mercenaries, the Silvercorp company of Mr. Goudreau, and offered free transit for Colombian drug trafficking,” he stated.
(Últimas Noticias) by Randolph Borges
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
OT/SC/DZ
