This is not just Trump’s war on Venezuela, it is an imperialist war and Britain is complicit. As head of the imperialist war-mongering Labour Party, Keir Starmer’s stance is no surprise. This former human rights lawyer failed to condemn this brutal violation of the UN charter and instead declared ‘Britain has long supported a transition in Venezuela, regarded Maduro as an illegitimate president and we shed no tears about the end of his regime’. Days later the British Ministry of Defence sent RAF surveillance and a Royal Navy support ship to participate in the hijacking of the Bella 1 oil tanker in the Atlantic that had been carrying oil between Venezuela, Russia and Iran. US planes used civilian airstrips in Scotland’s Wick and Benbecula.
Britain has refused to recognise Venezuelan election results since 2018, giving political cover for freezing 31 tonnes of Venezuelan’s gold bullion in the Bank of England. In January 2019, Britain took this further, recognising Juan Guaido as ‘interim president’ of Venezuela, supporting his legal bid to access the gold. Guaido was an opposition deputy in the National Assembly who swore himself in as ‘interim president’ despite never standing in a presidential election. The same year a secretive ‘reconstruction unit’ for Venezuela was exposed, operating out of the British Foreign Office. Declassified UK reported that, in the hopes of gaining access to Venezuelan oil contracts should Guaido’s coup attempt be successful, the Foreign Office spent £80,697 promoting Guaido’s legal campaign over the gold whilst Britain donated £450,000 to the ‘Transparencia Venezuela’ NGO linked to Venezuela’s opposition. Former Foreign Minister Alan Duncan declared ‘The revival of the oil industry will be an essential element in any recovery; I can imagine that British companies like Shell and BP will want to be part of it’. Repeated requests by the Venezuelan government to release the gold to the UN to pay for Covid vaccines, medications and protective equipment were denied. Though Guaido is spent, abandoned by his own opposition support base, the stolen gold remains in the Bank of England.
British imperialist interests in Latin America go back hundreds of years. Eduardo Galeano in Open Veins of Latin America reminds us: ‘The British economy paid with cotton textiles for the hides of Rio de la Plata, the guano and nitrates of Peru, the copper of Chile, the sugar of Cuba, the coffee of Brazil. Industrial exports, freightage, insurance, interest on loans, and profits on investments fed British prosperity.’ British Guiana and British Honduras provided mainland ports for colonialism, supporting the exploitation of Britain’s slave plantations in the Caribbean. In 1840, Britain attacked Venezuela’s borders via the infamous Schomburgk line, redrawing the map and claiming the Orinoco river mouth for the British empire in Guiana. The Vestey family, one of Britain’s wealthiest aristocratic families, acquired cattle ranches in Venezuela and Brazil, driving land clearances and ethnic cleansing.
Today huge British multinationals loot and plunder the continent, leaving environmental disaster, poverty and pollution in their wake. The British army controls a sixth of Belize for jungle warfare training and Britain continues to occupy the Malvinas Islands (Falklands) where it maintains 2,000 military personnel. Further south, the British Rothera research station monitors Britain’s ‘Antarctic Territory’ whilst HMS Protector patrols British territories, South Georgia and South Sandwich Islands. Thus, Britain shores up NATO through this ‘strategic triangle of control’. No wonder then that Britain has repeatedly been implicated in ‘regime’ change efforts against progressive governments, including Cheddi Jagan’s Guyana, Goulart’s Brazil (1964) and Salvador Allende’s Chile (1973). Britain is a willing participant in the US-led war on South America and the Caribbean, desperate to protect its profits. Hands off Latin America!
