The United States has once again used the UN general assembly in New York to launch an attack on the struggle for socialism in Latin America. Brazenly, President Trump declared: ‘the Venezuelan people are starving and their country is collapsing, their democratic institutions are being destroyed, this situation is completely unacceptable, and we cannot stand by and watch’. Illegal unilateral US sanctions have cost Venezuela over $130bn since 2015, blocking imports of food and medicines, whilst the US has thrown its full weight behind opposition leader Juan Guaido, the unelected self-sworn ‘interim’ president of Venezuela. During the UN meeting, the US State Department announced it would divert a further $52m destined for aid programmes in Central America to bolster his flagging campaign. SAM McGill reports.
With his domestic support waning, Guaido has little choice but to step up his campaign on the international stage. His unaccredited representatives have been busy canvassing for foreign intervention against Venezuela, formally reactivating the Cold War Treaty of Inter-American Reciprocal Assistance (TIAR). This is the latest attempt to overthrow the United Socialist Party government of Nicolas Maduro.
The US-led treaty was signed in 1947 to reassert the Monroe doctrine against communist influence in the region and tie in the countries of Latin America to a joint principle of ‘hemispheric defence’. Although Venezuela withdrew from the treaty in 2012, Guaido first forced a resolution of reinstatement through Venezuela’s National Assembly and then secured the support of the pro-imperialist Organisation of American States (OAS). This is despite the suspension of the opposition-controlled National Assembly, found in contempt of court since 2016, and Venezuela’s official departure from the OAS in April this year. Guaido’s ‘justification’ for invoking TIAR rests on Obama’s 2015 executive order declaring Venezuela a threat to US national security. The order has been ratified every year since, backing up the OAS designation of Venezuela as ‘a clear threat to peace and security in the region.’
Equally baseless are the accusations made by the Colombian president, Ivan Duque, that Venezuela is trafficking narcotics and ‘harbouring’ Colombian guerrillas. He has raised tensions along the border by mobilising military units in response to the new phase of armed struggle by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. Elliot Abrams, US special envoy for Venezuela and a Cold War hawk, has pledged his country’s ‘full support’ for Colombia should a conflict break out, further sketching out a scenario for a TIAR-ratified intervention in Venezuela. The reality is that it is Guaido who has been hanging out with Colombia’s drug gangs, even taking selfies with known narco-traffickers during his ill-fated attempt to force USAID through the Colombian-Venezuelan border in February, whilst opposition celebrity Lilian Tintori has openly admitted that her US funded ‘RescateVe’ NGO works with ‘irregular groups and paramilitaries’.
In a statement, the Venezuelan government stressed: ‘It is necessary to remember that the TIAR was imposed on our region by the US within the framework of the Cold War, whose purpose was to legitimise military interventions in Latin America for ideological reasons. This happened in Guatemala in 1954, in Cuba in 1961, in the Dominican Republic in 1965, in Grenada in 1983 and in Panama in 1989. It is also important to underline that when there was a real aggression of an extra-continental power against a Latin American country, as in the case of Argentina in 1982 by the United Kingdom, the US betrayed the continent and ignored its activation, aligning with its partner NATO. It is painful that countries, who were invaded by US troops and whose peoples were slaughtered due to the implementation of the TIAR, today endorse a similar crime against a brotherly country.’
The official Venezuelan delegation to the UN will present more than 13 million signatures opposing US sanctions, detailing how they undermine oil production and exports, cut Venezuela off from international credit and debt renegotiation, and impose secondary sanctions on those who trade with Venezuela, leading even China’s National Petroleum Company to cancel shipments. Yet despite the fact that sanctions and economic crisis have decimated the purchasing power of the working class and slashed government reserves, state social projects continue. By September, Venezuela’s housing mission had completed 2.8 million units of social housing, distributed at low cost or free. The committees for production and supply continue to provide food bags to around 6 million families, despite new sanctions targeting the programme.
As minor opposition figures sign agreements with Maduro calling for sanctions to be lifted, Guaido calls for the intensification of the blockade and has repeatedly demanded US military intervention, opening talks with the US military’s ‘SOUTHCOM’. As a representative of the Venezuelan elite, Guaido has no problem purchasing luxury food or accessing dollars. He will be far from the front line in the event of military action. In the pocket of US imperialism, with each of his coup attempts thwarted so far, his recent ‘street sessions’ have only drawn in a few hundred. Now Guaido has been accused of high treason alongside his British envoy Vanessa Neumann and international office coordinator Manuel Avendano for negotiations with the British Foreign Commonwealth Office over Venezuela’s historic claim to the disputed border region of Essequibo on the border with Guyana.
In true colonial fashion, the border was drawn under a British commission in 1895. The area has been under official UN mediation since Guyana won independence in 1966 (see FRFI 246 August/September 2015). The dispute has escalated since Guyana authorised ExxonMobil to drill for offshore oil.
Neumann, who boasts of lobbying the British government and Bank of England to illegally withhold $1.3bn of Venezuelan gold, is now bartering Venezuela’s anti-colonial claim to the Essequibo for more British backing for Guaido. It is no surprise that she is the owner of Asymmetrica, which advises businesses and governments on strategy and risk for finance, oil and gas, consumer goods and manufacturing in Latin America, the Middle East and Africa. A scion of the old Venezuelan elite, she previously lobbied the US government on behalf of the Venezuelan oil industry in the 1990s.
Meanwhile the US-based, pro-imperialist Human Rights Watch (HRW) has added fuel to the propaganda attach on Venezuela with a carefully timed report accusing the armed forces of extra-judicial killings. Though the Special Actions Force (FAES) have faced criticism from both opposition and Chavista activists over their involvement in the death of civilians, HRW’s report is highly selective. These ‘human rights’ activists make no mention of the 40,000+ deaths caused by US sanctions which prevent vital medicines from reaching Venezuela. Nor does HRW address paramilitary assassinations of Chavista politicians, or the killing of rural activists by landlords’ gangs, or the lynchings and burning of hospitals carried out by opposition thugs. As Haiti Information Project tweeted ‘We never forget HRW’s role justifying the brutality of the 2004 coup in #Haiti. They were in lock step with US foreign policy which put them far afield of the actual human rights situation. Given this ideological bias we found their reporting largely unreliable #Venezuela’.
Hands off Venezuela!
No sanctions! No coup!
