[News] Why Venezuela’s Election Matters – It Was Under Siege by US, Canadian and EU Influence

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/13841


  Why Venezuela’s Election Matters – It Was Under Siege by US, Canadian
  and EU Influence

By Vijay Prashad - May 29, 2018
------------------------------------------------------------------------

On May 20, half the people of Venezuela went to vote. They delivered a 
mandate to Nicolás Maduro, the 55-year-old successor to Hugo Chávez and 
the leader of the Chavista movement. Maduro won 68 percent of the vote. 
His closest challenger, Henri Falcón, who had been a Chavista until 
2010, took 21 percent of the vote. It was clear for months that Maduro 
would win the election. This had nothing to do with “irregularities” in 
the voting process, as the European Union put it. The residue of loyalty 
to the Chavista movement is clear. It is also clear that the opposition 
to Maduro and to the Chavista movement represents the oligarchy. These 
are not the sentinels of democracy. They are merely using the word 
“democracy” to return to the old ways. This is clear among Venezuela’s 
poor, who stick with the Chávez movement despite the privations of the 
current period.

Why did half of Venezuela’s population not vote? In the last 
presidential election—which elected Maduro—80 percent of the population 
voted. What is the reason for the decline? It has everything to do with 
a clever strategy worked out by the opposition to the Bolivarian 
Revolution, the revolutionary process opened up in 1998 when Hugo Chávez 
won the first of many elections. The opposition—and its foreign allies 
(particularly the government of the United States)—knows that they 
cannot win at the ballot box. What they have done is to encourage the 
United States and their fellow oligarchs in Latin America to put the 
Venezuelan economy under siege. The pain from this “economic war” has 
certainly disoriented and demoralized the Venezuelan people. At which 
point, still unsure about their ability to win an election, they have 
sought to reduce the legitimacy of the Chavista government. Hence, the 
opposition—backed by the oligarchs and the United States—boycotted the 
election. This is why only half the population voted.

The “irregularities” in this presidential election came—essentially—from 
outside interference in Venezuela’s political process. Many are up in 
arms in the United States about allegations of Russian interference in 
the U.S. presidential election. But they are totally sanguine about the 
open intervention of the United States in the Venezuelan election. There 
has been no public criticism of the statements made by the White 
House—notably Vice President Mike Pence—who called 
<https://www.frontline.in/world-affairs/resisting-us-pressure/article10108357.ece?homepage=true> the 
election a “fraud and a sham” weeks before the Venezuelans went to the 
polls.

Strikingly, the European Union—which has been so sharp in its criticism 
of the election—and the United Nations were both invited to send 
election observers, but both declined. Those international observers who 
did come—including former Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez 
Zapatero—have said that they did not see anything outrageously untoward 
in the election process. Certainly, there will be problems. No election 
is conducted without some measure of fraud. According to the Electoral 
Integrity Project <https://www.electoralintegrityproject.com/>—based at 
Harvard University and Sydney University—the United States displays the 
worst election performance among all Western democracies. To point to 
this or that example alone is hardly a good measure of a failed 
election. That the opposition won the 2015 parliamentary elections in 
Venezuela suggests that the government—even then led by Nicolás 
Maduro—did not fix the elections to their benefit. Why the opposition 
decided to boycott this election has—it seems to me—little to do with 
the possibility of a fair election in Venezuela and much more to do with 
the attempt to isolate the Venezuelan government and to set the stage 
for its collapse.

In January, Maduro announced that Venezuela would hold a presidential 
election in the coming months. Within no time at all, the United States 
and the European Union said that they would not recognize the election’s 
legitimacy. The U.S. and the EU found quick allies in the Lima Group, an 
intergovernmental organization of 17 states of the Americas. These 17 
states—from Canada to Chile—have taken an openly hostile position not 
only against the government of Maduro, but against the Bolivarian 
process inside Venezuela and in the Bolivarian process across Latin 
America. Close coordination between the United States, the European 
Union, and the Lima Group is suggested by the similarity of the language 
used by their representatives.


    ALBA versus Lima

It is important to know a little about the Lima Group, which has 
functioned as the Latin American mouthpiece for its domestic oligarchs 
and for the United States and Canada. It was set up in Lima (Peru) in 
August 2017. The purpose of the Lima Group was to overthrow the 
government of Venezuela. It was a formation that had been created to put 
pressure on the Organization of American States (OAS), set up in 1948, 
to take a firm position against Venezuela.

For some time now, the United States and Canada have not been able to 
get their way in the OAS. The emergence of the Bolivarian Alliance for 
the Peoples of Our Americas (ALBA) in 2004 was a direct challenge to the 
OAS. Led by Chávez and Fidel Castro, ALBA pushed aside the OAS and 
produced new formations—without U.S. control—in its place. Chávez called 
the OAS “a corpse that must be buried” and suggested—in 2010—that it was 
the “sign of a dying empire.” ALBA would soon have 11 members. It 
promised a new view of Latin American sovereignty and economic cooperation.

With the coup against Honduras in 2009, the United States announced a 
more aggressive posture against the ALBA dynamic. Honduras, an ALBA 
member, now left the group. It was the clearest sign of what was to 
come. Since 2010, the United States and its allies have worked hard to 
roll back the “pink tide” in Latin America. Pressure was put on 
Venezuela, the heartbeat of the ALBA process. When the Lima Group was 
set up in 2017, Peru’s Foreign Minister Ricardo Luna said, “What we have 
in Venezuela is a dictatorship.” There was no need for evidence. The 
term “dictatorship” would now be used by these governments to define the 
politics of Venezuela. Brazil, another member of the Lima Group, had 
recently conducted a “soft coup” against the government of President 
Dilma Rousseff. That did not disqualify them from being a sanctimonious 
part of this alliance. Nor was there any uneasiness about the Peruvian 
government of President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski—whom Maduro routinely 
called a lackey of Wall Street; Kuczynski would later resign under 
charges of corruption, but not after he offered a pardon for Peru’s 
dictator Alberto Fujimori. None of these men looked in the mirror. They 
had their fingers firmly pointed toward Venezuela.

One of the leaders of the Lima Group is Canada, whose Foreign Minister 
Chrystia Freeland felt no embarrassment in October 2017 saying, “If 
necessary we must put added pressure on the Maduro regime by taking 
concrete steps to further isolate it from the international community.” 
This kind of colonial language makes few in North America shudder. Nor 
did it worry anyone that Freeland gave political advice to the 
Venezuelan opposition, asking them to unite behind one candidate against 
Maduro.

Long before Maduro announced the presidential elections, therefore, the 
opponents of Venezuela (the U.S., the EU, and the Lima Group) had begun 
the process of denying the government legitimacy. They were openly 
meeting as the Lima Group to coordinate strategies to isolate Venezuela 
and to conduct regime change there.

Just before the elections, the United States and the Lima Group 
engineered the expulsion of Venezuela from the OAS.


    Throttle

The election is over. Predictably, the United States and Canada will 
increase their sanctions regime. The Lima Group ambassadors are home 
getting their instructions. They will likely downgrade diplomatic 
relations with Venezuela. None of this is a surprise. It is what they 
had already announced. They did not wait to see how the elections went. 
Isolation of Venezuela is their strategy.

Meanwhile, the ALBA group congratulated Venezuela. They know that this 
is not just about one election or about Venezuela’s current 
difficulties. This is a line-struggle between the ALBA group and the 
Lima group, between those who want to drive a people-centered policy and 
those who want to drive a Wall Street-centered policy.

Oil prices are high. But these will not benefit Venezuela. Its oil 
economy is under threat not only from the seizure of its refineries, but 
also by the lack of investment in its oil infrastructure. Russia and 
China, as if on cue, have disassociated themselves with the isolation 
strategy. They will return with capital both for the distressed 
Venezuelan economy and for the oil sector. But, of course, Maduro will 
have to face the crisis of his economy—whether created by the “economic 
war” or not. This has to be his priority—to stem the hunger and 
frustration inside the country. Venezuela is being garroted. Will 
Maduro’s government have the means to break the cord?

/Vijay Prashad is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute 
<http://independentmediainstitute.org/>. He is the chief editor of 
LeftWord Books <http://leftword.com/> and the director of 
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is also the author of 
Red Star Over the Third World 
<http://mayday.leftword.com/index.php?url_section=book&slug=red-star-over-the-third-world&isbn=9789380118666> (LeftWord, 
2017) and The Death of the Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution 
<https://www.amazon.com/Death-Nation-Future-Arab-Revolution/dp/0520293266/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=> (University 
of California Press, 2016), among other books. /

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