[News] Regime Change 2.0: Is Venezuela Next?

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/10/02/regime-change-2-0-is-venezuela-next/ 



  Regime Change 2.0: Is Venezuela Next?

by Vijay Prashad <https://www.counterpunch.org/author/drespu/> - October 
2, 2018
------------------------------------------------------------------------
On September 8, /T//he New York Times/ carried a story with a 
provocative headline: “Trump Administration Discussed Coup Plans With 
Rebel Venezuelan Officers”. The journalists Ernesto Londoño and Nicholas 
Casey spoke to 11 current and former United States officials and 
Venezuelan commanders. These people told the journalists that they had 
been involved in conversations with the Donald Trump administration 
about regime change in Venezuela. In August 2017, Trump had bragged that 
the U.S. had a “military option” for Venezuela. This statement, these 
men told the reporters, “encouraged rebellious Venezuelan military 
officers to reach out to Washington”.

In February this year, then U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said, 
“In the history of Venezuela and South American countries, it is often 
times that the military is the agent of change when things are so bad 
and the leadership can no longer serve the people.” This was an 
invitation for a military coup in Venezuela.

The language Tillerson used has a long history inside the U.S. State 
Department. It is the logic used since 1954, when the U.S. government 
overthrew the democratically elected Guatemalan government of Jacobo 
Arbenz. The theory was known as “military modernisation”, the idea being 
that in a former colonial country the only modern and efficient 
institution is the military. The U.S. government used this theory of 
military modernisation to defend its support of countries littered with 
military rulers—Ayub Khan in Pakistan (1958), Castelo Branco in Brazil 
(1964) and René Barrientos in Bolivia (1964).

The ideas that germinated from the conversations between the U.S. 
officials and the Venezuelans were for a small group of Venezuelan 
officers to overthrow the government of Nicolas Maduro. The Venezuelans 
had no clear plot. They wanted encrypted radios and hoped that “the 
Americans would offer guidance or ideas”.

On August 4 this year, during the 81st anniversary celebrations of the 
Bolivarian National Armed Forces, an attack took place against Maduro. 
Two drones—with C4 explosives on them—were driven over the parade and 
were being directed to strike Maduro. The clumsy, but dangerous, attempt 
failed. The Venezuelan government arrested 40 people, including a 
retired colonel (Oswaldo Garcia) and a parliamentarian (Julio Borges). 
On September 8, Venezuela’s Foreign Minister, Jorge Arreaza, noted that 
the coup plotters had met with U.S. officials. That the attack on Maduro 
failed is cold comfort. That there are plots afoot is what is worrisome.

Everything about Hugo Chávez bothered the U.S. government. That he was a 
socialist who won an election to govern a country with one of the 
largest oil reserves irked Washington. It also bothered the 
administrations of George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump that 
the policy of Chávez was to demonstrate in practical terms the 
importance of regional cooperation rather than surrender to the policies 
of mostly U.S.-based multinational corporations. Chávez had to go. There 
were no two ways about it.

Means to undermine Chávez were tried from his accession to the 
presidency in 1999; not one day went by without plots being hatched and 
tried out. The most spectacular attempt to unseat Chávez came in 2002, 
when Venezuelan military officials seized power. Chávez surrendered to 
them in an act of political courage. But he did not have to wait long in 
their custody. Mass protests engulfed the country and the military had 
to back off. Their allies in the U.S. could not have their way.

Not long after this coup attempt, the U.S. State Department set up the 
Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI), linked to the United States 
Agency for International Development (USAID) bureaucracy. Four years 
later, after the agenda of the OTI had been solidified, U.S. Ambassador 
William Brownfield wrote to Washington about its five-point plan:

    1. Strengthening Democratic Institutions.

    2. Penetrating Chávez’s Political Base.

    3. Dividing Chavismo.

    4. Protecting Vital U.S. Business.

    5. Isolating Chávez Internationally.

In the decade since Brownfield wrote this note, each of them has been 
developed by the U.S. government and its Venezuelan allies methodically. 
To protect U.S. business interests is the key issue here. John 
Caulfield, the leading U.S. diplomat in Venezuela in 2009, noted that 
Chávez had used petrodollars to make Venezuela “an active and 
intractable U.S. competitor in the region”.

This was unforgivable—neither could Venezuela be allowed to lead an 
independent bloc of oil-producing countries (including to revitalise the 
Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC) nor could it 
be allowed to create a bloc of Latin American states that opposed U.S. 
interference (by the creation of the Bolivarian Alliance of the 
Americas, or ALBA). The 2009 coup in Honduras against the government of 
Manuel Zelaya, an ally of Chávez, was a direct shot across the bow. But 
it was not enough. Chávez and his revolution had to be taken down at home.

*Aiding the fractious right wing*

The U.S. government and the Venezuelan oligarchy carefully funded 
institutions inside Venezuela that gave off the appearance of democracy. 
These are groups that are controlled fully by the oligarchy, but 
nonetheless are clothed in the style of democratic institutions. The 
U.S. government’s National Endowment for Democracy and the International 
Republican Institute have worked closely to train leaders to run both 
political parties and civil society organisations. One of the key tasks 
of the U.S. officials involved in this aspect of “strengthening 
democratic institutions” was to unify the fractious Venezuelan right 
wing. Conversations with U.S. State Department officials over the past 
decade reveal that they have been frustrated by the bickering and petty 
ambition inside the oligarchy, whose factions are eager to ingratiate 
themselves to the U.S. rather than to build popular support amongst the 
Venezuelan people.

Through the Pan-American Development Foundation, the U.S. government has 
allocated funds to work inside Venezuela to cultivate very specific 
non-governmental organisations (NGOs). These NGOs concentrate their work 
on the problems of crime, press freedom, judicial independence, and 
women’s and human rights. Their work has been to document the rise of 
crime to the harassment of journalists with pointillist focus—exaggerate 
each individual incident rather than provide the context for their 
occurrence.

The point of this work is not to appeal to the West, where there is 
already a disposition to hate the Bolivarian experiment, but to sow 
dissension amongst the key classes that continue to support Chávez. 
Brownfield wrote that the U.S. support of these groups was intended to 
“shine a flashlight into the dark corners of the revolution, to collect 
and document information and make it public”. But the point was not to 
merely distribute information. It was to package it in such a way as to 
erase the legitimacy of the Venezuelan experiment. Nothing was out of 
bounds. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the OTI would enter 
the drains of Venezuela, flashlights ablaze, and report every detail of 
what they found—and then, if there was not enough dirt down there, would 
exaggerate and manufacture evidence.

*Regime Change 2.0*

On September 11, /T//he New York Times/ published an editorial with a 
perplexing title, “Stay Out of Venezuela, Mr. Trump”. Did this mean that 
the U.S. liberal elite no longer had the appetite for regime change? The 
subtitle of the article quickly disabuses the reader of any such 
illusions: “President Maduro has to Go, but an American Backed Coup is 
not the Answer”. Regime change by a military coup is disdained, but 
other means are to be encouraged. What are these other means? More 
sanctions on Venezuela, more pain for the Venezuelan people. This 
pressure is expected to release emotions against the Maduro government 
and drive the people to take to the streets.

One avenue to go after Maduro is to draw in the United Nations into the 
U.S. strategy. The Trump administration has asked the U.N. Security 
Council to isolate Venezuela’s elected leadership by setting in motion 
money-laundering investigations and by preventing it from accessing 
international financial networks. It is clear that these investigations 
are part of an old road map, that is, to bring the U.N. into the 
conversation about Venezuela, to establish U.N. sanctions against 
Venezuela, to put more and more pressure on the government and then to 
call for some kind of U.N.-sanctioned operations to overthrow the 
government. This is an old series of developments, already experienced 
by Iraq, then Iran, North Korea and Syria. Venezuela was always in the 
queue for such treatment.

*Long March of the Campesinos (Farmers)*

Conditions inside Venezuela are not easy, with the economy in various 
stages of crisis. Venezuela has not been able to exit the trap of 
rent-dependent capitalism—the rents being what it was able to collect 
for the export of oil. What the Bolivarian revolution has been able to 
do is to increase social welfare for the public and to generate new 
kinds of institutions to deliver resources to the hardest hit among the 
people. But it has not been able to shift the organisation of the 
economy and of society.

The working class and peasantry inside Venezuela have reacted with 
maturity to the deepening crisis. Over the past year, there have been 
strikes by electrical workers and nurses, protests by retired people who 
live in declining government pensions, and a march of the peasants. Each 
of these protests against the government has been on the premise that it 
opposes regime change and it defends the Bolivarian revolution, but it 
has demands to make on the government and on society that cannot be muffled.

On July 12 this year, a hundred farmers set off from the city of Guanare 
(Portuguesa State) for Venezuela’s capital, Caracas. They marched for 
over a month across the country and then met Maduro in an emotional 
meeting (broadcast live on television). “During the past three years, 
the crisis has become critical because of the lack of food,” said Usmary 
Enrique of the Platform of the Struggling Farmers (Plataforma de Luchas 
Campesinas). “It is ridiculous that we import food when we could produce 
it,” he said.

Maduro promised to take their complaints seriously. A month later, the 
farmers went on hunger strike until Maduro focussed attention on their 
revised agrarian policy. Maduro passed an order against land evictions 
and warned against the use of violence against farmers. Tensions between 
small farmers and the Venezuelan government are genuine and serious. But 
there is no expectation that farmers would join a platform set up by the 
U.S. government for regime change. They do not see the U.S. government 
or the Venezuelan oligarchy as allies.

/*Vijay Prashad’s* most recent book is No Free Left: The Futures of 
Indian Communism (New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2015)./

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