[News] Another Failed Coup in Venezuela?

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/14372


  Another Failed Coup in Venezuela?

By George Ciccariello-Maher - March 7, 2019
------------------------------------------------------------------------

If you repeat your own lies enough—so goes the apocryphal Goebbels 
quote—you start to believe them yourself. For two decades, the 
Venezuelan opposition and its supporters in Washington have smeared Hugo 
Chávez and now his successor, Nicolás Maduro, as despotic strongmen kept 
in power solely through military force and paltry payouts to the poor. 
So it’s no surprise that they are once again underestimating both 
Chavismo and the resilience of its supporters today.

*Underestimating the People*

We’ve seen this all before: On April 11 of 2002, the Venezuelan 
opposition—according to the most credible accounts—unleashed snipers on 
its own supporters and used the ensuing deaths to justify a coup against 
Hugo Chávez. But the opposition dramatically overplayed its hand and 
underestimated the Chavista grassroots, who it routinely smeared as the 
blind followers of a populist strongman. When coup leaders abolished all 
branches of government and scrapped the constitution, hundreds of 
thousands of poor Venezuelans poured into the streets demanding, and 
eventually forcing, Chávez’s return to power.

Much has changed since 2002. A perfect storm of Chávez’s death, 
collapsing global oil prices, a mismanaged system of currency controls, 
ferocious aggression from the opposition and—more recently—U.S. 
sanctions, has thrown the Venezuelan economy into a tailspin. Many of 
the impressive accomplishments of the Bolivarian Revolution—in health 
care, education and poverty reduction—have quickly evaporated, producing 
frustration, confusion and desperation among even Chavismo’s most 
hardline supporters.

So when opposition backbencher Juan Guaidó declared himself interim 
president of Venezuela on January 23, he and his co-conspirators thought 
the military would quickly fragment before eventually falling in line 
behind the self-proclaimed president. Things didn’t work that way: Aside 
from a handful of soldiers 
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/they-are-authorized-to-shoot-us-stories-from-5-soldiers-who-broke-from-maduro-and-venezuelas-armed-forces/2019/02/24/16f6cce2-3884-11e9-b10b-f05a22e75865_story.html> and 
the U.S. military attaché, the Venezuelan armed forces remained solidly 
behind Nicolás Maduro. And despite large demonstrations both for and 
against the government, there have been no signs of sustained, mass 
resistance in the streets in favor of the coup either.

Why? In part because the frustration many poor Venezuelans feel today is 
just that: /frustration/. They are fed up with the economic crisis, and 
many place at least a share of the blame on Maduro. But as in the past, 
most don’t see frustration as justifying undemocratic regime change, 
much less foreign intervention—which the majority of Venezuelans oppose 
<https://www.pri.org/stories/2019-01-08/venezuelans-want-president-maduro-out-most-would-oppose-foreign-military>. 
What’s more, wanting the economy to improve has not led many to identify 
with opposition parties that still represent the most elite sectors of 
Venezuelan society and have offered no credible solutions to the 
economic crisis.

*The Trojan Horse of Humanitarian Aid*

But if much has changed, much has also stayed the same: Unable to 
believe that the poor might hold such a nuanced position, the opposition 
has again overplayed its hand and bet it all on yet another failed coup. 
February 23 marked one month since Guaidó’s self-coronation, and also 
the expiration of the 30-day period during which any interim president 
must hold new elections. According to even the opposition’s contrived 
reading of the Venezuelan Constitution, since Guaidó never called those 
elections, he has no remaining claim to the presidency. And so it was 
that on February 23, Guaidó resorted to increasingly desperate measures, 
attempting to provoke a crisis by forcing deliveries of US-provided 
“humanitarian aid” across the border.

It’s not difficult to debunk this false humanitarianism. The United 
Nations refused to participate in what it deemed “politicized” aid 
shipments, and the Red Cross denounced 
<https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/14316> the border charade as “not 
humanitarian aid”—and rebuked the unauthorized use 
<https://twitter.com/ifrc/status/1099374815394308102> of Red Cross 
insignia by opposition forces. Given that Contra war criminal Elliott 
Abrams 
<http://inthesetimes.com/article/21758/war-criminal-elliott-abrams-nicaragua-venezuela-maduro-trump-ilhan-omar> is 
now in charge of U.S. policy in Venezuela, it’s worth recalling that 
U.S.-backed Contras <https://chomsky.info/unclesam08/> used the Red 
Cross insignia toward similar ends in Nicaragua.

And then there’s also basic math: While the opposition mounted a 
spectacle to deliver a few million dollars in aid, U.S. sanctions have 
already cost Venezuela /billions/, and will cost billions more 
<https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-politics-citgo-exclusive/venezuelas-guaido-aims-at-control-of-pdvsa-citgo-as-u-s-imposes-sanctions-idUSKCN1PM2B6>. 
Economist Mark Weisbrot estimates 
<https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/14360> the death toll of the 
sanctions to be “in the thousands or tens of thousands so far,” with 
more deaths from Trump’s draconian tightening of the sanctions almost 
guaranteed.

In contrast, the Trump government essentially handed over the keys of 
Citgo’s bank accounts and assets—worth around $7 billion—to Guaidó, who 
has also demanded control of more than a billion dollars’ worth of 
Venezuelan gold held by the Bank of England. And if we harbored any 
illusions about the humanitarian credentials of the Venezuelan 
opposition, it’s worth noting that it routinely attacks a social welfare 
infrastructure it associates with Chavismo—most recently burning a 
warehouse 
<http://www.eluniversal.com/sucesos/34301/incendio-se-consumio-galpones-de-empaquetadora-del-clap-en-el-puerto-de-la-guaira> where 
subsidized food bundles known as CLAPs were packaged and distributed.

*Provocation on the Border*

On February 23, as in 2002, the opposition sought to sow blood and chaos 
to justify its coup, but this time it was unsuccessful. Any objective 
analysis of video footage from the Colombian border makes this clear: On 
the Venezuelan side, Venezuelan troops were standing in a single line 
behind riot shields. On the Colombian side, masked opposition protesters 
hurled molotov cocktails toward them. When two “aid” trucks suddenly 
burst into flames, Guaidó and most of the media immediately blamed the 
fire on Maduro. So overwhelming was this media narrative that few 
observers seemed to notice that the trucks never reached the Venezuelan 
side, and were almost certainly ignited 
<https://twitter.com/graffitiborrao/status/1099540683575185408> by those 
same molotovs.

Desperate for any pretext to justify foreign intervention, Senator Marco 
Rubio (R-Fla.) even blamed 
<https://twitter.com/marcorubio/status/1099512202799779841> Maduro when 
an opposition lawmaker and his aide were “poisoned” on the Colombian 
side of the border. Despite an utter lack of any evidence, the 
international press ran with the story 
<https://www.businessinsider.com/freddy-superlano-poisoned-marco-rubio-venezuela-opposition-lawmaker-per>. 
But it turned out the assemblyman was apparently drugged and robbed by 
sex workers 
<https://www.laopinion.com.co/judicial/diputado-venezolano-grave-y-su-primo-muerto-por-burundanga-172004> he 
had brought back to his room after a night of partying. And when 
long-simmering tensions between the Venezuelan military and indigenous 
Pemones on the southern border with Brazil led to violent clashes and 
several deaths, their longstanding concerns were opportunistically 
folded into the opposition narrative 
<https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-politics-aid-indigenous/indigenous-pemon-on-venezuelas-border-with-brazil-vow-to-let-aid-in-idUSKCN1PY0MO> about 
aid deliveries. Opposition parties had been stoking dissent among 
indigenous groups for years, and many of those involved in clashes were 
less concerned with aid shipments than with what they perceived as years 
of corrupt military activity in the region.

The opposition has been oddly silent about its own violence, however. 
When three defecting Venezuelan soldiers hijacked armored personnel 
carriers, driving them at full speed into the border barriers in order 
to defect to the Colombian side, they struck a crowd of civilians that 
included Nicole Kramm, a Chilean photojournalist. Kramm, who was nearly 
killed in the attack—and whose camera was running 
<https://twitter.com/redfishstream/status/1099716919815491586> the 
entire time—later described the scene 
<https://www.rt.com/news/452317-journalist-hurt-defectors-venezuela/>: 
“This was an attack on civilians. I can’t believe they are being treated 
as heroes. If I didn’t run, and was 15 centimeters closer, I would not 
be here to tell you this.”

*The Danger Isn’t Over*

“Plan A” failed on January 23rd and “Plan B” similarly failed a month 
later, leaving Guaidó in dire straits and without a clear path forward. 
When he attempted to reach out to disaffected Chavistas by tweeting that 
<https://twitter.com/jguaido/status/1099511994263261184> Hugo Chávez 
would not approve of Maduro’s actions, Guaidó was attacked by his own 
supporters on Twitter, revealing old tensions simmering within the 
opposition coalition. And with all other options exhausted, Guaidó and 
U.S. vice president Mike Pence failed to convince 
<https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/09/lima-group-rejects-military-intervention-venezuela-180917061724188.html> the 
Lima Group—a regional coalition of mostly right-wing governments and 
Canada—to support military intervention. With the threat of U.S. 
intervention stirring dissension 
<https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/severinomotta/brazil-generals-no-military-intervention-venezuela> even 
within the cabinet of far-right Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, 
Guaidó’s coup appears to be on its last legs.

This doesn’t mean that the danger is over, however. On Monday, Guaidó 
made a less-than-triumphant return to Venezuela and, despite his 
violation of a travel ban, the government has opted not to arrest him 
for now. If anything, Maduro will protect him at all costs: Amid threats 
on Guaidó’s life, the Lima Group has warned 
<https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/venezuela/article226745184.html> of 
dire consequences should anything happen to him. If Guaidó were to be 
killed, however, it would almost certainly be at the hands of a 
Venezuelan right-wing eager to provoke military intervention (the 
government has dismantled similar plots 
<https://www.telesurtv.net/news/Esposa-de-Leopoldo-Lopez-admite-que-Gobierno-venezolano-lo-protege-20140219-0037.html> in 
the past).

In the coming months, U.S. sanctions will continue to tighten the 
economic screws, heaping suffering on those who always suffer most—the 
poorest Venezuelans—while waiting out defections from the military and 
the population as a whole. In 1990, Nicaraguans voted the Sandinistas 
out of power, knowing full well that if they didn’t, both U.S. sanctions 
and the Contra War would continue. With many of the same people once 
again in charge of U.S. policy today, the strategy remains the same: to 
“make the economy scream,” in Nixon’s words. This coup may be failing, 
but Washington will fail and try again. Venezuela can’t afford to fail 
even once.

/The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not 
necessarily reflect those of the Venezuelanalysis editorial staff./

/George Ciccariello-Maher is a Visiting Scholar at the Hemispheric 
Institute of Performance and Politics, and the author of We Created 
Chávez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution (Duke, 2013); 
Building the Commune: Radical Democracy in Venezuela (Verso, 2016); and 
Decolonizing Dialectics (Duke, 2017)./

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