[News] Venezuela - We Don’t Listen to the Dying Government of Donald Trump

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://www.thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/50-venezuela/ We Don’t
Listen to the Dying Government of Donald Trump: The Fiftieth Newsletter
(2020)
December 10, 2020 - Vijay Prashad
------------------------------

[image: Madhuri Shukla (USA), Wring, 2020]

Madhuri Shukla (USA), *Wring*, 2020

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social
Research.

The night before the National Assembly elections in Venezuela, President
Nicolás Maduro spoke to a group of visitors at Miraflores Palace in
Caracas. He recounted how he had been a member of the Constituent Assembly,
which was formed in 1999 and set up the legal framework for Venezuela’s
political system. Maduro told the visitors that he had been a member of the
National Assembly during its first and second terms (2000-2005 and
2005-2010 respectively), and he was the president of the National Assembly
during its second term before being asked to take on the post of foreign
minister. During the election of the National Assembly’s fourth term
(2015-2020), the Socialist Unity Party of Venezuela (PSUV), which he leads,
lost the majority in the National Assembly ‘because we made mistakes’, he
told me. ‘Let’s be clear’.

When the fourth National Assembly took its seat in Caracas, it was used by
the United States government and a section of the Venezuelan right wing in
their attempt to overthrow the government of Maduro and the Bolivarian
Revolution. From within the National Assembly, the US government and the
most extreme elements of the Venezuelan opposition plucked out an obscure
politician, Juan Guaidó, and selected him as their instrument to
delegitimise the politics of Venezuela. The US State Department bizarrely
appointed Guaidó as the president of Venezuela, his authority almost
entirely derived from the pronouncements of US Secretary of State Mike
Pompeo. All attempts to overthrow the government of President Maduro
failed, although the US escalation of sanctions and the forced seizure of
more Venezuelan assets outside the country have taken a severe toll on the
people of Venezuela and on the country’s ability to fully exercise its
sovereignty.

[image: Daniela Ruggeri / Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
(Argentina), Hybrid Wars, 2020]

Daniela Ruggeri / Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
(Argentina), *Hybrid Wars*, 2020

According to the Venezuelan Constitution, the fourth National Assembly’s
term lapsed in December 2020, which means an election had to be held to
seat the fifth National Assembly. This election was held on 6 December.
Shortly before the election, I met with a series of political leaders in
Caracas who oppose the government of President Maduro and contested the
National Assembly election against the PSUV candidates. ‘We are the
invisible opposition’, said Pedro José Rojas, a leader of Acción
Democrática (AD), which, alongside the Comité de Organización Política
Electoral Independiente (COPEI), form the *partidocracia* or the old
political establishment. These parties are against the government, but not
against the political system and are not in favour of the extreme
opposition of Guaidó or the US attempt at regime change.

The US unilateral sanctions, Rojas said, ‘have had a devastating impact for
the Venezuelan people. They have not fulfilled what they are supposed to
do’; namely to conduct regime change by the range of hybrid war techniques
employed by the US government against Venezuela since the election of Hugo
Chávez in 1998. Juan Carlos Alvarado, a leader of COPEI, said that ‘the
blockade has had a terrible impact on the country’. In fact, the entirety
of the opposition that is participating in the elections and that believes
that the democratic way is the only way forward say that in 2021 they would
like to work with the President to set up a commission to investigate the
harsh impact of these US sanctions on all Venezuelan people.

[image: César Mosquera / Utopix (Venezuela), War Media, 2020]

César Mosquera / Utopix (Venezuela), *War Media*, 2020

Guaidó and the extreme, undemocratic opposition – alongside the US
government and the European Union – had argued *long before the election*
that the 6 December election was fraudulent; after the election, both the US
<https://www.state.gov/the-united-states-condemns-venezuelas-fraudulent-legislative-elections/>
and the European Union
<https://eeas.europa.eu/headquarters/headquarters-homepage/90032/venezuela-declaration-high-representative-behalf-eu-elections-national-assembly_en>
offered stale statements of condemnation. The US State Department has on
several occasions interfered
<https://peoplesdispatch.org/2020/12/02/venezuela-wins-simply-by-holding-an-election/>
in the election by sanctioning the officials in the National Electoral
Council (CNE), including its president, by sanctioning opposition
candidates, and by shaping a storyline that focused on unproven allegations
of fraud. Opposition politicians such as Bruno Gallo (Avanzada Progresista)
and Timoteo Zambrano (Cambiemos) told me that there is no fraud in this
election, but only the normal irregularities (such as, they said, that the
state media favours the incumbent; although private media favours the
opposition). Gallo told me that he had spent ten years looking closely at
the CNE for fraud, with the intent to undermine it, but could not find any
evidence of sustained fraud. This is a fair election, they said, as far as
elections go.

The result came in by nightfall: the PSUV won a majority of the seats,
although both the right-wing and left-wing opposition earned a third of the
votes. On a lovely December day in Caracas, more than five million people
came to polling centres across the country to cast their ballots. The
turnout – near 32% – is about average for a non-presidential election,
particularly due to the pandemic, the shortages of fuel (which hamper
transportation), and the atmosphere of fear created by the extreme
right-wing calls for boycotts. In comparison, an election
<https://peoplesdispatch.org/2020/12/07/social-democrats-re-emerge-as-single-largest-party-in-romanian-elections/>
in Romania on the same day saw a turnout of 30% and the municipal election
<https://www.tse.go.cr/> in Costa Rica in February this year saw 34% of the
electorate come to vote. There was no violence in the country, nor were
there any serious complaints of fraud to the CNE. The morning after the
election, Venezuela’s foreign minister Jorge Arreaza said of the election
campaign and voting that Venezuela has completed a ‘peaceful journey where
democracy triumphed and where the Venezuelan people triumphed’.

[image: Anonymous (Hong Kong, China), Foreign Interference in Hong Kong,
2020]

Anonymous (Hong Kong, China), *Foreign Interference in Hong Kong*, 2020

Since the election campaign run by a popular movement led by Hugo Chávez in
1998, the United States and its allies have waged a hybrid war against the
possibility of a different future for Venezuela and for Latin America. The
term ‘hybrid war’ is a key concept of our work at Tricontinental: Institute
for Social Research, since it has helped focus our attention on the many
new forms of warfare used by the United States and its allies against
anyone who challenges US authority. Our Tricontinental: Institute for
Social Research dossier for January 2021 will provide a conjunctural
analysis of the world situation and properly develop the concept of hybrid
war.

Rather than conduct a frontal military attack against its adversaries, the
US has gone to war along axes such as diplomacy, communications, trade, and
commerce. For instance, the control of US media organisations to shape the
narrative of world affairs has been used as a weapon against US adversaries
such as Venezuela, whose government is described by this media as a
‘regime’ and not a ‘government’, and whose struggles in a complex world are
blamed entirely on government policy or ‘corruption’ rather than on the
impact of colonialism, the intensification of inequalities by the
capitalist world system, and the harsh attack by the imperialist powers –
including the sanctions regime.

As part of this information war, a front of the hybrid war, it is important
for the US and the European Union to delegitimise Venezuela’s political
culture and to therefore reject this election; the statements released by
the European Union and the US were probably written days before the actual
election, because they do not reflect at all the events that took place on
6 December. The European Union did not send observers to Venezuela, and
therefore based their own statement on their prejudices rather than on
credible reports from the ground. I was an electoral observer for the CNE
and would like to say – in my personal and professional opinion – that I
saw no evidence of fraud in the election; this was also the view of the
opposition leaders who told me categorically that they did not believe that
there was any fraud in the election.

[image: Gabriel Martínez and Sonia Díaz / Un Mundo Feliz (Spain), Hybrid
War Economy, 2020]

Gabriel Martínez and Sonia Díaz / Un Mundo Feliz (Spain), *Hybrid War
Economy*, 2020

Hybrid war takes on many forms, and none of them are easy to visualise. In
this fourth and final Anti-Imperialist Poster Exhibition: Hybrid War
<https://antiimperialistweek.org/en/exhibitions/hybrid-wars/>, 39 artists
from 18 countries contributed posters that help give visual expression to
this defining concept of our times. This exhibition was launched on 3
December in solidarity with the people of Venezuela in the lead up to the
National Assembly election. It looks at how the US-led hybrid war manifests
itself from Venezuela to India, from Cuba to China to Brazil and beyond.
These posters are a living testimony to people’s struggles against
imperialism.

[image: Jorge Luis Rodríguez-Aguilar (Cuba), Hybrid War, 2020]

Jorge Luis Rodríguez-Aguilar (Cuba), *Hybrid War*, 2020

On the night before the election, President Maduro said that the Venezuelan
people expected that the US would deny the validity of the election and
prevent the Venezuelan political representatives from forwarding an agenda
needed to solve the grave problems that the Venezuelan people face. ‘The US
said that they do not accept the results of the elections a long time
before the elections took place’, Maduro told me at Miraflores. ‘We don’t
listen to the dying government of Donald Trump’.

The new National Assembly will take its seat on 5 January, fifteen days
before the transfer of power in the United States (where Trump also alleged
fraud). The US, Maduro said, ‘does not decide what we do in Venezuela’.
This is true politically, but because of the US control over information
and economic activity through control over parts of the financial system
and through payment reconciliation systems, the US does constrain the
possibility of Venezuela to act on behalf of its people. Hugo Chávez used
to say ‘viviremos y venceremos’ – we will live, and we will overcome.  That
is the sentiment inside Venezuela across the various political lines; it is
what gives hope to people.

Warmly,

Vijay.


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