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<h1 class="reader-title">Why Venezuela’s Election Matters – It
Was Under Siege by US, Canadian and EU Influence</h1>
<div class="credits reader-credits">By Vijay Prashad - May 29,
2018<br>
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<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.frontline.in/world-affairs/resisting-us-pressure/article10108357.ece?homepage=true">called</a> the
election a “fraud and a sham” weeks before
the Venezuelans went to the polls.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.electoralintegrityproject.com/">Electoral
Integrity Project</a>—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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h2>ALBA versus Lima</h2>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Just before the elections, the United
States and the Lima Group engineered the
expulsion of Venezuela from the OAS.</p>
<h2>Throttle</h2>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p><em>Vijay Prashad is a writing fellow at
the <a
href="http://independentmediainstitute.org/"
target="_blank">Independent Media
Institute</a>. He is the chief editor
of <a href="http://leftword.com/"
target="_blank">LeftWord Books</a> and
the director of Tricontinental: Institute
for Social Research. He is also the author
of <a
href="http://mayday.leftword.com/index.php?url_section=book&slug=red-star-over-the-third-world&isbn=9789380118666">Red
Star Over the Third World</a> (LeftWord,
2017) and <a
href="https://www.amazon.com/Death-Nation-Future-Arab-Revolution/dp/0520293266/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=">The
Death of the Nation and the Future of
the Arab Revolution</a> (University of
California Press, 2016), among other
books. </em></p>
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