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<div class="header reader-header reader-show-element" dir="ltr"> <font
size="-2"><a class="domain reader-domain"
href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/10/02/regime-change-2-0-is-venezuela-next/">https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/10/02/regime-change-2-0-is-venezuela-next/</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">Regime Change 2.0: Is Venezuela Next?</h1>
<span class="post_author_intro">by</span> <span
class="post_author" itemprop="author"><a
href="https://www.counterpunch.org/author/drespu/"
rel="nofollow">Vijay Prashad</a> - October 2, 2018</span></div>
<hr><span></span><span>On September 8, </span><em><span>T</span></em><em><span>he
New York Times</span></em> 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”.
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<p>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.</p>
<p>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).</p>
<p>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”.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>1. Strengthening Democratic Institutions.</p>
<p>2. Penetrating Chávez’s Political Base.</p>
<p>3. Dividing Chavismo.</p>
<p>4. Protecting Vital U.S. Business.</p>
<p>5. Isolating Chávez Internationally.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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”.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>Aiding the fractious right wing</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>Regime Change 2.0</strong></p>
<p>On September 11, <em>T</em><em>he New York Times</em>
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>Long March of the Campesinos (Farmers)</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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<p> <em><strong>Vijay Prashad’s</strong> most recent book
is No Free Left: The Futures of Indian Communism (New
Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2015).</em> </p>
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