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<div class="header reader-header reader-show-element" dir="ltr"> <font
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href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/02/05/the-12-step-method-of-regime-change/">https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/02/05/the-12-step-method-of-regime-change/</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">The 12-Step Method of Regime Change</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> - February 5, 2019</span></div>
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<p>On 15 September 1970, US President Richard Nixon and
National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger authorised the
US government to do everything possible to undermine the
incoming government of the socialist president of Chile,
Salvador Allende. Nixon and Kissinger, according to the
notes kept by CIA Director Richard Helms, wanted to
‘make the economy scream’ in Chile; they were ‘not
concerned [about the] risks involved’. War was
acceptable to them as long as Allende’s government was
removed from power. The CIA started Project FUBELT, with
$10 million as a first instalment to begin the covert
destabilisation of the country.</p>
<p>US business firms, such as the telecommunication giant
ITT, the soft drink maker Pepsi Cola and copper
monopolies such as Anaconda and Kennecott, put pressure
on the US government once Allende nationalised the
copper sector on 11 July 1971. Chileans celebrated this
day as the Day of National Dignity (Dia de la Dignidad
Nacional). The CIA began to make contact with sections
of the military seen to be against Allende. Three years
later, on 11 September 1973, these military men moved
against Allende, who died in the regime change
operation. The US ‘created the conditions’ as US
National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger put it, to
which US President Richard Nixon answered, ‘that is the
way it is going to be played’. Such is the mood of
international gangsterism.</p>
<p>Chile entered the dark night of a military dictatorship
that turned over the country to US monopoly firms. US
advisors rushed in to strengthen the nerve of General
Augusto Pinochet’s cabinet.</p>
<p>What happened to Chile in 1973 is precisely what the
United States has attempted to do in many other
countries of the Global South. The most recent target
for the US government – and Western big business – is
Venezuela. But what is happening to Venezuela is nothing
unique. It faces an onslaught from the United States and
its allies that is familiar to countries as far afield
as Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The
formula is clichéd. It is commonplace, a twelve-step
plan to produce a coup climate, to create a world under
the heel of the West and of Western big business.</p>
<p><strong>Step One: Colonialism’s Traps.</strong></p>
<p>Most of the Global South remains trapped by the
structures put in place by colonialism. Colonial
boundaries encircled states that had the misfortune of
being single commodity producers – either sugar for Cuba
or oil for Venezuela. The inability to diversify their
economies meant that these countries earned the bulk of
their export revenues from their singular commodities
(98% of Venezuela’s export revenues come from oil). As
long as the prices of the commodities remained high, the
export revenues were secure. When the prices fell,
revenue suffered. This was a legacy of colonialism. Oil
prices dropped from $160.72 per barrel (June 2008) to
$51.99 per barrel (January 2019). Venezuela’s export
revenues collapsed in this decade.</p>
<p>Step Two: The Defeat of the New International Economic
Order. In 1974, the countries of the Global South
attempted to redo the architecture of the world economy.
They called for the creation of a New International
Economic Order (NIEO) that would allow them to pivot
away from the colonial reliance upon one commodity and
diversify their economies. Cartels of raw materials –
such as oil and bauxite – were to be built so that the
one-commodity country could have some control over
prices of the products that they relied upon. The
Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC),
founded in 1960, was a pioneer of these commodity
cartels. Others were not permitted to be formed. With
the defeat of OPEC over the past three decades, its
members – such as Venezuela (which has the world’s
largest proven oil reserves) – have not been able to
control oil prices. They are at the mercy of the
powerful countries of the world.</p>
<p><strong>Step Three: The Death of Southern Agriculture.
</strong></p>
<p>In November 2001, there were about three billion small
farmers and landless peasants in the world. That month,
the World Trade Organisation met in Doha (Qatar) to
unleash the productivity of Northern agri-business
against the billions of small farmers and landless
peasants of the Global South. Mechanisation and large,
industrial-scale farms in North America and Europe had
raised productivity to about 1 to 2 million kilogrammes
of cereals per farmer. The small farmers and landless
peasants in the rest of the world struggled to grow
1,000 kilogrammes of cereals per farmer. They were
nowhere near as productive. The Doha decision, as <a
href="https://monthlyreview.org/2003/10/01/world-poverty-pauperization-capital-accumulation/?utm_source=Tricontinental+English&utm_campaign=8c9cb1b47e-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_02_01_02_25&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_9fbe436b65-8c9cb1b47e-83955073">Samir
Amin wrote</a>, presages the annihilation of the small
farmer and landless peasant. What are these men and
women to do? The production per hectare is higher in the
West, but the corporate take-over of agriculture (as
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research Senior
Fellow P. Sainath shows) leads to increased hunger as it
pushes peasants off their land and leaves them to
starve.</p>
<p><strong>Step Four: Culture of Plunder.</strong></p>
<p>Emboldened by Western domination, monopoly firms act
with disregard for the law. As <a
href="https://www.pressenza.com/2019/01/how-todays-crisis-in-the-congo-began/?utm_source=Tricontinental+English&utm_campaign=8c9cb1b47e-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_02_01_02_25&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_9fbe436b65-8c9cb1b47e-83955073">Kambale
Musavuli and I write</a> of the Democratic Republic of
Congo, its annual budget of $6 billion is routinely
robbed of at least $500 by monopoly mining firms, mostly
from Canada – the country now leading the charge against
Venezuela. Mispricing and tax avoidance schemes allow
these large firms (Canada’s Agrium, Barrick and Suncor)
to routinely steal billions of dollars from impoverished
states.</p>
<p><strong>Step Five: Debt as a Way of Life. </strong></p>
<p>Unable to raise money from commodity sales, hemmed in
by a broken world agricultural system and victim of a
culture of plunder, countries of the Global South have
been forced to go hat in hand to commercial lenders for
finance. Over the past decade, debt held by the Global
South states has increased, while debt payments have
ballooned by 60%. When commodity prices rose between
2000 and 2010, debt in the Global South decreased. As
commodity prices began to fall from 2010, debts have
risen. The IMF points out that of the 67 impoverished
countries that they follow, 30 are in debt distress, a
number that has doubled since 2013. More than 55.4% of
Angola’s export revenue is paid to service its debt. And
Angola, like Venezuela, is an oil exporter. Other oil
exporters such as Ghana, Chad, Gabon and Venezuela
suffer high debt to GDP ratios. Two out of five
low-income countries are in deep financial distress.</p>
<p><strong>Step Six: Public Finances Go to Hell. </strong></p>
<p>With little incoming revenue and low tax collection
rates, public finances in the Global South has gone into
crisis. As the UN Conference on Trade and Development
points out, ‘public finances have continued to be
suffocated’. States simply cannot put together the funds
needed to maintain basic state functions. Balanced
budget rules make borrowing difficult, which is
compounded by the fact that banks charge high rates for
money, citing the risks of lending to indebted
countries.</p>
<p><strong>Step Seven: Deep Cuts in Social Spending</strong>.</p>
<p>Impossible to raise funds, trapped by the fickleness of
international finance, governments are forced to make
deep cuts in social spending. Education and health, food
sovereignty and economic diversification – all this goes
by the wayside. International agencies such as the IMF
force countries to conduct ‘reforms’, a word that means
extermination of independence. Those countries that hold
out face immense international pressure to submit under
pain of extinction, as the Communist Manifesto (1848)
put it.</p>
<p><strong>Step Eight: Social Distress Leads to Migration.
</strong></p>
<p>The total number of migrants in the world is now at
least 68.5 million. That makes the country called
Migration the 21st largest country in the world after
Thailand and ahead of the United Kingdom. Migration has
become a global reaction to the collapse of countries
from one end of the planet to the other. The migration
out of Venezuela is not unique to that country but is
now merely the normal reaction to the global crisis.
Migrants from Honduras who go northward to the United
States or migrants from West Africa who go towards
Europe through Libya are part of this global exodus.</p>
<p><strong>Step Nine: Who Controls the Narrative? </strong></p>
<p>The monopoly corporate media takes its orders from the
elite. There is no sympathy for the structural crisis
faced by governments from Afghanistan to Venezuela.
Those leaders who cave to Western pressure are given a
free pass by the media. As long as they conduct
‘reforms’, they are safe. Those countries that argue
against the ‘reforms’ are vulnerable to being attacked.
Their leaders become ‘dictators’, their people hostages.
A contested election in Bangladesh or in the Democratic
Republic of Congo or in the United States is not cause
for regime change. That special treatment is left for
Venezuela.</p>
<p><strong>Step Ten: Who’s the Real President? </strong></p>
<p>Regime change operations begin when the imperialists
question the legitimacy of the government in power: by
putting the weight of the United States behind an
unelected person, calling him the new president and
creating a situation where the elected leader’s
authority is undermined. The coup takes place when a
powerful country decides – without an election – to
anoint its own proxy. That person – in Venezuela’s case
Juan Guaidó – rapidly has to make it clear that he will
bend to the authority of the United States. His kitchen
cabinet – made up of former government officials with
intimate ties to the US (such as Harvard University’s
Ricardo Hausmann and Carnegie’s Moisés Naím) – will make
it clear that they want to privatise everything and sell
out the Venezuelan people in the name of the Venezuelan
people.</p>
<p><strong>Step Eleven: Make the Economy Scream. </strong></p>
<p>Venezuela has faced harsh US sanctions since 2014, when
the US Congress started down this road. The next year,
US President Barack Obama declared Venezuela a ‘threat
to national security’. The economy started to scream. In
recent days, the United States and the United Kingdom
brazenly stole billions of dollars of Venezuelan money,
placed the shackles of sanctions on its only revenue
generating sector (oil) and watched the pain flood
through the country. This is what the US did to Iran and
this is what they did to Cuba. The UN says that the US
sanctions on Cuba have cost the small island $130
billion. Venezuela lost $6 billion for the first year of
Trump’s sanctions, since they began in August 2017. More
is to be lost as the days unfold. No wonder that the
United Nations Special Rapporteur Idriss Jazairy says
that ‘sanctions which can lead to starvation and medical
shortages are not the answer to the crisis in
Venezuela’. He said that sanctions are ‘not a foundation
for the peaceful settlement of disputes’. Further,
Jazairy said, ‘I am especially concerned to hear reports
that these sanctions are aimed at changing the
government of Venezuela’. He called for ‘compassion’ for
the people of Venezuela.</p>
<p><strong>Step Twelve: Go to War. </strong></p>
<p>US National Security Advisor John Bolton held a yellow
pad with the words 5,000 troops in Colombia written on
it. These are US troops, already deployed in Venezuela’s
neighbour. The US Southern Command is ready. They are
egging on Colombia and Brazil to do their bit. As the
coup climate is created, a nudge will be necessary. They
will go to war.</p>
<p>None of this is inevitable. It was not inevitable to
Titina Silá, a commander of the Partido Africano para a
Independència da Guiné e Cabo Verde (PAIGC) who was
murdered on 30 January 1973. She fought to free her
country. It is not inevitable to the people of
Venezuela, who continue to fight to defend their
revolution. It is not inevitable to our friends at
CodePink: Women for Peace, whose Medea Benjamin walked
into a meeting of the Organisation of American States
and said – No!</p>
<p>It is time to say No to regime change intervention.
There is no middle ground.</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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