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href="https://truthout.org/articles/in-venezuela-white-supremacy-is-a-key-driver-of-the-coup/">https://truthout.org/articles/in-venezuela-white-supremacy-is-a-key-driver-of-the-coup/</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">In Venezuela, White Supremacy Is a Key
Driver of the Coup</h1>
<div class="credits reader-credits">Greg Palast - February 8,
2019<br>
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<p>On January 23, right after a <a
href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-30/trump-congratulates-venezuela-s-guaido-in-call-white-house-says">phone
call</a> from Donald Trump, Juan Guaidó, former <a
href="https://www.npr.org/2019/01/27/688707295/who-is-venezuelas-juan-guaid">speaker
of Venezuela’s National Assembly</a>, declared himself
president. No voting. When you have <a
href="https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/23/politics/trump-juan-guaido-venezuela/index.html">official
recognition</a> from <a
href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=19&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwjGzoC-hKPgAhWaJDQIHd2EArMQ1ScwEnoECA0QAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonpost.com%2Fnews%2Farts-and-entertainment%2Fwp%2F2015%2F09%2F01%2Fwhy-does-everyone-call-donald-trump-the-donald-its-an-interesting-story%2F&usg=AOvVaw38Z6pKH_xLwEK1zWtfUcbC">The
Donald</a>, who needs elections?</p>
<p><em>Say what?</em></p>
<p>I can explain what’s going on in Venezuela in photos.</p>
<p>First, we have Juan Guaidó, self-proclaimed (and
Trump-proclaimed) president of the nation, with his wife
and child, a photo prominently placed in The New York
Times. And here, the class photo of <a
href="https://twitter.com/vijayprashad/status/1088875934680338433">Guaidó’s
party members in the National Assembly</a>. They
appear, overwhelmingly light-skinned — especially when
compared to their political opposites in <a
href="https://twitter.com/vijayprashad/status/1088875934680338433">the
third photo</a>, the congress members who support the
elected President Nicolás Maduro. </p>
<p>This is the story of Venezuela in black and white, the
story not told in The New York Times or the rest of our
establishment media. This year’s so-called popular
uprising is, at its heart, a furious backlash of the <a
href="https://www.voanews.com/a/are-race-and-class-at-the-root-of-venezuelas-political-crisis/1886458.html">whiter
(and wealthier)</a> Venezuelans against their
replacement by the larger Mestizo (mixed-race) poor.
(Forty-four percent of the population that answered the
<a
href="http://www.ine.gob.ve/documentos/Demografia/CensodePoblacionyVivienda/pdf/nacional.pdf">2014
census</a> listed themselves as “white.”)</p>
<p><span>Four centuries of white supremacy in Venezuela by
those who identify their ancestors as European came to
an end with the 1998 election of Hugo Chavez, </span>who
won with the overwhelming support of the Mestizo
majority. This turn away from white supremacy continues
under Maduro, Chavez’s chosen successor. </p>
<p>In my interviews with Chavez for BBC beginning in 2002,
he talked with humor about the fury of a white ruling
class finding itself displaced by a man who <a
href="https://books.google.it/books?id=ZGWeBAAAQBAJ&pg=PT367&lpg=PT367&dq=chavez+%22negro+e+indio%22&source=bl&ots=zuVaRN-Oqy&sig=ACfU3U2ssQoWljSXVDrGA7t5DvJskhCLXQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiKhcTr16XgAhVMgxoKHW73DScQ6AEwB3oECAQQAQ#v=onepage&q=chavez%20%22negro%20e%20indio%22&f=false">embraced</a>
his own Indigenous and African <a
href="https://www.democracynow.org/2005/9/20/venezuelas_president_chavez_offers_cheap_oil">heritage</a>.
</p>
<p>In Venezuela, as in the USA, <a
href="https://www.voanews.com/a/are-race-and-class-at-the-root-of-venezuelas-political-crisis/1886458.html">poverty
and race are locked together</a>. Why did so many
Mestizo, poor Venezuelans love Chavez? As even the CIA’s
surprisingly honest <em><a
href="https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ve.html">Fact
Book</a></em> states:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Social investment in Venezuela during the Chavez
administration reduced poverty from nearly 50% in 1999
to about 27% in 2011, increased school enrollment,
substantially decreased infant and child mortality,
and improved access to potable water and sanitation
through social investment.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But, just as Maduro took office, the price of oil began
its <a
href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/262858/change-in-opec-crude-oil-prices-since-1960/">collapse</a>,
and the vast social programs that oil had paid for were
now supported by <a
href="https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/07/venezuela-china-and-russia-owed-debts-as-presidential-fight-rages.html">borrowing
money</a> and printing it, causing wild <a
href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevehanke/2019/01/01/venezuelas-hyperinflation-hits-80000-per-year-in-2018/">inflation</a>.
The economic slide is now made impossibly worse by what
the <a
href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/venezuela-us-sanctions-united-nations-oil-pdvsa-a8748201.html">UN
rapporteur</a> for Venezuela compared to “medieval
sieges.” The Trump administration <a
href="https://in.reuters.com/article/venezuela-politics-usa-sanctions-factbox/factbox-u-s-sanctions-on-venezuelas-oil-industry-idINKCN1PV274">cut
off Venezuela</a> from the oil sale proceeds from its
biggest customer, the US. </p>
<p>Everyone has been hurt economically, but the privileged
class’s bank accounts have become <a
href="https://money.cnn.com/2018/01/17/news/economy/venezuela-cash-crisis/index.html">nearly
worthless</a>. So, knowing that the Mestizo majority
would not elect their Great White Hope Guaidó, they
simply took to the streets — often armed. (And yes, both
sides are armed.)</p>
<p>I’ve seen this movie before. When I look at today’s <a
href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/venezuela-protests-guaido-vs-maduro/2019/02/02/ef043b00-2660-11e9-b5b4-1d18dfb7b084_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.bbf723e08930">news
reports of massive demonstrations</a> against the
so-called “dictatorship” of Venezuela’s left government,
it looks awfully like 2002, when I was first in Caracas
reporting for BBC Television.</p>
<p>Then, The New York Times<em>, </em>NPR and other
mainstream outlets in the US reported on marches against
the Chavez government, describing the tens of thousands
of Venezuelans calling for Chavez’s removal. The
light-skinned protesters were overwhelmingly wealthy —
and they wanted you to know it. Many of the women <a
href="https://newint.org/features/2002/07/05/coups">marched
in high heels</a>, the men peacocking in business
suits, proudly displayed in the uniforms of their
privileged class. The Chavistas wore patriotic yellow,
blue and red T-shirts, sneakers, jeans.</p>
<p>To anti-Chavista protesters, race was an issue as much
as class economics. I heard these opposition
demonstrators shout <a
href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/oct/08/hugo-chavez-victory-political-venezuela">“Chavez,
Monkey!”</a> and worse.</p>
<p>Many in the US have never heard this story of race war
in Venezuela (and war is what it is), as the US press
does not recognize its own racial bias. In 2002, as
today, the massive demonstrations of the whiter
Venezuelans were reported as evidence that Chavez was
wildly unpopular. Yet, the day after each anti-Chavez
march, I would <a
href="https://www.gregpalast.com/chavezdownload/">witness
and film</a> the pro-Chavez demonstrations that
flooded Caracas with an ocean of nearly half a million
marchers, largely the Mestizo poor, that received little
or no coverage in the US press.</p>
<p>The bias continues. The New York Times did not run a
photo of this past week’s pro-Maduro demonstrations. But
in <a
href="https://twitter.com/AbbyMartin/status/1091840005868158976/photo/1">hard-to-find
photos and reports</a> from my colleagues on the
ground, the <em>Chavista</em> demonstrations are
bigger, involving mass turnouts in several cities, not
just wealthy neighborhoods in Caracas.</p>
<p>Why do the poor march for Maduro? Even though the
Mestizo majority suffers today, they will not turn back
to the pre-Chavez days of <em>de facto </em>apartheid.</p>
<p>And we must remember this is not the first time the US
government has tried to overthrow the elected government
in Venezuela.</p>
<p>In 2002, George W. Bush’s State Department cheer-led <a
href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/apr/21/usa.venezuela">the
coup</a>. The plotters kidnapped Chavez and held him
hostage. The coup was led by an oil industry leader and
head of the Chamber of Commerce, <a
href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1927678.stm">Pedro
Carmona</a>, <a
href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/apr/22/venezuela.duncancampbell">who
had seized the nation’s White House</a>, and, like
Guaidó today, <a
href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/may/13/oil.venezuela">declared
himself president</a>. Carmona told me proudly about
the fancy inaugural ball held by the nation’s elite and
attended by Bush’s ambassador.</p>
<p>But the Bush/Carmona coup collapsed when a million
mostly Mestizo, Indigenous and Black Venezuelans flooded
the capital and <a
href="https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/2336">forced
the plotters to return their hero</a>, the supposedly
unpopular Chavez, to Miraflores, the presidential
palace. “Presidente” Carmona fled.</p>
<p>Today, Guaidó’s supporters, like Carmona’s, know they
can’t win an election given the overwhelming fact of the
newly empowered Mestizo majority. So Guaidó has skipped
the idea of an election altogether, simply replacing
running for office with the “recognition” from Trump and
allies which Guaidó can’t get from Venezuelans.</p>
<p>When I see the images and hear the chants of the <a
href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/venezuela-protests-guaido-vs-maduro/2019/02/02/ef043b00-2660-11e9-b5b4-1d18dfb7b084_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.b7eab7e11adb">anti-Chavista
demonstrators</a> now, I’m also reminded of what I saw
at a <a
href="https://www.c-span.org/video/?453849-1/president-trump-campaigns-republicans-georgia">Trump
rally in Macon, Georgia</a>, this past November. The
president slid out of Air Force One to <a
href="https://www.pantagraph.com/news/national/obama-trump-offer-dueling-final-pitches-to-midterm-voters/article_9def71a9-2188-537f-a4ed-167aef3e198f.html">tell
the crowd</a> — heavily <a
href="https://truthout.org/articles/purged-voters-provisional-ballots-could-decide-georgia-governor-race/">weighted
with white supremacists</a> — that they needed to <em>take
back their country</em> from those “invading” the
border. Trump told them to fear gubernatorial candidate
Stacey Abrams, who is Black, saying she would “<a
href="https://truthout.org/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Mail%20Downloads/242876FF-4B3E-48F1-8ED1-D2F1C61E7AD3/video.foxnews.com/v/5857526451001">turn
Georgia into Venezuela</a>.”</p>
<p>I don’t think Trump was talking about Abrams’s program
to <a
href="http://www.georgiahealthnews.com/2018/06/abrams-pushing-health-care-key-issue-campaign/">bring
universal health care to Georgia</a>, as Chavez did
for Venezuela.</p>
<p>Some of the US press is quick to condemn the racial
hatred on display at Trump rallies. But I have yet to
hear or read in the US press what our eyes can see in
the three photos from Venezuela: an uprising of white or
light-skinned people wanting to “take back their
country.” </p>
<p>The putsch in Venezuela is run by the wealthy,
internationally connected minority operating by a
regime-change plan designed by neocon retread John
Bolton, Trump’s national security adviser — a plan to <a
href="https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/02/04/john-bolton-living-his-dream-224546">control
Venezuela</a> <em>and its oil</em>, as Bolton openly
<a
href="https://truthout.org/video/bolton-pushes-privatization-of-venezuelas-oil-as-us-ratchets-up-pressure/">proclaims</a>.</p>
<p>Ah, yes, the oil. It’s always the oil. And Venezuela
has plenty to seize: the <a
href="https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-world-s-largest-oil-reserves-by-country.html">world’s</a>
<a
href="https://www.opec.org/opec_web/en/about_us/171.htm">largest
reserves</a>.</p>
<p>We’ll get to that in <em>Part II. </em></p>
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