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href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/06/07/venezuelas-bolivarian-revolution-in-the-crosshairs-of-us-imperialism/">https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/06/07/venezuelas-bolivarian-revolution-in-the-crosshairs-of-us-imperialism/</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution in
the Crosshairs of US Imperialism</h1>
<span class="post_author_intro">by</span> <span
class="post_author" itemprop="author"><a
href="https://www.counterpunch.org/author/roger-harris/"
rel="nofollow">Roger Harris</a> - June 7, 2019</span></div>
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<p>With the likes of John Bolton and Elliot Abrams
directing US foreign policy, the US government has
abandoned all pretense of “plausible denial” for its
illegal regime-change initiatives. The “humanitarian”
bombs may not be falling but, make no mistake, the US is
waging a full-bore war against the Bolivarian Revolution
in Venezuela.</p>
<p>Back in 1998, Venezuela had had nearly a half a century
of two-party rule. A duopoly, not unlike the Republican
and Democratic parties in the US, alternated in power
imposing a neoliberal order. Poor and working people
experienced deteriorating conditions of austerity
regardless of which party was in power.</p>
<p>Then third-party candidate Hugo Chávez was elected
president. HeH He initiated what has become known as the
Bolivarian Revolution, which has inspired the peoples of
the world while engendering the enmity of both the US
imperialists and the Venezuelan elites.</p>
<p>This article explores the contributions, shortcomings,
and lessons of the Bolivarian Revolution’s two decades,
in the context of the US regime-change efforts from its
inception to current attempts by the US to install the
unelected Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s president.</p>
<p><strong>Forging a new national identity based on a
people’s history. </strong></p>
<p>History, it is said, is written by the victors. The
historical narrative typically reflects the class that
enslaved the Africans, dispossessed the Indigenous, and
exploited the workers. There are exceptions. In the US,
we have the legacy of Howard Zinn’s <em>People’s
History of the United States.</em></p>
<p>In Venezuela, Chávez revised his country’s history and
thereby wrought a sea change of national consciousness.
Prior to Chávez, Venezuela was arguably the most
sycophantically pro-US country in South America. Miami
was looked to for cultural affirmation; baseball was the
national pastime.</p>
<p>Chávez took special inspiration from the leader of the
South American struggle against Spanish colonialism and
named his project after Simón Bolívar, known as the
“Liberator.” Bolívar was not merely a national leader,
but a true internationalist. The Bolivarian project is
about the integration of nations based on mutual respect
and sovereignty. Bolívar presciently declared in 1829:
“The United States appears to be destined by Providence
to plague Latin America with misery in the name of
liberty.”</p>
<p>This new Venezuelan national identity and
consciousness, based on their history told from the
bottom up, may prove to be the most lasting legacy of
the Bolivarian Revolution.</p>
<p><strong>Inclusive society.</strong></p>
<p>Fundamental to the Bolivarian project has been the
inclusion of the formerly dispossessed: especially
women, people of color, and youth.</p>
<p>As professor of Latin American history at NYU Greg
Grandin observed, this inclusiveness has awakened “a
deep fear of the primal hatred, racism, and fury of the
opposition, which for now is directed at the agents of
Maduro’s state but really springs from Chávez’s
expansion of the public sphere to include Venezuela’s
poor.”</p>
<p>For example, when an opposition demonstration came upon
an Afro-descendent street peddler, he was presumed to be
a <em>chavista</em> because he was dark-skinned and
poor. The opposition demonstrators poured gasoline over
him and set him on fire. Then the horrific image was
posted on social media.</p>
<p>A less gruesome example occurred at the Venezuelan
Embassy in Washington, DC. North American activists in
solidarity with the Bolivarian government protected the
embassy in accordance with international law from being
usurped by representatives of US-backed Juan Guaidó for
36 days. Before the protectors were evicted by the US
Secret Service on May 16, counter-protesting opposition
expatriate Venezuelans would wave bananas at African
American solidarity activists, chanting “go back to the
zoo.” Such is the racist loathing that fuels the
Venezuelan opposition.</p>
<p><strong>Special option for poor and working people. </strong></p>
<p>Why should a state of all the people have a special
option for those who are poor and working? Because these
are the people who most need the social welfare services
of the state. Billionaires don’t need government
schools, hospitals, and housing, but the masses of
Venezuelan people do.</p>
<p>The Bolivarian project had halved poverty and cut
extreme poverty by two-thirds, while providing free
health care and education. On May 27, the United Nations
cited Venezuela as one of the top countries for
guaranteeing the right to housing, recognizing the over
2.5 million public housing units built.</p>
<p><strong>Democracy promotion. </strong></p>
<p>The role of a state aspiring to be socialist is not
simply to provide social welfare, but to empower the
people.</p>
<p>The Bolivarian project has experimented in what is
called “protagonistic democracy”: cooperatives, citizens
councils, and communes. Some succeeded; others did not.
One of the first priorities was to eradicate illiteracy.
The Bolivarian state has promoted community radio
stations, low-cost computers, internet cafés for senior
citizens, and other venues for popular expression.
Venezuela now has one of the highest rates of higher
education attendance in the world. These are not the
hallmarks of a dictatorship.</p>
<p><strong>21<sup>st</sup> century socialism. </strong></p>
<p>More than even Bernie Sanders, the Bolivarian
Revolution put socialism on the agenda for the 21<sup>st</sup>
century. For this we owe the Venezuelans a debt of
gratitude, not for providing us with a playbook to be
copied, but for demonstrating that the creation of a
better world is principally a <em>process.</em></p>
<p>This was not the primary transgression placing
Venezuela in the crosshairs of US imperialism. Promoting
socialism may be regarded as blasphemy, but the original
sin is the following.</p>
<p><strong>Multi-polar world and regional integration. </strong></p>
<p>The greatest challenge to the Empire, to the world’s
sole superpower, is a multi-polar world based on
regional integration. In 1999, Chávez helped strengthen
OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries). In
2004, he helped initiate ALBA (Alliance for Our Peoples
of America), followed by PetroCaribe in 2005, UNASUR
(Union of South American Nations) in 2008, and CELAC
(Community of Latin American and Caribbean States) in
2011. Venezuela has consistently demonstrated solidarity
with the Palestinian struggle and other oppressed
peoples.</p>
<p>When the small fish organize, the big fish gets nasty.
Above all, this is why the world’s hegemon has targeted
Venezuela.</p>
<p><strong>The traumatic transition from Chávez to Maduro</strong></p>
<p>Chávez, suffering from cancer, died on March 5, 2013.
The reaction in Venezuela was polarized. The elites
danced in the street. The majority, composed mainly of
poor and working people, were traumatized.</p>
<p>The bully to the north, smelling blood, saw an
opportunity. The US had conspired to overthrow the
Bolivarian Revolution from the beginning, backing a
short-lived coup in 2002 followed by a boss’s strike.
With the passing of Chávez, the imperialist offensive
doubled down.</p>
<p>A snap election was called according to the Venezuelan
Constitution for April 14 to replace the deceased
president. Chávez, anticipating his demise, had
designated Nicolás Maduro as his successor. Although
polls had shown Maduro with a 10% lead going into the
election campaign, he won with a narrow 1.5% margin.</p>
<p>I was in Caracas as an election observer when Maduro
won. My observation of the election was like that of
former US President Jimmy Carter, who had declared a
year before that of the 92 elections the Carter Center
had observed, “The election process in Venezuela is the
best in the world.”</p>
<p>Within minutes of the announcement of Maduro’s victory,
the main opposition candidate, Henrique Capriles, came
on TV to denounce the election as fraudulent and call on
the people to “show their rage.” Thus began the
opposition’s violent offensive, the <em>guarimbas, </em>to
achieve by violence what they could not achieve in
democratic elections.</p>
<p>The opposition charges of fraud were investigated by
Venezuela’s National Electoral Council (CNE) and found
groundless, based on a 100% audit of the electronic vote
backed up with paper receipts. Capriles still maintained
the charge of fraud, and the US became the sole nation
to refuse to recognize the Maduro presidency. The
opposition violence continued, taking over 40 lives.</p>
<p>Upon assuming the presidency, Maduro inherited existing
problems of crime, inefficiency, corruption, inflation,
and a dysfunctional currency exchange system. These were
problems that existed during the Chávez period and even
prior to that. These problems persist in varying degrees
to the present, despite concerted programs to address
them.</p>
<p>President Maduro has had his feet held to the fire by
the imperialists from the get-go. Far from having a
respite, shortly into his presidency, Venezuela was hit
with petroleum prices plummeting from a high of nearly
$125/barrel to a low of close to $25/barrel. Despite
efforts to diversify the economy, Venezuela remains
dependent on oil exports for most of its foreign
exchange, which is used to fund the social programs.</p>
<p><strong>US regime-change war intensifies</strong></p>
<p>The US regime-change war continues to intensify with
increasingly harsh sanctions. These unilateral measures
are illegal under the charters of the United Nations and
the Organization of American States, because they
constitute collective punishment. Trump’s security
advisor, John Bolton, elucidates: “It’s like in <em>Star
Wars</em>, when Darth Vader grips someone. That’s what
we’re doing economically with the (Venezuelan) regime.”</p>
<p>In 2013, the US waited until after the presidential
election in Venezuela to declare it fraudulent. Taking
no chances, the US declared the 2018 election fraudulent
four months before it was held. Joining Trump in this
rush to pre-judgement were eleven Democratic senators
including Bernie Sanders.</p>
<p>The charges of fraud were based on three issues:
setting the date of the election, disqualifying
opposition parties, and barring opposition candidates.
Maduro had continually called for dialogue with the
opposition to set the election date. But each time a
date was mutually agreed upon, the opposition backed out
after their US handlers intervened. As for the
disqualified parties, they had lost their ballot status
because they had boycotted past elections. They then
refused to reapply for ballot status, because their
intention was not to participate in the electoral
process.</p>
<p>Opposition candidates, namely Leopoldo López and
Henrique Capriles, were barred from running, because
they had committed criminal acts that warranted their
exclusion. López clearly incited violence that resulted
in deaths and would have received far harsher treatment
had he committed such acts in the US. Capriles was
convicted of economic fraud, “administrative
irregularities,” during his tenure as a state governor.
While the courts found Capriles guilty, this action
against a political opponent damaged the Maduro
government’s international image.</p>
<p>Overall, the charges of fraud by the radical right
opposition were mainly pretenses to delegitimize the
upcoming election. However, several moderate opposition
candidates did run, defying the US demand that the
election be boycotted.</p>
<p>Henri Falcón was the leading opposition candidate to
run in 2018, championing a neoliberal platform of
privatization, austerity for workers, and subservience
to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The US, which
would ordinarily gleefully embrace such a platform,
instead threatened Falcón with sanctions for breaking
the election boycott.</p>
<p>The explanation for this seemingly anomalous behavior
by the US government is that the stakes in Venezuela are
much higher than just the presidency. The regime-change
project is to exterminate the Bolivarian Revolution,
reverse its social gains, and return Venezuela to a
subservient client state where the world’s largest oil
reserves would be freely exploited by US corporations.</p>
<p><strong>Orwellian world of US foreign policy</strong></p>
<p>As CEO of the capitalist world order (that is what is
meant by exercising “American world leadership”), then
US President Obama declared in 2015 that Venezuela
constituted an imminent and extraordinary threat to US
national security. He didn’t mean a military or even an
economic threat. That would have been preposterous. What
Obama was implicitly confirming is that Venezuela poses
a “threat of a good example.” Venezuela is at the top of
US imperialism’s hit list because of the good things,
not for its faults.</p>
<p>President Trump has intensified Obama’s regime-change
policies aimed at Venezuela. Condemning the Bolivarian
Revolution, Trump opined: “Socialism is not about
justice, it’s not about equality, it’s not about lifting
up the poor.” Might he have been really thinking of
capitalism? His national security advisor John Bolton
tweeted that removing the democratically elected
President Maduro by violent coup and installing the
US-anointed and unelected Guaidó is protecting the
Venezuelan constitution.</p>
<p>On the other side of the aisle, Senator Sanders accused
Chávez of being a “dead communist dictator.” Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez described the US regime-change war as a
contest of “authoritarian regime versus democracy,” with
the questionable presumption that the US is the
democracy.</p>
<p>In the Orwellian terminology of US politicians and
corporate media, a <em>fraudulent election</em> is one
where the people vote their choice. A <em>dictator</em>
is the democratically elected choice of the people. And
the so-called dictator is an <em>authoritarian</em> if
he resists rather than surrenders to the bullying power.</p>
<p>Surrender does not appear to be on the agenda for the
Bolivarian Revolution, with US asset Guaidó forced to
negotiate in Norway after his failed coup attempts.
Despite the suffocating sanctions and threats of
military action, the poor and working people in
Venezuela who are most adversely affected by the US war
against them remain the strongest supporters of their
elected government.</p>
<p>Make Orwell fiction again!</p>
</div>
<p> <strong><em>Roger Harris </em></strong><em>is on the
board of the <a href="http://taskforceamericas.org/">Task
Force on the Americas</a>, a 32-year-old
anti-imperialist human rights organization.</em> </p>
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