<div dir="ltr">
<div class="gmail-container gmail-content-width3">
<div class="gmail-header gmail-reader-header gmail-reader-show-element">
<font size="1"><a href="https://www.thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/23-2020-venezuela/">https://www.thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/23-2020-venezuela/</a>
</font><h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Goliath Is Not Invincible: The Twenty-Third Newsletter (2020).</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">June 4, 2020 - Vijay Prashad<br></div>
<div class="gmail-meta-data">
<div class="gmail-reader-estimated-time"></div>
</div>
</div>
<hr>
<div class="gmail-content">
<div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-line-height4 gmail-reader-show-element"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><div>
<div id="gmail-attachment_20536" class="gmail-wp-caption"><p><img src="https://www.thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Caracas-Bellas-Artes-1.jpg" alt="Comando Creativo, History is watching us, Bellas Artes, Caracas, 2011." style="margin-right: 0px;" width="454" height="341"></p><p id="gmail-caption-attachment-20536" class="gmail-wp-caption-text"><span>Comando Creativo, <em>History is watching us</em>, Bellas Artes, Caracas, 2011.</span></p></div>
<p>Dear Friends,</p>
<p>Greetings from the desk of the <a href="http://thetricontinental.org/">Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research</a>.</p>
<p>Last year, I <a href="https://www.pressenza.com/2019/02/notes-from-the-streets-of-venezuela-the-people-are-resilient-in-the-face-of-foreign-intervention/">walked</a>
with Mariela Machado in her housing complex known as Kaikachi in the
neighbourhood of La Vega (Caracas, Venezuela). After Hugo Chávez was
inaugurated president in 1999, a group of working-class residents of the
city saw an empty piece of land and occupied it. Mariela and others
went to the government and said, ‘We built this city. We can build our
own houses. All we want are machines and materials’. The government
supported them, and they built a charming multi-story complex that
houses ninety-two families.</p>
<p>Across the road is a middle-class apartment building. Sometimes,
Mariela told me, the people from that building throw trash into
Kaikachi. ‘They want us to be evicted’, she says. If the Bolivarian
governments fall, she points out, a government of the oligarchy will
take the side of those residents, evict the families – mainly
Afro-Venezuelans – who built the housing development, and hand it over
to a landlord. This, she says, is the nature of her struggle, a class
struggle to defend the precious gains of the poor against the oligarchy.</p>
<div id="gmail-attachment_20563" class="gmail-wp-caption"><p><img src="https://www.thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Marisol-Escobar-Venezuela-Cultural-Head-1975.-12.jpg" alt="Marisol, Culture Head, 1975." style="margin-right: 0px;" width="354" height="454"></p><p id="gmail-caption-attachment-20563" class="gmail-wp-caption-text"><span>Marisol, <em>Culture Head</em>, 1975.</span></p></div>
<p>Everywhere you go amongst the Venezuelan working class and the urban poor, you are greeted with an effusive identity: <em>Chavista</em>.
This word is used by women and men who are loyal to Chávez, certainly,
but also to the Bolivarian Revolution that his election inaugurated.
Revolutions are difficult; they must chip away at hundreds of years of
inequality; they must erode cultural expectations and build the material
foundations for a new society. Revolutions, Lenin <a href="https://mronline.org/2019/11/20/a-letter-to-intellectuals-who-deride-revolutions-in-the-name-of-purity/">wrote</a>,
are ‘a long, difficult, and stubborn class struggle, which, after the
overthrow of capitalist rule, after the destruction of the bourgeois
state…does not disappear…but merely changes its forms and in many
respects becomes fiercer’. Hunched shoulders must straighten and
aspirations beyond the most basic needs must be met. That was the agenda
put on the table by Chávez. Initially, oil revenues provided the
resources for these dreams – both within Venezuela and across the <a href="https://www.salon.com/2019/02/21/how-the-u-s-is-strangling-haiti-as-it-attempts-regime-change-in-venezuela_partner/">Global South</a> – but then oil prices <a href="https://www.un.org/development/desa/dpad/publication/world-economic-situation-and-prospects-2018/">collapsed</a>
in 2015, which impacted the ability of the Venezuelan state to deepen
revolutionary change. But the revolutionary process did not weaken.</p>
<p>From 1999, the main oil and mining companies tried their best to
delegitimise the revolutionary process in Venezuela. They did this not
only to access the resources of Venezuela, but also to make sure that
the Venezuelan example of resource socialism did not inspire other
countries. In 2007, for instance, Peter Munk, the head of Canada’s <a href="https://www.thetricontinental.org/ten-canadian-mining-companies-financial-details-and-violations/">Barrick Gold</a>, wrote an inflammatory letter to the <em>Financial Times</em>
with the title ‘Stop Chavez’ Demagoguery Before it is Too Late’. Munk
compared Chávez to Hitler and Pol Pot, saying that such ‘autocratic
demagogues’ should not be permitted to function. What bothered Munk –
and executives of mining companies such as him – is that Chávez was
carrying out a ‘step-by-step transformation of Venezuela’. What was the
nature of this step-by-step transformation? Chávez and the Bolivarian
Revolution were taking resources away from the likes of Barrick Gold and
diverting their wealth to benefit not only the Venezuelan people, but
also the people of Latin America and elsewhere. This resource socialism
had to be destroyed.</p>
<div id="gmail-attachment_20554" class="gmail-wp-caption"><p><img src="https://www.thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Macuro2-2.jpg" alt="Comando Creativo, ‘This is our homeland’ / Tenemos patria. Macuro, Sucre. 2014." style="margin-right: 0px;" width="454" height="341"></p><p id="gmail-caption-attachment-20554" class="gmail-wp-caption-text"><span>Comando Creativo, ‘This is our homeland’ / <em>Tenemos patria.</em> Macuro, Sucre. 2014.</span></p></div>
<p>In 2002, the United States – with funds provided by the National
Endowment for Democracy and USAID – attempted a coup d’état against
Chávez. This coup failed decisively, but it did not stop the
shenanigans. In 2004, US Ambassador William Brownfield produced a
five-point plan of the embassy: ‘the strategy’s focus’, he <a href="https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/06CARACAS3356_a.html">writes</a>,
‘is 1) strengthening democratic [namely oligarchic] institutions; 2)
penetrating [meaning to disorient and buy off] Chavez’ political base;
3) dividing Chavismo; 4) protecting vital US business, and 5) isolating
Chavez internationally’.</p>
<p>These are the elements of the <a href="https://www.thetricontinental.org/dossier-17-venezuela-and-hybrid-wars-in-latin-america/">hybrid war</a>
against Venezuela, a war whose tactics range from sanctions to
throttling the economy to spreading misinformation and isolating the
revolutionary process. Every attempt has been made by the United States
government and its allies (including Canada and a number of governments
in Latin America) to overthrow not just President Chávez and President
Nicolás Maduro, but also the Bolivarian revolution in its entirely. If
the US and its allies were to win such a war, there is no doubt that
they would erase the Kaikachi housing complex where Mariela Machado is a
local leader.</p>
<p><img src="https://www.thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/20200529_Coronashock-02_EN_quote1-1.jpg" alt="Coronashock 02_EN_quote1-1" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="454" height="240"></p>
<p>When I met Mariela in 2019, the US had been trying to install Juan
Guaidó – an insignificant politician inside of Venezuela up to that
point – as the president. It was people like Mariela who took to the
streets on a daily basis to resist the attempted coup and hybrid war
engineered by Washington, DC, by the transnational corporations, and by
Venezuela’s old oligarchy. Chavistas like Mariela understood very well
Chávez’s <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=fh4YdItHuPgC&pg=PA63&lpg=PA63&dq#v=onepage&q&f=false">comments</a>
from 2005: ‘Goliath is not invincible. That makes it more dangerous,
because as it begins to be aware of its weaknesses, it begins to resort
to brute force. The assault on Venezuela, utilising brute force, is a
sign of weakness, ideological weakness’. What Chávez said then mirrors
what Franz Fanon wrote in <em>A Dying Colonialism</em> (1959): ‘What we
are really witnessing is the slow but sure agony of the settler
mentality’ and the ‘radical mutation’ that the revolutionary process
produces in the working class. Chavismo is the name of revolutionary
energy, of the radical mutation of the personality of the Venezuelan who
is no longer willing to bend before the oligarchy or of Washington, DC,
but dignified in the struggle, is unwilling to accept a life of
submission.</p>
<p><img src="https://www.thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/20200529_Coronashock-02_EN_Social-Media_TT.jpg" alt="" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="454" height="239"></p>
<p>During the period of the global pandemic, a sensitive world would
have united to condemn the suffocation of places like Venezuela and
Iran, which face a hybrid war from Washington, DC that has diminished
their ability to combat the virus. But, instead of ending or even
suspending the hybrid war, the United States government – and its
Canadian, European, and Latin American allies – increased their attack
on Venezuela. This attack ranges from preventing Venezuela from using
the International Monetary Fund (IMF) COVID-19 fund to accusing –
without evidence – key Venezuelan leaders of narco-trafficking to
attempting to invade the country.</p>
<p>Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research worked closely with Ana
Maldonado of Frente Francisco de Miranda (Venezuela), Paola Estrada of
the International Peoples Assembly, and Zoe PC of Peoples Dispatch to
craft CoronaShock study no. 2: <a href="https://www.thetricontinental.org/studies-2-sanctions-and-coronashock"><em>CoronaShock and the Hybrid War Against Venezuela</em></a>
(June 2020). The text covers the hybrid war against Venezuela during
2020 and shows how – despite entreaties from the United Nations – the
United States persisted in, and even increased, its sanctions policy and
military attacks. We urge you to read this booklet, discuss it with
your friends and comrades, and circulate it widely.</p>
<p><img src="https://www.thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/20200529_Coronashock-02_EN_quote2-2.jpg" alt="" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="454" height="240"></p>
<p>Words such as ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’ have been emptied of
their meaning by the hybrid war. The United States accuses Venezuela of
‘human rights violations’ at the same time as it operates a sanctions
policy that is tantamount to a crime against humanity; the US – out of
thin air – chooses a man that it anoints as the president of Venezuela
in the name of ‘democracy’ without concern for the democratic processes
inside Venezuela.</p>
<p>Years before Chávez won his election, the Venezuelan poet Miyó Vestrini <a href="https://granta.com/three-poems-vestrini/">wrote</a> about this manipulation of language:</p>
<p><em>I wonder if human rights really<br>
are an ideology.<br>
Fernando, the only alcoholic bartender who hasn’t retired,<br>
speaks in rhymes:<br>
the night is dark<br>
and I don’t have my heart.<br>
As I understand it, he’s one of the few left who<br>
thinks human rights are morals.</em></p>
<p>Certainly, in Washington, DC, they treat ‘human rights’ as an instrument of war.</p>
<p><img src="https://www.thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/20200529_Coronashock-02_EN_quote3-3.jpg" alt="" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="454" height="240"></p>
<p>Meanwhile, five Iranian oil tankers broke what is effectively a US
embargo on Venezuelan trade to bring gasoline into the country. The
first tanker, <em>Fortune</em>, <a href="https://asiatimes.com/2020/05/smooth-sailing-for-iranian-tankers-with-chinas-backing/">entered</a> on 24 May and the fifth, <em>Carnation</em>, came into port on 1 June. Last year, an Iranian ship, <em>Grace 1</em>,
was hijacked in Gibraltar, but this time the United States could not
provoke an incident. It helps that China and Russia are supporting
Venezuela with resources to assist in the struggle against COVID-19, and
it helps that China has made it clear that it will not allow a regime
change in Caracas. This is not enough of a shield, however; nothing in
our times seems to prevent Washington from conducting a war.</p>
<div id="gmail-attachment_20545" class="gmail-wp-caption"><p><img src="https://www.thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Luis-Cario-Now-we-are-breathing_2020-4.jpg" alt="Luis Cario, Now we are breathing, 2020." style="margin-right: 0px;" width="284" height="454"></p><p id="gmail-caption-attachment-20545" class="gmail-wp-caption-text"><span>Luis Cario, <em>Now we are breathing</em>, 2020.</span></p></div>
<p>The streets in the US are on fire once more because of the murder of
George Floyd, an unarmed black man, by a white police officer and his
accomplices in Minneapolis. Malcolm X once said ‘That’s not a chip on my
shoulder. That’s your foot on my neck’. A week before George Floyd was <a href="https://peoplesdispatch.org/2020/06/03/the-murder-of-george-floyd-is-normal-in-an-abnormal-society/">murdered</a>,
João Pedro Mattos Pinto (age 14) was killed by the police in Rio de
Janeiro (Brazil) while playing in the yard of his house; a few days
after his murder, Israeli occupation forces murdered Iyad el-Hallak (age
32), who worked in and attended a special needs school in Old
Jerusalem. The foot on the neck of George Floyd, João Pedro, and on Iyad
el-Hallak is the same foot that suffocates the Venezuelan people, who
suffer each day from the US-driven hybrid war.</p>
<p>Warmly, Vijay.</p>
</div></div></div>
</div>
<div>
</div>
</div>
</div>