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Below, three articles about the so-called “democracy battle” in Venezuela.
Rights Action shares these articles to focus attention, again, on the repetitive patterns of illegal military, economic and political interventions and the accompanying disinformation campaigns (basically lying) by the U.S. and Canadian governments, and our media, in country after country around the planet.
As the U.S., Canadian and Western-backed genocide and ethnic cleansing land theft continue unabated in Palestine, and as the Western media distorts (and sometimes lies) about the slaughter and destruction being carried out by Israel, the U.S.-led West turns its interventionist attention back to the reviled Venezuelan government, always in the name of “democracy”, “human rights”, etc.
The history of U.S. and Canadian support for military coups and pro-global business regimes in Honduras and Guatemala has been well documented by Rights Action and many others.
Most of Rights Action’s work in Honduras and Guatemala is in support of land and environmental defenders, human rights and justice struggles, in resistance to violence, corruption and land theft carried out by (until recently) decades of repressive Guatemalan and Honduran regimes, always referred to as “democratic allies” by the U.S. and Canada, and a host of North American companies, banks and investors.
Our 2021 book TESTIMONIO Canadian Mining in the Aftermath of Genocides in Guatemala (edited by Catherine Nolin & Grahame Russell demonstrates these points: that the U.S. and Canadian governments regularly prop up repressive, corrupt, ‘open-for-global-business’ regimes, publicly referring to them as “democratic allies”, while paving the way for the expansion of U.S. and Canadian companies and banks into multiple sectors of the Guatemalan and Honduran economies - the results almost always being more corruption, violence and harms to local populations and the environment.
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Trudeau’s failure in Venezuela
By Yves Engler, July 29, 2024
https://yvesengler.com/2024/07/29/trudeaus-failure-in-venezuela/
Yesterday [July 28, 2024] Venezuelans voted for Nicolás Maduro to continue as president. The election highlights one of Justin Trudeau’s most embarrassing foreign policy failures and a lesson regarding media and government propaganda.
According to Venezuela’s National Electoral Council, Maduro received 51% of the vote. His main challenger, Edmundo Gonzalez, garnered 44% while 59% of eligible voters cast ballots.
Without presenting any evidence, the opposition cried foul. But they’ve done so after basically every election loss over the past 20 years (though not their wins).
The vote is the first presidential poll since a brazen Canadian-backed campaign to oust Maduro. In a bid to elicit “regime change,” Ottawa worked to isolate Caracas, imposed illegal sanctions, took the Maduro government to the International Criminal Court, financed an often-unsavoury opposition and decided that a marginal right-wing opposition politician was the country’s legitimate president.
On January 23, 2019, Juan Guaidó declared himself president of Venezuela in a Caracas park. The same day then foreign minister Chrystia Freeland formally recognized the little-known opposition politician. In subsequent days Canadian diplomats boasted to reporters that they played an important role in uniting large swaths of the Venezuelan opposition behind the plan to ratchet up tensions by proclaiming the new head of the opposition-dominated National Assembly president. They also told the Globe and Mail and Associated Press that Canada played an important role in building international diplomatic support for claiming the relatively marginal politician was president.
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Canadian PM Trudeau and Deputy PM Chrystia Freeland with “president” Juan Guaido, after the previous electoral victory by President Maduro of Venezuela in 2018. Confronted with the Maduro victory, the U.S. and Canadian governments unilaterally recognized Guaido as “president”, a charade parroted by most of the North American media, that went on for 3-4 years.
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Amidst the exuberance the Liberals quickly organized a meeting of the Lima Group of states opposed to the Venezuelan government. At the February 4, 2019, meeting in Ottawa Trudeau declared, “the international community must immediately unite behind the interim president.”
The post Lima Group “Ottawa Declaration” called on Venezuela’s armed forces “to demonstrate their loyalty to the interim president” by removing the elected president.
(Despite the opposition boycotting the May 2018 poll, Maduro received a higher proportion of the overall vote than leaders in the US, Canada and elsewhere. For instance, in 2019, Trudeau’s Liberals received 33% of the vote with 66% of eligible voters casting their ballots, which amounted to 22% of the adult population. Maduro received 67% of votes cast with 41% of eligible voters participating, which equaled 27% of the population.)
About a year before the poll Canada founded the anti-Maduro Lima Group coalition with Peru. A year later Canada and five like-minded South American nations asked the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor — the first time a member state was brought before the ICC by other members — to investigate the Maduro government.
During this period Ottawa also severed diplomatic relations with Caracas and imposed four rounds of sanctions on Venezuelan officials. While ostensibly targeted at individuals, Canadian sanctions deterred companies from doing business in Venezuela. They also helped legitimate more devastating US actions. A recent front page Washington Post article detailed the impact of US sanctions played in Venezuela’s economic collapse.
Trudeau and Freeland were at the forefront of the anti-Maduro campaign. In the weeks after Guaidó declared himself president, Canada’s prime minister called the leaders of France, Spain, Paraguay, Ireland, Italy and others to convince them to join Canada’s campaign against the Venezuelan government. When Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visited Ottawa in April 2019 Canada’s post meeting release noted, “during the visit, Prime Minister Abe announced Japan’s endorsement of the Ottawa Declaration on Venezuela.”
At the end of that month Guaidó, opposition politician Leopoldo Lopez and others sought to stoke a military uprising in Caracas. Hours into the early morning effort Freeland tweeted, “watching events today in Venezuela very closely. The safety and security of Juan Guaidó and Leopoldo López must be guaranteed. Venezuelans who peacefully support Interim President Guaidó must do so without fear of intimidation or violence.”
She followed that up with a statement to the press noting, “Venezuelans are in the streets today demonstrating their desire for a return to democracy” and a video calling on Venezuelans to rise up. She later promoted a Lima Group statement labeling the attempted putsch an effort “to restore democracy” and demanded the military “cease being instruments of the illegitimate regime for the oppression of the Venezuelan people.”
While this failed insurrection marked the end of any realistic chance Guaidó had at becoming president, Trudeau openly supported him for months longer. In January 2020 Guaidó was fêted in Ottawa, meeting the PM, international development minister and foreign minister. A picture of Trudeau and Guaidó taking a selfie together was released by the Prime Minister’s Office and Trudeau declared, “I commend Interim President Guaidó for the courage and leadership he has shown in his efforts to return democracy to Venezuela, and I offer Canada’s continued support.”
Since then Guaidó has moved to the US and the Lima group has become dormant. But the Trudeau government hasn’t formally reversed its position or restarted diplomatic relations or withdrawn sanctions.
On the third anniversary of Guaidó’s presidential self-declaration an open letter was released demanding Trudeau stop recognizing Guaidó, end sanctions and reset relations with Venezuela. It was signed by 2 MPs, 4 former MPs and 50 prominent individuals. The government should heed its call.
Very little to none of the above important context will appear in the mainstream media over what looks to be yet another ongoing US-led attempt to destabilize the Venezuelan government.
The bottom line? Neither the Canadian government nor media should be considered arbiters of truth regarding events in Venezuela. They have repeatedly proven themselves self-interested liars and agents of US hegemony.
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The Venezuelan People Stay With the Bolivarian Revolution
By Vijay Prashad, July 31, 2024
https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/07/31/the-venezuelan-people-stay-with-the-bolivarian-revolution/
On July 28, the 70th birthday of Hugo Chávez (1954-2013), Nicolás Maduro Moros won the Venezuelan presidential election, the fifth since the Bolivarian Constitution was ratified in 1999.
In January 2025, Maduro will start his third six-year term as president. He took over the reins of the Bolivarian Revolution after the death of Chávez from pelvic cancer in 2013. Since the death of Chávez, Maduro has faced several challenges: to build his own legitimacy as president in the place of a charismatic man who came to define the Bolivarian Revolution; to tackle the collapse of oil prices in mid-2014, which negatively impacted Venezuela’s state revenues (over 90 percent of which was from oil exports); and to manage a response to the unilateral, illegal sanctions deepened on Venezuela by the United States as oil prices declined.
These negative factors weighed heavily on the Maduro government, which has now been in office for a decade after being re-elected through the ballot box in 2018 and now in 2024.
From Maduro’s first election victory in 2013, the increasingly far-right opposition began to reject the electoral process and complain about irregularities in the system. Interviews I have held over the past decade with conservative politicians have made it clear that they recognize both the ideological grip of Chavismo over the working class of Venezuela and the organizational power not only of Maduro’s United Socialist Party of Venezuela but of the networks of Chavismo that run from the communes (1.4 million strong) to youth organizations.
About half of Venezuela’s voting population is reliably wedded to the Bolivarian project, and no other political project in Venezuela has the kind of election machine built by the forces of the Bolivarian revolution. That makes winning an election for the anti-Chávez forces impossible.
To that end, their only path is to malign Maduro’s government as corrupt and to complain that the elections are not fair. After Maduro’s victory—by a margin of 51.2 percent to 44.2 percent—this is precisely what the far-right opposition has been trying to do, egged on by the United States and a network of far-right and pro-U.S. governments in South America.
Europe Needs Venezuelan Oil
The United States has been trying to find a solution to a problem of its own making. Having placed severe sanctions against both Iran and Russia, the United States now cannot easily find a source of energy for its European partners. Liquified natural gas from the United States is expensive and not sufficient. What the U.S. would like is to have a reliable source of oil that is easy to process and in sufficient quantities. Venezuelan oil fits the requirements, but given the U.S. sanctions on Venezuela, this oil cannot be found in the European market. The United States has created a trap from which it finds few solutions.
In June 2022, the U.S. government allowed Eni SpA (Italy) and Repsol SA (Spain) to transport Venezuelan oil to the European market to compensate for the loss of Russian oil deliveries. This allowance revealed Washington’s shift in strategy regarding Venezuela. No longer was it going to be possible to suffocate Venezuela by preventing exports of oil, since this oil was needed as a result of U.S. sanctions on Russia.
Since June 2022, the United States has been trying to calibrate its need for this oil, its antipathy to the Bolivarian Revolution, and its relations with the far-right opposition in Venezuela.
The U.S. and the Venezuelan Far-Right
The emergence of Chavismo—the politics of mass action to build socialism in Venezuela—transformed the political scenario in the country. The old parties of the right (Acción Democrática and COPEI) collapsed after 40 years of alternating power.
In the 2000 and 2006 elections, the opposition to Chávez was provided not by the right, but by dissenting center-left forces (La Causa R and Un Nuevo Tiempo). The Old Right faced a challenge from the New Right, which was decidedly pro-capitalist, anti-Chavista, and pro-U.S.; this group formed a political platform called La Salida or The Exit, which referred to their desired exit from the Bolivarian Revolution.
The key figures here were Leopoldo López, Antonio Ledezma, and María Corina Machado, who led violent protests against the government in 2014 (López was arrested for incitement to violence and now lives in Spain; a U.S. government official in 2009 said he is “often described as arrogant, vindictive, and power-hungry”). Ledezma moved to Spain in 2017 and was—with Corina Machado—a signatory of the far-right Madrid Charter, an anti-communist manifesto organized by the Spanish far-right party, Vox.
Corina Machado’s political project is underpinned by the proposal to privatize Venezuela’s oil company.
Since the death of Chávez, Venezuela’s right wing has struggled with the absence of a unified program and with a mess of egotistical leaders. It fell to the United States to try and shape the opposition into a political project.
Juan Guido: The most comical attempt
The most comical attempt was the elevation in January 2019 of an obscure politician named Juan Guaidó to be the president. That maneuver failed and in December 2022, the far-right opposition removed Guaidó as its leader. The removal of Guaidó allowed for direct negotiations between the Venezuelan government and the far-right opposition, which had since 2019 hoped for U.S. military intervention to secure them in power in Caracas.
The U.S. pressured the increasingly intransigent far-right to hold talks with the Venezuelan government in order to allow the U.S. to reduce sanctions and let Venezuelan oil go into European markets. This pressure resulted in the Barbados Agreement of October 2023, in which the two sides agreed to a fair election in 2024 as the basis for the slow withdrawal of the sanctions.
The elections of July 28 are the outcome of the Barbados process. Even though María Corina Machado was barred from running, she effectively ran against Maduro through her proxy candidate Edmundo González and lost in a hard-fought election.
Twenty-three minutes after the polls closed, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris—and now a presidential candidate in the November elections in the United States—put out a tweet conceding that the far-right had lost. It was an early sign that the United States—despite making noises about election fraud—wanted to move past their allies in the far-right, find a way to normalize relations with the Venezuelan government and allow the oil to flow to Europe.
This tendency of the U.S. government has frustrated the far-right, which turned to other far-right forces across Latin America for support, and which knows that its remaining political argument is about election fraud.
If the U.S. government wants to get Venezuelan oil to Europe it will need to abandon the far-right and accommodate the Maduro government. Meanwhile, the far-right has taken to the streets through armed gangs who want to repeat the guarimba(barricade) disruptions of 2017.
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Far-right politician María Corina Machado (left) and Edmundo González holding a candle in a religious political rally before the Venezuelan presidential elections. Henry Chirinos/EFE.
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The Venezuelan far-right former candidate for the presidential elections that were held on July 28, Edmundo González Urrutia, has declared himself the winner despite coming in second place.
He has been recognized as the “president” of Venezuela by Washington and some of its vassal states as part of a plot reminiscent of the failed Juan Guaidó project [of a few years ago].
In parallel, there is a broad campaign on mainstream media and social media to create an image of González as a “bird-loving old grandfather;” a career diplomat with a “democratic vocation” who is “fighting for democracy” against the “Maduro regime” in Venezuela.
However, Salvadorans, especially ex-combatants of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) from the Salvadoran war era, remember him very differently.
U.S. Plan Cóndor counterinsurgency project in El Salvador
During 1979-1985, Edmundo González served as the second-in-command of the Venezuelan Embassy in San Salvador, under ambassador Leopoldo Castillo. Both officials participated in the United States’ Plan Cóndor counterinsurgency project in El Salvador, the aim of the project being the destruction of the Salvadoran popular armed revolution.
According to former FMLN Commander Nidia Díaz, during the late 70s and early 80s, the conspiracies to capture, torture, disappear, and kill revolutionaries and their sympathizers were planned in the Venezuelan embassy in El Salvador and were directed by Leopoldo Castillo, whose closest collaborator was Edmundo González. “Castillo was named MataCuras [murderer of priests]—that is how he is known,” Díaz commented. “He was an agent of death and he persecuted Christians in the country. I do not doubt that he was involved in some way with the assassination of Saint Óscar Romero. We know that he was also involved with the assassination of the Maryknoll nuns in November 1982 as well as with the murders of many other priests.”
She added that while she was a prisoner of war, two officials from the Venezuelan embassy interrogated her. One of them was Castillo.
According to US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) documents declassified in February 2009, Castillo was mentioned as jointly responsible for the intelligence services that coordinated, financed, and gave the order for the execution of Operation Centauro, which consisted of a series of violent actions committed by the Salvadoran army and the Plan Cóndor death squads that were trained, armed, and financed by the US government led by Ronald Reagan to eliminate the Christian communities that were looking for a peaceful and negotiated solution to the war through the application of the principles of Liberation Theology.
During the period that Castillo and González were in charge of the Venezuelan embassy in El Salvador, the Salvadoran armed forces and the death squads killed 13,194 civilians, among them St. Óscar Arnulfo Romero, archbishop of the Catholic Church of El Salvador; four nuns of the Maryknoll order; and priests Rafael Palacios, Alirio Macias, Francisco Cosme, Jesús Cáceres, and Manuel Reyes.
Even after 1985, when Castillo no longer served as a diplomat, he still worked as an advisor to the US intelligence structure in El Salvador, called Pentagonito. It was during this period that he collaborated in the murders six Jesuit priests and two female household workers, namely, Ignacio Ellacuría, who was also the then rector of the University of Central America in San Salvador, Segundo Montes, Ignacio Martín-Baró, Juan Ramón Moreno, Amando López, Joaquin López, and Elba and Celina Ramos, in November 1989.
Another FMLN ex-combatant and former president of the Salvadoran Congress, Sigfrido Reyes, called Edmundo González “an accomplice of barbaric crimes.” “Edmundo González has this dark past,” said Reyes. “He is directly responsible for and a perpetrator of war crimes and crimes against humanity… Edmundo González’s hands are stained with blood.”
As for the reasons behind such involvement, Salvadoran historian Marvin Aguilar pointed out that it was not just those two diplomats but the entire Venezuelan State that collaborated with the United States’ Plan Cóndor to eliminate revolutions across Latin America. “The United States had its interests… and Carlos Andrés Pérez [then president of Venezuela] wanted international prestige, I think,” he remarked.
The historian added the Salvadoran and Venezuelan ultra-right forces collaborate to this day, albeit in a different form. “Today in El Salvador, there is a group of Venezuelans associated with the anti-Chavista right who work for the government of President Bukele,” he said, referring to a team of Venezuelans allied with the coup-plotter Juan Guaidó who serve as “advisors” to the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele. “It is a sort of shadow government. Thus, in one way or another, that connection exists.”
In May of this year, Venezuelan National Assembly Deputy Diosdado Cabello referred in detail to Edmundo González’s dark past in an episode of his TV program Con El Mazo Dando. The PSUV leader said at that time that he got the information from a letter sent to him by a former official of the Colombian Foreign Affairs Ministry, named María Catalina Restrepo Pinzón de Londoño.
However, after the program was aired, Venezuelan extreme-right-aligned journalists and social media personalities launched a media campaign claiming that no such Colombian official existed and that González was never involved in the massacres committed in El Salvador during the war era. However, Salvadoran ex-combatants from that same era, as well as documents from US federal agencies, dismantle that propaganda.
It may be mentioned here that in the aforementioned CIA documents, Castillo and González are named together with Luis Posada Carriles, the infamous Cuban counter-revolutionary terrorist and CIA asset who was the mastermind of the Cubana Flight 455 bombing and numerous other acts of terrorism against the Cuban Revolution, the people of Cuba, and other countries of the Caribbean.
In 2008, a case was opened in a Spanish court by the US-based Center for Justice and Accountability and the Spanish Pro-Human Rights Association to bring the Salvadoran assassins and their superiors to justice. The case contemplates the massacres committed in El Salvador as crimes against humanity, and as such, they have no statute of limitations.
Therefore, although González and his superior Castillo, who currently resides in Miami, USA, deny their involvement, they may still be called someday to respond to justice.
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