In Venezuela, White Supremacy Is a Key Driver of the Coup
Juan Guaidó engages supporters in Caracas, Venezuela, on February 2, 2019.
NurPhoto / Getty Images
By Greg Palast, TruthoutPublished February 7, 2019
Note: Palast covered Venezuela during the Chavez presidency for BBC
Television Newsnight and the Guardian. Readers of Truthout may download, for
free, the film of Palasts BBC reports, The Assassination of Hugo
Chavez.This article incorporates additional reporting by William Camacaro in
Caracas.
On January 23, right after a phone callfrom Donald Trump, Juan Guaidó,
former speaker of Venezuelas National Assembly, declared himself president.
No voting. When you have official recognitionfrom The Donald, who needs
elections?
Say what?
I can explain whats going on in Venezuela in photos.
Embed from Getty Images
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 Guaidós party members in the
National Assembly. They appear, overwhelmingly light-skinned especially
when compared to their political opposites in the third photo, the congress
members who support the elected President Nicolás Maduro.
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 years so-called
popular uprising is, at its heart, a furious backlash of the whiter (and
wealthier)Venezuelans against their replacement by the larger Mestizo
(mixed-race) poor. (Forty-four percent of the population that answered the
2014 censuslisted themselves as white.)
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,
who won with the overwhelming support of the Mestizo majority. This turn
away from white supremacy continues under Maduro, Chavezs chosen successor.
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
embracedhis own Indigenous and African heritage.
In Venezuela, as in the USA, poverty and race are locked together. Why did
so many Mestizo, poor Venezuelans love Chavez? As even the CIAs
surprisingly honest Fact Bookstates:
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.
But, just as Maduro took office, the price of oil began its collapse, and
the vast social programs that oil had paid for were now supported by
borrowing moneyand printing it, causing wild inflation. The economic slide
is now made impossibly worse by what the UN rapporteurfor Venezuela compared
to medieval sieges. The Trump administration cut off Venezuelafrom the oil
sale proceeds from its biggest customer, the US.
Everyone has been hurt economically, but the privileged classs bank
accounts have become nearly worthless. 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.)
Ive seen this movie before. When I look at todays news reports of massive
demonstrationsagainst the so-called dictatorship of Venezuelas left
government, it looks awfully like 2002, when I was first in Caracas
reporting for BBC Television.
Then, The New York Times, NPR and other mainstream outlets in the US
reported on marches against the Chavez government, describing the tens of
thousands of Venezuelans calling for Chavezs removal. The light-skinned
protesters were overwhelmingly wealthy and they wanted you to know it.
Many of the women marched in high heels, 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.
To anti-Chavista protesters, race was an issue as much as class economics. I
heard these opposition demonstrators shout Chavez, Monkey!and worse.
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 witness and filmthe 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.
The bias continues. The New York Times did not run a photo of this past
weeks pro-Maduro demonstrations. But in hard-to-find photos and reportsfrom
my colleagues on the ground, the Chavistademonstrations are bigger,
involving mass turnouts in several cities, not just wealthy neighborhoods in
Caracas.
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 de facto apartheid.
And we must remember this is not the first time the US government has tried
to overthrow the elected government in Venezuela.
In 2002, George W. Bushs State Department cheer-led the coup. The plotters
kidnapped Chavez and held him hostage. The coup was led by an oil industry
leader and head of the Chamber of Commerce, Pedro Carmona, who had seized
the nations White House, and, like Guaidó today, declared himself
president. Carmona told me proudly about the fancy inaugural ball held by
the nations elite and attended by Bushs ambassador.
But the Bush/Carmona coup collapsed when a million mostly Mestizo,
Indigenous and Black Venezuelans flooded the capital and forced the plotters
to return their hero, the supposedly unpopular Chavez, to Miraflores, the
presidential palace. Presidente Carmona fled.
Today, Guaidós supporters, like Carmonas, know they cant 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
cant get from Venezuelans.
When I see the images and hear the chants of the anti-Chavista
demonstratorsnow, Im also reminded of what I saw at a Trump rally in Macon,
Georgia, this past November. The president slid out of Air Force One to tell
the crowd heavily weighted with white supremacists that they needed to
take back their countryfrom those invading the border. Trump told them to
fear gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, who is Black, saying she would
turn Georgia into Venezuela.
I dont think Trump was talking about Abramss program to bring universal
health care to Georgia, as Chavez did for Venezuela.
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.
The putsch in Venezuela is run by the wealthy, internationally connected
minority operating by a regime-change plan designed by neocon retread John
Bolton, Trumps national security adviser a plan to control Venezuelaand
its oil, as Bolton openly proclaims.
Ah, yes, the oil. Its always the oil. And Venezuela has plenty to seize:
the worldslargest reserves.
Well get to that in Part II.
