Venezuela: Another US Coup Attempt and Why It Failed
By Keith Brooks, Reader Supported News
08 August 19
How come were not at war with Venezuela? They have all that oil.
was in Caracas, Venezuela, on April 30th, the day of the failed coup. There
were eight of us, five from NYC, one Vermonter and one Canadian, along with
the leader of our group, a Venezuelan with whom I had traveled to Venezuela
once before, in 2012, when Hugo Chavez was still alive. Chavez was elected
to power in 1999 leading what is known as the Bolivarian Revolution. Less
than three years later, a 2002 U.S.-backed coup failed to overthrow him.
I witnessed back then Chavezs wide base of support, and the reasons for it:
a new constitution guaranteeing as human rights health, education, housing
and social welfare, and the laws and projects designed to make those rights
a reality. The results were impressive: one million new low-cost housing
units, a dramatic drop in the poverty rate, infant mortality rate down from
19.1 per thousand in 1999 to 10 per thousand by 2012. Health Care was made
free for all Venezuelans, reflected by an increase in life expectancy.
Working hours were reduced to 6 hours a day and 36 hours per week, without
loss of pay, while the minimum wage became the highest minimum wage in Latin
America. In December 2005, UNESCO said that Venezuela had eradicated
illiteracy. The malnutrition rate fell from 21% in 1998 to less than 3% in
2012.
The national management of the oil industry in 2003 put Venezuela in control
over its most valuable natural resource, and used it to fund many of the
social reform programs. Venezuela has the worlds largest oil reserves,
which the U.S. has coveted ever since and admittedly seeks to control, as
John Bolton made clear on Fox News: It will make a big difference to the
United States economically if we could have American oil companies invest in
and produce the oil capabilities in Venezuela.
So the Chavez presidency marked a new day of empowerment for Venezuelas
poor and working-class people, overwhelmingly people of color. And there was
always a sector of the population, mainly the very wealthy mainly white
upper class, who hated Chavez and his openly socialist policies.
So I went again this April because I wanted to see for myself if it was
possible the impressions we are now given by the mainstream corporate media
were true was Venezuela really on the verge of civil war? Had the
Venezuelan people turned against the Bolivarian revolution and President
Maduro, who was elected to office after Chavezs death in 2013 and
re-elected in 2018? Did the U.S.-supported opposition really have widespread
mass support?
The April 30th Failed Coup
Back in January, a politician virtually unknown to Venezuelans named Juan
Guaidó, long mentored by U.S. regime-change specialists, announced himself
as the president of Venezuela after receiving a phone call from U.S. Vice
President Mike Pence. Guaidó, who was the head of the National Assembly, an
unelected post, vowed that President Maduro would be gone by May Day. While
blackouts of electricity rolled across Venezuela, Trump and Secretary of
State Pompeo threatened U.S. military intervention if Maduro didnt step
down.
We were in Venezuela from April 26th to May 5th. On April 30th, the morning
of the failed coup, we knew something was up as we ate breakfast in our
hotels restaurant which had an open-air terrace. I saw a woman banging on a
pan standing on a balcony in the apartment house next door to the hotel,
yelling out to others to join her in denouncing Maduro. No one else joined
her. She went back in. We heard what could have been firecrackers or
gunfire. But when we looked out onto the street, business seemed no
different than any of the previous three mornings we were there people on
their way to work, students going to school, motorbikes and cars on the
streets.
By the time we left in our van for a housing conference at the Hotel ALBA
celebrating the construction of two and a half million new low-cost housing
units, we learned that there was a coup attempt, yet we had seen no sign of
a military or police presence on the streets as one might expect if there
was a major threat to the government. If you were in Caracas that day,
outside the upper-class neighborhood where the attempt was made, you would
never have known there was a coup attempt. During a lunch break in the
conference, we were able to watch TV coverage on the attempted coup from
both CNN and TeleSUR, a Venezuelan news outlet. Right in the lobby of the
hotel our group quickly wrote a statement denouncing the Trump
administrations efforts to overthrow the government, and we were
interviewed by Venezuelan government television, which was featured in the
news throughout the day. Our statement said in part, We are a group of U.S.
and Canadian citizens gathered to denounce the U.S. governments illegal and
immoral actions against the people of Venezuela. We also oppose the U.S.
sanctions which are not only illegal but are already causing immense
suffering, especially through the denial of much needed medicines and
adequate nutrition ...
While we soon learned that the coup had failed, it was not until later that
we heard the incredibly farcical details of what had transpired. Some might
remember U.S Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claiming the day before that
Maduro was escaping to Cuba. In fact, Guaidó had been led actually duped
to believe that high-level military officials were going to defect and join
him outside the airport that morning, along with large numbers of soldiers.
But almost all the soldiers who showed up after being lied to that they
were going to receive promotions quickly ran back to the base when it was
clear they had been tricked into appearing to defect! Within a short time,
the same Venezuelan defense minister that Guaidó had expected to defect to
his side went on national television surrounded by his generals to say that
the military was standing strong with Maduro and that no coup had taken
place.
An estimated 2,000 Guaidó supporters did gather on an overpass to watch the
highway below where 200 or so violent protesters were firing on the military
and throwing Molotov cocktails near the airbase as tens of thousands of
Maduro supporters flocked to the presidential palace to defend it. Guaidó
then went into hiding, but not before calling for the mother of all
marches for the next days May Day celebrations. His mother of all
marches pulled out at best 3 to 4 thousand less than 1% of the estimated
400,000 our group marched with at the Maduro May Day rally, one of the
largest pro-government mobilizations since the days of Chavez.
It was quite striking even for a longtime activist like myself to witness
the blatant lies and propaganda that saturate our media. It was like two
different worlds as CNN, The New York Times, and mainstream media reported
that a coup was underway in Venezuela. The NYT reported a predawn takeover
of a military base in the heart of the capital and that Guaidó had made a
video appeal for an uprising from the liberated airbase except they
never got on the base. In another outrageous example, theres a film clip
that has been aired of two military vehicles running into opposition
protesters. Whats not shown is what happened next, as the vehicles were
surrounded by soldiers, with the occupants forced at gunpoint to get out and
lie down on the ground! The truth is that the vehicles were driven by
defecting soldiers who rammed into their own protesters to make it look like
it was the government violently suppressing dissent. The drivers of the
vehicle were arrested shortly after by the military as the rest of the news
video clearly showed.
This is not the foolish country of yesteryear. This country has awoken, and
thats one of the biggest changes that has taken place here in these 13
years, a cultural change Hugo Chavez, 2012
So this trip did dispel for me any of the widespread notions spread 24/7 by
the mainstream U.S. corporate media that Maduro and the Bolivarian
revolution have lost popular support and that Venezuela is a country on the
verge of a civil war. While the U.S. sanctions, along with plummeting oil
prices, have created serious challenges to Maduro, popular support and
enthusiasm for the Bolivarian revolution and the elected government remains.
Has Venezuela become a dictatorship? Not if judged by the 2 or 3 major
newspapers I bought every day that were anti-Maduro (as were the daily
anti-Chavez papers I bought on my 2012 trip), nor by the rallies called by
the U.S. backed coupsters openly inciting violence and calling for the
overthrow of the government. There is, in fact, a loyal opposition that
ran against Maduro in the 2018 election, the leader of which, Henri Falcon,
received 32 % of the vote and was actually threatened with sanctions by the
U.S. for participating in the election! And it deserves mention that I saw
marchers at the Maduro May Day rally evidently feeling comfortable enough to
be wearing Falcon t-shirts. Even Maria Machado, a well known staunch Guaidó
supporter, has stated that Maduro is not a dictator.
The American people have been propagandized to believe that Trump is trying
to overthrow Maduro out of humanitarian concern for an economic crisis
caused by Maduros incompetence in handling the collapse of oil prices over
the last five years and to restore democracy, a laughable rationale in
light of the history: the U.S. has been trying to overthrow the Bolivarian
revolution since the failed attempt against Chavez in 2002, and then there
is the long history of U.S. coups and invasions of Latin America and around
the world from the 1954 Guatemala coup, the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion
of Cuba, U.S. invasions of the Dominican Republic in 1965, the overthrow of
Allende in 1973 in Chile, Grenada in 1983, Panama in 1989, the removal of
Aristide in Haiti in 2004, the Honduras coup in 2009 and many others. Any
government that refuses to be under the thumb of the U.S. is a target for
overthrow.
While there is debate over how much Maduros economic policies have played a
role, its not the fall in oil prices that have put Venezuela in crisis and
threaten to destroy all the gains over the last 20 years its the
sanctions where the U.S. uses its worldwide economic power to prohibit
countries from doing business with Venezuela. Along with the U.S.-engineered
electricity blackouts, and the failed coup attempts, sanctions have frozen
and even confiscated billions of dollars of Venezuelan assets in banks
around the world, blocked payments for Venezuelan oil, and facilitated other
outright instances of what can only be called piracy. Sanctions are just as
deadly as bombs and bullets, a form of economic terrorism whose explicit
rationale is to escalate the suffering of the civilian population to get
them to turn against their government. A recent study estimated 40,000
deaths caused by blockading the shipment of medical supplies like insulin,
HIV medications, and other life-supporting supplies, such as an emergency
food program.
But all this has failed in the goal of driving the population into blaming
and overthrowing the Maduro government; instead, as Chavez put it, this is
an awakened country that largely understands the main role the U.S. has
played in fomenting a crisis. From what I saw, Trump has actually united
many of those opposed to and critical of Maduro to join in opposition to
U.S. sanctions and military intervention, as Falcon and others have done.
While the threat of direct U.S. military intervention is ever-present, our
trip also brought home how it is too easy for liberals like Bernie Sanders,
AOC, and others to oppose military intervention and avoid taking a stand
against the sanctions. Among Democratic Party candidates running for the
presidency, only Tulsi Gabbard has opposed the sanctions.
It is also essential to establish that one does not have to defend Maduro to
oppose this latest U.S. imperialist adventure and understand that the U.S.
has ABSOLUTELY NO RIGHT to sabotage the Venezuelan economy and impose
murderous sanctions to strangle the population into submission. This didnt
start with Maduro, and it is just the latest in the long list of U.S. coups
and overthrows in Latin America and around the world.
So What Can We Do?
As we head toward the 2020 election, the issue of Trumps policies toward
Venezuela as well as Iran should be front and center in the debates, yet
the Democratic party and the mainstream corporate media seem to have a tacit
agreement to say as little as possible on these two imminent threats of more
U.S. aggression. And a number of Democrats and liberal media Joe Biden,
Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Amy Klobuchar, Kirsten Gillibrand, The New York
Times, The Washington Post, Rachel Maddow, and PBS commentators are among
those leading liberal figures actually in support of Trumps right to impose
regime change on another peoples country.
Its hard to see how this protracted siege of Venezuela will resolve itself,
but the Venezuelan people are far from a demoralized population; rather
theyve been mobilized to resist with the formation of a peoples militia of
2 million, training with the military and national guard. An infrastructure
of resistance has been created that would make it more than difficult for
any U.S.-installed neoliberal puppet regime to rule. It could just turn into
a peoples war, Trumps Vietnam, for the president who ran claiming he was
going to end all these foolish wars.
As U.S. citizens it is our responsibility to demand that our elected
officials stop the threat of war and end the sanctions on Venezuela. We have
a particular responsibility to oppose our governments actions. Write
letters to the editor, sign petitions, call your elected officials, take
part in rallies and demonstrations, and challenge in whatever ways you can
the official story were fed by the corporate mass media. And I urge
anyone interested to go to Venezuela and see for yourself what is going on.
William Camarada, the Venezuelan who led the two trips I was on, is planning
another highly affordable trip in August. For more information, contact
cbalbertolovera@xxxxxxxxx or estebanbartlett@xxxxxxxxx or call 502 /
415-1080.
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Keith Brooks is a longtime anti-war and labor/community activist, a retired
NYC alternative high school teacher, and a member of DSA and Brooklyn For
Peace.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission
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