Tag: venezuela

In Venezuela, the US Recognizes a Nonexistent Government

In a piece of bizarre political theater, the US now officially recognizes a government in Venezuela that does not exist. Despite the termination of the government recognized by the US, State Department spokesman Ned Price assured a press briefing that “our approach has not changed.” The US still considers the elected President illegitimate – an increasingly isolated position – and the assembly the unelected president led legitimate, though he no longer leads it, and they are no longer the assembly.

Since February of 2019, the US has recognized the never elected Juan Guaidó as the legitimate leader of Venezuela, creating an already bizarre situation in which there were parallel governments in Venezuela: one recognized within the country and one recognized outside the country.

But the US plan failed in its goal of removing Nicolás Maduro from power. And after four years, the opposition in Venezuela decided to abandon the plan and move on. At the end of December, 2022, Venezuela’s opposition lawmakers by an overwhelming preliminary vote of 72-23, removed Guaidó from power and pulled the plug on his interim government. On December 30, three of Venezuela’s four main opposition parties supported the proposal to remove Guaidó.

Though the US continued to support Guaidó, few in Venezuela did. Only 6% of Venezuelans said they would support Guaidó in presidential primaries, and more than 56% said the interim government should be terminated. Miguel Tinker Salas, Professor of Latin American History at Pomona College, and one of the world’s leading experts on Venezuelan history and politics, told me in November, 2022 that “For all intents and purposes he has been sidelined by developments in the country and even for those in the opposition he is a non-entity.”

Keep reading

The US Has As Much Moral Authority As Saudi Arabia On The Legitimacy Of Elections

“Let there be no mistake – Sunday’s regional and municipal elections in Venezuela are nothing more than a sham,” reads a recent statement authored by Republican US Senators Jim Risch and Michael McCaul. “The illegitimate Maduro regime has taken drastic measures to dismantle or control every independent institution in the country, including hijacking political parties and the National Electoral Council to ensure state-sponsored electoral fraud.”

“Today’s elections in Venezuela are as illegitimate as Maduro’s tyrannical regime,” reads a tweet by Republican Senator Rick Scott. “The Venezuelan people deserve free and democratic elections NOW. The U.S. and all freedom-loving nations must stand up, condemn these sham elections and support the people in their fight for freedom.”

The imperial media are lining up behind the official US government line on Venezuela’s gubernatorial and mayoral elections, with The New York Times assuring us that conditions “are far from freely democratic” and The Washington Post reporting that opposition parties “say the elections have been stacked against them by the socialist government of President Nicolás Maduro,” who sees the elections as “a chance to reassert strength while projecting a veneer of legitimacy.”

This level of intrusiveness into Venezuela’s heavily internationally monitored democratic process is typical of what we’ve been seeing from the US political/media class with regard to electoral contests in empire-targeted Latin American nations like Bolivia and Nicaragua. Which is really silly, because the US has no more moral authority over the legitimacy of democratic processes than a totalitarian monarchy like Saudi Arabia.

US elections are of course corrupt and fraudulent, entirely dominated at the federal level by legalized oligarchic bribery in the form of campaign contributions, manipulated primaries, gerrymandering, voter suppression, shutting out third parties, and the worst voting system in the western world.

More than this, though, the United States is also the world’s single most egregious offender when it comes to interfering in foreign elections. As Claire Bernish has observed in The Free Thought Project, the US government’s own data shows that it interfered in no fewer than 81 foreign elections just between the years 1946 and 2000. You’d never know it from the shrieking of the political/media class post-2016, but this would also include brazenly interfering in Russia’s elections in the nineties to ensure the presidency of Washington lackey Boris Yeltsin.

And that’s just election interferences. It doesn’t include more brazen interferences in who governs foreign nations like direct military invasions, staged coups, color revolutions and proxy wars.

Keep reading

The US Has Placed Itself In Charge Over Which Nations Get To Eat

The globally influential propaganda multiplier news agencies AP and AFP have both informed their readers that a “fugitive” has been extradited to the United States.

“Fugitive businessman close to Venezuela’s Maduro extradited to US,” reads the AFP headline.

“Alex Saab, a top fugitive close to Venezuela’s socialist government, has been put on a plane to the U.S. to face money laundering charges,” AP announced on Twitter.

You’d be forgiven for wondering what specifically makes this man a “fugitive”, and what that status has to do with his extradition to a foreign government whose laws should have no bearing on his life. The Colombian-born Venezuelan citizen Alex Saab, as it happens, is a “fugitive” from the US government’s self-appointed authority to decide which populations on our planet are permitted to have ready access to food. His crime is working to circumvent the crushing US sanctions which have been starving Venezuelan civilians to death by the tens of thousands.

Keep reading

US and Colombian govts supported botched invasion of Venezuela: Bombshell testimony from coup-plotter

Awitness at the heart of the botched invasion of Venezuela in May 2020 has stated that the US and Colombian governments were involved in the regime-change operation. Coup-plotter Yacsy Álvarez said she met with officials from the FBI and DEA in Florida and informed them of their plans.

Álvarez also revealed that Colombia’s President Iván Duque and his powerful mentor Álvaro Uribe, who is closely linked to drug cartels and death squads, were aiding the Venezuelan coup-plotters. Colombia’s top intelligence agency supported the conspirators before and after the attempted invasion, and Álvarez explained that “they knew everything.”

But the Colombian government later turned on Álvarez and her fellow coup-plotters and arrested them. Her lawyer has accused Colombia’s intelligence services of setting a “trap,” so Bogotá could pin the blame on her and her associates and wash its hands of the operation.

The failed invasion, which aimed to violently overthrow Venezuela’s elected President Nicolás Maduro, was spearheaded by a Florida-based private military company called SilverCorp, led by former US Army Special Forces officer Jordan Goudreau.

Goudreau said in a breach-of-contract lawsuit that he had met with two Donald Trump administration officials at the former US president’s National Doral Miami golf resort to discuss the coup plans, and was told that the White House supported it.

Keep reading