Venezuela: Anti Imperialist Champion

By Ángel Guerra Cabrera on January 30, 2020

Why is Venezuela capable of successfully bringing together hundreds of important representatives of the main leftist parties and popular movements, women, youth, from our region and the world as it did this past week? It often manages to do so despite the obstacles imposed by the Yankee empire, which pressures foreign ministries not to give visas and airlines not to sell tickets. Last week Caracas brought together the Sao Paulo Forum and a World Meeting against Imperialism for Life, Sovereignty and Peace. In my opinion, the only thing that explains this capacity to convene is its moral strength, its example of resistance. And also the need created by the times we live in. The assassination of an anti-imperialist general moves multitudes in the Middle East and outrages millions around the world.

In 2019 Venezuela defeated the most ferocious attack by the United States against another nation in the 21st century. The self-proclamation of Juan Guaidó in January of that year as president in charge was the signal for the beginning of the new offensive against Bolivar’s homeland, in accordance with plans previously approved by the U.S. Southern Command, in turn coordinated with the most right-wing governments of the region and with the servile secretary general of the OAS, Luis Almagro. These plans are based on the so-called fourth generation war scheme, which includes actions in various fields, notably massive and prolonged campaigns of media intoxication, economic warfare and subversive actions of various kinds, including the attempted assassination of President Nicolas Maduro and other military and paramilitary operations whose execution is channeled via Colombia by the Southern Command with the active participation of Alvaro Uribe and his Deputy President Ivan Duque. How did those two, Piñera, Almagro, Pence, Elliott Abrams, Marco Rubio and, of course, Trump, think that Guaidó was going to overthrow Maduro?

The coup attempt of April 30th was also seen as the end of the Bolivarian revolution. It was certainly the high point of the offensive, with the presence of Guaidó and his political boss Leopoldo López. It was an adventurous and irresponsible action that could have cost numerous lives were it not for the patriotism and professionalism of the Bolivarian National Armed Forces that has forged a close civic-military union with the people. By then, the self-proclaimed had already started to lose rapidly the capacity of assembling people as shown in the first weeks of the year. Today, it has become much more extinguished because he has not fulfilled a single one of his promises and is wallowing in a gigantic scandal for his links with narco-paramilitaries, for the theft of funds for humanitarian aid and of Venezuelan assets. The most he can muster is a few hundred people in opposition areas of Caracas, in contrast to Maduro’s permanent political initiative and Chavismo’s enormous capacity for mass mobilization.

But the most harmful and criminal part of this long chain of aggressions is the daily attack, through economic warfare, on the bases of food and medicine supply for the Venezuelan people. When one visits Venezuela and observes the action of the people’s power, of the Local Councils of Supply and Production, one can fully realize the creativity, the high political consciousness, and the unstoppable heroism of the Chavista people.

For as powerful as the empire is, it has not been able to extinguish the flame of rebellion of the Venezuelans, nor imagine the solutions that have emerged at the level of the neighborhoods to defeat their war. Underestimating these people has been a grave error on the part of the United States. It also underestimates the other Latin American and Caribbean peoples who are no longer willing to accept the unbearable and immoral system of super-exploitation of neoliberal capitalism and its elitist and anti-popular democracy.

Who could have imagined in 2019 that the Latin American and Caribbean prairie would burn as fast as it has since the end of that year? There is a lack of leadership, projects, and organization, but that is created and it is helped by meetings like this one in Caracas, because they allow something as valuable and essential as the exchange of experiences, the certainty of not being alone and that there are many others who are fighting.

In this regard, Maduro said to those gathered in Caracas that we should not hesitate to organize ourselves. I thought then of Fidel and the exchanges he promoted in Havana on the foreign debt and the threat of the FTAA, meetings without which one could not really explain the great anti-neoliberal wave of Latin America in the 1990s and even today. What the United States and the oligarchies are really afraid of is that we will meet and organize. They blame Cuba and Venezuela to justify more aggressions against them but they know that it is their neoliberal model of death that has made Haiti, Honduras, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina, Mexico, and those who follow, rise up to overthrow it, in the streets or at the polls.

Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano, North America bureau