Venezuela: The West wants the oil and Maduro is in the way.

.

How to guarantee that the U.S. will try to change the government in your country.

(a) Have assets of interest to U.S. corporations, especially fossil fuel assets.

(b) Decline in any small way, to allow global neoliberalism to turn your nation into a sacrifice zone of exploitation and environmental degradation.

(c) Have a government even seen to be resisting neoliberalism via socialism.

Venezuela fits this profile perfectly and the U.S. has been trying to install a puppet government in Caracas for decades now.

Since the arrival of Hugo Chavez’s explicitly socialist political stylings in 1999, the U.S. has been busy trying to flip Venezuela back to its right wing past.

• 2002 the U.S. supported a (failed) coup against Chavez.
• 2015, U.S. declared Venezuela an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to U.S. national security. Quite bizarre given that the vast mismatch of wealth, population and military budget.
• 2019, Donald Trump (ever eager to support his sponsors in the fossil fuel business) declared the democratically elected government of Nicolás Maduro “illegitimate” and that the opposition leader Juan Guaidó was to be the interim president of Venezuela.
• 2019, U.S. placed sanctions on Venezuelan oil industry that have crippled the economy, leaving them in place throughout the Covid crisis.
• 2019 U.S. encouraged the Venezuelan military to topple Maduro.
• 2019 Juan Guaidó responding to U.S. prompts launched ‘Operation Freedom’, an attempted uprising, but Guaidó’s efforts to persuade senior military officials to join his movement failed.
• 2020 U.S. indicted Maduro on charges of narco-terrorism and sent a large number of U.S. warships to threaten Venezuela, stirring echoes of the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989 that removed Gen. Manuel Noriega.
• 2020 A U.S. backed attempt to capture Maduro via Operation Gideon ended in farce.

Amid the war in Ukraine and sanctions against Russian oil, the West was in need of additional suppliers and thus a limited thaw in relations with Venezuela has taken place (the U.S. used to be the biggest customer for Venezuelan oil).

Venezuela is home to the world’s largest proven oil reserves (Middle East reserves are much larger but kept a closely guarded secret) and the hostility and interference of the U.S. towards Venezuela has served only to aid relations with China and Russia.

It was no surprise then that the re-election of Nicolás Maduro was met with thunderous condemnation from the entirety of the Western media, tasked as they all are to deliver timely and bombastic support for U.S. empire narratives.

The old newsrooms and networks of international stringers have long since been gutted and replaced by the news factories of churnalism. The neo-liberalised and captured Western media are in no position to asses the truth of the latest Venezuelan elections and have no interest in doing so. Nicolás Maduro is simply in the way of Western plans for Venezuelan oil and public perception must thus be primed for his removal.

[this also buttresses by another round of repetition, the long standing gaslighting of the Western citizenry into believing that the U.S. and their vassals are the good guys with a moral duty to endlessly interfere in other people’s governments.]

The news coverage this morning has a familiar beat, with western news portals desperate to talk down the legitimacy of the election result and desperate to talk up the prospects for a coup.

Now I am no expert in the Venezuelan electoral system. Nor am I well placed to judge the many allegations of corruption, authoritarianism and (gasp!) socialism that are directed towards Maduro’s government from ‘concerned’ media hacks in London and Washington but there are some things that are easily discerned.

As always, the West doesn’t give a damn about democracy. The inability of the empire to stage manage foreign elections as tightly controlled objects of spectacle (as they do at home) is a source of imperial spite and fury – they want control not democracy.

The reason that Venezuela dominates headlines this morning is because their government has something that the West is desperate to control – massive oil reserves. Had all this been taking place in Namibia (few resources of interest) or Egypt (captured) no one at The Guardian or the New York Times would care.

While Venezuela is unquestionably in economic dire straits, this is due in no small part to moves of classic economic imperialism from the U.S. which have crippled their primary export – oil. While many people in the country quite understandably want change, the politics of the nation are complex and the Chavez / Maduro resistance to the U.S. remains a matter of pride to many Venezuelans.

While it is quite possible that the latest election results in Venezuela were rigged in Maduro’s favour, the client journalism of the western media provides no guide to finding out the truth for they (as always) are pushing an agenda. It is also quite possible that Maduro, mindful of U.S. interference (and with a U.S. gun to his head) decided not to leave the elections to chance.

Whatever the truth of the latest elections, the western media will restlessly try to propagandise into existence the outcome that they want in Venezuela (regime change) – probably a preamble to another western backed coup attempt.

What won’t happen is that the West will leave Venezuela to sort out its own affairs, free it to sell oil to whomever it pleases, neither will the Western press focus on the undemocratic capture of its own ‘democracies’ via the wholesale corruption of lobbyist cash and indeed… the Western press.

The losers in all of this will of course be the impoverished Venezuelan people, because as sure as night follows day, when a nation has assets of interest to any empire, violence and exploitation soon follow – that is the real story here.

People of good conscience should resist the propaganda that now seeks to manufacture consent for a regime change in Venezuela and say loudly that we recognise this nakedly imperialist grab for resources for what it is.