The United States hates the Bolivarian revolution — the socialist political restructuring that Hugo Chavez initiated in Venezuela. The suits in Washington earnestly believe that every country in the Americas should bow to the U.S. Empire. U.S. capitalists despise countries that use their resources for their own betterment. In the eyes of the United States investor, Latin America is a bottomless well and the U.S. ruling class should be able to draw as much water out of it as it wants. Witness the moaning of outlets like Foreign Policy that “in recent years, the United States has become a hostage” to “the whims of its smaller neighbors.”
The U.S. Empire has always treated the Latin American countries this way. From the creation of the so-called Monroe Doctrine in 1823 all the way up through the Cold War and into the new millennium, the United States has pushed the Latin American countries around, violated their sovereignty, murdered their citizens, and encouraged U.S. corporations to do the same. The term “banana republic” was coined to describe the domination of the United Fruit Company (Chiquita Banana) over Guatemala. As late as 2007, U.S. courts found that companies like United Fruit were providing millions of dollars to far-right paramilitary organizations in Colombia and other Latin American countries for the express purpose of terrorizing their people and clearcutting the ground for exploitative U.S. corporate practices. Coca-Cola funds anti-union Colombian death squads. God bless America!
In 1999, the Venezuelan Constituent Assembly created a new constitution and inaugurated the Bolivarian Revolution, which promised resistance to the International Monetary Fund’s meddling in the Venezuelan economy and the establishment of social welfare programs. Perhaps most critically from the point of view of the United States vultures, it nationalized a number of economic sectors. The natural reaction of the U.S. Empire was to impose an ever-tightening regime of sanctions designed to “make the economy scream.” This was the response of the Nixon administration to the socialist government headed by Allende in Chile; it was the response of the Bush administration to the socialist government of Venezuela. Since 2008, the U.S. Empire has continuously put restrictions on one or another part of the Venezuelan economy, with the intention of destroying the socialist government there, as they did in Chile. As a result, Venezuela has been isolated from the U.S. portion of the world-economy. It cannot access the U.S. financial system, its accounts have been frozen, it cannot sell oil to U.S. allies, and many companies inside Venezuela are prevented from accessing the international market.
This is not enough for the ghouls who run the U.S. Empire, but despite the fact that these sanctions led directly to more than 40,000 deaths from 2017-2018, the Bolivarian Revolution remains standing, resisting the onrush of empire. The seizure of foreign-owned oil fields and the transfer of ConocoPhillips, Chevron, and Exxon Mobile property to the control of Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), the state-owned oil company, drove the Washington ghouls and their puppeteers into apoplectic convulsions.
The Trump regime tried to launch a takeover of the country in early 2019, naming one of their many puppets, a vacant-eyed politician named Juan Guaido, interim president. Guaido, a graduate of CIA-hotbed, Andres Bello Catholic University — which has been the alma mater of several CIA agents, hosts a CIA-funded partner program with George Washington University and the National Security Archive, and which has been implicated in papers from the U.S. embassy obtained by the Venezuelan intelligence service — attempted, with considerable U.S. backing, to force President Nicolas Maduro out of office and take control of the country. This laughable coup, a repeat of the much more serious U.S.-backed attempt to remove Hugo Chavez in 2002, was easily repulsed.
This brings us to today and the U.S. state’s newest attack on the Bolivarian Revolution through PDVSA, the state oil company.
In 1990, before the Bolivarian Revolution began, PDVSA acquired control over the oil conglomerate Citgo. Perhaps as retaliation for the defeat of the Guaido coup, the U.S. Treasury Department under Trump issued further sanctions against Venezuela. These specifically targeted PDVSA. These sanctions allowed Citgo’s executives to block payments to PDVSA and operate independently, essentially severing the Venezuelan government from Citgo entirely. The Bolivarian Republic’s assets have been placed in a “blocked account” which both Citgo and the U.S. government have conspired to prevent the people of Venezuela from getting the benefit of their ownership of the company.
At the end of this last July, the necromancers in charge of President Biden began a final assault against the Bolivarian Republic’s ownership of Citgo. PDVSA’s shares are being stripped from the company — and thus, the Republic and all its people — by Obama-appointed and Biden-promoted federal judge Leonard Stark. The shares will be auctioned off to satisfy “creditors” of the Venezuelan government, and will almost certainly be sold at a hugely discounted rate. This same neoliberal tactic was wielded against Allende’s Chile, the U.S.S.R. and many other places struggling for socialism. Pedro Tellechea, Venezuelan Oil Minister, said “It’s not a PDVSA asset. It’s an asset of all Venezuelans.”
Mr. Tellechea is right. This is a crime being committed against the people of Venezuela, another in the long list of crimes the U.S. Empire has committed in Latin America. It’s yet another outrage against the sovereignty of the people of Venezuela, another of many attacks on the right of the Venezuelans to determine their own future. The United Socialist Party of Venezuela, also known as PSUV, is consistently elected to fill most positions throughout their government. The Indigenous people of Venezuela are now, thanks to the 1999 constituent process, guaranteed political representation in all levels of the government, and have reserved parliamentary seats in the national assembly and on municipal councils in districts with Indigenous populations.
Like the Plurinational State of Bolivia, Venezuela has a uniquely representative and responsive form of government. Like Venezuela, Bolivia’s government was recently forced to survive an American backed coup because it had nationalized its mineral resources. The U.S. Empire, of course, takes every effort to paint both governments as “undemocratic” and “authoritarian.” This is the same empire that was thrown out of Venezuela by the Revolution’s nationalization program, the same empire whose tendrils have been repulsed time and time again, whose interference and influence among the Venezuelan class of exploiters has been defeated and turned back. Of course the capitalists who lost out when Venezuela nationalized its industries and began to spend its resources to take care of its own citizens, rather than ship them abroad to make profits for American businessmen, despise Venezuela.
Having failed, for approaching twenty years, to directly overthrow the socialist Bolivarian Republic, the United States is now employing its grinding legal system. If they can’t recapture the oil, they can at least steal the profits of the Indigenous people of Latin America — so goes the corrupt thinking behind the bench and in the halls of power. The U.S. vampire demands satisfaction, and is now employing its own court systems to get the blood it feels it’s owed.
The Americas are no longer the preserve of United States corporations; despite the empire’s failing efforts to damn the people of Venezuela for daring to control their own destiny, the mighty Yanqui beast is doomed to failure as other Central and South American countries follow suit and shrug off the yoke of their imperial masters.
