Despite the best efforts of US imperialism and its compradors, President Nicolás Maduro and his ruling PSUV party have won another presidential electoral victory. Frustrated once more in its attempts to carry out regime change during this election cycle, the USA has set about punishing the Venezuelan people and their chosen government, by escalating its sanctions war.
Victory for Maduro
The presidential elections held on 28 July resulted in victory for President Maduro, who won 52 percent of the vote, compared to 43 percent for the US-backed opposition candidate Edmundo González.
González, a previously little-known diplomat, was acting as a stand-in for the real frontwoman of the opposition, Maria Machado, leader of the US-sponsored ‘Unitary Platform’ coalition. Ms Machado receives funding from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and has been involved in US-backed regime-change operations dating back as far back as the presidency of Hugo Chávez.
But Machado was disqualified from running for election herself by the Venezuelan supreme court, which debarred her two years ago for her corruption and for publicly endorsing foreign sanctions and military interventions against her own country.
With what has now become routine predictability, the opposition and its western backers immediately disputed the election results, claiming González had really won the contest by a huge margin. He and Machado went so far as to release a statement declaring González “president-elect” and calling on the police and armed forces to follow his orders.
Using monopoly media to incite Venezuelans to “take to the streets”, the opposition unleashed a wave of fascistic rioting and looting, in which not only PSUV offices but also all kinds of government buildings, schools and healthcare facilities were attacked and burned.
To head off this latest coup attempt, President Maduro requested that the electoral results should be independently ratified, and they were duly upheld by the supreme court four weeks later. Tellingly, the González campaign refused to appear before the court to submit evidence in support of their wild claims.
Facing the consequences of these unsuccessful provocations, González fled Venezuela for Spain, after a warrant for his arrest had been issued on various charges of usurpation, forgery, instigation of law-breaking, conspiracy, sabotage and association to commit crimes. Ms Machado, meanwhile, is thought to be hiding within Venezuela, most likely inside the diplomatic building of a hostile government.
Machado insists that González “will fight from the outside alongside our diaspora” and has maintained that he should be sworn in as president of Venezuela on 10 January 2025, when the new term is set to begin. González himself, now safely ensconced in Europe, seems determined to continue to make as much mischief as possible, taking on public and political activities that aim to undermine the legitimate government of Venezuela, very much as Juan Guaidó did before him. (Does anyone remember Juan Guaidó?)
US lashes out in frustration
The reaction of the imperialists has been fierce, with politicians and media alike rejecting the results and attempting to legitimise the opposition as ‘victors’. And the US government has once more backed this propaganda campaign with a new assault in the economic war.
The US treasury department, ‘responding’ to the supposedly ‘stolen election’, imposed sanctions on 16 Venezuelans involved in the electoral process from judicial, security and electoral bodies, alleging that they had “obstructed a competitive and inclusive presidential election”.
It followed this with an act of shameless piracy, in which US operatives seized a Venezuelan jet that has been used by President Maduro (among other national officials), claiming that its purchase had “illegally” bypassed US sanctions.
According to Venezuelanalysis, “The Dassault Falcon, bearing tail number T7-ESPRT, was used by Venezuelan government officials, including recent trips to Cuba and Guyana, and was also used in a recent prisoner swap between the USA and Venezuela that saw the release of up to 36 people, ten of them US citizens, in exchange for Venezuelan government envoy Alex Saab.”
In order to grab the plane from where it was parked on a runway in the Dominican Republic, the US employed a large group of agencies and officials, including the Department of Justice, the Department of Commerce and Homeland Security Investigations. Indeed, the cost of the operation, which moved the plane a relatively short hop across the ocean to Florida, where it may well be destroyed, was probably greater than the value of the plane itself.
On an even more sinister note, the Venezuelan government on 16 September announced that it had arrested three US citizens, including an active-duty Navy Seal, uncovering a plot to bring weapons into the country that were to be used to assassinate President Maduro and other high-ranking Venezuelan officials, and to launch attacks on key public infrastructure.
Imperialism is never sated
Since the election of Hugo Chávez in 1998, Venezuela has faced the unending wrath of US imperialism, with repeated attempts at colour revolutions and ever more draconian and genocidal economic sanctions. The sanctions have been declared illegal by the United Nations and have caused the deaths of thousands of people – facts rarely if ever mentioned in western corporate media.
It is crystal clear that the USA will never willingly allow resource-rich Venezuela to escape the clutches of imperialism. The Latin-American country contains not only the largest known oil reserves on the planet but also large deposits of gold and other important minerals.
By defying the imperialist diktat and attempting to build a sovereign and independent life for its people, the Chavista government is setting a courageous example to other Latin American and Caribbean countries – all of which occupy a region that the US imperialists consider to be their own private thiefdom.
The return of a US-backed government to Venezuela would mean the end of economic and social reforms implemented by presidents Chávez and Maduro that benefit the poor and which ultimately aim to rebuild the country’s economy into one that is resilient and self-reliant. US corporations would sweep in and resume their century-old plunder of Venezuelan resources and their superexploitation of Venezuelan people – and their local oligarchic compradors would be rewarded with enormous personal fortunes in return for facilitating this looting frenzy.
The Venezuelan people, despite having attended the polls with a gun held to their head by the USA, once again chose to support the Bolivarian Revolution, even though this certainly means continued sanctions and more suffering in the short term. In the medium term, there is great hope that the rise of alternate trading partners and the Brics alliance will finally allow Venezuela to break the hold of sanctions and return to its programme of economic and social transformation.
Yet despite the genuinely anti-imperialist and pro-revolutionary sentiments of the masses, the US-backed opposition was able to gain a significant portion of the vote in July. This is a warning sign that there are significant elements in Venezuela who feel overwhelmed and fatigued by more than a decade of devastating economic war.
It is also a warning about what can be achieved by hostile agents when they have relative freedom to organise themselves, the bottomless pockets of external backers, and enormously powerful economic and media levers remaining in their hands, which they can use both to hurt (via economic sabotage) and to manipulate (via corporate media lies) the people.
Imperialism as an economic system cannot be reasoned with or placated; it demands the total subservience of oppressed nations to its interests. The imperialists and their lackeys are tireless in the pursuit of profit and domination; they will always treat their defeats as temporary setbacks for as long as their global economic system remains in place.
Oppressed nations that escape the yolk of imperialism and act in their own interest will continue to have to guard against attacks on their sovereignty until such time as the entire edifice of imperialist domination of the planet has been brought down.
The Venezuelan people show every sign of making a signal contribution to this outcome.
