The Plot to Overthrow Venezuela

How the US Is Orchestrating a Coup for Oil

Dan Kovalik

• Publisher: Hot Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781510750739
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Global Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

An in-depth look at the US threat to "save" Venezuela Since 1999 when Hugo Chavez became the elected president of Venezuela, the US has been conniving to overthrow his government and to roll back the Bolivarian Revolution which he ushered in to Venezuela. With the untimely death of Hugo Chavez in 2013, and the election of Nicolas Maduro that followed, the US redoubled its efforts to overturn this revolution. The US is now threatening to intervenemilitarily to bring about the regime change it has wanted for twenty years. While we have been told that the US's efforts to overthrow Chavez and Maduro are motivated by altruistic goals of advancing the interests of democracy and human rights in Venezuela, is this true? The Plot to Overthrow Venezuela answers this question with a resounding "no, " demonstrating that:

• The US's interests in Venezuela have always centered upon one and only one thing: Venezuela's vast oil reserves;
• The US has happily supported one repressive regime after another in Venezuela to protect its oil interests;
• Chavez and Maduro are not the "tyrants" we have been led to believe they are, but in fact have done much to advance the interests of democracy and economic equality in Venezuela;
• What the US and the Venezuelan opposition resentmost is the fact that Chavez and Maduro have governed in the interest of Venezuela's vast numbers of poor and oppressed racial groups;
• While the US claims that it is has the humanitarian interests of the Venezuelan people at heart, the fact is that the US has been waging a one-sided economic war against Venezuela which has greatly undermined the health and living conditions of Venezuelans;
• The opposition forces the US is attempting to put into power represent Venezuela's oligarchy who want to place Venezuela's oil revenues back in the hands of Venezuela's economic elite as well as US oil companies.

The battle for Venezuela which is now being waged will determine the fate of all of Latin America for many years to come. The Plot to Overthrow Venezuela lets readers know what is at stake in this struggle and urges readers to reconsider which side they are on.

1

THE US THREATENS TO “SAVE” VENEZUELA

The United States appear to be destined to plague America with misery in the name of liberty.

—Simon Bolivar, 1829

AS THE OLD ADAGE GOES, “THE Cavalry is coming!” And, this time it is coming to Venezuela; specifically, to save that country from a humanitarian disaster which includes a mass migration by Venezuelans fleeing a repressive and inept government—or at least, this is what we are told.

When most Americans hear the above adage, they are moved to believe that relief is in sight; that the cavalry has come to save and liberate those held captive by the bad guys. Those on the receiving end of the cavalry tend to feel differently.

As just one example, we learned nearly 50 years after the fact of possibly the worst US war crime of the 20th century—one committed by the US cavalry in Korea in 1950 to stop the flow of refugees from North Korea. As PRI explains:

On the same day that the US Army delivered a stop refugee order in July 1950, around 400 South Korean civilians were killed in the town of No Gun Ri by US forces from the 7th Cavalry Regiment. The soldiers argued they thought the refugees could include disguised North Korean soldiers.

Many refugees were shot while on or under a stone bridge that ran through the town; others were attacked with bombs and machine-gun fire from US planes, the BBC reported. The ordeal lasted for three days, according to local survivors and members of the Cavalry.

“There was a lieutenant screaming like a madman, fire on everything, kill ’em all,” veteran Joe Jackman recalled, according to the BBC. “I didn’t know if they were soldiers or what. Kids, there was kids out there, it didn’t matter what it was, 8 to 80, blind, crippled or crazy, they shot ’em all.”

The Associated Press broke the news of the massacre in September 1999. It has come to be known as one of the largest single killings of civilians by American forces in the 20th century.¹

As famed Latin American writer, Eduardo Galeano, once said, “Every time the US ‘saves’ a country, it converts it into either an insane asylum or a cemetery.” And indeed, this assertion has been proven true time and time and time again.

For example, in the aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003—an invasion which many Iraqis believe left their country in the worst condition it has been since the Mongol invasion of 1258—there was much discussion in the media about the Bush Administration’s goal for “nation-building” in that country. Of course, if there ever had been such a goal, it was quickly abandoned, with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson stating quite bluntly in 2017, “we are not in the business of nation-building or reconstruction.”²

The stark truth is that the US is in fact in the business of nation destroying, and it has been in this business for some time.

Indeed, South Korean human rights scholar Dong Choon Kim, writing of the US war in Korea (1950—1953)—a war which he opines was at least arguably genocidal—explains that even back then, the nation-building of Third World peoples was viewed as an act of subversion which had to be snuffed out. As he explained, “[t]he American government interpreted the aspiration for building an independent nation as an exclusive ‘communist conspiracy,’ and thus took responsibility for killing innocent people, as in the case of [the] My Lai incident in Vietnam.”³ Thanks to the US war on Korea, Korea to this day remains a country divided in half, with no prospects for unification anytime soon. Kim explains that the Korean War “was a bridge to connect the old type of massacres under colonialism and the new types of state terrorism and political massacre during the Cold War…. And the mass killings committed by US soldiers in the Korean War marked the inception of military interventions by the US in the Third World at the cost of enormous civilian deaths.”

Similarly, the US objective in Vietnam was the destruction of any prospect of an intact, independent state from being created. As Jean-Paul Sartre wrote as part of the International War Crimes Tribunal that he and Bertrand Russell chaired after the war, the US gave the Vietnamese a stark choice: either accept capitulation in which the country would be severed in half, with one half run by a US client, or be subjected to near total annihilation. Sartre wrote that, even in the former case, in which there would be a “cutting in two of a sovereign state … [t]he national unit of ‘Vietnam’ would not be physically eliminated, but it would no longer exist economically, politically or culturally.”⁴ Of course, in the latter case, Vietnam would suffer physical elimination; bombed “‘back to the Stone Age’” as the US threatened. As we know, the Vietnamese did not capitulate, and therefore suffered near-total destruction of their country at the hands of the United States. Meanwhile, for good measure, the US simultaneously bombed both Cambodia and Laos back to the Stone Age as well.

To understand the purpose behind such violent and destructive actions, we need look no further than the US’s own post-WWII policy statements, as well articulated by George Kennan serving as the State Department’s Director of Policy Planning in 1948:

We must be very careful when we speak of exercising “leadership” in Asia. We are deceiving ourselves and others when we pretend to have answers to the problems, which agitate many of these Asiatic peoples. Furthermore, we have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3 of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships, which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and daydreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world benefaction …

In the face of this situation we would be better off to dispense now with a number of the concepts which have underlined our thinking with regard to the Far East. We should dispense with the aspiration to “be liked” or to be regarded as the repository of a high-minded international altruism. We should stop putting ourselves in the position of being our brothers’ keeper and refrain from offering moral and ideological advice. We should cease to talk about vague—and for the Far East—unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.⁵

While it would have been impossible for the US to continue to monopolize a full half of the world’s wealth after Europe, Japan, China and the USSR inevitably got up on their feet after WWII, the US has nonetheless done an amazing job of controlling an unjustifiable and disproportionate amount of the world’s resources.

Thus, currently, the US has about 5% of the world’s population, and consumes about 25% of its resources. An article in Scientific American, citing the Sierra Club’s Dave Tilford, explains that,“‘[w]ith less than 5 percent of world population, the US uses one-third of the world’s paper, a quarter of the world’s oil, 23 percent of the coal, 27 percent of the aluminum, and 19 percent of the copper…. Our per capita use of energy, metals, minerals, forest products, fish, grains, meat, and even fresh water dwarfs that of people living in the developing world.’”⁶

The only way the US has been able to achieve this impressive, though morally reprehensible, feat has been to undermine, many times fatally, the ability of independent states to exist, defend themselves and to protect their own resources from foreign plunder. This is why the US has teamed up with the world’s most deplorable forces in destroying independent states around the globe.

Just to name a few examples, since 1996, the US has supported Rwandan and Ugandan forces in invading the Democratic Republic of Congo, making that country ungovernable and plundering its incredible natural resources. The fact that around 6 million innocents have been murdered in the process is of no matter, and certainly not to the mainstream press which rarely mentions the DRC. In Colombia, the US has backed a repressive military and right-wing paramilitaries for decades in destabilizing whole swaths of the Colombian countryside, and in assisting multinational corporations, and especially extractive industries, in displacing around 8 million people from their homes and land, all in order to exploit Colombia’s vast oil, coal and gold reserves. Again, this receives barely a word in the mainstream press.

Of course, in the Middle East, Northern Africa and Afghanistan, the US has been teaming up with Saudi Arabia and radical Islamist forces—forces the US itself has dubbed “terrorist”—in undermining and destroying secular states.

As far back as the 1970s, the US began supporting the mujahidin in attacking the secular, Marxist state of Afghanistan in order to destroy that state and also to fatally weaken the Soviet state by, in the words of Zbigniew Brzezinski, “drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap … [and] giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.” Afghanistan may never recover from the devastation wrought by that fateful decision of the US and of its subsequent intervention which is now well into its 18th year and counting. As we know full well, the USSR never recovered either, and the US is trying mightily to prevent post-Soviet Russia from becoming a strong rival state again.

In addition, as we learned from Seymour Hersh back in 2007, the US began at that time to try to weaken Iran and Syria by supporting Sunni extremist groups to subvert those countries. As Hersh explained:

To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has cooperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The US has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.

One contradictory aspect of the new strategy is that, in Iraq, most of the insurgent violence directed at the American military has come from Sunni forces, and not from Shiites.⁷

The US continues to intervene in Syria in a way that prevents the Syrian state from achieving a decisive victory against the various militant groups it is fighting—some of which the US itself admits are terrorists—while at the same time targeting some of these same militant groups themselves, thereby preventing either side of the conflict from coming out on top. Indeed, as we have learned, the CIA and the Pentagon have even been backing opposing militant groups that are fighting each other.⁸ The result is a drawn-out war which threatens to leave Syria in chaos and ruins for the foreseeable future.

This would seem to be an insane course of action for the US to take, and indeed it is, but there is method to the madness. The US appears to be intentionally spreading chaos throughout strategic portions of the world, leaving virtually no independent state standing to protect their resources, especially oil, from Western exploitation. And, this goal is being achieved with resounding success, while also achieving the subsidiary goal of enriching the behemoth military-industrial complex.

Meanwhile, in Libya, the US again partnered with jihadists in 2011 in overthrowing and indeed smashing a state that used its oil wealth to guarantee the best living standards of any country in Africa while assisting independence struggles around the world. In this way, Libya, which under Qaddafi also happened to be one of the staunchest enemies of Al-Qaeda in the world, presented a double threat to US foreign policy aims. Post-intervention Libya is now a failed state with little prospects of being able to secure its oil wealth for its own people again, much less for any other peoples in the Third World.

Indeed, slaves are being openly marketed on the streets of Libya after being “saved” by Obama and his humanitarian interventionist ideologues, including Samantha Power.

I mention Samantha Power because, quite ironically, she won a Pulitzer Prize for her book decrying genocide. Of course, the book, entitled A Problem from Hell,⁹ decried only other peoples’ genocides, and none of those committed by the US. Meanwhile, Power would go on as Obama’s UN ambassador to run interference at the Security Council to make sure that the US-backed genocide in Yemen, still ongoing, be permitted to continue without pause and without any pesky war crimes investigations getting in the way.¹⁰ Millions will certainly die in Yemen as a result of the US-backed campaign of the Saudis, as even Power recognized at the time, but neither she nor any other US official will ever view this as a “problem from hell.”

Meanwhile, despite these obvious truths, there appears to be no diminishment in fervor for another US intervention which purports to bring democracy and freedom to other peoples. Of course, in the case of Venezuela, the “humanitarian” part of the intervention is now barely a fig leaf for the real, and usual intention—the control of another country’s oil supplies. Retread neo-con, John Bolton, recently made this clear, saying that “we’re in conversation with major American companies now…. It would make a difference if we could have American companies produce the oil in Venezuela. We both have a lot at stake here.”¹¹

Despite Bolton’s candor in this regard, the fact that convicted Iran-Contra spook Elliott Abrams has been tasked to oversee the Venezuela operations, and despite the fact that all of this is being led by a president who liberals otherwise, and quite rightly, view as unintelligent and mean-spirited, there is nearly unanimous, bi-partisan support for the US’s dangerous game of regime change in Venezuela.

The irony in all of this seems lost in the seemingly ecstatic push for another US-backed coup in Latin America. Thus, we have Donald J. Trump—an individual who became president after losing to his opponent by nearly 3 million votes (that’s 10% of Venezuela’s entire population), and after around one million voters had been wrongly purged from the voter rolls—trying to unseat Nicolas Maduro who was duly elected president last ...