Tag Archives: Venezuela

Is Washington Preparing the Groundwork for a Maidan Scenario in Venezuela? by Robert Bridge

Posted on April 2, 2019 | Leave a comment

Maidan was the name given to the 2014 “revolution” the US government fomented in Ukraine to install a government more to its liking. From Robert Bridge at strategic-culture.org:

Venezuela is home to the largest oil deposits in the world, which makes the political stakes involved much higher than they would be otherwise. Enter Juan Guaidó, Washington’s puppet leader in Caracas, who will be attempting to rally the country against legitimate (i.e., democratically elected by the people) President Nicolas Maduro next month.

Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó has announced that April 6 will kick off a nationwide “tactical actions” as part of the so-called Operation Freedom protests, which are designed to oust President Nicolas Maduro.

“On April 6 will be the first tactical actions of the # Operation Freedom across the country,” Guaidó declared over Twitter this week. “That day we must be ready, prepared and organized, with the Aid and Freedom Committees already formed. The rescue of Venezuela is in our hands!”

Is this the start of Maidan 2.0?

But first, who is Juan Guaidó? That’s a questioning worth pondering momentarily because just a few months ago, the overwhelming majority of Venezuelans – 81 percent of the population – had never heard of the young man before. That all changed when Guaidó, 35, was awakened by a phone call from none other than US Vice President Mike Pence. Literally overnight he had become the poster boy of the political opposition in Venezuela and leader of the National Assembly. “Juan Guaidó is a character that has been created for this circumstance,” Marco Teruggi, a sociologist and leading observer of Venezuelan politics, told the Grayzone. “It’s the logic of a laboratory – Guaidó is like a mixture of several elements that create a character who, in all honesty, oscillates between laughable and worrying.”

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Trump’s CIA Now Unbound and Back to Its Traditional Hijinks, by Wayne Madsen

Posted on March 24, 2019 | Leave a comment

Is the CIA trying to sabotage Venezuela and the prospects for an agreement with North Korea? Probably. From Wayne Madsen at strategic-culture.org:

Under the directorship of torture and black site maven Gina Haspel, Donald Trump’s Central Intelligence Agency has returned to its traditional roots of conducting “black bag” operations and disrupting electrical grids through cyber-attacks.

The Venezuelan government has accused the Trump administration of giving the green light for a series of crippling power failures in Venezuela, which affected 22 of Venezuela’s 23 states, including the capital of Caracas. The long-duration power failures were cited by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as a reason for the US withdrawing its diplomats from Caracas. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro announced that an international commission assisted by specialists from Russia, China, Iran, and the United Nations would help his country analyze the sources of the Venezuelan electrical grid cyber-attack. Initial cyber-forensics by Venezuela traced some of the cyber warfare being waged against Venezuela to nodes in Houston and Chicago.

In addition to electricity, water service was disrupted in Venezuela. From Miraflores presidential palace in Caracas, Maduro tweeted on March 12: “From the Presidential Command Post, we monitored minute-by-minute the progress of the recovery of the National Electric System.”

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America’s Venezuela Strategy: Coup By Sheer Narrative Control, by Caitlin Johnstone

Posted on March 21, 2019 | Leave a comment

Can the US government change a government by making up a story? We’ll find out in Venezuela. From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

The Trump administration is working to overthrow the government of Venezuela. They are not at this time doing this by military invasion, nor by funneling thousands of armed militants into the country, nor even solely with starvation sanctions and CIA ops. The first and foremost means of overthrowing Venezuela’s government currently being utilized by the United States government is the low-risk, low-cost plan to simply control the stories that everyone tells themselves about who is in charge in Venezuela.

Adept manipulators understand that humans are storytelling animals. The only thing keeping the powerful powerful, keeping money operating the way it operates, and keeping government running the way it runs is the stories we all agree to tell each other about those things. If everyone collectively decided today that poker chips are the new currency and Kim Kardashian is the Supreme Ruler of the Entire World, those stories would be the new reality, and tomorrow we’d all be doing whatever Empress Kim commands and Las Vegas would be the new Wall Street.

The Trump administration is exploiting this exact principle in Venezuela by singling out some guy named Juan and calling him Mister President, despite the fact that he’s never received a single vote for that office and holds no actual power. If they can persuade enough Venezuelans (particularly the ones with the big guns) and the rest of the world’s governments to do the same, then Guaido will indeed become the functional president of the country.

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Why Won’t Maduro Let US Humanitarian Aid Into Venezuela? History. by Ted Snider

Posted on March 5, 2019 | Leave a comment

The American government gives aid to get what it wants. In Venezuela, it wants regime change, so the regime resists. From Ted Snider at antiwar.com:

The mainstream media is full of images and stories of Venezuela’s inhumanely authoritarian leader Nicolás Maduro pushing American offerings of humanitarian aid away from Venezuela’s border with Columbia.

The mainstream media serves us up our offerings of news as if each headline story was an isolated event, floating alone on an ahistorical sea, unmoored from the events that came before it. Severed from its causes and context, the event can be created for the public in an original, but misleading, way. Restoring the history can clarify the story and prevent its misappropriation.

In the current case of U.S. aid to Venezuela, the restoration of the picture requires at least four pieces of history being painted back into the picture.

The Bridge: Pictures Don’t Lie. People Do.

The story of Maduro’s neglect of his people and his rejection of American aid begins on the Francisco de Paula Santander bridge that connects Venezuela to Columbia.

US officials and the mainstream media cried the same complaint in unison. America had tried to deliver humanitarian aid to the people of Venezuela, and their illegitimate ruler had blocked the bridge and kept it out. But the cry and the photos of the bridge had been manipulatively severed from history. Maduro didn’t block the bridge because it was already blocked, and he couldn’t close the bridge because it had never been opened. Most of the barriers have been there for years because, after the bridge was built in 2015, it has never been opened.

And yet, that image of a stone hearted Maduro was used to cement public opinion against him. The images join a long history of pictures being presented out of historical context to mold public opinion and justify intervention.

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Shocker: “Humanitarian Aid” Stunt Used To Escalate Against Venezuela, by Caitlin Johnstone

Posted on March 3, 2019 | Leave a comment

Believe or not, the US government isn’t really interested in the welfare of the Venezuelan people. From Caitlin Johnstone at medium.com:

So, you might want to sit down for this, but believe it or not it appears that the US government is using the fallout from its “humanitarian aid” performanceto justify further sanctions against the Venezuelan government.

I know, I know. I’m just as shocked as you are.

“This action, taken pursuant to Executive Order (E.O.) 13692, targets six security officials who control many of the groups that prevented humanitarian aid from entering Venezuela, thereby exacerbating the humanitarian crisis that has left millions of Venezuelans starving and without access to medical care under the Maduro regime,” reads a statement from the US Treasury, if you can imagine such a thing.

“Those who continue to support a dictator that violates human rights and steals from the starving should not be allowed to walk around with impunity,” tweeted US National Security Advisor John Bolton of this latest escalation, to everyone’s breathless astonishment. “The United States will continue to take appropriate action against Maduro and those aligned with him.”

“The United States urges all nations to step up economic pressure on Maduro and his corrupt associates, as well as restrict visas for his inner circle,” US special envoy to Venezuela Elliott Abrams told a room full of stunned, slack-jawed reporters, adding, get this, “Now is the time to act in support of democracy and in response to the needs of the Venezuelan people.”

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Maduro 1: Abrams 0: but this match is far from over… by the Saker

Posted on March 2, 2019 | Leave a comment

If at first it doesn’t succeed at something it shouldn’t have been trying in the first place, the US government will most certainly try again. From the Saker at thesaker.is:

Maduro wins the first round

The standoff between Venezuela and the AngloZionist Empire last week-end has clearly ended in what can only be called a total defeat for Elliott Abrams.  While we will never know what was initially planned by the demented minds of the Neocons, what we do know is that nothing critical happened: no invasion, not even any major false flag operation.  The most remarkable facet of the standoff is how little effect all the AngloZionist propaganda has had inside Venezuela. There were clashes, including some rather violent ones, across the border, but nothing much happened in the rest of the country.  Furthermore, while a few senior officers and a few soldiers did commit treason and joined forces with the enemy, the overwhelming majority of the Venezuelan military remained faithful to the Constitution.  Finally, it appears that Maduro and his ministers were successful in devising a strategy combining roadblocks, a concert on the Venezuelan side, and the minimal but effective use of riot police to keep the border closed.  Most remarkably, “unidentified snipers” did not appear to shoot at both sides (a favorite tactic of the Empire to justify its interventions).  I give the credit for this to whatever Venezuelan (or allied) units were in charge of counter-sniper operations along the border.

Outside Venezuela this first confrontation has also been a defeat for the Empire.  Not only did most countries worldwide not recognize the AngloZionist puppet, but the level of protest and opposition to what appeared to be the preparations for a possible invasion (or, at least, a military operation of some kind) was remarkably high, while the legacy corporate Ziomedia did what it always does (that is whatever the Empire wants it to do), the Internet and the blogosphere were overwhelmingly opposed to a direct US intervention.  This situation also created a great deal of internal political tensions in various Latin American countries whose public opinion remains strongly opposed to any form of US imperial control over Latin America.

In this respect, the situation with Brazil is particularly interesting. While the Brazilian government fully backed the US coup attempt, the Brazilian military was most uncomfortable with this.  My contacts in Brazil had correctly predicted that the Brazilian military would refuse to attack Venezuela and, eventually, the Brazilians even issued a statement to that effect.

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Venezuela set for more false flags… US puppet Guaido better watch his back, by Finian Cunningham

Posted on February 28, 2019 | Leave a comment

The US government can be very fickle when it’s playing its regime change games. From Finian Cunningham at rt.com:

Venezuela set for more false flags… US puppet Guaido better watch his back
US Vice President Mike Pence (C) and Juan Guaido (L) © AFP / Diana Sanchez
The much-hyped “aid weekend” involving a US Trojan Horse fell at the first hurdle. Venezuelan government forces averted the provocation intended by US aid convoys from Colombia and Brazil.

However, increasing frustration in Washington beckons more false flags.

Something shocking is “needed” in order to jolt world opinion into acquiescing to Washington’s criminal agenda of “all options.” In the fiendish mind of American imperialism, it is also prudent to consider “all options” as meaning more than military aggression. The foulest moves.

The torching of trucks purportedly ferrying US food and medicines across the border from Colombia was patently a planned provocation. Credible video footage and witnesses attested to the arson being carried out by supporters of the US-backed opposition figure Juan Guaido.

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Venezuela was my home, and socialism destroyed it. Slowly, it will destroy America, too. By Daniel Di Martino

Posted on February 22, 2019 | 6 comments

There’s little doubt that the US government’s regime change effort in Venezuela will come a cropper. There’s no doubt that socialism of the Venezuelan or any other variety has a long history of failure and imposes stagnation, misery, and death.  Socialism is evil. From someone who has lived through Venezuela’s, Daniel di Martino at usatoday.com:

While neither ‘Medicare for All’ nor a wealth tax will turn America into Venezuela overnight, all it would take is a series of catastrophic policies.

The first time I couldn’t buy food at the grocery store, I was 15 years old. It was 2014 in Caracas, Venezuela, and I had spent more than an hour in line waiting. When I got to the register, I noticed I had forgotten my ID that day. Without the ID, the government rationing system would not let the supermarket sell my family the full quota of food we needed. It was four days until the government allowed me to buy more.

This was fairly normal for me. All my life, I lived under socialism in Venezuela until I left and came to the United States as a student in 2016. Because the regime in charge imposed price controls and nationalized the most important private industries, production plummeted. No wonder I had to wait hours in lines to buy simple products such as toothpaste or flour.

And the shortages went far beyond the supermarket.

My family and I suffered from blackouts and lack of water. The regime nationalized electricity in 2007 in an effort to make electricity “free.” Unsurprisingly, this resulted in underinvestment in the electrical grid. By 2016, my home lost power roughly once a week.

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Is Venezuela On The Verge Of Becoming Another Syria? by Brandon Smith

Posted on February 21, 2019 | Leave a comment

The globalists have a vested interest in turning places like Syria and Venezuela into hell holes. From Brandon Smith at alt-market.com:

Establishment elites have always had a predilection for regime change. Obviously, this strategy helps weed out nation states that might be uncooperative with their future plans for a fully centralized global economic and political order. We have also seen regime change occur when former puppet leaders go rogue and refuse to follow the script they have been given. Most of these men have acted as dictators and are not very empathetic public figures, so we rarely care when they get overthrown or murdered. That said, there are always wider implications to such events.

I believe the reasons for regime change and the destabilization of particular countries have evolved in recent years. In the past it was about bringing each countries under the new world order umbrella. Today, the goal seems to be an attempt to create points of global contention. That is to say, the elites want to draw much of the world into various forms of conflict, and they are using special regions of the globe as nexus points for these conflicts.

Syria was and still is one of those nexus points. The transmutation of Syria began as an extension of the Arab Spring. Western funded and organized coups in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt inspired even more extremism as well as a vast flow of black market military grade armaments. The CIA under the Obama Administration in particular took advantage of this chaos to fill training camps in Jordan with “moderate rebels”, the same rebels that would go on to launch ISIS and start a civil war in Syria.

While the billion dollar program to arm and supply Syrian rebel groups, many of which were closely tied to ISIS, was finally “officially ended” under the Trump administration in 2017, more covert US support continued for these groups as well support for Israeli incursions into sovereign Syrian air space.

Syria has had the potential to draw multiple nations into close and hostile proximity with each other, including the US, Russia, Israel and Iran. This was not a mistake, it was entirely deliberate.

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Venezuela – Media Find Trump’s Coup Plan Does Not Work, by Moon of Alabama

Posted on February 17, 2019 | 1 comment

This regime change business is tougher than it looks. From Moon of Alabama at moonofalabama.org:

On January 25, two days after Random Guyidó declared himself President of Venezuela, the lack of planing in the U.S. coup attempt was already obvious:

My impression is that Trump was scammed. It was long evident that he gives little attention to details and does not think things through. Most likely Bolton, Pompeo and Rubio presented him with a three step plan:Phase 1. Support the self declared president Guaidó; Phase 2: … (wishful thinking) …; Phase 3: Take half of their oil!
…
Bolton and Pompeo are both experienced politicians and bureaucrats. They likely knew that their plan was deeply flawed and would require much more than Trump would normally commit to. My hunch is that the soon coming mission creep was build into their plan, but that they did not reveal that.

The U.S. coup planners and their Venezuelan puppets had hoped that the Venezuelan military would jump to their side. That was wishful thinking and unlikely to happen. They also thought up some “humanitarian aid” scheme in which pictures of trucks crossing a long blocked bridge would soon shame the Venezuelan president into stepping down. That was likewise nonsense.

Unless the U.S. is willing and able to escalate, the coup attempt is destined to fail.

‘Western’ media now recognize that phase 2 of the coup plan is in deep trouble. Today the Guardian, Bloomberg and the New York Times all describe growing frustration with the lack of success.

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