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Rick Sanchez, an anchor for Russia’s RT-America, reported last week of “Signs that the US attempt to change-out presidents in Venezuela may be falling flat.” He was speaking about the in-plain-sight US coup attempt unfolding on the northern coast of South America against the elected president of Venezuela. Lucas Koerner, a reporter with Venezuela Analysis, told RT there was “an eerie calm” in Caracas. “Life continues as normal,” he said. Juan Guaido, the man out-of-nowhere the Trump administration anointed as “the legitimate president of Venezuela” first appeared on a Wednesday, then was not seen in public until Friday. Koerner emphasized the complexities: President Nicolas Maduro is, indeed, not very popular among the Venezuelan people, but Donald Trump and the United States, given its history in Latin America, is even more unpopular. A recent poll revealed that 70% of Venezuelans disapprove of the opposition-controlled National Assembly that elected a 35-year-old US-educated nobody its president. It has been reported that Guaido was never even a full-fledged member of the legislative body; he was an alternative deputy. The reason for his ascendancy to be Venezuela’s “legitimate president” is simple, according to Diego Sequera, a Venezuelan writer with the investigative publication Mision Verdad: Guaido is a handsome young man with no problematic background, which makes him sellable to a US market. He’s the classic expendable puppet.

Guaido was an energetic young activist seen in many anti-Chavez and anti-Maduro demonstrations, such as the violent demonstrations called guarimbas or violent fortresses. “Around 43 were killed during the 2014 guarimbas,” according to Gray Zone writers Dan Cohen and Max Blumenthal. “Three years later, they erupted again, causing mass destruction of public infrastructure, the murder of government supporters, and the deaths of 126 people, many of whom were Chavistas.” There’s even an online image of what appears to be the new “legitimate president of Venezuela” dropping his pants in a demonstration with other men in a common youthful gesture of disrespect. (The hairline in the photo, a rear view, seems to be his hairline.) The point is, US mainstream media entities like The New York Times (which I often defend to my leftist friends) NEVER cover or factor in this kind of planned, violent opposition. As someone put it, the problem in Venezuela is not socialism — it’s sabotage. It’s gone on for years and even included a failed coup. If these kinds of insurrectionary actions happened in the United States, people would be gassed and gunned down in the streets by police and the 82nd Airborne. All this is covered thoroughly in a Cohen/Blumenthal article in Gray Zone called “The Making of Juan Guaidó: How the US Regime Change Laboratory Created Venezuela’s Coup Leader”.

This coup attempt is nothing really new, considering classics like the 1954 US coup in Guatemala. The difference is this one is being played out in a 21st century, internet-saturated world of the i-phone, social media swarm. We’re all lost in a world-wide information explosion and time constraints, media national loyalties and each individual’s focus on things that comfort or comport with his or her prejudices; the whole ever-shifting process ironically contributes to huge areas of ignorance. The realities of poverty in a place like Venezuela is one of those areas of ignorance. The story most North Americans get is that Hugo Chavez was a “socialist” (ie. a bad guy) and his successor is incompetent and also a “socialist” (so he’s a really bad guy). Meanwhile, the rich history and human complexity of the bottom-up Hugo Chavez driven Bolivarian Revolution is lost in the relentless moneyed and sexy drive for power among top-down oligarchic interests in both Venezuela and the United States.

This horror-story carnival is rife with absurdities and ironies. One of the most interesting is that while our US mainstream media are doing a typically rotten job covering the real story in Venezuela, Russia Todayor RT is doing some of the best, fairest coverage on the web. I’m not a Russia fan, but the RT coverage of Russia’s friend Venezuela makes CNN and MSNBC look like instruments of US propaganda. RT reports that most Venezuelans understand only too well their nation is in a god-awful mess desperately in need of change, but they make it clear the mess can’t be solved by a US intervention undertaken by Donald Trump and his gang that can’t shoot straight. Just consider what it means when a large, water-buffalo-like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announces by Twitter video that the US is recognizing Juan “Guido” as the legitimate president of Venezuela. Guido, as in the epithet for greasy Italians? Of course, the man’s name is Guaido, which is pronounced in Spanish why-doe. (I can now see Christian Bale fattening up even more from his role as Dick Cheney in Vice to play Pompeo in a thriller to be called The Guido Insurrection.)

The cast of characters for this insidious cluster-fornication starts with Florida Senator Marco Rubio, Trump’s “little Marco,” a member of the rabidly anti-Castro Cuban community in Miami; then there’s Pompeo, number one in his West Point class with five years service in the peacetime tank corps, congressman from Kansas, a stint as CIA director and evangelical Christian, a civilian militarist with the corpulent, blitzkrieg spirit of Ariel Sharon; John Bolton, far-right zealot, former UN ambassador and sender of military threats via semiotic scribbles on his yellow legal pad; and last but certainly not least, the odious Elliot Abrams, designated go-to man for the mission, pardoned criminal convicted in the Iran-Contra debacle and eager, perennial brewer of Latin American coups; Elliot is always only an email away, lurking under a rock somewhere in a dank State Department basement office. Besides his criminal conviction in the Iran-Contra episode, Abrams was closely aligned with the coup that ousted Chavez in 2002 for 48 hours. It collapsed thanks to the purity of its malignancy. Abrams is the natural pick to oversee this operation.

In Latin America, the top-down/bottom-up struggle is an eternal, archetypal conflict. That means it’s complicated, something too many North Americans have been weaned to avoid — especially when history and science are bunk and politics is reduced to 140-characters. At its best, this eternal struggle between the rich and the poor is addressed as a structural challenge where the ideal is an on-going dialogue leading to a mixed economy that accepts free-enterprise, personal incentive and private property as it also provides education, health-care and safety nets for the poor. Live and let live, where the dignity of all people, rich and poor, is a goal. What we have, instead, in Venezuela is the worst kind of toxic, violent polarization with no way out. Thanks to the Trump regime change plot, violence seems inevitable. The US media does nothing but help fuel the violence; even the “politically incorrect” Bill Maher has tooted like a patriotic moron in support of the coup.



Hugo Chavez’s Legacy and the Perennial Struggle

In any serious discussion of the Trump administration’s regime-change gambit in Venezuela one has to concede that Hugo Chavez’s legacy in Venezuela currently lies in shambles; the nation is in desperate need of rescue, for some kind of constructive synthesis. Meanwhile, the absolute worst possible scenario (the equivalent of hosing gasoline on a fire) is now in play and unfolding, a tiresome, classic imperial coup updated to the i-phone-swarm, Twitter age, pretty much the exact same thing the US has criticized Vladimir Putin for in Crimea and Ukraine. To round this absurd circle, Putin and Russia have warned the US to stay out of Venezuela, just like the US warned Russia to stay out of Ukraine. But this is the Tweeting 21st century — not 1954 Guatemala where mind-messing tactics were used to bamboozle Guatemalans as the coup became a fait accompli. Everything now is either secret or so intentionally confused by willful obfuscation and lies that citizens don’t know whether to spit or go blind. They’ve learned to shrug and go about their business consuming, playing with their i-phones and fantasizing about their inner superhero powers garnered from the tsunami of special-effects movies flooding the culture. For all we know, Trump and his bromance pal Putin have communicated secretly (no one really knows what they talked about in Helsinki) agreeing to criticize each other and demonize each other’s nations as they give each other a personal green light to strong-arming errant little nations in their respective spheres of interest. This is pure speculation rooted in the impotence of 21st century citizenship, but given the past two years and the successful public/private gangster governing mode of Vladimir Putin, something Donald Trump seems to envy, this kind of speculation is not far-fetched. We’re all subjects to the art of the deal, a Trump arena where bankruptcy means opportunity.

The way the right exploits the very real wreckage in Venezuela is insidious because those same right-wing elements and their allies in Venezuela who exploiti the wreckage helped create the problem in the first place — as they are hosing gasoline on the fire right now. Back in the ‘80s, the Reagan strategy against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua was to cause enough havoc and suffering to create an untenable situation that amounted to a “bad example” for any other shithole countries considering social reforms at the expense of US hegemonic capitalism. Besides this, by raising the frustration and fury level inside Venezuela the coup attempt contributes to the possibility of the demonized Maduro regime doing something stupid like harm a US ambassador or other US citizen — thus, creating a casus belli, an act that justifies sending in the Marines or some under-the-radar 21stcentury equivalent of that imperialistic mantra.

I spent time in the ‘80s and early ‘90s as a documentary photographer in Nicaragua and El Salvador, during the Contra war in the former and, in the latter, the war to put down the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, better known as the FMLN, the Salvadoran guerrilla organization founded in 1980. The FMLN was not rooted in Stalinist communism, as the virulent propaganda would have it. It was a reaction to history, to the relentless oppression of Salvadoran peasantry by the wealthy that reached back to the famous Matanza(massacre) of January 22nd, 1932. Fed-up peasants whose land had been stolen over the decades began to speak out and protest; thousands were slaughtered in a matter of days. Today, Salvadoran peasants don’t wear native clothing (as they still do in Guatemala) because that’s how they were identified by the killers who gunned them down in large numbers. The unforgettable event was just honored (like the Jewish holocaust) by the FMLN political party in El Salvador, which elected its first national president, Maurico Funes, in 2010. I attended Funes’ inauguration. That’s how the long war against the so-called Fourteen Families and other elements of Salvador’s repressive upper classes ended, with a war-weary stalemate and the election of an FMLN candidate to the highest office in the land. While the war may be over and the FMLN still holds the presidency, the struggle between rich and poor continues like a perennial dance.

If the Trump bully capitalist coup is successful in driving Venezuela to ruin and regime change, I would bet good money that won’t be the end of the story. There will be no triumphant Mission Accomplished high-five event with a fly-in on an aircraft carrier. Given the strong support for Hugo’s Bolivarian Revolution and the deep historic disdain for US imperial intervention, I’m convinced resistance will grow and evolve into an insurgency that, if there’s enough of an escalation of US-supported violence, could evolve into an intense and furious reaction not unlike a Latin American ISIS. Push people too far and they explode.

I know writing that last paragraph and especially mentioning ISIS will provoke right-wing elements in my country to see me as an unpatriotic American-hating leftist — even a “communist,” the classic casus belliterm that comes from an earlier time when America was top-o’-the-world, ma! and perceived as “great.” A Marine I once knew loved to grin and intone what for him was a mantra of his service: “Kill a Commie for Mommie!” But accusing me of being unpatriotic at this stage would be dead wrong. I’m a red-blooded American and I love the America of Walt Whitman’s poems and Woody Guthries’s songs. My plea, and the plea of other members of the anti-war movement, is not un-patriotic. Peace and justice are not un-American ideas; at least they shouldn’t be. In 2019, we’re all too aware of how US interventions work and how they generally fail in the end and how the anti-war movement is, then, charged with that failure as a key component of the stabbed-in-the-back myth. If only you cowards and commies had supported the war we would’ve won. The anti-war movement has seen it come down like that too many times not to expect such the same arc in the case of Venezuela. It’s why the figure in Greek myth most resonant with responsible voices in the American anti-war movement is Cassandra, who angered the god Apollo for spurning his sexual advances. He retaliated by making her prophesies accurate — with a twist: No one would heed them.

Based on my experience and study over the years, I can envision the rise of a force called the HCLN, in English, the Hugo Chavez National Liberation Front. The perennial struggle between rich and poor will re-set and come full circle. As in El Salvador, after years, maybe decades, of hate and horrific violence, the war-weariness phase will set in and the two struggling elements will reluctantly come to some kind of shaky peace that will essentially be an agreement to keep the struggle below the status of all-out warfare. As in El Salvador, in the much larger, more sophisticated and more resource-rich Venezuela, I see the guerrilla organization named for the great and now mythic Hugo Chavez — the HCLN — evolving into a political party and, because of so much poverty they’ll have the numbers to elect a president, who, if you believe in poetry, will be an offspring of Hugo Chavez, himself. But this is imaginative fiction based on the pattern recognition capacity of a jaundiced 71-year-old leftist who still admires the great but flawed Hugo Chavez.

We Gringos Need To Get Venezuela Right

In 2007, I was on Hugo Chavez’s Alo Presidente radio show; a friend and I were traveling in Venezuela and, through connections we made, ended up being invited onto the president’s radio show, which was broadcast every Sunday from the Presidential Palace or from somewhere in the hinterlands. The show we were on lasted eight hours without a break. The whole time, Chavez held forth from a small wooden desk in the front of a studio auditorium in total control of the show like a Johnny Carson. My friend and I were two audience members among many international guests that Chavez, a man with a rich sense of humor and wit, identified and chatted up from his little desk. “John Grant es un periodista,” he said as he introduced me.

The man was charismatic and, most important, fearless, a man who came from, and sided with, the poor as he worked his way up the ranks of the military. Where he went wrong was being so strong in his determination to obtain justice for the poor that he failed to take the long view and make necessary compromises with the entrenched wealth that remained powerful and in control of institutions in the culture. And, no doubt, there was some corruption. Leaders on the right in Venezuela and in the US, likewise, have no interest in dialogue or pragmatic political synthesis; all they want is a pro-capitalist government friendly to the rich. This kind of stand-off polarization is a formula for disaster. Both sides in this eternal top-down / bottom-up struggle are forced to live together in a country like Venezuela, but both sides want it all, absolute control of the other side.

Center-right columnist Brett Stephens of The New York Times is a classic example of the standard mainstream media Venezuela coverage in North America. He has given us a column titled “Yes, Venezuela Is a Socialist Catastrophe” in which he pushes all the tired old buttons and employs the word socialism enough times to choke a red-diaper baby with his own diapers. He goes wrong first in the title. Sure, we can all agree Venezuela is a “catastrophe,” but his column could just as legitimately have been titled, “Yes, Venezuela Is a Capitalist Catastrophe.”

Anyone who would take an unknown 35-year-old, US-educated Venezuelan — a man who never got enough votes to become a full member of the Assembly he was suddenly made president of because of his attractive mestizo profile — and palm him off as the “legitimate” president of Venezuela is clearly not concerned about what’s good for the people of Venezuela. What the coup leaders are doing is what’s good for their interests. It can’t help but remind us of the lying spy asset Curveball and the foisting of Ahmed Chalabi as the legitimate president of liberated Iraq. Remember him? This foul business gets even more dark and weird when you realize we in the United States of America have very real, even glaring, problems with our own democracy; it’s as if Hillary Clinton had been elected president and Russia (I employ Russia, here, for obvious reasons) decided her election was illegitimate and anointed Donald Trump as the legitimatepresident of the United States of America, refusing in the process to engage with the elected president and, then, holding the idea of some kind of military action over the heads of Americans if she didn’t comply and resign.

I agree with Stephens when he says the fundamental problem in Venezuela is “human nature,” especially the inclination “for people to find loopholes and workarounds to keep as much of their property as they can.” But, typically, such a statement needs to be parsed. Property rights are, indeed, important and need to be protected. But let’s not conveniently forget power and greed, major aspects of the “human nature” Stephens says is the fundamental problem in Venezuela. First off, greed is clearly a dominant personal trait of the current president of the United States, the guy in whose name this regime change is being undertaken. When you analyze the property claims of many rich and powerful elements in Latin America vis-a-vis the poor (think of the “fourteen families” in El Salvador), a lot of those property “rights” are based on the power to grab the property of the poor and the greed to never have enough of it once the thievery has begun. Raised in poverty, Hugo understood this. It’s where his incredible populist power came from; it’s where his fearless sense of mission came from. It was an impulse toward justice. What the clown-show of right-wing zealots and predators behind this coup may not realize and what may bite them in the ass is the spirit of Hugo Chavez still living in the huge barrios that cover the many hillsides of Caracas like colorful tufted blankets.

The US shamefully left Vietnam after 30 years of betraying an important WWII ally, the Viet Minh; the US tripped over its you-know-what in Iraq with President Bush’s unnecessary war there; betrayal has became a US modus operandi in places like Libya and Syria; after 18 years, the US is now negotiating an exit from Afghanistan, and like in Vietnam, the Taliban may follow that by moving back in. Why should we expect anything different in Venezuela? With all this ignominy as internationally-perceived back-story and the ever-closing-in encirclement for crimes committed of the man whose name is emblazoned on this coup, why should Donald Trump and his pack of wolves turning Venezuela into a conflagration end any different?