By Mike Treen

Global Peace and Justice Auckland are holding a rally calling for Hands Off Venezuela on Saturday March 16th. Click here for details.

People around the world are being hit with an avalanche of propaganda about Venezuela and the government of President Nicolás Maduro. This happens in the run up to every US-led war. The tactic is to psychologically prepare people to accept the coming aggression, by connecting it to a noble cause. We only need to remember the claims that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which were used to justify sanctions and war being imposed on that country. The information war always precedes the real war.

The demonisation of the Maduro government is constant. It is repeated so often that it has an impact even on progressive people who are against a new war. In opposing a coup or intervention, many will quickly add “of course I don’t support Maduro” — he is “dictatorial”, “corrupt”, “undemocratic”, or has “mismanaged the economy”. But is this really true? Or is it just propaganda spread by the warmongers?

Is Maduro a Dictator?

If President Maduro is a dictator, why has he allowed large demonstrations to take place on a regular basis calling for his ouster, promoted by huge private media corporations? Does a dictatorship allow 11 opposition parties to take part in elections, as happened in the most recent vote the country held last December?

Even the US-backed coup leader Juan Guaidó, who pronounced himself president and every day calls for the military to mutiny and for a hostile foreign power to intervene, is free to travel around the capital city giving speeches and holding meetings as part of his campaign to overthrow the government.

Is the Electoral System Fraudulent?

Venezuela has had 24 elections since former president Hugo Chávez was first elected in 1998. International observer missions have long verified the electoral system as free, fair, and top-notch. The right-wing opposition even won some of these elections — they didn’t claim fraud those times! The system has not changed since then. The claim of electoral fraud has not been backed by evidence; it has been made precisely because the opposition could not find a way to dislodge the governing socialist party and President Maduro.

What About the Images of Violence on the Streets?

Opposition protests large and small take place all the time in Venezuela without incident. In 2014, following Maduro’s first election the previous year, right-wing forces initiated a series of riots called “guarimbas”, which claimed 43 lives. The majority of the 43 people killed were bystanders, or others who were targeted by the rioters, including nine members of the police and national guard. They set up barricades and barbed wire to close off intersections and entire neighbourhoods, and committed horrific violence against those who stood in their way.

Elvis Rafael Durán was one of their victims. His father Luis recalled, two years after his death: “On [my son’s] way home he crashed into a barbed wire that was hanging across the boulevard and he was decapitated … If these people hadn’t called for these violent acts, none of this would have happened. My son would not have lost his life.” In 2014, an opposition demonstration marched on a government agency which provides free housing to the poor, and attempted to burn down the building, which included a nursery filled with children!

The opposition revived these tactics in 2017 with renewed brutality, and with their extreme white supremacy on full display. One of their victims was a young Afro-Venezuelan named Orlando Figuera, who was stabbed multiple times, then doused with gasoline and burned alive.

The riots were aimed at escalating the conflict with Venezuela’s government, to give the image of instability, or provoke the sort of repression which could usher in an international intervention. Any government would punish the perpetrators of such violence. One opposition “freedom fighter” — celebrated by US politicians such as the right-wing attack dog Senator Marco Rubio — was Óscar Pérez, who was killed in a shootout while being arrested. His crime? He had hijacked a helicopter and dropped grenades on the Venezuelan Supreme Court.

Despite all this, the government has cracked down on police excesses. After violent anti-government protests in late 2016, for example, seven police officers were arrested and charged with “violations of fundamental rights”. In 2014, a police officer was charged with the murder of an opposition protester, despite the fact that he was surrounded and being pelted with rocks. Maduro’s interior minister defended the officer’s arrest, saying, “We will be relentless in the application of justice and the law.”

Are Opposition Leaders Being Arrested?

The right-wing leaders who were arrested and jailed, like Leopoldo López, Freddy Guevara, and David Smolansky, were those who organised and encouraged this violent movement. They were not arrested because of their beliefs. This is who the US considers “political prisoners”. Opposition parties and leaders, drawing on huge sums from the country’s upper class and US agencies, continue to organise and agitate openly. One such opposition leader, Henri Falcón, ran in the 2018 presidential election and received 2 million votes (just under 20%). He accepted his defeat by Maduro.

What About the Removal of Opposition Parties?

Some of the opposition parties which boycotted the last few elections have been de-listed by the government. That is true, but hardly a scandal. In most states in the United States, a third party is only on the ballot if it reaches a certain threshold of votes in the last election. If it fails to do so, it has to start from scratch.

Did Maduro “Ruin the Economy”?

Venezuela is undoubtedly in the midst of a serious economic crisis. But laying the blame on Maduro and his administration ignores both the causes of the crisis, and the government’s response.

The main reason for the economic problems is the historic collapse of the price of oil, which began in 2014. The price of oil reached a peak of $115 per barrel in June 2014, and then fell dramatically to under $35 in February 2016. For the last hundred years, Venezuela has depended almost exclusively on oil to fund its national budget and acquire foreign currency earnings. The Bolivarian Revolution has led to enormous social progress since Hugo Chávez’s election in 1998, but it has not yet been able to overcome this oil dependence, or the country’s legacy of foreign domination — both difficult tasks, which few countries have been able to accomplish.

The economic crisis of the last few years has been greatly exacerbated by US sanctions against Venezuela’s oil industry, which has now turned into a full-blown blockade. Trump’s National Security Adviser John Bolton estimates that this blockade will cost Venezuela about $30 million a day. At the urging of the United States in late 2017, Belgian financial services firm Euroclear froze $1.65 billion of Venezuelan public funds — including $450 million of cash! — which the government was attempting to use to purchase food and medicine. In January, the Bank of England essentially plundered the $1.2 billion worth of Venezuelan gold which the government had deposited with them. This is pure colonial looting.

Is the Economic Crisis Because of Socialism?

While the Bolivarian Revolution and Venezuelan government have declared that their project is to build socialism, and have made major strides in that direction, the vast majority of the economy is still in the hands of capitalists. The private sector controls 50% of production and distribution of food, 80% of personal hygiene items, 70% of pharmaceutical items, and 80% of clothes and shoes.

Venezuela exists in a global order dominated by hostile capitalist classes, to whom it has to sell its exports, such as oil, and from whom it has to import goods as wide-ranging as food, technology, and spare parts. Even the state-owned and nationalised enterprises have to operate by the rules of those foreign corporations, banks and creditors. All this creates a large toolkit for the forces of capitalism — not socialism — to sabotage, extort and undermine Venezuela’s economic development.

What About the Inflation?

In 2003, Hugo Chávez instituted currency exchange controls, in order to keep the Venezuelan elite from taking their money out of the country and its banks, exchanging it for dollars, and leaving the country broke as a result. Only certain amounts of currency could be exchanged for dollars, and that money had to go through government approved institutions.

This led to an underground exchange of currency, which widened over time. When oil prices collapsed, the government could have done what the governments of the rich do: cut off all social programmes, sold off government assets to private investors, and let the poor fend for themselves and starve. That’s what the New Zealand government did to us between 1984 and 1993. Instead, the Maduro government continued to finance these programmes, and import food and medicine with its dwindling foreign currency reserves. The government tried to issue debt to investors to stabilize its finances, as so many others do, but US sanctions and a pullout from international capital limited this. In response, the Maduro government printed more money to import required food and technology, for the people. This increased inflationary pressures, however.

There is also considerable evidence which suggests the US Federal Reserve devalued Venezuelan currency at various moments for political reasons. Meanwhile, privately run websites, such as DolarToday, publish wildly inflated estimates of the “true” value of the Venezuelan currency relative to the US dollar. DolarToday is run by Gustavo Díaz, a former Venezuelan military officer who participated in the failed 2002 coup. This constitutes a form of psychological warfare, constantly throwing workers and businesses into doubt about the real value of their wages and products. With each exchange rate spike, stores increased their prices, but, fearing future instability, did not then lower prices in equal measure when the exchange rate declined. This too accelerated inflation.

Meanwhile, private distributors and importers hoarded goods to inflate their costs and deepen the social crisis. State-subsidised and price controlled goods such as petrol have been pilfered into the underground market and resold at huge profits at the Colombian border. For instance, one raid conducted by security forces in 2015 uncovered a stockpile of 176,000 liters of petrol, 1,260 liters of vehicle oil, 2,000 cases of beer, two tons of sugar, three tons of rice, a half ton of cooking oil, and nearly 15 tons of other essential food goods.

Altogether, these factors created a crisis of confidence in the currency as a whole. Mistakes and mismanagement are of course part of the problem — as the government has always declared — but at its core Venezuela has been punished by international capitalism for continuing to prioritise the needs of the poor throughout this economic downturn, in spite of all the sanctions.

Is the Government Letting People Starve?

No. Six million families now benefit from a new initiative called Local Committees for Supply and Production, which directly distributes packages of essential food and other consumer goods on a regular basis to those who are most affected by inflation.

The Venezuelan government has repeatedly raised the minimum wage to try and make up for inflationary pressures. Other steps include making the metro transportation system of Caracas, although already affordable, completely free, so that people can go to work and school unimpeded by finances.

Are All the Country’s Resources Being Stolen by the Venezuelan Leadership, As the US Government Claims?

There is of course bureaucratic corruption in Venezuela, as the government readily admits, and as there is in many countries. But in the face of this crisis, the Venezuelan government has focused on defending the living standards of poor and working people. In 2016, during the collapse of oil prices, the Venezuelan government allocated 73% of its budget to social programmes.

In 2017, Maduro announced a new programme called Chamba Juvenil, aimed at guaranteeing jobs to young people. Nearly 200,000 youths enrolled in the programme. Venezuelan youth, especially those historically excluded from higher education because of poverty, now enjoy free education and real opportunity, thanks to 45 public universities and colleges which have been created in 20 years of the Bolivarian Revolution.

Perhaps the Maduro government’s most impressive social programme is the Grand Housing Mission Venezuela, an initiative to give free or nearly free homes to every Venezuelan who is in need of dignified housing. At the beginning of this year, the Housing Mission reached a new milestone: 2.5 million new homes constructed and distributed to the people in less than seven years.

That would be the equivalent of the New Zealand government, which is far richer than the Venezuelan government, building 375,000 homes, and providing them free or extremely cheap. But our government can’t even meet its initial Kiwibuild targets on the way to building 100,000 new houses — and let alone providing homes cheaply to poor people in need, the houses under construction aren’t even going to be remotely affordable! This is while housing costs for the bottom fifth of New Zealanders increased from 30% of disposable income in 1990 to a shocking 54% in 2015, while the median house price increased from three times the median annual income in the early 90s to six times in 2017, while home ownership has been plummeting in the last three decades, and while, most shockingly of all, 40,000 people in New Zealand are homeless — a statistic far worse than the rest of the OECD. If only we had a government who cared about workers and the poor as much as the Maduro administration does — they might be able to solve this crisis!

What About the Medical Shortages?

Venezuela’s constitution guarantees the right to medical care, and more than 20,000 Cuban doctors and nurses provide free care to the population. With Cuban-Venezuelan cooperation, thousands of Venezuelans have been trained to become the new generation of doctors.

But these health gains have been threatened by US sanctions, and even right-wing violence targeting these facilities and doctors. In 2018, Venezuela’s purchase order of five major medical shipments was blocked by US banks under government order. The year’s vaccination programme for children was delayed for five months, and the country’s 60,000-plus diabetics were denied insulin, again because of US sanctions.

Why Is the Maduro Government Blocking “Humanitarian Aid”?

The United Nations and Red Cross have both declared that the “aid” at the Colombian border does not meet the definition of humanitarian, which has to be neutral, apolitical and requested by the receiving country. Why would Venezuela allow the very countries that have looted its resources and treasury to now pretend to be for “humanitarian aid”? It rightly views this as political theater to try and humiliate the government in the media and provoke it into a military conflict.

Venezuela has not rejected aid from less hostile nations. In February, Venezuelan Health Minister Carlos Alvarado announced the arrival of 933 tons of medicines and medical supplies from China, Cuba, and the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO). Soon after, President Maduro announced that 300 tons of Russian aid is scheduled to arrive. This is more than ten times the amount being “offered” by USAID, whose director has been giving militant speeches calling for regime change in Venezuela.

Conclusion

There is no need to bow before the ongoing lies about Venezuela. There is a reason that the Maduro government continues to enjoy its widest support among the country’s poor and working class, even though they have been hit hardest by the economic crisis. Millions see that the government and United Socialist Party has consistently tried to make society more just, equal, participatory and independent — and that is precisely why US imperialism and the country’s oligarchy are trying to strangle it.

Mike Treen is the National Director of Unite Union, and spokesperson for Global Peace & Justice Auckland. Socialist Aotearoa thanks Mike for allowing us to republish his work.

For more information go to: venezuelanalysis.com/

Global Peace and Justice Aotearoa are holding a rally on Saturday March 16. We will be gathering in Aotea Square at 2pm. Come stand with us to demand: US Hands Off Venezuela!

RSVP HERE