"Venezuela claims the world’s largest proven reserves of petroleum, an estimated 298 billion barrels of oil." - Michael Klare, The Desperate Plight of Petro-States TomDispatch 05/26/2016
The Trump-Pence Administration has officially recognized an opposition figure as the legitimate government of Venezuela: Jim Wyss and Carlos Camacho, Venezuela now has two presidents. How long will the uncertainty last? Miami Herald 01/23/2019; Marco Teruggi, Las claves del golpe Página/12 (Argentina) 24.01.2019; Ana Langner, México no desconocerá al gobierno de Maduro: SRE La Journada (México) 23.01.2019; Venezuela, entre protestas y un presidente autoproclamado Melenio (México) 23.01.2019.
Mike Pence, the rightwing theocrat who the TV commentariat will annoint as the Savior of the Republic when he takes over after Trump's removal from office, tweeted:
As I told @Trish_regan, the Maduro regime has oppressed its people & @POTUS has taken decisive action over the last 2 years to bring sanctions on officials in the Maduro regime. Today, freedom broke out in Venezuela with the recognition of a new interim President in @JGuaido. pic.twitter.com/eJKJz4wsSS— Vice President Mike Pence (@VP) January 24, 2019
It's telling - a Freudian slip, or maybe very conscious - that future Great Statesman Pence said that "freedom broke out in Venezuela with the recognition of a new interim President." The normal diplomatic convention with this kind of move is to declare that the coup has already liberated the country involved and now the foreign government is just recognizing and supporting the new, legitimate government. But for Savior of the Republican Pence, freedom in Venezuela broke out the moment the US declared that was the new reality.
This is a policy which in some ways continues the Obama-Biden-Hillary Clinton Administration's distinctly conservative policy toward Latin America. And their policy toward Veneuela was also reckless. Obama declared a state of emergency for the United States over Venezuela: Declaration of a National Emergency with Respect to Venezuela 03/09/2015
Let's take a moment here to note that this was one in a long chain of abusives of Executive power via declarations of emergencies that Congress seriously needs to curb. Obama's 2015 action involved blatant threat inflation:
Pursuant to the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (50 U.S.C. 1701 et seq.) (IEEPA), I hereby report that I have issued an Executive Order (the "order") declaring a national emergency with respect to the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States posed by the situation in Venezuela. [my emphasis]Anyone who thinks that Venezuela's oil isn't the main consideration in US policy toward Venezuela has already lost the thread of this story.
Venezuela is a petrostate whose prosperity or lack thereof is driven by world oil prices. That was true 20 years ago, it's true today, and it will be true whether or not this coup attempt succeeds. And it will be true 10 years from now whether it has a Maduro-style socialist government or a Bolsinaro-type authoritarian one.
But we also shouldn't be simplistic about the oil factor. There are also distinct political and diplomatic reasons for US hostility to Maduro's government. To summarize, that government has never seen its primary role as doing what Washington orders them to.
American-backed coups in Latin America have a seriously bad history. (See: Augusto Pinochet.) How many Americans noticed after 9/11 that the expressions of sympathy from Latin American governments to the US were more restrained than most others? There's a reason for that. (Iran was more enthusiastic in expressing sympathy, for God's sake.) Answer: almost no Americans noticed because we were too busy howling to bomb somebody and because US news coverage of Latin America (even Mexico) is pitiful.
How many Americans remember the coup the Obama-Biden Administration backed in 2009 in Honduras? Also not many. (See US Media, Coverage of Latin America.) But here 10 years later, the President of the US has shut down the government demanding a wall to protect us from the refugee "caravans" from Central America, which are in very significant part due to that 2009 coup and the ensuing destabliization. Huge numbers of refugees from Venezuela are already in Colombia and a civil war in Venzuela will generate more. Wow, wars and coups generate refugees? Who could have guessed?
The most recent blog post I did about Venezuela was one on a rogue's gallery of authoritarians in the Austrian magazine Profil (What does a democracy under internal threat look like? 10/16/2018):
Nicolás Maduro can legitimately be called a populist. But, to put it generously, the constant American polemics against Maduro and Hugo Chávez before him as dictators was always overblown. Prior to 2016, international observers of Venezuelan elections under both Chávez and Maduro, including the Carter Center, regarded their national elections as legitimate with strong safeguards against fraud. The US is openly engaged in a regime change effort against the current Venezuelan government and Trump has threaned to militarily invade the country. And the US government always become intensely concerned about human rights and democracy in countries that it is preparing to bomb and kill lots of their people. Also, not at all incidentally, Venezuela has the largest known oil reserves of any country in the world. Anyone who think that hasn't been the overriding concern of American policy toward Venezuela is disregarding the entire history of US dealings with Venezuela and the rest of Latin America. Venezuela is a petrostate heavily hit for years by falling oil prices and facing a protracted period of civil disorder that makes it particularly difficult to compare Venezuela's situation in 2018 with any of the other country's whose leaders feature in the Profil rouges' gallery.I'm outraged over Russian interference in the 2016 US election and over their malicious meddling in European politics and I think it all needs to be thoroughly investigated and Trump should be impeached and removed from office. But the Trump-Pence Administration and allied governments in Latin America just officially backed a coup in progress in Venezuela against an elected goverment. And, yes, Maduro was legitimately elected, however horrible you may think his government is.
Americans should be angry about Russian meddling in our politics because nations have to defend their sovereignty. But did I mention that the US just formally backed a coup attempt in progress in Venezuela against an elected government?
One last thought: the next time there's a foreign terrorist attack on an American target, how many of the politicians and pundits wringing their hands and asking, "Why do They hate us?" will mention any of this? Sadly, we all know the answer to that one, too.
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