Nobel Peace Prize winner, President Barack Obama has
declared Venezuela an extraordinary threat to the United States of America and
has initiated economic sanctions against the government. Nicolas Maduro, president of the oil rich
socialist nation, has been on the Obama Administration’s Latin American hit
list for a long time. So it’s coup, coup
ca-choo Venezuela.
Earlier in the year Vice President Joe Biden was slithering
around Venezuela meeting with opposition leaders to lay the foundation for a violent
coup against the Maduro government.
Think you’ve seen this movie before? In my blog post “Ukraine Meet Your Future,Wash Rinse Repeat” I described the coup blue print as such:
Excerpt:
For so long now, the robotic
motions of: 1) preemptively attack a cash poor, resource rich country, 2)
remove their leader, 3) steal or give away the rights to all their resources,
4) provide a democratic “election” for a new leader who is Western friendly
from a pool of pre-approved candidates and 5)
foment unending chaos and war for profit. Wash, rinse, repeat.
I believe Nicolas Maduro knows the formula, after all he has
banned U.S. officials from entering his country calling them terrorists. According to the Washington Times, Biden was
quite busy during his February trip to Venezuela for an “energy summit” in
Caracas.
Excerpt:
Vice President Joseph R. Biden met
Wednesday at the White House with the spouse of a jailed Venezuelan opposition
leader just a week after the South American nation’s president accused Mr.
Biden of actively helping to plot a coup against him.
Sources familiar with the meeting
said Lilian Tintori, whose husband Leopoldo Lopez was arrested last February in
Caracas, pressed Mr. Biden and others in the Obama administration to be more
aggressive in condemning human rights violations in Venezuela.
Mr. Biden’s office confirmed the
meeting had taken place, saying in a statement that the goal was to “underscore” the administration’s “commitment in promoting
human rights around the world.”
Jiminy Cricket, do those assholes even hear themselves? They are meeting with CIA assets, conspiring
to overthrow the Venezuelan government in a coup just like they did in Ukraine. So who is this guy Leopoldo Lopez that has
been in prison since last February? From
Bloomberg News, February 2014:
Excerpt:
….Leopoldo López tweeted on Feb. 15
after Venezuelan police raided his home. The unofficial head of Venezuela’s newly active opposition movement,
López, 42, was addressing President Nicolas Maduro, who has been in office
since April 2013, following the cancer-related death of his mentor, Hugo
Chávez.
Three days before, Maduro issued an
arrest warrant for López, charging him
with terrorism and murder after gunmen opened fire on a thousands-strong
antigovernment demonstration as it was dispersing in Caracas.
Maduro’s people say protesters, led
by López, initiated the violence. The demonstrators say the authorities opened
fire to scatter the crowd, and killed three.
Man oh man, its déjà vu all over again. So the Obama Administration denies they are
conspiring to overthrow the government of Venezuela.
Mr. Maduro said Mr. Biden was
trying to foment his ouster during a Caribbean energy summit the U.S. vice
president hosted last month in Washington. He
claimed the U.S. vice president had told regional heads of state attending the
summit that the government in Caracas was near collapse, and they should
abandon it.
The accusation came as a surprise,
since Mr. Maduro and Mr. Biden had been photographed while shaking hands and
expressing mutual interest in warmer relations during an impromptu meeting a
month earlier in Brazil.
Never trust a snake like Biden, next thing you know his ne’er
do well son, Hunter will be running your energy companies. These people are such clumsy liars.
While the U.S. remains a
significant buyer of Venezuelan oil, the recent developments have cast a shadow
over hopes that the two nations might improve their long-rocky relationship in
light of the Obama administration’s recent push for a thaw in relations with
Cuba, Caracas‘closest strategic and ideological ally.
Hey, wasn’t the Obama Administration’s State Department rep
in Cuba meeting with “dissidents” just as America was opening relations with
the Castro’s? From Think Progress:
Excerpt:
The highest-ranking U.S. diplomatic
official to visit Cuba in more almost 40 years met with seven leading
dissidents there on Friday, to the seeming annoyance of the communist nation’s
leadership.
U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Roberta
Jacobson had breakfast with dissidents on Friday after a day of talks with the
regime focused on the practicalities of restoring long-dormant diplomatic
relations.
But leaders in Havana saw the
decision to speak with a wider range of Cuban civil society as meddlesome
interference in the country’s internal affairs.
Coup, coup ca-choo Cuba.
So what did Maduro do in response to the Obama sanctions? He declared U.S. politicians terrorists and
instituted a requirement for American visitors to obtain visas to travel in
Venezuela. From The Anti-News:
Excerpt:
(ANTIMEDIA) Venezuelan President
Nicolas Maduro recently announced that VISAs are now mandatory for US citizens
visiting the country.
He also banned George W. Bush and
Dick Cheney from Venezuela, among other American politicians, calling them
terrorists for their war crimes…
“Former US President George W.
Bush, former Vice President Dick Cheney, and Republican Congress members Ileana
Ros-Lehtinen, Robert Menendez, and Marco Rubio will be denied visas into the
country, labeling Bush and Cheney as “terrorists.””
… “In order to protect our
country…I have decided to implement a system of compulsory visas for all
Americans entering Venezuela,” the president said in a speech.
So Obama is hell bent on overthrowing Maduro whose oil based
economy has been suffering since the price of oil has cratered after being
manipulated by Saudi Arabia.
But the absolute gall of the Obama/Biden cabal knows no
limits. Take these recent statements by
Obama as reported by teleSUR TV:
Excerpt:
President Barack Obama declared
Venezuela an “extraordinary threat to national security” March 9 on the basis of alleged human rights abuses
and political corruption. This is part of an ongoing U.S. campaign of
aggression toward Venezuela, which includes actively supporting right-wing
Venezuelan opposition forces in fomenting chaos and instability in attempts to
execute a coup against President Nicolas Maduro…
Yep that’s the “new” America brought to you by the United
States Senate and Supreme Court coup.
Human rights, democracy, and
anti-corruption are supposedly core values of U.S. foreign policy, yet these
buzzwords are reduced to little more than rhetorical tools for the U.S. in
crafting its own narrative about the countries in the region to suit its own
political and economic agenda.
For example, human rights is never
portrayed as a serious issue for U.S. allies like Mexico and Honduras, both of
which have high rates of murder, femicide, human rights abuses, and political
repression. A few case studies in hypocrisy demonstrate that the U.S. interest
in portraying itself as the global champion of democracy and human rights is
highly selective and politically strategic.
Hmmm “human rights” in Mexico and Honduras isn’t of any
importance to the Obama Administration.
On January 6, Obama met with
Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto at the White House. Prior to the meeting,
a senior administration official said Obama
was looking to partner with Mexico to encourage “positive change in Cuba
and reinforce democratic principles.”
Obama is partnering with Mexico to promote “human
rights?” That would be laughable if it
weren’t so deadly.
Peña Nieto had been lauded by
political and media elites in the United States. For example, the 47-year-old
photogenic Mexican president adorned the cover of the February 24, 2014,
edition Time Magazine with a gushing, accompanying story entitled “Saving
Mexico”--a story that was much derided as a puff piece.
Nieto and his predecessor Calderon both came to power in
Mexico through “made in America sham elections.” A gushing press in America is all we have
left, because any investigative reporters that delve into the corruption in America’s
government are charged with espionage.
Seven months later Peña Nieto and
his “new” Mexico would be unmasked. On Sept. 26, 43 students from the
Ayotzinapa teacher training college were disappeared and six others killed in
the Mexican State of Guerrero.
This horrifying event sparked
outrage across the country. Protests mushroomed across Mexico, not only to
demand the safe return of and justice for the students, but for the indignation
of the Mexican state’s involvement and
complicity in this case and scores of others like it…
Since 2008, when Pena Nieto’s
predecessor Felipe Calderon executed
Plan Mexico, there have been over 42,000
people disappeared in the country, according to a 2013 report by Mexico's
National Human Rights Commission. In addition, the drug war has killed well over 100,000 Mexicans.
And that is the human rights that the Obama/Biden
Administration want to bring to Cuba.
And as for Obama’s other partner in bringing “positive results and human
rights” to Cuba, Honduras well I’ll let teleSUR tell the story:
In June 2009, a U.S.-backed coup
ousted Honduras’ democratically-elected President Manuel Zelaya. Amid popular
cries of unconstitutionality in Honduras and throughout the region, coup perpetrators, including four generals
trained at the U.S.-based School of the Americas, installed a de facto coup
regime that committed widespread human rights violations, after Zelaya was
whisked out of the country.
Latin American leaders and regional
bodies were quick to denounce the coup and demand the return to democracy.
However, the Obama administration
did not ask for Zelaya’s reinstatement and
refused to label the crisis a military coup.
Zelaya’s modest shift to the left,
including raising the minimum wage, buying oil from Venezuela, and joining
ALBA, ruffled right-wing feathers and gave fodder for framing Zelaya as
“another Chavez” to justify his ouster….
Yep, if you are an elected leader of a cash poor, resource
rich country that believes in the dignity of human life, believe that your
people deserve a living wage and that oil revenues should be used to improve
the living standards for your people, you are a candidate for coup, coup
ca-choo.
And how have the people of Honduras fared since the coup,
coup ca-choo?
Since the coup, Honduras has notoriously become known as the “murder
capital of the world.” Violence has indeed soared, but it’s not a
coincidence. Rather, it is a consequence of police corruption, increased
militarization (including the introduction of a controversial hybrid
military-police force), extrajudicial killings, impunity, and extreme
neoliberal politics that – with the
helping hand of the U.S. – exacerbate inequalities while harshly criminalizing
dissent.
And remember all those children pouring in over the southern
border that O’Biden (sic) wants to fast track citizenship for? From Common Dreams:
Excerpt:
If you're reading this, you
probably follow the news. So you've probably heard of the latest iteration of
the "crisis at the border": tens of thousands of children, many of
them unaccompanied by an adult, crossing the desert from Mexico into the United
States, where they surrender to the Border Patrol in hope of being allowed to
remain here permanently…
The fact that Honduras is the
biggest source of the exodus jumped out at me. That's because, in 2009, the
United States government — under President Obama — tacitly supported a military
coup that overthrew the democratically elected president of Honduras.
"Washington has a very close
relationship with the Honduran military, which goes back decades," The
Guardian noted at the time. "During the 1980s, the US used bases in
Honduras to train and arm the Contras, Nicaraguan paramilitaries who became
known for their atrocities in their war against the Sandinista government in
neighbouring Nicaragua."
Honduras wasn't paradise under
President Manuel Zelaya. Since the coup,
however, the country has entered a
downward death spiral of drug-related bloodshed and political revenge killings
that crashed the economy, brought an end to law, order and civil society, and
now has some analysts calling it a "failed state" along the lines of
Somalia and Afghanistan during the 1990s.
Another success story for the “new” America. So, what did the UN and other Latin American
nations have to say about the Honduran coup, coup ca-choo? According to The Guardian:
Excerpt:
The military coup that overthrew
Honduras's elected president, Manuel Zelaya, brought unanimous international condemnation.
The O’Biden Administration could care less. This is the “new” America run out of the
bowels of the Pentagon.
The first statement from the White
House in response to the coup was weak and non-committal. It did not denounce
the coup but rather called upon "all political and social actors in
Honduras to respect democratic norms, the rule of law and the tenets of the
Inter-American Democratic Charter".
This contrasted with statements
from other presidents in the hemisphere, such as Lula da Silva of Brazil and
Cristina Fernandez of Argentina, who denounced the coup and called for the
re-instatement of Zelaya. The EU issued
a similar, less ambiguous and more immediate response.
I’ll bet the EU regrets they ever threw their lot in with
the illegitimate Bush/Obama administrations. From BBC News:
Members of the Alba regional group
expressed their support for Venezuela on Tuesday in the face of increasing
tensions between the US and Venezuela.
At an emergency summit, Latin
American left-wing leaders urged the US to repeal an executive order which
declared Venezuela a threat to the national security of the US…
Tension shot up after the US published
an executive order on 9 March announcing sanctions on seven Venezuelan officials suspected by the US of committing
human rights abuses…
In the order, US President Barack Obama
stated that the situation in Venezuela, including "the government's
erosion of human rights guarantees (...) constitutes an unusual and
extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United
States"…
"Venezuela has no plans, did
not have, nor will it ever have plans to attack the United States or hurt
anyone," Mr. Maduro said at the Alba summit in the Venezuelan capital,
Caracas.
He received strong backing from the Cuban leader, Raul Castro.
Mr. Castro, who announced a rapprochement
between his government and that of the US in December after decades of
animosity, said that "the US needs to understand once and for all that it
cannot seduce or buy Cuba, just as it cannot intimidate Venezuela".
Bolivian President Evo Morales said that "the US government
must understand we are not living in imperial times of the past".
Evo Morales said Latin American nations stood united against "US
imperialism"
Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega said that it was the US and not Venezuela which was "a threat to
global security, this is not rhetoric, it is reality".
Ecuadorean Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino questioned what the US,
a country which he said "has made
torture legal and (...) developed
the most powerful mass surveillance system", could teach Latin American
nations about human rights.
At a Senate hearing in Washington,
the US Deputy Assistant Secretary for South America and Cuba, Alex Lee, meanwhile urged Latin American
nations "to emphasize to the [Venezuelan] government the absolute importance
of holding free and fair elections".
She means an “American made sham election.”
Parliamentary elections are due to
be held in Venezuela later this year. The exact date has yet to be announced.
Mr. Maduro won the presidential
polls in 2013 by a razor-thin margin.
Opposition leader Henrique Capriles
cried foul, but following an audit of the electronic voting system, the
election authority confirmed Mr. Maduro's poll victory of 50.7% of votes to Mr.
Capriles's 49.1%
I have a quiz, what do the Latin American countries have in
common? Answer “Monsanto”
Venezuela 1993 -
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez Frias has announced that the cultivation of genetically modified crops will be prohibited on Venezuelan soil, possibly establishing the most sweeping restrictions on transgenic crops in the western hemisphere…
Before a recent international gathering of supporters in Caracas, Chavez admonished genetically engineered crops as contrary to interests and needs of the nation's farmers and farmworkers. He then zeroed in on Monsanto's plans to plant up to 500,000 acres of transgenic soybeans in Venezuela.
Chavez emphasised the importance of food sovereignty and security…. Instead of allowing Monsanto to grow its transgenic crops, these fields will be used to plant yucca, an indigenous crop, Chavez explained. He also announced the creation of a large seed bank facility to maintain indigenous seeds for peasants' movements around the world.
Imagine that, a country who actually stands up to Monsanto on behalf of their farmers. After the 2000 coup in the United States of America.
Venezuela 2002 - From The Guardian:
Washington's involvement in the
turbulent events that briefly removed left-wing leader Hugo Chavez from power
last weekend resurrects fears about US ambitions in the hemisphere.
It also deepens doubts about policy
in the region being made by appointees to the Bush administration, all of whom
owe their careers to serving in the dirty wars under President Reagan.
One of them, Elliot Abrams, who
gave a nod to the attempted Venezuelan coup, has a conviction for misleading
Congress over the infamous Iran-Contra affair.
Man, the world must have been heartsick after watching the
Supreme Court and the United States Senate overthrow our government and all
those lunatics from Reagan’s administration with their “new world order” plans
all set to go. And remember President
Clinton left a $5 billion dollar surplus to play with.
What does the United Nations have to say about Venezuela’s
human rights record?
From TeleSUR:
Excerpt:
Alicia Barcena, executive secretary
of the U.N. Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC),
praised Venezuela Thursday for its efforts to eradicate poverty in the country.
Barcena, who was in Venezuela at
the invitation of President Nicolas Maduro, visited working class communities
in the capital of Caracas to familiarize herself with the social programs of
the Venezuelan government.
Looks like Venezuela just got a seat on the U.N. Security
Council against the strong objections of the “new” America. America wanted Turkey to get the seat, you
know that paragon of human rights.
UNITED NATIONS — Despite objections
by the United States, Venezuela secured a seat on Thursday at the global table
of high power, the United Nations Security Council, while Turkey, a vital but
complicated American ally, was resoundingly defeated.
So war drums are beating and war is in their blood. From Black Agenda Report:
Excerpt:
U.S. manic belligerence towards
Venezuela may seem counterproductive, given Washington’s growing isolation in
Latin America. But the logic of imperialism dictates that it must destroy the
Venezuelan model of economic and political development. “Venezuela is no threat
to US ‘national security,’ but its resistance to Empire is a threat to US
hegemony.”
So, its coup, coup ca-choo Latin America, and like in the
song “Mrs. Robinson” any way you look at it you lose.
By Patricia Baeten
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