I don’t know if it was at the start of this week or at the end of last week, but at some point recently I wondered aloud what became of the Trump administration’s coup plan in Venezuela. It seemed to have fizzled rather badly, despite their best efforts … but then this week it sprang back to life like Frankenstein’s monster. Washington’s hand-picked maximum leader of that unfortunate country, Juan Guaido, appeared in a cell-phone video surrounded by what appears to be a handful of soldiers, declaring himself president once again. This is, of course, not a coup, we’re told, because officials of the United States government have decided that Guaido is the legitimate president of Venezuela. Nothing screams freedom more than leaders selected by the regional hegemon.
Naturally, our execrable National Security Advisor John Bolton and our equally fragrant Secretary of State Michael Pompeo are behaving as if whatever they say randomly just has to be true. Pompeo claimed to CNN that Maduro had a plane ready to fly to Havana, but was talked out of it by the Russians. This doesn’t appear to be anything near the truth, it will surprise you to hear. Let’s just say these gentlemen have some serious credibility issues. As ham-fisted as they are, though, it’s hard to overstate the pressure that the United States can apply to a country like Venezuela. We basically control the international financial system, and Caracas has been cut off from the banking, loans, etc., since Trump applied sanctions in 2017. They are making the economy scream, as Nixon/Kissinger did with Chile in 1973, and this could bring the roof down eventually. (See the Center for Economic and Policy Research paper on these sanctions for more.)
We know from the Iraq debacle, and other comparable debacles before and since, that craven policy makers like Bolton, Pompeo, and Elliott Abrams can break a country in half, if we let them. What they’re not so good at is putting it back together (not that possessing that particular skill would make it in any way a worthy enterprise). There’s a better than fair chance that they will succeed in crushing the Maduro government, but very likely that will not be the end of it. Venezuela may be plunged into a bloody civil conflict that could last for years, perhaps decades. Not that such an outcome would be any skin off of Bolton’s ample nose, nor Abrams’. They’ve come through their previous disasters without a scratch. That’s more than I can say for their targets.
The only thing that can stop them is us. We need to raise our voices on this now, before it’s too late.
luv u,
jp
Omar is the perfect target for Trump. She’s a woman, a person of color, an immigrant from Somalia, and a Muslim who, like many Somali women, wears a headscarf. The orange-faced jackass has attacked all of those things separately on many occasions – by attacking Omar, he gets more bang for the buck. Would that he were the only one so eager to jump on her over an anti-AIPAC tweet. Democratic leadership really showed their ass this week, following up on their shameful support of Trump’s Venezuela policy from the previous week. A really poor performance. Still, Trump and Kevin McCarthy both get extra credit for crying antisemitism when their own track records on bigotry are unambiguously offensive. Both McCarthy and Trump made George Soros the bête noir of the mid-term campaign last year. Not subtle.
Abrams was an essential player in Reagan’s war on Central American peasantry throughout the 1980s. He worked to cover up the hideous El Mozote massacre in El Salvador at the end of 1981, then went on to flak for that murderous government for the balance of his tenure. He defended the mass murderer Rios Montt in Guatemala during that period under the banner of anti-communism – a position he has proudly owned up to ever since, even though the former Guatemalan dictator was posthumously convicted of genocide in his home country (and the United States was called out by the court for supporting him). He was convicted as part of the Iran-Contra prosecution, then pardoned by pappy Bush so that he could soldier on into junior’s administration and make a mess of our policy toward Haiti, Israel Palestine, and everything else he could get his greasy hands on.