Trump's Venezuela War Is The Final Phase In A Longtime Neo-Con Regime Change War.

Trump Has Kidnapped Venezuela's President, Nicolas Maduro, The Final Phase Of A Longtime Regime Change Campaign.

Trump carried out his regime change campaign in Venezuela, bombed the country and sent in troops to kidnap the country’s president, Nicolas Maduro.

After the operation, Trump boasted that the U.S. will run Venezuela and take the country’s resources, saying, “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies—the biggest anywhere in the world—go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country, We’re going to have a presence in Venezuela as it pertains to oil, We’re going to be taking a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground”.

Trump also said that the U.S. is “going to run” Venezuela, adding, “We’re not afraid of boots on the ground if we have to have. We had boots on the ground last night at a very high level, actually. We’re not afraid of it. We don’t mind saying it, but we’re going to make sure that country is run properly. We’re not doing this in vain”.

The Guardian noted that Trump added, “A US occupation ‘won’t cost us a penny’ because the US would be reimbursed from the ‘money coming out of the ground’, Trump said, referring to Venezuela’s oil reserves.”

The context around this brazen act of imperialism that has been missing from much of the coverage is that it is the final phase of a long-time Neo-con war on Venezuela that began under the George W. Bush administration, when Nicolas Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chavez, was elected.

A Longtime Regime Change Plot For Oil.

As journalist Vijay Prashad noted in a recent article, “In 2001, Chávez’s Bolivarian process passed a law called the Organic Hydrocarbons Law, which asserted state ownership over all oil and gas reserves, held upstream activities of exploration and extraction for the state-controlled companies, but allowed private firms – including foreign firms – to participate in downstream activities (such as refining and sale). Venezuela, which has the world’s largest petroleum reserves, had already nationalized its oil through laws in 1943 and then repeated in 1975. However, in the 1990s as part of the neoliberal reforms pushed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and by the large US-owned oil companies, the oil industry was substantially privatized.”

As Prashad noted, “When Chávez enacted the new law, it brought the state back into control of the oil industry (whose foreign oil sales were responsible for 80% of the country’s external revenues). This deeply angered the US-owned oil companies – particularly ExxonMobil and Chevron – which put pressure on the government of US President George W. Bush to act against Chávez.”

As he noted, “From 2001 till today, they have tried to overthrow the Bolivarian process – to effectively return the US-owned oil companies to power. The question of Venezuela, then, is not so much about ‘democracy’ (an overused word, which is being stripped of meaning) but about the international class struggle between the right of the Venezuelan people to freely control their oil and gas and that of the US-owned oil companies to dominate Venezuelan natural resources.”

Regime Changes Attempted Against Hugo Chavez.

Indeed shortly after Chavez was elected and nationalized the country’s oil and gas, the Bush administration tapped the CIA cutout USAID (US Agency for International Development) for a program of regime change in Venezuela and gave 15 million dollars to the agency and tapped it to “Penetrate Base/Divide Chavismo” Hugo Chavez’s political base, and “Isolate Chavez”.

The campaign ramped up in 2002 when the Bush administration backed a short lived military coup against Hugo Chavez, which was reversed when his supporters took to the streets and demanded he be reinstated.

As mother Jones noted, “In Venezuela, IRI (International Republican Institute, a subsidiary of the CIA cut out NED) staffed its program with Bush allies and campaign supporters; in turn, in 2001 the administration increased funding for IRI’s activities in Venezuela sixfold, from $50,000 to $300,000 — the largest grant any of NED’s democracy-promotion organizations received that year.”

Mother Jones noted:

At the time, all the major U.S. democracy-promotion groups were active in Venezuela, including both IRI and NDI. But documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act show that while NDI worked with parties across the political spectrum, IRI staffers spent much of their time cultivating the opposition. IRI worked closely with Acción Democrática, a group that, IRI’s own documents acknowledge, “refused to recognize the legitimacy of the Chavez presidency.” IRI also tutored opposition figures, including Caracas mayor Alfredo Peña, an outspoken Chavez critic, on how to create a political party. And despite a warning from the National Endowment for Democracy not to take sides in Venezuela, IRI also used its own money to bring opposition figures to Washington, where they met with top U.S. officials.

The outlet added:

In April 2002, a group of military officers launched a coup against Chavez, and leaders of several parties trained by IRI joined the junta. When news of the coup emerged, democracy-promotion groups in Venezuela were holding a meeting to discuss ways of working together to avoid political violence; IRI representatives didn’t attend, saying that they were drafting a statement on Chavez’s overthrow. On April 12, the institute’s Venezuela office released a statement praising the “bravery” of the junta and “commending the patriotism of the Venezuelan military.”

After the coup was reversed, the Guardian reported that, Elliot Abrams, a Bush administration official, “gave a nod to the attempted Venezuelan coup” and added that, “officials at the Organisation of American States and other diplomatic sources, …assert that the US administration was not only aware the coup was about to take place, but had sanctioned it, presuming it to be destined for success.”

It added, “The visits by Venezuelans plotting a coup… began, say sources, ‘several months ago’, and continued until weeks before the putsch last weekend. The visitors were received at the White House by the man President George Bush tasked to be his key policy-maker for Latin America, Otto Reich.”

The Bush administration also funded and coordinated with U.S. asset María Corina Machado, who, in turn, attempted regime change in Venezuela using different approaches.

Venezuelanalysis noted that her NGO Sumate was, “financed by the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and Development Alternatives, Inc. (DAI), all three of which are known across Latin America for their attempts to destabilize progressive governments under the guise of ‘democracy promotion’.”

In turn, Sumate was “behind the failed recall referendum against the Venezuelan President,” which attempted to remove Hugo Chavez through referendum, which failed after he won with 60 percent of the vote.

The Long-Term Campaign To Remove Maduro.

Trump’s recent kidnapping of Maduro has been the final phase in a long series of attempts to remove him, after he was elected president of Venezuela following Hugo Chavez’s death in 2013.

Early on in his presidency, the U.S. successfully swung the Venezuelan national assembly to the U.S. backed opposition and funded violent riots against him.

As journalist Michelle Ellner noted, U.S.-funded asset María Corina Machado “was also one of the political architects of La Salida, the 2014 opposition campaign that called for escalated protests, including guarimba tactics. Those weren’t ‘peaceful protests’ as the foreign press claimed; they were organized barricades meant to paralyze the country and force the government’s fall. Streets were blocked with burning trash and barbed wire, buses carrying workers were torched, and people suspected of being Chavista were beaten or killed. Even ambulances and doctors were attacked. Some Cuban medical brigades were nearly burned alive. Public buildings, food trucks, and schools were destroyed. Entire neighborhoods were held hostage by fear while opposition leaders like Machado cheered from the sidelines and called it ‘resistance.’”

Along with this, the Obama administration gave $300,000 to the National Democratic Institute, another subsidiary of the NED to, “mobilize a voter database that identified and targeted swing voters through social media” in the run-up to the 2015 national assembly elections.

Jacobin Magazine noted that, “indeed, in December 2015, the opposition won a majority in the Venezuelan National Assembly for the first time since Chávez came to power in 1999” adding, “the NDI claims credit for the opposition’s success, writing that this strategy ‘ultimately played an important role in their resounding victory in the 2015 election’ and that a ‘determining factor in the success of the coalition in the parliamentary elections of 2015 was a two-year effort prior to the elections”.

In 2015, the Obama administration began a series of increasingly harsh sanctions on Venezuela’s oil sector, the country’s main export.

In a detailed study, the Venezuelan opposition economist Francisco Rodríguez showed that U.S. sanctions prevented Venezuela’s oil production from recovering.

Francisco Rodríguez noted, “economic sanctions and other actions of economic statecraft aimed at the Venezuelan government have strongly impacted the country’s economic and humanitarian conditions” and “it is hard to deny that they have had a sizable negative impact on living conditions in the country”.

The Economists Jeffery Sachs and Mark Weisbrot documented that the sanctions on Venezuela’s oil sector caused 40,000 deaths from 2017 to 2019, noting that, “it is important to emphasize that nearly all of the foreign exchange that is needed to import medicine, food, medical equipment, spare parts, and equipment needed for electricity generation, water systems, or transportation, is received by the Venezuelan economy through the government’s revenue from the export of oil. Thus, any sanctions that reduce export earnings, and therefore government revenue, thereby reduce the imports of these essential and, in many cases, life-saving goods”.

Mark Weisbrot, in the LA Times, noted that the sanctions following this were even more severe, writing:

In Venezuela, the first year of sanctions under the first Trump administration took tens of thousands of lives. Then things got even worse, as the U.S. cut off the country from the international financial system and oil exports, froze billions of dollars of assets and imposed “secondary sanctions” on countries that tried to do business with Venezuela.

Venezuela experienced the worst depression, without a war, in world history. This was from 2012 to 2020, with the economy contracting by 71% — more than three times the severity of the Great Depression in the U.S. in the 1930s. Most of this was found to be the result of the sanctions.

By 2020, the former UN expert Alfred de Zayas found that the sanctions killed 100,000 people overall, and the UN noted that, “the economic blockade of Venezuela and the freezing of Central Bank assets have exacerbated pre-existing economic and humanitarian situation by preventing the earning of revenues and the use of resources to develop and maintain infrastructure and for social support programs, which has a devastating effect on the whole population of Venezuela, especially those in extreme poverty, women, children, medical workers, people with disabilities or life-threatening or chronic diseases, and the indigenous population”.

While ramping up U.S. siege warfare on Venezuela that began under the Obama administration, the Trump administration in its first term, attempted multiple coup attempts against Maduro, primarily by recognizing the unelected U.S. asset Juan Guaido as the president of Venezuela and getting to set up a fake “interim government” which the U.S. funnelled millions of dollars to.

Describing U.S. policy towards Venezuela during Trump’s first term, U.S. Senator Cris Murphy said, “First, we thought that getting Guaidó to declare himself president would be enough to topple the regime. Then we thought putting aid on the border would be enough. Then we tried to sort of construct a kind of coup in April of last year, and it blew up in our face when all the generals that were supposed to break with Maduro decided to stick with him in the end”.

Seeding the ground for the eventual kidnapping of Maduro, Trump’s Justice Department brought a bogus indictment against Maudro over false claims of a “Narco-Terrorism Conspiracy”in 2020.

Before Trump kidnapped Maduro, the first U.S. kidnapping attempt happened under the Biden administration.

The AP reported that- with support from the Biden administration- the U.S. DHS agent Edwin Lopez attempted to bribe Maduro’s pilot Bitner Villegas to kidnap him and bring him to the U.S. to face bogus drug charges.

After Villegas responded by saying, ““We Venezuelans are cut from a different cloth, the last thing we are is traitors”, Lopez made threats against his family with the AP noting, “Lopez tried one last time, mentioning Villegas’ three children by name and a better future he said awaited them in the U.S.” noting that Villegas said, “The window for a decision is closing, soon it will be too late”.

On the campaign trail in 2023, Trump openly announced his intention to continue his regime change war on Venezuela and take over the country, and its oil, saying, “When I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse, we would have taken it over, we would have gotten all that oil, it would have been right next door”.

Trump made good on his campaign threat and carried out the longtime Neo-con regime change plan, openly boasting about taking over Venezuela and its resources.

While Trump carried out the final escalation of this campaign, it should not be forgotten that it is a continuation of the policy from the Bush, Obama, first Trump, and Biden administrations.

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