Venezuela and Truth

The mainstream media covered Venezuela non-stop yesterday. They many times mentioned Delcy Rodriguez, Vice President, because Trump stated she is now in charge. They never mentioned that 2026 marks the 50th anniversary of the torture to death of her father, socialist activist Jorge Rodriguez, by the CIA backed security services of the US aligned Perez regime in Venezuela.

That would of course spoil the evil communists versus nice democrats narrative that is being forced down everybody’s throats.

Nor did they mention that the elected governments of Hugo Chavez reduced extreme poverty by over 70%, reduced poverty by 50%, halved unemployment, quadrupled the number receiving a state pension and achieved 100% literacy. Chavez took Venezuela from the most unequal society for wealth distribution in Latin America to the most equal.

Nor have they mentioned that Marina Corina Machado is from one of Venezuela’s wealthiest families, which dominated the electricity and steel industries before nationalisation, and that her backers are the very families that were behind those CIA controlled murderous regimes.

Economic sanctions imposed by the West – and another thing they have not mentioned is that the UK has confiscated over £2 billion of the Venezuelan government’s assets – have made it difficult for the Maduro government to do much more than shore up the gains of the Chavez years.

But that Venezuela is a major production or trafficking point for narcotics entering the USA is simply a nonsense. Nicolas Maduro has his faults, but he is not a drug trafficking kingpin. The claim is utter garbage.

The willingness of the West to accept the opposition’s dodgy vote tallies from the 2024 Presidential elections does not legitimise invasion and kidnap.

Yesterday almost every western government came up with a statement that managed to endorse Trump’s bombing and kidnap – plainly grossly illegal in international law – and simultaneously claim to support international law. The hypocrisy is truly off the scale. It is also precisely the western powers that support the genocide in Gaza that support the attack on Venezuela.

The genocide in Gaza demonstrated the end of hopes – which were extremely important to my own worldview – for the rule of international law to outweigh the brutal use of force in international relations. The kidnap of Maduro, the rush of western powers to accept it, and the inability of the rest of the world to do anything about it, have underlined that international law is simply dead.

In the long list of appalling awards of the Nobel peace prize, none can be worse than the latest to the Venezuelan traitor Maria Corina Machado, intended actively to promote and bring forward the imperialist attack on Venezuela by the United States.

It taks a great deal of effort to come up with a worse decision than to award Kissinger immediately after the massive bombing of Laos and Cambodia. It was a dreadful award, but it was intended to recognise the putative Paris peace deal and prod the United States towards honouring the peace process. Initially it was a joint award with Vietnamese negotiator Le Duc Tho (who sensibly declined).

The Kissinger award was a terrible mistake, but the Committee were seeking to end a war, starting from a willingness to cooperate with unprincipled realpolitik. In the award to Machado, they are deliberately seeking to endorse and promote the start of a war. That is a very different thing.

Similarly the award to Obama was a crazed moment of hope after the despair of the invasion of Iraq. It was a combined mistaken belief that Obama would be better, with a mistaken idea it would encourage him to be so.

I accept that the line I am drawing is a thin one; rewarding the perpetrators of western aggression is only a short step away from actually encouraging western aggression. But nevertheless a line has been crossed.

The gross hypocrisy of the morally bankrupt Committee chairman, Jorgen Watne Frydnes, in claiming that the prize is for non-violent action on Venezuela, at the very moment that Trump gathered the largest invasion force since Iraq off Venezuela make me feel thoughts towards Frydnes that ought not qualify me for any peace prize at all. I feel similarly towards Gutteres and all those others abandoning their supposed international role to lick Trump’s boot today.

So what now for Venezuela? Well, on the most optimistic reading Trump’s action was performative. He had to do something to avoid the Grand Old Duke of York jibes after that immense concentration of forces off Venezuela, and he has produced a spectacular that actually changes little.

On this reading. the Americans may be making the same mistake they made in Iran, in believing that decapitation strategy and bombing will spark internal revolution. In Iran, they actually strengthened support for the Government.

As of yesterday afternoon, the Bolivarian government in Caracas genuinely did not yet know what had happened, how far there was collusion in the armed forces in Maduro’s kidnap, and whether they still had the control of the army.

Trump’s plain signal that the US views Rodriguez as in charge, and Trump’s contemptuous dismissal of Machado – the only bright point in an appalling day – might give pause to any in Venezuela expecting active US support for a coup.

To those who claim Machado was a tyrant, I refer you to the comic opera Guaido coup of April 30 2019. Guaido had been declared President of Venezuela by the western powers despite never even having been a candidate. He attempted a coup and wandered around Caracas with heavily armed henchmen, declaring himself President but just being laughed at by the army, police and population.

In any country in the world Guaido would have been jailed for life for attempting an armed coup, and I expect in the majority he would have been executed. Maduro just patted him on the head and put him back on a plane.

So much for the evil dictatorship.

By pure chance, on Friday I had texted Delcy Rodriguez about arrangements for travel and accreditation so I could go and report from Venezuela and bring you more of the truth from that country that the media is hiding from you. I made plain I was not asking for financial support. Things are obviously fluid at the moment, but it is still my intention to get there.

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