Opinion article published on August 20, 2024 in response to the events that took place after the Venezuelan Presidential Elections, in Other News.
Regarding the possible electoral fraud in Venezuela, I calmly await the decision of the Supreme Court of Justice. I have no reason to have less confidence in this court than in the Supreme Court of the United States, after it decreed total impunity for presidents, in obvious favor of Donald Trump, or in the Supreme Court of Brazil, after it kept Lula da Silva in prison without a firm sentence on the crimes for which he was convicted -unjustly, as it turned out-.
What prompts me to write is my bewilderment at the astonishing global news attention on Venezuela, all driven by the certainty that there has been fraud and that Nicolás Maduro is a bloodthirsty dictator. The genocide in Gaza seems like a video game episode compared to the gravity of what is happening in Venezuela. The crises in Sudan, Kenya, Tanzania, Nigeria and Guatemala are trivial compared to the horror in Venezuela. This global and politically monolithic focus on Venezuela reminds me of a recent one centered on Ukraine. Are we facing a new episode of propaganda warfare, an inherent part of the regime change strategy?
Anyone familiar with U.S. history knows that U.S. defense of democracy has always been subordinated to the economic and geopolitical interests of the country, defined by the dominant classes, economic groups or elites of the moment. The Latin American democratic left has had a tragic experience of this, so one might ask why the United States is so interested in the defense of democracy in Venezuela. In my opinion, the answer is relatively obvious. The U.S. wants to control the largest certified oil reserves in the world and close the doors of Latin America to China, as it has done in Europe. As has happened in many other countries (most recently in Ukraine in 2014), this is a regime change strategy.
Since the objective is the aforementioned, it supports those political forces that guarantee the safeguarding of that objective. In Venezuela, given the strong sovereigntist sentiment that goes back long before Hugo Chavez Frias, that guarantee is given by the more extremist and even fascist forces of Corina Machado. There is another opposition in Venezuela, some anti-Chavista, some formed by dissident Chavistas, democratic, moderate, some leftist, but it is never mentioned, because that opposition, however anti-Maduro it may be (and it is), is sovereigntist. Therefore, it is not reliable from the point of view of the economic and geostrategic interests of the United States.
About ten years ago, the situation in Syria was somewhat similar. There was a moderate democratic opposition to the Assad government, but it was not this opposition that had the support of the "international community". It was the Islamic extremists, and the reasons were the same. What is specific in the case of Venezuela is the enthusiasm with which part of the Latin American democratic left is aligned with the United States in this crusade. Officially it is the other way around, i.e., it is the United States that supports Latin American initiatives, but the official truth in this field is, at best, a half-truth. This sector of the Latin American left clearly shows that the defense of democracy takes priority over the defense of sovereignty. Not only does it join the "world clamor" about fraud, but it proposes new elections, even before the Venezuelan Supreme Court has pronounced itself.
In my opinion, this move is dangerous and even suicidal for Latin American democracy, given the international context in which we are entering. One does not need to be a sociologist to predict that the questioning of elections in a given country and the demand for new elections could be triggered in the near future, if the economic and geostrategic interests of the dominant power in the subcontinent so require. The embrace that some of the founding BRICS countries gave Nicolás Maduro will increasingly prove to be a fatal embrace, as Russia, China and Iran (soon to join the BRICS) have been in the U.S. crosshairs for years.
Another founding member of the BRICS is Brazil. If the interests of Brazil and the United States seem to coincide in the defense of democracy, it is hard to believe that the same is true of the BRICS. As much as it pains brilliant Brazilian diplomats to admit it, from the perspective of U.S. geopolitical interests, Brazil means two things: the Amazon and China's blockade of Latin America. As for the latter, the most the United States will accept is the split (and consequent weakening) of the BRICS, which it hopes may come about through a possible alliance between Brazil and Narendra Modi's India. If this does not happen, and if it is true that U.S. economic and geopolitical interests will always prevail in this region, it will not happen. If this does not happen, and if it is true that US economic and geopolitical interests always prevail in this region, it cannot be ruled out that in a few years we will be facing the "international outcry" of fraud in the Brazilian elections, demanding a recount of the votes and possibly new elections, even before the national institutions in charge of certifying the elections have pronounced themselves. The goal will always be regime change. In fact, this has already been attempted in Brazil, and in the most violent way, on January 6, 2023. This is unlikely to happen and, from the depths of my political convictions, I hope it never happens.
What worries me is that the procedure of putting a sovereign country in the alternative of repeating elections or becoming an international pariah is being legitimized by political forces that, if the lessons of history are anything to go by, are more likely to fall victim to it in the future. Finally, if this kind of defense of democracy were to prevail over everything else, one would predict that the same Latin American left, out of consistency, would then target Cuba. Fortunately, this is an erroneous prediction. Cuba has no natural resources and, in any case, after all that has happened since the Cuban Revolution, the United States can do without the help of left-wing Latin American governments to bring about regime change in the Caribbean.
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