The mainstream media covered Venezuela non-stop yesterday. They many times mentioned Delcy Rodríguez, 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 Rodríguez, by the CIA-backed security services of the US-aligned Pérez 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 Chávez reduced extreme poverty by over 70%, reduced poverty by 50%, halved unemployment, quadrupled the number receiving a state pension and achieved 100% literacy. Chávez took Venezuela from the most unequal society for wealth distribution in Latin America to the most equal.
Nor have they mentioned that María 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 Chávez years.
But that Venezuela is a major production or trafficking point for narcotics entering the USA is simply a nonsense. Nicolás 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 María Corina Machado, intended actively to promote and bring forward the imperialist attack on Venezuela by the United States.
It takes 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 Lê Đức Thọ (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, Jørgen 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 makes me feel thoughts towards Frydnes that ought not qualify me for any peace prize at all. I feel similarly towards Guterres 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 Rodríguez 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 Maduro was a tyrant, I refer you to the comic opera Guaidó coup of 30 April 2019. Guaidó 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 Guaidó 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 Rodríguez 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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Venezuela’s ambassador to the UN yesterday told the UN Security Council about the British regime’s funding of an anti-government coalition in Venezuela.
Here he is:
https://images.euronews.com/articles/stories/09/60/32/12/828x552_cmsv2_a959d1e0-64ae-51cf-a7d9-f05afef6de4e-9603212.jpg
holding up a printout of this article:
https://www.declassifieduk.org/revealed-uk-foreign-office-has-spent-nearly-half-a-million-pounds-in-aid-setting-up-anti-government-coalition-in-venezuela/
That article is 5 years old, but what else did he say? Were British military special forces involved in this week’s attack and kidnapping?
British company, the Vestey Group, a meat products company owned by the aristocratic Vestey family, had owned ranches in Venezuela since the early 20th century. The Vestey Group (specifically its local subsidiary Agroflora), lost significant cattle ranch holdings in Venezuela during the “agrarian revolution” led by President Hugo Chávez.
The seizures were part of a land reform program initiated under a 2001 law that allowed the government to expropriate “idle” or unproductively used land to redistribute to landless peasants.
Venezuela’s oil boom made farming uneconomic, many farm workers left the countryside for better paid jobs elsewhere. Food production declined and despite having large areas of fertile land Venezuela had to import most of its food. The land reform programme was intended to reverse this but the new small farmers faced numerous problems and production actually fell.
One of the biggest exporters of food to Venezuela is.. the US; $750 million in 2024.
Pears
We need more proof of this than your hearsay. I have seen opposite statements stating that diversifications of the economy was becoming more successful in Venezuela recently as the result of the vindictive and illegal sanctions.
Pears is correct here. According to DoS, Venezuela imported $800M worth of food from the US in 2024. However, at the same time the US imported $173M worth of agriculural products from Venezuela, mostly sea food. Total food imports to Venezuela in 2024 were $3B.
Pears Morgaine
I don’t dispute that there was financial mismanagement in Venezuela. That’s not unique though, look how the UK squandered North Sea oil revenues with Thatcher’s ideological drive in the early 1980s to lower upper rates of taxation in successive budgets.
I go back to what I said earlier though. It’s interesting how European and EU leaders all use the same agreed wording on Venezuela; how there needs to be “a transition of power” in Venezuela, i.e. not a re-run election under their observers, no, it’s got to be a transition of power. That is to say they want to put the opposition in power without any public say on the matter, like some colonial overlords. Probably because they have little confidence Venezuelans would endorse their preferred candidate, be it Machado or anyone else.
To help to understand US intervention in Venezuela the new National security document spells it out, the US is losing its hegemony all over the world, in Europe it has lost the Ukraine war but still needs its vassals in NATO to contribute 5% of the combined GDP of NATO counties approx $1.5 trillion dollars to its US Military Industrial complex, and at the same time encourage its partners [vassals] to take on more of its own defence. In effect the US, the leader of NATO will lead from behind. From the US point of view, this is wise since they make money from US arms sales to Europe while ensuring the buck stops with its vassals.
In other parts of the world China is the growing threat and must be contained [somehow] US arms sales to Taiwan are increasing and allies in East Asia like South Korea and Japan etc are being encouraged to confront China [like Ukraine was a spear to Russian vitals].
In the middle east US/Israel are lashing out at all Israels neighbors and at the same time ginning up a war with [they think] the last piece on the chessboard, Iran. Good luck with that.
These machinations are led by the US Military Industrial complex [Boeing, Lockheed Martin etc] the financial industrial complex led by the IMF and economic hit men like John Perkins, and the surveillance complex led by Peter Thiel and other Silicon valley billionaires.
All the above make it very difficult for Venezuela [or any smallish country to survive]. The US National Security document recognizes the new multi polar world and is going to ensure its place in the western hemisphere with the new and improved Donroe doctrine. I do not think it will work since Trump will not put boots on the ground in Venezuela and Delcy Rodríguez has come out fighting, she will need help from others, will it come?
Another reason Trump could be escalating conflict in Venezuela and the middle east is to placate Netanyahu, could be in order to distract us away from the Epstein files and the additional million more documents they have found. Who is Bubba?
Agreed – also to distract people from the rising prices of food in the US, thanks to his unhinged tariff regime, and the skyrocketing medical insurance premiums of Americans, thanks to his removal of Obamacare provisions.
“Bubba” is in an email in the Epstein files.
This Don Lemmon video on the release of the Epstein files, you must watch this unhinged MAGA woman going off the rails, this is hilarious, she also wants to know who Bubba is, thinking it could be MelaniaTrump when in fact it is Ghislaine Maxwell’s horse. 5 mins in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lbc8WX_e0-k
My starting point would be when Chavez was President. He nationalised and the US disliked that move. Quite credibly he improved the living standards of the ordinary Venezuelans. That was his ‘crime’.
The US retaliated by imposing illegal sanctions. They seized all of CITGO’s ( Venezuelan gas distributors based in the US) assets and even confiscated the Venezuelan Embassy. They kicked Venezuela out of the SWIFT system. The UK assisted by seizing Venezuelan gold that Chavez had lodged with the Bank of England. Now, the US blockades traffic in and out of Venezuela.
Now, the blame for economic hardship is all placed on Chavez and Maduro and their ‘socialism’ without factual reference or legal considerations.
The kidnapping of Maduro is patently illegal – but might is right.
I leave it at that for now.
According to a Guardian report the UK did not recognise the legitimacy of Maduro’s election, and that is why (at the request of the US) the transfer of the gold to Venezuela was blocked. The UK recognised the leader of the opposiiton Guaido as interim head of state, but with Maduro the de facto ruler, the blockade continued. Maduro’s successor, Delcy Rodriguez has condemned this as “piracy”, but IMHO the UK will likely not release the gold before it recognises a regime in Caracas as legitimate. it may take a general election with validation by respected observers like the UN and the Carter Center (who were not satisfied with Maduro’s election) to accomplish that.
M.J.
Consider – Guaidó had absolutely any electoral credibility – so where does UK gold seizure derive its legitimacy from?
As I understand, the UK’s gold seizure derived its legitimacy from not recognising the legitimacy of Maduro’s election. It had recognised the legitimacy of Guaido’s election, so if Maduro had stepped down and Guaido has assumed office, I believe the gold would have been duly released.
Therefore the best thing for Venezuela now may be for Delcy Rodriguez to call a general election immediately, let exiles like Machado return safely, and invite UN observers (and Carter Center people) as monitors, and do everything by the book where the recording of votes is concerned.
“and do everything by the book where the recording of votes is concerned.”
and turning a blind eye to blatant electoral malpractice in favour of the US’s preferred candidate, as in Romania and Moldova. In any case, if they use electronic voting, there is no chain of custody, so the result can be whatever the current powers that be want it to be. Let’s face it, the US, the UK and the others are never going to recognise an election that produces a Socialist government.
The U.S. doesn’t recognize the legitimacy of President Maduro’s election because the millions of dollars we spent for his opposition failed. We’ve been at war with Venezuela for decades because they nationalized their own oil, and that is Utterly Forbidden in the unwritten international law that says: ALL THE WEALTH in the Universe BELONGS TO US, signed, The Rich People.
Looks like Jeremy Corbyn dodged a bullet by losing the LP leadership.
“STOP: The Secretary of State Mike Pompeo just promised ‘Jewish leaders’ in the United States that he would stop Jeremy Corbyn coming to power here,” tweeted former British MP George Galloway. “Is this normal now? Is this what we’ve been led to? Is this good for Jews? For Britain? Really?”
“They did it in Latin America, Africa and Asia. Now the US government wants to overthrow democracy in Britain,” tweeted The Guardian’s George Monbiot. “Still waiting for a UK government spokesperson to express their outrage. Hello???” https://caityjohnstone.medium.com/uh-what-did-pompeo-mean-when-he-vowed-to-push-back-against-corbyn-8aa668c5416d
England to keep Venezuela’s gold, which is illegally held in the Bank of England – Trump’s minion regime following in his footsteps.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/britain-to-keep-venezuelan-gold/ar-AA1TFNY7?ocid=msedgntp&pc=U531&cvid=695d5323e45b459fbe9cb2e4ea663ee1&ei=14
How would members here react to a US annexation of Greenland? (I think that we are all opposed to Trump’s invasion of Venezuela?).
Obviously it would be disastrous for the current “Atlantic alliance”.
But would it be a Good Thing?
And if not what should W Europe and Canada do about it?
If anyone here knows Denmark well or has contacts who know it well, I’d be interested to hear whether there’s any kinda Trump-Kushner effort inside that country. This would be more important info than pronouncements by Donald Tusk, who’s doing little more than PR for weapons companies. Certainly if Denmark invoke Article 5 of the NATO treaty, then yes it’s the end of NATO. But what if they don’t? Denmark isn’t compradore-free. If it were, it wouldn’t be in NATO in the first place. But note well that even the end of NATO doesn’t mean e.g. the closing down of Fylingdales (where the USA almost certainly keeps some nukes), Menwith Hill, or the CIA’s London station. Similar statements could be made about Germany etc.
Glenn Greenwald explains why people change from being anti interventionists and viscerally defend Trumps campaign promises not to regime change governments in the future, then suddenly turn into warmongers. He shows Lindsey Graham almost having an orgasm alongside Trump explaining his stance on Venezuela, Colombia,Cuba and Greenland.
“Deranged Warmongering FREAK” Lindsey Graham Gets His Neocon Wish https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekLY21sIa40
https://phillippresswood.medium.com/the-gilgamesh-protocol-reading-the-subtext-of-the-venezuela-raid-d740f7ed1e68