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NYT Reconfirms U.S. Coup Plot In Venezuela – Adds Pro-Coup Propaganda
U.S. rejects claim by Venezuela's Maduro that U.S. envoys engaged in conspiracy – Reuters – May 22 2018
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. State Department said on Tuesday it rejected accusations by Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro that two top U.S. diplomats were engaged in what Maduro called a “military conspiracy” or had been meddling in the country’s economic and political issues.
Maduro earlier on Tuesday ordered the expulsion of U.S. charge d’affaires Todd Robinson and another senior diplomat, Brian Naranjo, ordering them to leave Venezuela within 48 hours.
As the saying goes: "Never believe anything in politics until it has been officially denied." The above denial confirmed Nicolas Maduro's claim of U.S. coup attempts against the Venezuelan government. A new report reconfirms the plot and reveals some new details of the still unwritten larger story.
Trump Administration Discussed Coup Plans With Rebel Venezuelan Officers – New York Times – September 8 2018
The Trump administration held secret meetings with rebellious military officers from Venezuela over the last year to discuss their plans to overthrow President Nicolás Maduro, according to American officials and a former Venezuelan military commander who participated in the talks.
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The administration initially considered dispatching Juan Cruz, a veteran Central Intelligence Agency official who recently stepped down as the White House’s top Latin America policymaker. But White House lawyers said it would be more prudent to send a career diplomat instead.
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After the first meeting, which took place in the fall of 2017, the diplomat reported that the Venezuelans didn’t appear to have a detailed plan and had showed up at the encounter hoping the Americans would offer guidance or ideas, officials said.
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The American diplomat then met the coup plotters a third time early this year, but the discussions did not result in a promise of material aid or even a clear signal that Washington endorsed the rebels’ plans, according to the Venezuelan commander and several American officials.
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Days later, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, who has sought to shape the Trump administration’s approach toward Latin America, wrote a series of Twitter posts that encouraged dissident members of the Venezuelan armed forces to topple their commander in chief.
The Venezuelan generals the U.S. diplomat plotted with, are under U.S. sanctions for alleged corruption and drug smuggling. Isn't it illegal to deal with them? The story claims that nothing came from these talks. I see no reason to believe that. One attempt may have failed. But the U.S. surely continues to cultivate such contacts to overthrow the Venezuelan government.
The NYT hack, Ernesto Londoño, also inserts this:
Establishing a clandestine channel with coup plotters in Venezuela was a big gamble for Washington, given its long history of covert intervention across Latin America. Many in the region still deeply resent the United States for backing previous rebellions, coups and plots in countries like Cuba, Nicaragua, Brazil and Chile, and for turning a blind eye to the abuses military regimes committed during the Cold War.
Only Cuba, Nicaragua, Brazil and Chile? It seems that a not-so-small number of other U.S. coups in South America are missing here, even very recent ones. Why is there no mention of the 2009 military coup in Honduras, which the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton avidly supported? And it was only during the Cold War that the U.S. turned a bling eye to torture? What about the ongoing abuses regimes in Latin America currently commit?
Then there is also this nonsense:
Most Latin American leaders agree that Venezuela’s president, Mr. Maduro, is an increasingly authoritarian ruler who has effectively ruined his country’s economy, leading to extreme shortages of food and medicine.
"Most Latin American leaders" obviously means those satraps the U.S. installed and supports. Even then it is doubtful that they say such things. The author just abuses them to introduce a false claim.
It is not Maduro "who has effectively ruined his country’s economy". Illegal U.S. sanctions against Venezuela, imposed under Obama as well as Trump, did and do that.
Max Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research explains on BBC (vid) how the U.S. is waging a brutal economic war against Venezuela. It is this war that caused the depression and makes a recovery from the induced hyperinflation nearly impossible. Billions of dollars that Venezuelan owns and needs are frozen in U.S. accounts. U.S. sanctions make it extremely difficult for the country to sell assets or to borrow money:
[W]ith Trump’s executive order, even if Venezuela were to stabilize the exchange rate and return to growth, it would be cut off from borrowing, investment, and proprietary sources of income such as dividend payments from Venezuela-owned but US-based Citgo Petroleum. This makes a sustained recovery nearly impossible without outside help—or a new government that is approved by the Trump administration.
Venezuela is a rich country. It has the biggest known oil reserves on the planet, though much of those are difficult to retrieve.
That is of course the reason why the U.S. wants to install a rightwing proxy government in Venezuela. It is the reason why it wages war against its people.
China is currently the only country with the necessary capacity and geopolitical standing to support Venezuela. It would the best for the country, and for the world, if China would come to its help.
Obviously Maduro and company don’t know much about international trade and currency management. The single greatest cause of Venezuela’s crisis is the government’s mismanagement of its currency. The problem stems from the coexistence of three different exchange rates, and the gulf between the lower of two official rates and the black market rate. They should have re-established a free float which would immediately end one of the major incentives for corruption, and would have quickly lead to an easing of scarcities, a rise in imports, and increased production. Why didn’t Maduro or Chavez do this? Perhaps to keep the military officials who are benefiting from the corruption happy (so they don’t heed opposition calls for a coup?) and keep import businesses happy. Those entities get provided dollars by the government at the lower official rate. These businesses and officials often trade these dollars on the black market in order to make obscene profits.
And its interesting that US diplomats are meeting with military officials under sanctions for drug trafficking and corruption. The thing is, the US’s local agents, the upper class comparador elite that ran the country for over 150 years, and were subservient to first London banking interests and then fully under US control after the 1890’s, are just too weak.
So without local agents, you need an army to invade. The other countries in the region have already voiced their displeasure with a US military invasion. And the pro-American elements of the army are outnumbered by the revolutionaries installed by Chavez. So, if/when Maduro is overthrown, the counter coup will be viscous, bloody and you’ll probably have an even more anti-US government.
You see the collapse of the rule of law and criminal gangs around Venezuela which is paralyzing the police. However, Maduro isn’t a guy who has killed tens of thousands in a purge of his opponents. He doesn’t like conflict and killing. But what’s destructive is he is naive and utterly clueless about economics, currency management, and international trade.
But one thing we have to remember its not just about a coup. The financial sanctions have had a big impact on Venezuela as well. 95% of Venezuela’s export revenue comes from oil sold by the state-owned oil company. Cutting off the government’s access to dollars has left the economy without the hard currency needed to pay for imports of food and medicine. Starving the Venezuelan economy of its foreign currency earnings has turned this into a full-blown humanitarian catastrophe.
Last year, Venezuela’s export revenues rose from $28 to $32 billion, cause of increased world oil prices. Under normal conditions, a rise in a country’s exports would leave it with more resources to pay for its imports. But in the Venezuelan case, imports fell by 31 percent during the same year. The reason is that the country lost access to international financial markets. Unable to roll over its debt, it was forced to build up huge external surpluses to continue servicing that debt in a desperate attempt to avoid a default. Meanwhile, creditors threatened to seize the Venezuelan government’s remaining revenue sources if the country defaulted, including refineries located abroad and payments for oil shipments.
So, for example, CITGO is not allowed to send a lot of money back to Venezuela. But even more importantly, they can’t borrow. So, they spent billions of dollars last year paying off loans. The government is paying off loans because they can’t borrow. And the sanctions actually prevents them from borrowing from the U.S. financial system or anything that goes through the U.S. financial system. And the financial institutions are very conservative about this, so even though there’s allowances for a certain kind of trade credits or loans that could be used to get food or medicine, they’ll cut that because they don’t want to get fined by the U.S. government.
If they want to restructure their debt, which would be a very big part of getting out of the depression and hyperinflation that they have right now, they can’t do that under the embargo either. They are trying to strangle the economy, and they’re trying to overthrow the government.
For those talking about socialism. The private sector, not the state (and still less the social economy), controls the overwhelming majority of economic activity (70%). There’s also historically been and even in recent times hoarding of food and basic goods (e.g. toilet paper, toothpaste, flour, etc.) by private producers opposed to the government, to deliberately manufacture scarcities and generate popular opposition. Then you have the gross incompetence of the government headed by a man who knows nothing about managing an economy or currency. Plus, the corruption. The currency crisis goes to terrible management not on what type of ideology government is there.
Posted by: Faazzla | Sep 8 2018 20:41 utc | 28
@ Posted by: james | Sep 8, 2018 4:47:10 PM | 30
Except that wasn’t what “Red Ryder” (8) said. He specifically said that all of Venezuela’s woes come from the fact that Maduro allegedly nationalised private property. This is doubly false, because 1) he didn’t do it and 2) even if he had, nationalisation of property doesn’t cause economic collapse.
To add insult to injury, he equates the USA to “God” (“Unless God intervenes, it will remain dead”). This is typical (Latin American) right-wing vocabulary. He may fool some mundane commenters from the MSM, but he won’t fool me: I can identify what ideology you belong just with a phrase you say, so don’t waste your time.
however, i think some of the l.a leadership has been corrupt and corrupted too..
Well, and what’s the news on that? Are you implying the socialists invented corruption in Latin America? The question remains: why does the USA, from all the very corrupt Latin American countries, chose Venezuela — the only non-corrupt (alongside Cuba) to invade? An analogy: why, from all the extremist Muslim countries in the ME, the USA chose to invade the only secular (Syria) regime left? The USA, obviously, doesn’t care about ending corruption or extremism, let alone promote “democracy”.
All I can say (and I too, have many people in Venezuela) is that there is not systemic corruption in the Bolivarian government. Until now, no accusations with proof arose, and there won’t be any, because there isn’t and there wasn’t.
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About the whole climate on the comments here.
I really don’t see the enigma many here are trying to solve: Venezuela was always a very poor country governed by very corrupt elites. That’s why the Bolivarian Revolution happened in the first place. That doesn’t mean the Revolution promised to deliver an Eden from day 1, just to make people’s lives better. And that happened: Venezuela now has, for the first time ever: a pension system, universal basic education, a directly elected judiciary, and a minimum wage policy.
Yes, the multiple currencies system is bad, but it is a symptom, not the cause, of the inflationary crisis in Venezuela. Venezuela is in a civil war, where the right-wing, who controls commerce and grains production, is besieging its own people, fuelling up black market, which fuels up inflation.
Posted by: vk | Sep 8 2018 23:02 utc | 53
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