In recent weeks, Venezuela has been rocked by violent demonstrators who, among other things, attacked government buildings, set fire to 19 popular clinics managed by Cuban physicians who were forced to flee for their lives, ransacked the offices of Attorney General Luisa Ortega Díaz, and torched the governor of Tachira's home. The street riots left a toll of three dead and 66 injured. “The regional South American organisation Mercosur — that includes Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela — has condemned the violent ‘attempts to destabilise Venezuela's democratic order',” said Juan Antonio Hernández, Venezuela's ambassador to Cairo, at a recent press conference. “While, on the other side of the equation, United States Secretary of State John Kerry has urged the Venezuelan government ‘to provide the political space necessary for meaningful dialogue with the Venezuelan people',” added Hernández, stressing that “Venezuela respects the right of peaceful demonstrations.” “However,” warned the ambassador, “this so-called opposition is composed of right-wing vandals aiming to destabilise and overthrow the Bolivarian government of Nicolas Maduro — our country's democratically elected president.” The opposition is headed by Leopoldo Lopez, leader of the far right Popular Will Party. Lopez is renowned for his role in the 2002 coup against Chavez and his ties to the CIA dating back to his student days at Harvard. He was recently arrested and charged with instigating crime, public intimidation, damage to public property, and intentional homicide. In 2011, he was barred from running for public office after he was found guilty of diverting public resources, while serving from 2000 to 2008 as mayor of Chacao. The opposition's aim is to the undermine security on the streets by creating chaotic conditions and thereby, if need be, pave the way for US intervention to restore order in its “own backyard” — the conventional US parlance used to legitimise CIA-led operations that historically crisscrossed Central and South America to overthrow rebellious regimes in Guatemala, Cuba, Chile, El-Salvador, Nicaragua and, more recently, Paraguay and Uruguay, among others. Last week, President Maduro expelled three undercover US embassy diplomats affiliated to the CIA. “We have evidence they're agents, they were under surveillance for the past two months. We've been watching them having meetings with students in the private universities,” explained Hernández. In Venezuela, the US-backed opposition is the same that instigated a coup against President Hugo Chavez in 2002; what they are doing essentially is replaying the same scenario. “Since then, though the actors have changed, the forces behind the siege are the same,” journalist Berta Joubert of the US-based El Mundo Obrero told Al-Ahram Weekly. “It's the Venezuelan oligarchy, backed by the US State Department that channels its funding through the US Agency for International Development and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).” Endowed with a deceptive aura of democracy, NED is an old hand at funding the right wing in Venezuela. Back in 2002, it channelled more than $1 million a year to replenish the coffers of the opposition in an effort to aid the overthrow of President Chavez. The coup was foiled, only because millions of Venezuelans took the streets and liberated Chavez from the presidential palace where he was held captive. Then, as now, the Venezuelan opposition's mode of operations relied heavily on media disinformation and economic sabotage. “The opposition media, which controls about 95 per cent of the country's media outlets, has lately transmitted allegations of police brutality and extrajudicial killings,” says Hernández. “To prove their point, they broadcasted and published recycled photos from other countries allegedly showing evidence of ‘cruel repression' by the ‘fascist assassins' among the Venezuelan police.” (http://tinyurl.com/ktyz9bk). As for economic warfare, part of the opposition's strategy has relied on manipulating the black market in an attempt to devalue the peso against the dollar and create inflationary pressures on the economy. Yet because they grossly underestimated Maduro, their machinations failed, writes Maria Paez Victorin Counterpunch. The Venezuelan president was quick to intervene by regulating the market, setting a price ceiling on retails and dollar exchange rates. To further pressure the economy in an attempt to trigger social unrest among the main beneficiaries of the Bolivarian revolution, Venezuela's poor, the opposition devised a strategy worthy of a Hollywood B-movie adventure film. They conspired to create food shortages by enlisting wealthy retailers to spree buy and thus deplete the market of basic foodstuffs such as corn flour, sugar, salt, cooking oil and toilet paper, among other items, reports Victor. The hoarded goods were then transported to Colombia on motorcycles, via a bridge specifically built to dump the foodstuffs across the border. As a result, Colombian byways were cluttered with thousands of bags of rotten food. The purchase and transport of the goods were presumably financed by the Obama administration's grant of some $5 million to Venezuela's opposition parties through 2014. This is not counting the hundreds of millions of dollars Venezuelan opposition groups gathered from NED and other right-wing US-based NGOs and think tanks. The motivation for such generosity is evident, given that the country with the world's largest oil reserves has exited from the US orbit since Hugo Chavez's election to the presidency in 1998. Worse still, his highly successful version of the Bolivarian Revolution has become a regional model. The Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), signed between Venezuela and Cuba in 2005, has meanwhile expanded to include nine countries, among them Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Dominica. ALBA represents a unique kind of trade agreement in modern history. This is because it invests in human development, putting people before profits. “Strong solidarity, mutual cooperation and aid between people must prevail, free from any interest in business or market profits. Benefits must improve the lives of the poor, the exploited and the discriminated,” reads the Cuban-Venezuelan joint communiqué, spelling out ALBA's principles. In practice “solidarity” and “mutual cooperation” has, for example, translated into the exchange of Venezuelan oil for the services of highly skilled Cuban educators and physicians. ALBA aside, Chavez was also instrumental in building a strategic alliance of Latin and South American states, focussed on regional integration. Formed in 2011, the Economic Community of Caribbean and Latin American States (CELAC) — an umbrella organisation of 33 country members and 600 million people — is the first autonomous regional organisation of its kind, exclusive of Canada and the North American superpower. During its January summit held in the Cuban capital, Havana, the assembled heads of state signed a “zone of peace” accord in the hemisphere, vowing to reject the use of arms and behave as respectful neighbours in conflict resolution. “As Cuban President Raul Castro said, the nations of our continent are committed to non-intervention in each other's internal affairs, to fully respect national sovereignty,” said Hernández. “This is also Venezuela's message to the US.”
