No War on Venezuela!

Speech given by CJ McCormick for the Anti-War Committee on 2/23/2019 at the Minnesota Peace Action Coalition protest in Uptown, Minneapolis as a part of a national day of action in solidarity with Venezuela

We must dispel State Department lies about Venezuela: Maduro’s election was fair until the United States saw a window for intervention. It’s the U.S. that installs dictators, not the Bolivarian Revolution, and no country which has suffered U.S. regime change has ever become more democratic. It’s the CIA’s playbook to falsely claim a foreign leader is un-democratic in order to justify invasion. And this isn’t even about democracy: It’s about oil!

The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and now Harvard: They would have us believe that Maduro stole reelection. That’s rich coming from the elites who hand-picked Juan Guaido, a man 81% of Venezuelans had never even heard of! To doubt the Venezuelan electoral process, which Maduro expedited by six months to May of 2018 at the request of his opposition, and which had over 300 international observers who audited 52% of its ballot machines against hand-counted votes – is the height of hypocrisy coming from a country where Trump lost the popular vote by 2.8 million ballots. The U.N. has praised Venezuela for cutting its hunger in half and becoming free of illiteracy under Chavismo, but our media blames Maduro for the artificial shortages of food, medicine, and financial capital from U.S. sanctions. They also report every mobilization of a few hundred to a few thousand people in support of the opposition, but conveniently forget about the more frequent protests numbering hundreds of thousands in support of their government and against intervention. Remember that the neutral polling firm Hinterlaces tells us that 86% of Venezuelans are against military intervention to remove Maduro and 81% disagree with the sanctions designed to remove Maduro. How’s that for Venezuelan democracy?

Dictatorship is an odd claim to make about a man who invited the U.N. to observe his election, a man who created a legislative body to literally rewrite the Venezuelan constitution after months of urging by his opposition parties. Parties who, by the way, proceeded to boycott the elections for this body – likely because, by their own internal polling, their approval rating can’t even break 30%! They accuse Maduro of “buying votes” with social programs continued from Hugo Chavez, who even the CIA recognized as improving the conditions of ordinary Venezuelans. To quote the CIA World Fact Book itself:

“[T]he Chavez administration reduced poverty from nearly 50% in 1999 to about 27% in 2011, increased school enrollment, substantially decreased infant and child mortality, and improved access to potable water and sanitation . . .”

This opposition calls for referendums, then boycotts them and commands the U.N. not to observe elections! Guaido himself, who U.S. media loves to label “democratically elected,” never ran for president! He was elected as representative of one region within Venezuela in 2015. And he didn’t wait for the “call of his people” – he waited for a call from vice president Mike Pence before declaring himself president without a single vote!

But electoral shadiness of the opposition is far from the end of it. Searching the name “Orlando Figuera” turns up reports on the dozens of Afro-Venezuelans these opposition parties have lynched in the streets. They are inviting aid marked strictly for Guaido and his supporters from Elliott Abrams, who used aid aircrafts to smuggle arms into Nicaragua three decades ago. The U.S. used forcing in humanitarian aid as pretext for turning Kosovo into a bloodbath in 1999! This is to say nothing of Air Bus N881YV out of Miami, whose “humanitarian aid” for Venezuela included 19 assault rifles and 118 AR magazines. Last I checked, starving children can’t digest bullets.

That Guaido’s fake government is a U.S. proxy and not democratically elected is further emphasized by two of his staff: Harvard University’s Ricardo Hausmann, who’s had a “morning after” plan for Venezuela for three years, and who wants a return to the “wonderful Venezuela of old,” when poverty consumed half the country while Indigenous and Afro-Venezuelans faced open discrimination. Then there’s Marco Rubio’s selection: Carlos Vecchio, an Exxon Mobil lawyer, furthering John Bolton’s wish of having “American oil companies invest in and produce the oil capabilities in Venezuela.” That Venezuelan oil profits go toward housing, education, and food subsidies and not the satisfaction of corporate American greed drives them insane! The CIA installed Sadam Hussein, but the second he tried to use Iraqi oil for Iraqi development, he became our enemy! As Haiti’s own democratically elected leader overthrown by the CIA, Jean-Bertrand Aristide says: It is all about “Privatization, privatization, privatization.”

Parroting the false myth of Maduro’s dictatorship justifies the militarism progressives claim to be against. Not only is Maduro not a dictator, but I know plenty of dictators installed by the United States: Pinochet, Armas, Suharto, Trujillo, Batista, Branco, the Shah – what makes you think Juan Guaido will be different?

Hands off Venezuela! Money for jobs and education, not for bombs or intervention!