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    Oscar Guardiola-Rivera - The Fire This Time in the Americas Archived Message

    Posted by johnhol on February 23, 2019, 7:09 pm

    Begins:

    The question isn’t whether this is a coup. The question isn’t whether Juan Guaidó’s self-proclamation of leadership of Venezuela, recognised by rightwing and far-right leaders of the Americas before it actually happened and immediately after by Donald Trump, is more or less legal than elected president Nicolás Maduro’s rule. Lawyers like Antonio Ecarri, vice president of the opposition party Democratic Action will spout their scholastic interpretations of article 233 of the Venezuelan constitution, which states that “when the president-elect is absolutely absent before taking office, a new election shall take place (…) And while the president is elected and takes office, the interim president shall be the president of the National Assembly.” They will argue that article 233 could be used because the absence is due to the “usurpation of the presidential office, which has left the position empty.”

    You may be forgiven for thinking their aim is to invalidate not only the last presidential election but also the very moment when former Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez was brought to power by the people who elected him back in 1998. Let me warn you against such an act of critique. However well-intentioned it may be, it is already a distraction.

    The ultimate aim of lawyers like Ecarri is not to demonstrate the legality of Guaidó or the illegality of Maduro’s rule, of which they are convinced already. Their aim is to erase the Venezuelan people; to vanish the role they played during the last decade and a half of the Bolivarian revolution from the annals of history and to proclaim their banishment from radical action in any future history. Why? Because these lawyers, along with puppet politicians like Guaidó, Colombian president Ivan Duque and Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, know very well that, from the outset, the Bolivarian revolution wasn’t about Hugo Chávez or Maduro. Neither of them created nor sustain the revolution. To paraphrase the Trinidad historian C. L. R. James, it was the revolution that made Chávez. Or, as Venezuelan organizers would tell journalists if they actually bothered asking them, neither Maduro nor Chávez created these movements. They pre-date both, as you would know if you were around as I was back on 27 February 1989.

    Chile and beyond.
    Venezuelans woke up to an austerity-like, International Monetary Fund-imposed package of structural adjustment that saw gas prices double overnight and consequently bus fares, foodstuffs and everything else. The popular eruption that followed, known as El Caracazo, opened the space for people to organise themselves against the spread of neoliberal and foreign debt service-related reforms, not only in Venezuela but elsewhere in the Americas. The key date in the minds of many Venezuelans is 11 September 1973. That day, Augusto Pinochet overthrew the elected socialist president of Chile, Salvador Allende. The script was the same as the one being followed today by Guaidó and his humanitarian patrons. In the midst of a profound economic crisis which included food and medicine shortages, Chile’s rightwing dominated legislature declared there was a power vacuum and a usurpation of power by Allende’s executive, thereby undermining support for Allende.

    The problem was that even after US sanctions had wreaked havoc, with Allende’s government unable to stop the economic downward spiral, the rightwing opposition couldn’t defeat the socialist in elections. So, in the eleventh hour they managed to turn the army generals Allende trusted most against him. The rest is tragedy. Sound familiar? It does to many Venezuelans on the ground. Even those who don’t know the story of Allende have heard of its more recent repetitions, which have taken place in neighbouring Colombia for the last two or three decades. At least 7m people have been forcibly displaced in Colombia to neighbouring countries like Ecuador and Venezuela, many more than the 2.3m who have left Venezuela as the economic situation worsens there. During this time, more people have been disappeared in the dirty war that the Colombian state and its army than in all of the dictatorships in the southern cone combined.

    Throughout all this, the lawyers, diplomats and political leaders have remained silent. These, of course, are the same people who signed a letter of support recognising Guaidó on 14 January 2019, an astonishing nine days before he proclaimed himself ‘interim’ president of the Bolivarian republic. In fact, one of them, the notorious Álvaro Uribe Vélez who presided over the darkest years of the war in Colombia, not only walks free, having allowed the US to establish a number of military bases in its territory, but also remains the most powerful politician in Colombia. Vélez even handpicked the then unknown Duque to lead his party to power after successfully painting the liberal Juan M. Santos as weak, corrupt, economically incompetent pro-Chavista, and a friend to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas and feminist struggles. Duque is now one of the two main South American players, the other being neo-fascist Bolosonaro of Brazil, in the ‘soft’ (for now) effort to oust Maduro.

    Continues:
    https://novaramedia.com/2019/02/21/the-fire-this-time-in-the-americas/

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