by The Swoozler
What countries come to mind when you think of oil reserves? Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Russia, the US? Nope. By far the world’s largest proven oil reserves are in Venezuela, as are the largest gold reserves in the Western Hemisphere.
This doesn’t say it all on the face of it, but we have certainly killed millions to help multi-national mega corporations extract other nations natural resources in the past.
To fully understand the situation, we need to go way back to 1823, to President James Monroe’s “Monroe Doctrine.” This claimed the entire western hemisphere should be subjugated to the USA. It stopped further European colonization.
Next stop, 1904, where European bankers threatened armed intervention across South American to recoup debts. President Theodore Roosevelt built on the Monroe Doctrine with his own Roosevelt Corollary.
Roosevelt proclaimed that the US had the right to exercise international police power throughout the Western Hemisphere.
Since then, the US has led regime changes, wars, and/or coups in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Honduras, Guatemala, Haiti, Panama, Grenada, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Bolivia, Chile, Bolivia Ecuador and Argentina.
With all these countries it was basically the same situation. They were rich in natural resources, that US corporations wanted and they wanted to control their own natural resources. We called them socialist, and some of them were.
Hugo Chavez was elected President of Venezuela in 1999, on a socialist-Marxist platform. He helped the people by strengthening and nationalizing key services. Many Venezuelans saw doctors and sent their kids to school for the first time in their lives.
To understand Venezuela today, we must look at Cuba. Chavez fostered close economic and political ties to Castro’s Cuba.
In 1959, Castro led a successful revolution against the violent and oppressive US oligarch supported Batista regime.
Since then, the US has waged economic, political and asymmetric (read: terrorism) war on Cuba. For its part, Cuba has adapted and resisted– thumbing their nose at the Monroe Doctrine and the Roosevelt Corollary.
Cuba remains a thorn in the side of U.S. imperialism, right in its own front yard.
Both Chavez and Castro are devout Marxists. They call thier movement Bolivarism, after Simon Bolivar, the equivalent in Latin America of our George Washington.
Back to Venezuela.
On April 11, 2002, Pedro Carmona, was the face of a CIA-backed coup. Carmona wanted to privatize the oil industry, and end the free medical and educational programs that were lifting everyday Venezuelans out of poverty. The coup was briefly successful, Carmona was sworn in, the United States quickly recognized the coup leaders as the legitimate rulers of Venezuela and proceeded to abolish the supreme court, the National Assembly, but then…
The people rallied behind Chavez with mass protests that shut the country down, and with a few loyal military units, they quickly overthrew the coup, and forty-seven hours after he was forced to abdicate, Chavez returned to power.
Like the endless low-level war we have waged against Cuba, Venezuela has had to endure almost 20 years of crippling economic unilateral sanctions that have killed hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans, and 20+ years of coup attempts on meddling by the CIA, State Department, and USaid.
The US has been choking Venezuela with extreme and severe sanctions since 2006. Additional sanctions were added under Obama, Trump, and Biden. This has crippled the Venezuelan economy by making it difficult to attract investors or tap into their immense oil wealth.
Scholars Joe Emersberger and Justin Podur documented at least six coup attempts against the Chavista governments, in their book, Extraordinary Threat: The U.S. Empire, the Media, and Twenty Years of Coup Attempts in Venezuela.
In recent years we have seen even more coup attempts.
In 2020, a number of U.S. mercenaries were busted in a plot that has become known as the Bay of Piglets.
In 2024, five CIA tied Americans were arrested by Venezuelan authorities with a cache of over 400 machine guns, one of the arrestees was an active duty Navy SEAL Petty Officer First Class Wilbert Joseph Castañeda. All while the State Department was spreading misinformation and undermining the election results, even before the election was over.
Just last month, on Oct. 6, Venezuelan authorities announced the arrest of opposition plotters planning to bomb the U.S. embassy in Caracas. Then on Oct. 27 Venezuela announced the foiling of another false-flag attack that was aimed at a U.S. Navy vessel in the Caribbean.
Combating narco-terrorism is false pretext on par with ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction,’ which duped us into invading Iraq. According to public DEA documents, Columbia, Ecuador and Mexico are, in reality, the top three exporters of cocaine.
But that hasn’t persuaded MAGA regime, which are currently engaged in extra judicial killings in international waters with no evidence they were smugglers and not fishermen. At least 15 boats have been bombed and an unknown number of people killed.
Maria Corina Machado, the recent winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, has been pushing for regime change, in Venezuela, for decades. She has applauded the bombing of Venezuelan ships on the high-seas, and has asked both Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu to invade her country and violently overthrow the current president Nicholas Muduro.
Machado wants to starve everyday Venezuelans as she is calling for even more severe sanctions.
The bipartisan U.S. imperialist project simply can’t abide a socialist government in Latin America, especially when they are sitting on so much oil. The US desperately wants regime change. Trump has publicly authorized the CIA to use deadly force in Venezuela, has put a $50 million bounty on Maduro’s head, and has moved 10,000’s of troops and major naval assets into the area.
Our asymmetric decades-long war on Venezuela is moving into its end-game. If the regime fails, it will likely be Machado who is propped up as a modern day Ahmed Chalabi, and puppet ruler in Venezuela.
Calls for open warfare in Venezuela are full-throated, and it has nothing to do with cocaine and everything to do with empire and oil.
The Revolutionist 