By CLAUDIO KATZ*
With or without minutes, the United States wants Venezuela's oil
1.
Two weeks have passed and the discussion about the minutes continues, which is a very controversial topic and so far there is no solid data to assess what happened. The National Electoral Council maintains the announcement of Nicolás Maduro's victory, but without detailed information by provinces, tables or districts. The body has 30 days to publish these reports, but the delay generates many doubts, which are not resolved with the presentation of the minutes by each party to the Judiciary.
The main official explanation for the current impasse is the sabotage suffered by the electoral system. A cyber attack with widespread invasion, which saturated networks through spurious traffic, that is, using a new type of digital conspiracy.
The existence of this electoral blackout is perfectly credible in the current scenario of computer wars. If Israel uses artificial intelligence to carry out a personalized genocide in Gaza, it is entirely possible that Venezuela has suffered the attack against the networks denounced by the government. But this accusation would have to be verified with evidence or evidence, which so far no person responsible has presented. In any case, it seems to me that the publication of the famous minutes will not solve the problem.
The right will not recognize an adverse result. For them, any lost election is equivalent to fraud. Since 1999, there have been 35 elections in Venezuela and they have only validated the two elections they won. In the opposite cases, they ignored the final numbers. In the fierce 2013 dispute, the recount of votes they demanded was carried out and they also did not accept the verdict of that count.
The right only agrees to run if it has prior guarantees of victory. Such a stance invalidates any election. They act like Donald Trump, who was unaware of his defeat against Joe Biden, alleging fraud that no one has been able to prove. To make matters worse, they have now released their own count, announcing that González Urrutia won by a margin of 60 to 80% in his favor. They do not present any serious document that corroborates this statement. They improvise and invent completely implausible statements.
Furthermore, the release of the minutes does not solve anything due to the atypical nature of this election. The elections were preceded by the Barbados agreement, which defined a call according to the power relations that keep the two parties in conflict. The right agreed to run after several years of fiasco with Guaidó. They could not continue supporting the corrupt puppet who proclaimed himself president without any records. Because of this defeat, they supported participation in general elections, with members on the National Electoral Council. They even validated the trickery of officialdom that severely restricted the vote of emigrants.
For its part, the government accepted the negotiated presence of international observers, which is not natural in any electoral event. In the United States, France, Israel or the United Kingdom, foreign inspectors do not arrive as naturally as they do in peripheral countries. The election was conditioned by this prior commitment.
2.
The right signed the agreement assuming that it had won the elections, but then ignored this commitment when it began to realize that its victory was uncertain. From then on, he resumed his usual provocations. Corina Machado took the reins of the campaign and the government logically decided to disqualify her for her participation in numerous coup attempts. Officialism also restricted the presence of conspirators disguised as international observers, in a legitimate act of sovereignty. The typical scenario of direct confrontation between officialdom and the opposition fully reappeared.
This is the behavior that this sector has invariably recreated since the failed coup against Hugo Chávez in 2002. They have accumulated a countless collection of provocations. Just remember the oil strike, the armed attacks from Colombia, the manipulated demonstrations, the attempted assassination of Nicolás Maduro using a drone, the landing of mercenaries and an economic war that includes 935 unilateral sanctions from the United States.
Now they tried to establish that their victory was assured and when they realized that something was going wrong, they resumed violence against Chavismo. To the fires, murders and calls for a military coup, this time, there was the symbolic destruction of statues of Hugo Chávez.
3.
The complicity of the international media is decisive because it articulates, from Miami, the entire campaign against Venezuela, with the repeated argument of fraud. It is the same flag used by the incipient Bolsonarists against Dilma Rousseff and by the racists of Santa Cruz against Evo Morales. But they never remember the only effectively proven fraud, which was carried out by their colleagues in Mexico in 2006.
The media also shamelessly repeat that a dictatorship prevails in Venezuela, omitting that this definition currently only applies to one country in the region: Peru. Nobody mentions Boluarte's name and the military leadership that overthrew Castillo.
What is most curious is the disregard for the Venezuelan electoral system, which includes mechanisms with greater democratic legitimacy than the models discussed by the Western press. This scheme is not subject to the United States Electoral College filter, which allows the selection of presidents without a majority vote of voters. And it is not supported, furthermore, by the plutocratic pillars that predominate in this country, where money defines who gets the main positions. Nor is it subject to the distortions imposed by electoral districts in England or France or to the electoral blackmail that prevails in our region. More unusual are the lessons of republicanism enunciated by the spokespeople of the Spanish monarchy.
The rule that was imposed to judge Venezuela is completely arbitrary. The great emigration suffered by this nation is presented as a unique case on the entire planet. It is forgotten, for example, that, in percentage terms, there are more Uruguayans than Venezuelans outside their country and that no one would classify the political system of our La Plata neighbors as a dictatorship. Venezuela suffers the same population hemorrhage as Mexico, Central America or the Caribbean, for the same reasons of impoverishment.
4.
It's difficult to know who is winning the arm wrestling match in Venezuela. For now, it seems that yet another political manipulation has failed and that society's rejection of extreme right-wing violence is repeated. After one or two days of provocations, massive demonstrations in favor of the government and the opposition returned, and the ground in favor of the majority of the population reappeared. The desire for peace is great, which makes the street coup promoted by Maria Corina and her faded presidential candidate very difficult. This character is accused of complicity in criminal acts because he allegedly used his diplomatic cover to facilitate the CIA's dirty war in Central America.
The United States plays the same game as always, to appropriate oil. It is worth remembering Donald Trump's sincerity when he declared that, under his administration, “Venezuela was about to collapse and we would have had all the fuel in that country”. Elections in territories with oil coveted by the empire are never normal, because they include a geopolitical component of enormous centrality.
The State Department has always tried to repeat in Venezuela what it did in Iraq or Libya. If Chávez had ended up like Saddam Hussein or Gaddafi, no one would mention in the world press what is happening in a lost nation in South America. After having managed to overthrow the demonized president, the White House's media spokespeople completely forget about these countries . Currently, no one knows who the president of Iraq or Libya is.
There is also no mention of Saudi Arabia's electoral system. As the United States cannot present the sheikhs of that peninsula as champions of democracy, they simply silence the issue. There is no need to be naive about the dispute in Venezuela. With or without minutes, the United States wants oil.
The Yankee leaders have already agreed with the Venezuelan right on a commitment to privatize PDVSA and are observing with great concern the country's entry into the BRICS that Maduro is negotiating. That is why they appropriated CITGO, monetary reserves abroad, increased sanctions and closed access to any type of international financing. They want to repeat what they did in Ukraine to have a Zelensky-type subordinate at the head of the country.
But as they failed time and time again, Joe Biden opted to negotiate and Chevron resumed drilling in the Orinoco belt. He made this wink compatible with diplomatic provocations and military exercises in Guyana. Donald Trump seems to be betting on the brutality of another coup d'état, but he is a pragmatist and we will see what happens if he gets another term.
5.
A right-wing victory in Venezuela would have harmful consequences for Argentina. Javier Milei operates side by side with Maria Corina Machado, and his minister of foreign relations and his minister of security participate quite naturally (as if they were not public agents) in the demonstrations in front of the Venezuelan embassy in Buenos Aires. Javier Milei was the main sponsor of the failed OAS statement in favor of Urrutia. The hypocrisy of this organization has no limits. After supporting the coup in Bolivia and Peru, they give democratic sermons to Venezuela.
Lula, together with Petro and López Obrador, leads a defensive reaction, recording the terrible consequences that a far-right government would have in Venezuela. To dissuade this perspective, they try to restore negotiation bridges between officialism and the opposition. They know that these negotiations go beyond the mere publication of minutes and their subsequent rejection with accusations of fraud. AMLO focused the problem on rejecting OAS interference and joined Cristina Kirchner. On the other hand, Lula was unable to obtain the support of Gabriel Boric, which reinforces his subservience to the White House.
I think that the Venezuelan crisis reveals a great division in Latin American progressivism, between a sector that reinforces its autonomous profile and another that chooses to follow the State Department's script. The media praises this last group, which increasingly disappoints its voters.
6.
Venezuela remains divided into two blocks with strong social support. The media image of a solitary and isolated government is as false as the assumption of a right wing without branches. Officialism appears to have regained its influence with the recovery of the economy and the improvement of street safety. The extent of his actions would indicate a certain recomposition of the moral decline of his followers. Paradoxically, however, if it is confirmed that they won the elections, this result will occur due to low voter turnout. This absenteeism illustrates a high level of disagreement that, fortunately, the right does not capture.
The confirmation of the official victory should be seen as positive for the left because it would imply a defeat for the extreme right in these elections. It's as if we were wondering whether we would celebrate Javier Milei's electoral defeat here. A failure by the pawns of the empire, in a country besieged by economic sanctions and attacked by the media, is always promising. This result would be part of the recent successes against the right that we have seen in Mexico and France.
7.
I signed a Manifesto supporting the vote for Nicolás Maduro based on the record of the terrible consequences that a right-wing victory would have for the region and especially for us, in Argentina. It doesn't take a great analyst to imagine the ruthless counter-revolutionary revanchism that Corina Machado would initiate if she came to power. It is incredibly naive to assume that such a victory would usher in a period of greater democratization. The condition for conceiving any popular advance in the future is the victory of officialism.
To some extent, we have to learn from the past. There is a long tradition of left-wing criticism of governments that stand in the way, or that retreat from the path of the radical changes we advocate. In these situations, the solution is never to throw out the baby with the dirty water and start all over again. On this path, the setback is always greater. Let's look at what happened with the restoration of capitalism after the implosion of the Soviet Union. Because of this result, we suffered 40 years of brutal neoliberalism.
In many areas, I share the objections of critical chavismo to economic policy, the weakening of communal power, the validation of the bolibourgeoisie and the unacceptable intervention in left-wing parties that did not accept the standards required by the government. There are also problematic cases of judicialization of social protests and little tolerance for questions within the field itself. The precedent of the path followed by Nicaragua raises alarm bells.
But none of these objections leads me to doubt the field in which the left should be located. We have to be on a terrain diametrically opposed to the main enemy, which is imperialism and the extreme right. This positioning is the condition for any other consideration.
I consider a third way for the left, of simultaneous criticism of Nicolas Maduro and Corina Machado to be completely unrealistic and I will summarize it for you in the practical example of participation in the marches that convulse the country. Venezuelan political life is shaken by major mobilizations by officials and the opposition. It is in these street actions that much of the future of the crisis rests. If we assume the identity of the left as our own: which of the two demonstrations should we participate in?
Since it is completely unthinkable for a socialist to participate in the actions of Javier Milei's colleagues, Donald Trump or Marine Le Pen, when one decides not to participate in Chavismo's marches, the only option is to stay at home. Then, it will be possible to deepen the study of Marxism, but with a total divorce from political action.
This disconnect cannot be remedied by writing a manifesto, drafting an article, convening a small group, or repeatedly assessing why the left is isolated. It is also not useful to judge movements that maintain their popular roots from an invariable minority condition. We have to intervene in political scenarios as they present themselves to us, in order to find ways to build our socialist project.
*Claudio Katz is professor of economics at Universidad Buenos Aires. Author, among other books, of Neoliberalism, neodevelopmentalism, socialism (popular expression). [https://amzn.to/3E1QoOD].
Translation: Fernando Lima das Neves.
the earth is round there is thanks to our readers and supporters.
Help us keep this idea going.
CONTRIBUTE
