By Ollantay Itzamná on August 24, 2018
The international press, such as BBC Mundo, in recent days, has been placing on their front page, images of roads and bridges full of thousands of “Venezuelans” fleeing Maduro’s dictatorship to border countries. The objective is always the same, to show Venezuela as a broken country, in a bloody “migratory” and “humanitarian” crisis, and thus justify a latent US military intervention, now, supported by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, (NATO) now in Colombia.
But, what these agents of the media circus does not explain is, how does Venezuela continue to be populated, if according to them, tens of thousands of Venezuelans have been fleeing daily to the exterior for months? Venezuela has no more than 32 million inhabitants. Who is left?
And, most grotesquely, they show roads full of supposed migrants, but they say: “Since 2017, 2.3 million Venezuelans have left their country”. This figure does not even represent 8% of the total population!
In the meantime countries like Colombia or Peru have more than 10% of their population expelled by the hardships of the neoliberal system they live in, fleeing to foreign lands to survive from the humiliating situation of semi-slavery.
By 2010, Guyana had 49.2% of its population living abroad. Jamaica, 29.4%, El Salvador 23%. In these cases, the national and international rogue press says nothing, nor do they speak, of an immigration crisis.
They want to install in our brains the image of a “broken Venezuela”, so that they can count on our complicit silence or unthinking applause when they invade Venezuela. But this will not be an easy thing to achieve due to the nearly 10 million courageous Venezuelans who are organized to respond to any kind of aggression.
The national and international rogue press has been rehearsing media performances of “political crisis”, “economic crisis”, “humanitarian crisis”, and now “migration crisis”. But in all of them they have failed.
Venezuela and its government stopped one after the other, of all the “justifications” for military intervention. Neither the gringos, nor their Lima group, dare to carry out the grotesque announced plan because they are afraid to come out on the losing end as they did in Vietnam (1975) and as they did at Playa Girón (Cuba, 1961)!
The disinformation media wants us to believe that misery in Venezuela is prevalent. But even the World Bank, in its reports, maintains that poverty in this country reaches 33%, and extreme poverty 9.2%.
In neoliberal countries (made in the USA), such as Guatemala or Honduras, poverty eats up almost 70% of their populations. In these U.S.-protected countries, 8 out of 10 children under the age of 5 are malnourished – that’s a humanitarian crisis! Every hour one person is killed! Do we hear about that in the headlines?
Exactly 64 years ago, the US Government, with the criminal complicity of Honduras and El Salvador, invaded Guatemala militarily. They expelled the worthy democratic government of Jacobo Árbenz, for the “crime” of having nationalized the land usurped by the US banana companies. Their justifying argument was the threat of a humanitarian crisis caused by latent communism.
Of course at that time the progressive government had not succeeded in organizing the people. As a result, a few hundred soldiers (armed by the US) were enough to defeat Jacobo Arbenz’s project. But, Bolivarian Venezuela, now, is not the Guatemala of 1954.
What is clear in this supposed Venezuelan immigration crisis is the servile vocation of the governments of Peru, Colombia, Brazil, Chile – the corrupt core of the so-called Lima Group, whose obedience to the U.S. government followed their suggestion open their borders for the free entry of “hungry” Venezuelans. Not only does Peru not require a passport for Venezuelans, but it also grants one year of legal residence without so much as a visa.
These servile governments believed that the so-called “humanitarian-migratory crisis” would quickly bring down the Venezuelan government. But, now, those countries are the ones with the problems due to the uncontrolled presence of Venezuelans in their territories.
The U.S. government, which applied and assumed the cost of its “dry feet, wet feet” policy with Cuban migration to overthrow Fidel Castro, now, left the burden of Venezuelan migration, to overthrow Maduro, on the peoples of the region.
https://www.alainet.org/es/articulo/194935
Source: America Latina en Movimiento, translation Resumen Latinoamericano, North American Bureau