By Bill Hackwell on February 26, 2019
A US created show-down at the Colombian border city of Cúcuta to force “humanitarian aid” into Venezuela has failed. Frustrated at the results, two trucks with aid were set on fire on the Colombia side followed by the worldwide corporate media dutifully blaming it on Venezuela while Washington looks for other means to overthrow the proud and resilient government of Nicolas Maduro. This aid has become so politicized that even international aid agencies like the Red Cross, Caritas, and the United Nations refuse to touch it knowing that it is a Trojan Horse.
The aid is part of a plan by the United States to send $20 million in aid, despite the fact that the legitimate government of Venezuela does not want to have anything to do with it and instead is demanding the return of more than $23 billion dollars frozen in accounts being held in the US, Canada and Europe that they consider stolen from their public treasury; money that could have been spent on the necessary import of food and medicine for the benefit of the entire population.
The sending of “humanitarian aid” to Venezuela by the US is being presented as an emergency and something humane and necessary to the international community. It is a pretext for an escalation of tensions and the Bolivarian government of Maduro has made it clear that if their concern were genuine they would unblock the funds that the world’s financial system has dammed up.
The self-proclaimed US picked, wannabe, “president in charge”, Juan Guaidó and his group of conspirators carrying out a coup d’état against Maduro were dreaming of riding into Venezuela with the paltry aid to “save” the Venezuelan people. Clearly this aid has nothing to do with any suffering of the Venezuelan people and everything to do with turning up the heat of the regime change strategy of Washington to undermine the democratically elected president of the country.
Venezuela has an extensive national food assistance program called CLAP (Local Committees for Supply and Production) that is functioning normally delivering a box of essential food directly every 15 days to 6 million families.
Maduro has made it clear that Venezuela does not need charity and if the stolen money was returned, “Venezuela will move forward by its own means as it has always done throughout its history.”
In a recent press conference Maduro said, “Take all that humanitarian aid and give it to the people of Colombia, where there is a lot of need. This is a macabre game, you see? They squeeze us by the neck and then make us beg for crumbs. They offer us toilet paper like Trump threw at the people of Puerto Rico after Hurricane María.”
The economic war against Venezuela started a while back but now as the threats of war escalate it is really ratcheting up.
In 2017, financial service provider Euroclear blocked nearly $1.65 billion for the purchase of medicines and food for the Venezuelan population.
Similarly, in 2018 nearly $2.5 billion were blocked, while England already in 2019 has retained $1.2 billion (in gold) and the US took $7 billion in assets of Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA).
Recently the Trump administration issued sweeping sanctions against state oil company PDVSA, freezing all profits generated by Venezuela’s refining subsidiary Citgo, and has vowed to starve Maduro’s government of any and all revenue.
There are some glaring historical similarities to the situation now in Venezuela where the US has used sanctions as a deadly economic weapon directed at a population. It is the strategy of slow steady strangulation to bring a country standing in opposition to imperialism to its knees, like Chile in 1973 when the Nixon Administration was destabilizing the Popular Unity government of Salvador Allende and he ordered then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, “Let’s make the Chilean economy scream.” Or who, with any conscience, could forget in 1996 after US led economic sanctions had resulted in the deaths of more than 500,000 Iraqi children that Secretary of State Madeline Albright went on 60 minutes and calmly said, “We think the price was worth it.”
The six decade long unilateral US economic blockade of Cuba is another example, one that is not just historical but current as well, that so far has cost the Cuban people over $130 billion in revenue. They too have been deprived of needed medicine and food but Cuba has prevailed through revolutionary determination, principle and the international solidarity that Venezuela now needs.
Source: Resumen Latinoamericano