By Atilio A. Boron on May 5, 2020
The frustrated incursion of a group of mercenaries trying to land on the coast of Macuto, La Guaira state, is yet another example of the United States being a “rogue state”; a country that systematically violates international law and in doing so endangers world peace. Last Sunday’s early morning attempt confirms that the White House is persisting in its criminal attitude of maintaining the blockade and attempting by any means to overthrow the governments of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. And they persist in this position in the midst of the disaster that the pandemic is producing in their country (69,000 dead and more than 30 million unemployed). Undaunted by the chaos, Trump has time to order a gang of mercenaries to launch a criminal “bidding war for an outsourced invasion” as formally announced by the New York brigand [1] The objective of this first attack was to test the response capacity of the FANB (Bolivarian National Armed Forces), its cohesion in the face of invasions and its potential vulnerability to the temptation that the million-dollar reward offered by Washington awakens among criminals of all kinds.
Make no mistake about it: what happened in Macuto is not an isolated incident, but rather the result of a meticulously conceived plan whose final outcome, in the feverish hallucination of those who conceived it, is the kidnapping and assassination of President Nicolas Maduro and the realization of the longed-for and elusive “regime change”. In fact, the day after the first incident in Macuto, a new mercenary collective was intercepted and subdued by the popular militias in Chuao, in the coastal region of the State of Aragua. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has accused the Trump Administration of promoting paramilitary movements on the Venezuelan border and justifying the attacks by narco-terrorists and mercenaries in the pay of the Pentagon.
There is no doubt that the scale of this operation was incomparably smaller than that launched by a group of counter-revolutionary Cubans at the Playa Girón landing on 15 April 1961. On that occasion, some 1,400 men were mobilized, more than a dozen transport planes and bombers, numerous ships, tanks and impressive armaments. The fulminating response of the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces prevented the invaders from achieving their first strategic objective, the preamble to other more ambitious ones: to create a “liberated zone” where a provisional government would be installed, which would obtain immediate recognition from the White House and the OAS and which would allow the media and the servile politicians and servants of the empire to put pressure on other governments to recognize the new Cuban government and to launch a worldwide campaign so that the “international community” would endorse this maneuver.
Macuto had another dimension, but one should not fall into the error of believing that this was the whole plan. In fact, the new incursion by Chuao proves what we have been saying. Both operations are “test balloons” to measure the speed and forcefulness of Chavismo’s response, and also diversionary operations to facilitate the eventual entry of contingents of mercenaries – “private military contractors” as defined by U.S. law, such as Academi (formerly Blackwater) and Triple Canopy, which have thousands of troops – regularly hired by the CIA and the State Department to carry out what are euphemistically
called “special operations”. For example, organizing micro-operations on Venezuela’s long Atlantic-Caribbean coast or along the vast Colombo-Venezuelan border (2,219 kilometers) that offers many alternative routes of illegal entry that are difficult to detect.
Of course, the narco-government of Iván Duque in Colombia will do absolutely anything that is requested by Trump because he is aware that if he disobeys the order both he and his political boss, Álvaro Uribe Vélez, could end their days in a maximum-security prison like former Panamanian President Manuel Antonio Noriega. On the other hand, one cannot forget the fact that the U.S. Fourth Fleet has been patrolling the Caribbean Sea for weeks under the pretext of dismantling the drug trafficking networks, when DEA reports indicate that 93 percent of the cocaine entering that country comes from Colombia and via the Pacific Ocean. This vast naval deployment was designed to provide logistical support, and eventually troops and equipment, to the operations that have been disrupted in the last few hours.
The situation, therefore, is extremely serious and the press’ underestimation is the best indication of the desire to minimize the danger so that the Bolivarian government lowers its guard and thinks that the worst is over. Such an attitude greatly underestimates Nicolas Maduro’s leadership and the patriotism of Venezuelan men and women that, should the attack take place, will inflict a tremendous defeat on the invaders. It would be good if someone told the ignorant Trump about what happened to the United States in Playa Girón and in Vietnam.
The media hit men of the empire say that the aggressions against Venezuela have the approval, or at least the acquiescence, of the “international community”. But that community does not exist and it is a deceptive entelechy. This is how it was described by an American expert, Samuel P. Huntington, a conservative but not particularly fond of the “postures” and propaganda schemes of the right. He wrote that “American leaders constantly claim to speak for ‘the international community. But who do you have in mind? China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Iran, the Arab world, Latin America, France… Could it be that some of these countries or regions perceive the United States as the spokesperson for a community of which they are an integral part? The community in whose name the United States speaks includes, at most, its Anglo-Saxon cousins (United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) … Germany and some small European democracies … Israel on Middle East issues and Japan. These are important states, but they are far from being the “global international community.”[3]
In spite of this, Trump and his henchmen at the Fundación Libertad continue to maintain, for instance, that Juan Guaidó or the blockade of Cuba and Venezuela are supported by “the international community”. Or they accuse Latin American governments that prioritize the health of their populations instead of guaranteeing the free functioning of markets of being “populists,” “authoritarians,” or violators of the separation of powers, something that for Mario Vargas Llosa and his troupe of impressible politicians beginning with Álvaro Uribe Vélez, José María Aznar and Mauricio Macri reflects the aspirations of the “international community”. They lie knowingly and they should remember, before they experience an abrupt awakening, the words of Abraham Lincoln when he said: “You can fool everybody for a while. You can fool some people all the time. But you can’t fool everybody all the time.”
In the face of this offensive by Washington, the first thing that needs to be done is to close ranks in defense of the Bolivarian government. The interference of the United States and its Colombian pawn in Venezuela’s internal affairs is absolutely inadmissible and must be roundly condemned. This is a categorical imperative, with Kantian roots, which is essential to prevent the international system from unleashing an uncontrollable spiral of chaos, violence and death. Secondly, any attitude that is eclectic or seeks to appeal to imaginary neutrality will also be unacceptable, especially in times of a universal pandemic. And if some rulers miss the mark either because they give in to White House coercion or because of their own ideological weaknesses, they should know that popular revulsion at such behavior could cause their governments to collapse sooner rather than later. Third and last: to strengthen the coordination devices through the Internet, which we have been forced to use due to the quarantine., to form a great movement of continental consensus repudiating the US offensive against the Bolivarian government and, of course, Cuba, Nicaragua and Iran. And, we would add, against the policies of economic sanctions against Russia and China and the “extraterritoriality” of U.S. laws that exacerbate the already dangerous tensions in the international system. We have learned that even when we cannot meet physically, we can meet virtually, and promote self-defense initiatives that prevent capital from exploiting the ravages of the pandemic to rebuild, in an even more authoritarian way, its domination over peoples. This “digital associativism” can and must become a significant contribution to facilitate the international coordination of anti-imperialist struggles and an ideal instrument to combat the lies and media manipulations to which we are being subjugated.
Source: Atilio Boron, translation, Internationalist 360
References:
1] Cf. María Fernanda Barreto, in Correo del Alba, 26 March 2020, available at: https://correodelalba.org/2020/03/26/trump-abre-la-licitacion-para-la-invasion-militar-a-venezuela-en-medio-de-la-pandemia/. The figure of 55 million dollars is the result of adding the 15 million dollars offered for the capture (or murder) of Nicolás Maduro to which must be added the 10 million dollars offered by Diosdado Cabello and Tareck El Aissami and, furthermore, by the traitors Hugo Carvajal and Clíver Alcalá who will surely want to capture them alive. Cf. the data in the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo: https://www.eltiempo.com/unidad-investigativa/quienes-estan-con-maduro-en-el-cartel-de-recompensas-de-ee-uu-477386
[2] https://twitter.com/oriolsabata/status/1257378597439967239
3] Cf. “The lonely superpower”, in Foreign Affairs, March-April 1999, Vol. 78, Issue