By Atilio A. Boron on July 9, 2023
Corina Machado
Suppose Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, had become jaded with Joe Biden’s irresponsible bluster (calling Xi Jinping a dictator, for example, after Blinken’s trip to “improve” relations with China) and had asked for help from a foreign power, let’s say for example Russia and China, to send a military expedition to the United States or to apply sanctions to this country with the purpose of achieving a “regime change”, i.e. the de facto removal of Biden. What would have happened to her?
Let’s imagine something else: if the assault on Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021 had successfully culminated in the appointment of a new president -let’s say Bob Menendez, to put it in the name of any American political scapegoat- and the most distinguished members of the establishment, including Ocasio-Cortez, had participated in the swearing-in ceremony, and all had signed a book validating the legitimacy of the new president, what would have been the response of the US Justice system?
Surely her legal situation would have worsened significantly, because it was no longer just a matter of requesting foreign intervention against her country in order to, returning to Venezuela and the case of Maria Corina Machado, depose a legitimate government such as that of Hugo Chavez, but she also took an active part in the legitimization of a usurper. But if Menendez had not been able to stay in office because an immense popular mobilization reinstated Biden in office and Ocasio-Cortez from that moment began to travel frequently to Moscow or Beijing to ask the Russian or Chinese authorities to collaborate with the violent protests that she and her colleagues were organizing (like the violent Venezuelan “guarimbas” of 2014 and 2017) that left a couple of hundred dead and wounded. And if she also asked those foreign leaders to decree a complete blockade to the economic activities of the United States, so that nothing could be exported or imported and also to appoint a “president in charge” of the United States, let’s say the unpresentable Marco Rubio, and had decided, at Alexandria’s request, the expropriation of the assets of two gigantic companies such as CITGO and PdVSA, what do you think would have happened to her? Answer: she would have been immediately apprehended and imprisoned, and almost certainly punished by the courts of that country with capital punishment or life imprisonment.
But let’s now return to Venezuela: Maria Corina went even further: she met with President George W. Bush, on May 31, 2005 requesting support to end the “regime” of Hugo Chavez Frias. In 2014, she appeared before an OAS Assembly with the fanciful position of “alternate ambassador of Panama” to demand that discredited institution to harden its opposition to the Venezuelan government. During these years, successive U.S. governments financially supported various political formations that Machado created over time, as well as several NGOs with which she is linked or directs behind the scenes as she called for more energetic action by Washington to attack Venezuela and bring down Maduro.
In line with this intense activism of Machado and the anti-Chávez lobby, on March 8, 2015 Barack Obama issued an unusual executive order declaring a “national emergency in the face of the unusual and extraordinary threat” that the Bolivarian government represented for the United States, laying the legal groundwork for the imposition of harsh punitive measures against the South American country. This infamous decision was extended by Joe Biden and since then, both the U.S. and other countries have applied a total of 929 “unilateral coercive measures” against Venezuela.
The economic cost of these sanctions is staggering: US$ 7 billion frozen in banks; US$ 5 billion retained in the International Monetary Fund; US$ 2 billion in 31 tons of gold deposited in the Bank of England and confiscated by the British government; US$ 10 billion of Citgo Corp. confiscated by the US plus the looting of PDVSA. The plummeting of exports due to these sanctions was colossal: in 2012 that country exported 75,762.8 million Euros; in 2021 barely 3,005 million Euros. And the cost in human lives in the first two years of the Trump administration amounts to 40,000 according to a study prepared by Mark Weisbrot and Jeffrey Sachs.
The conduct of María Corina Machado (and those of Leopoldo López, Julio Borges and Juan Guaidó) in requesting the U.S. government to implement these policies against Venezuela clearly falls under the legal category of “treason”. This is clearly stated in Title 18, section 2381 of the U.S. Criminal Code: “Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, declares against his country or adheres to its enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer the death penalty, or shall be imprisoned and fined, and disqualified from holding any office in the United States”.
Therefore, what Corina Machado and her cronies did would have been punishable in the United States with capital punishment or, at least, with life imprisonment and disqualification to hold public office. Argentina’s Penal Code punishes this conduct with sentences ranging from 10 years to life imprisonment, with absolute disqualification for life to hold any public office. The Penal Code of Uruguay, which would be good for President Lacalle Pou to read, punishes conduct such as Machado’s with “ten to thirty years of penitentiary, and from two to ten years of absolute disqualification.” In Venezuela, on the other hand, the Justice of that country (not the president) applied the most benign sanction: only a disqualification for fifteen years for flagrant acts of treason. In the United States, Machado would already be in the death row of a maximum security prison. Meanwhile, the Latin American hegemonic press beats the patch of the exclusion from the electoral contest of a person who in any other country would have been in jail a long time ago.
Source: Pagina 12, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English