By Carlos Fazio on September 5, 2024
Drawing Adán Iglesias Toledo
A little more than a month before the US presidential elections, Venezuela is in a state of relative peace and calm, in spite of the destabilizing attempts of the US, which is ultimately responsible for the sabotage carried out on August 30, in collusion with agents of the local extreme right, against the Simon Bolivar Hydroelectric Power Plant (Guri), which was intended to permanently disable it and leave vast areas of the country without electricity, including Caracas, the capital city.
Located in the state of Bolivar, the Guri reservoir is the main source of electricity in Venezuela. Its infrastructure suffered a combination of electromagnetic and cyber attacks in 2019, in the context of Juan Guaidó’s self-proclamation as “president in charge” of the country (without any election by the way, and no “democratic” government in the West protested), leaving 80 percent of the country without service for several days.
As part of an asymmetric war without rules or battlefield, the criminal attack on Guri -the largest ever recorded against that hydroelectric power plant- is part of Washington’s covert actions, conceived as a broader strategy deployed on multiple fronts against Venezuela.
One of these fronts, denounced on August 28 Ambassador Samuel Moncada, Venezuelan representative to the United Nations (UN), was the US covert action in the electoral system “as a technique for the coup d’état in 2024”. During his intervention in the extraordinary session of the local National Assembly, Moncada said that together with other open and public coercive measures, Washington’s covert action on election day sought not only to frustrate and destabilize the electoral process, but also to “overthrow” the National Electoral Council.(CNE)
Typical of cyber warfare, Washington’s intervention in the Venezuelan elections included two key aspects of covert operations, which according to Directive 10/2 of the US National Security Council (established in 1948), are characterized by their planning and execution designed to conceal the identity of the sponsor or allow plausible deniability of its participation: interference and subversion.
Foreign interference is defined as the meddling by one country in the affairs of another, usually without authorization and with the intent to destabilize and/or dominate it. While subversion refers to the attempt to overthrow authority structures of a government or State -the National Electoral Council (CNE) of Venezuela in this case-, through the erosion of the institutional bases and outside the Constitution of the country, and the creation of social conflicts.
When the subversive action is executed against a government -as that of Nicolás Maduro now-, its intention is to help with advice, financing and political and moral support from abroad, to groups, organizations and political parties and individuals, and to promote its overthrow with violent and destructive urban actions, such as those carried out on July 28 and the two days following the elections with the excuse of “fraud”, by neo-fascist paramilitary gangs at the service of María Corina Machado and her front man, Edmundo González.
Moncada stated that the operation against the CNE to favor Machado and the vernacular ultra-right was financed by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), following the pattern used by Washington in the “color revolutions” (soft coup) in Serbia, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan, and also in the 2014 Euromaidan in Ukraine, as well as in the past Mexican elections to favor the opposition alliance of the National Action Party (PAN), the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD), which prompted a diplomatic letter of protest from President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to the US State Department.
According to Moncada, in the ongoing coup d’état against the governments of Hugo Chávez and Maduro in Venezuela (2002-24), the US strategy has consisted of an “operation of influence” that “exploits the electoral process with its local agents to destroy the source of legitimacy of the authorities”.
This plan has employed a combination of tactics involving psychological operations, espionage, economic sabotage and illegal extraterritorial coercive sanctions (with “blacklists” of officials), media and network warfare, assassination attempts, paramilitary urban warfare, airplane theft, cyber attacks and even the implementation of a parallel vote tabulation system, such as the one wielded by Machado and Gonzalez, designed for destabilization purposes from abroad, to which Washington’s vassal regimes in Europe and Latin America have adhered. The ultimate goal of these actions would be to replace the CNE, with a parallel ad hoc system at the service of the opposition, thus compromising the integrity of the democratic process in the country.
In its unconventional, hybrid or fourth generation warfare variables, black, gray or white propaganda and deception and lies are key instruments to generate a certain perception of the facts. But the most novel aspect is that information warfare is no longer a complement to broader military objectives, but has become an end in itself. From this point of view, the appropriation of a simplistic narrative that avoids argumentation and exploits the emotional, the fear of the other and prejudice, is fundamental to fabricate and impose a certain perception of (virtual) “victory” over “real” reality. An example is the supposed “victory” of the opposition Edmundo Gonzalez in the July 28 elections, multiplied through a broad Western ideological alliance and imposed in the US, Europe and Latin America through the hegemonic mass media. Thus, the manufacture of a false or imagined “reality” has taken precedence over the configuration of reality on the ground.
The double standard of the European and Latin American governments aligned with the US in the post-July 28 destabilization scenario in Venezuela -which seeks a ‘regime change’ with an eye on oil and other Venezuelan geostrategic resources under the camouflage of the defense of freedom, democracy and human rights-, is exhibited by the recent French elections, where the powers that be not only refuse to accept their defeat, but seek, through technical and narrative resources, to discredit the victors of Jean Luc Mélenchon’s Unsubmissive France, who led the New Popular Front that formed a “republican front” with Emmanuel Macron’s party under the premise of the “fight against fascism”. Macron used the left to buy time and preserve power in the face of the imminent threat of a victory of Marine Le Pen’s neo-Nazi National Rally, then undermine its legitimacy and retake power by extra-political means to the detriment of the vote. Fifty days after dissolving the National Assembly, Macron refuses to appoint a leftist prime minister despite the verdict of the ballot box and the constitutional mandate. Ergo, when it loses, the right refuses to cede power; or as in the cases of Mexico and Venezuela, it shouts “fraud!”. Only that, in the latter country, with or without acts, what the US wants is the oil.
Carlos Fazio, is a Uruguayan writer, journalist and academic living in Mexico.
Source: Mate Amargo, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English