Venezuela: The apparent negotiation and the real one

The circus put on by the United States and Norway, its NATO ally with respect to Venezuela, marked a turning point on October 17 when an agreement was signed between the government and the opposition.

The circus relates to the ridiculousness of negotiating outside Venezuelan territory (in Mexico and Barbados) only because there is no United States embassy in Venezuela, and they need to closely control their native employees who “negotiate” on their behalf. When has it been seen that two legal parties to a conflict have to negotiate abroad when neither of them is clandestine or persecuted and when a war is not taking place in the country?

The need for dialogue between Venezuelans in Mexico and Barbados is an expression of the deep distrust that Washington has for its local accomplices, whom it needs to “control closely.”

The objective of that “negotiation” was to ratify, to give a legal framework to what was agreed in the true negotiation, which is the one that the government of Venezuela held discreetly and confidentially with that of the United States. The latter asked to keep it a secret while deciding how to “sell” it to his public opinion that they are talking to a government which they had characterized as a dictatorship and swore to defeat, in any way considering that all options “were on the table.” Washington asked to keep the agreed confidential, until waiting for the “best moment” to make it public. That moment came, yes, before the time planned by the Biden administration.

At this point, the United States could already see that the entire arsenal of instruments used to overthrow the Bolivarian government failed resoundingly. Let’s see:

• They tried to fracture the armed force.
• They staged a coup d’état.
• They carried out an invasion by sea.
• Another by land from Colombia.
• They carried out an attack with drones to assassinate President Maduro and members of the government and the military high command.
• They allied themselves with organized crime and drug trafficking to destabilize the country.
• They carried out several waves of terrorist attacks and sabotages against public services.
• They approved around 930 unilateral coercive measures (misnamed as ‘sanctions’) against the people and the institutions in the country.
• They unleashed a furious media campaign of lies to misinform about what was happening in Venezuela.
• They falsified the number of migrants that they themselves produced with their wave of sanctions and attacks to maximize the profits that “that business” produces, also constructing a fable about it, without caring in the least about the pain of those citizens who were forced to leave their country.
• They blocked international financial transactions.
• They founded the Lima Group, the only international organization in history created to overthrow a government.
• They sent their warships to the Caribbean Sea to block trade, preventing the arrival of medicines and food.
• They ordered their satellite countries to withdraw their ambassadors from Caracas. They themselves left and closed their embassy while ordering groups of criminals to occupy ours in Washington by force, violating the most basic norms of international law.
• They prohibited Western laboratories from selling COVID vaccines to Venezuela.
• They mobilized neighboring countries to exert military pressure on Venezuela’s borders.
• They artificially manipulated the Venezuelan currency, the Bolivar.
• They indiscriminately sanctioned the national energy industry, especially PDVSA.
• They sent hundreds of millions of dollars to finance internal subversion that produced dozens of victims through practices only compared to that of the Nazis and Zionists today in Palestine.
• They invented an artificial president.
• They robbed Venezuelan companies, planes and refineries, as well as other assets with impunity, to give them as loot to their local employees who carried out the task entrusted to them by Washington.

… and they failed. All these actions are documented and can be the subject of study for those who are interested in knowing what has happened and is happening in Venezuela.

Once all these files have been exhausted, they intend to create a new Guaidó, but now trying to give the procedure a legal appearance. At the international level, given that the new progressive governments of Colombia and Brazil have refused to take part in the actions against Venezuela, they use the weak regime of Guyana, led by an elite with a neocolonial and low-minded mentality that has betrayed its great founding leaders, Cheddi Jagan and Forbes Burnham, to create an international conflict aimed at justifying military action under the leadership of the Southern Command of the United States Armed Forces, thus serving the large Western energy transnationals.

Despite having discovered that the Venezuelan opposition, in addition to being an expression of mediocrity and shameful ignorance, has lied to them for years, announcing “the imminent fall of Maduro”, the United States – as in Ukraine and Israel – clings to interventionists and interventionists practices, supporting forces that represent the most retrograde thinking in the country. Their attachment to an outdated cold war logic has been more powerful than the quest to understand a reality that is announcing the birth of a new world.

But that is not the reason why they negotiated with Venezuela. They have no qualms about wasting American taxpayers’ money like uncontrolled hemorrhage, trying to stop the course of history. This apparent approach to Venezuela has two aspects. First, the deep economic crisis, particularly in energy, that is besetting the United States.

It must be remembered that only two weeks after Russia’s military operation in Ukraine began, a US delegation, the highest level in more than a decade, arrived in Caracas headed by Juan González, White House national security advisor. Hidden behind an alleged interest in freeing some Americans imprisoned in Venezuela, the true objective of the visit was to open the doors of the country to establish a line of communication at a time of uncertainty regarding the scope of the conflict in Ukraine.

But what they could have foreseen fell short. The sanctions against Russia were reversed and are affecting the perpetrators more than the target. A report last week revealed that the United States’ strategic oil reserve is at its lowest level since 1983. The truth is that today they have less than half of the crude oil they had in reserve 10 years ago. At this moment, this amounts to 350 million barrels. To give you an idea of what this means, it is worth saying that in the last two years, Biden released 270 million barrels of his reserves to lower prices.

Today they can’t do that anymore. That is why they need Venezuela’s oil to flow without limitations through the market. That is the first reason that explains why the negotiations took place.

The second logic on which the United States government acts has to do with the way they sell to their public opinion that, – as I said before – they are negotiating with the “dictatorship” that they swore to destroy. As is known, public opinion in the United States is ignorant, manageable and manipulable and only matters as a vote-producing machine. However, if it does not work for that objective, it can also be manipulated to accept fraud, such as what occurred in the 2000 presidential elections when the election was stolen from Al Gore after an agreement between the elites and the institutions of power.

In such a way that, supported by the organic stupidity of that public opinion, this situation, which has a political nature, can be transformed into one of an electoral nature and that is a problem for the US administration. These two factors accelerated the development of the negotiating process in Venezuela.

Thus, they forced the Venezuelan opposition to go to Barbados and accept everything that the government proposed because everything that was presented had already been previously agreed upon between the governments of Venezuela and the United States. The opposition was not given the opportunity to express its opinion. It had only to comply. That is why the issue of disqualifications was not discussed. As is normal, once again, the United States made use of its lackeys – be they people, organizations or countries – when they no longer serve them. Ask Guaidó.

Now, Washington is selling it in such a way that it seems that, to the extent that the Venezuelan government and the opposition have agreed, it makes no sense to maintain the sanctions because they achieved their objective of forcing Maduro to give in. This is completely false, it is the other way around. Washington reached an agreement with Caracas and ordered the opposition to abide by it.

The statement that Maduro gave in makes it obvious that to some extent, politics, if it is to be carried out within the framework of the representative democracy that prevails in Venezuela, forces the parties to give in something. But what has not been negotiated is sovereignty, territorial integrity, the will of the people to defend their future, and in that, Venezuela has had a firm defender in President Maduro. You cannot talk about giving in pejorative terms. On the contrary, giving in is a symbol of greatness…and power. One gives in tactically while being firm and immovable in the defense of strategic objectives. That is the essence of successfully carrying out the long-term goals that lead to the revolutionary transformation of society.

To do this, we must know how to build the correlation of forces necessary to produce changes and, in the midst of brutal imperialist aggression, this process is slow and difficult. The government has given in to the negotiation with the democratic opposition because it is a constitutional mandate.

Reaching agreements in favor of the country and the people is not negative. On the contrary, it is what all Venezuelans want. But of course, the terrorist opposition that now seeks to create an artificial leader by deceiving the people and that also calls into question the sovereign interests of Venezuela in Essequibo does not have the capacity to debate. It has only to abide by what is dictated from the north.

The people of Venezuela resisted and triumphed, pointing out once again that victory is the prize of those who fight and do not kneel. That is what we learned from Bolívar and Chávez, and it is what sustains us to face and win the battles of the future wherever they are fought: At the negotiating table or on the battlefield.