Global Research

The people of Venezuela have been electing socialists as president since 1998. The (Jimmy) Carter Center has been monitoring those elections since 1998. In 2012, Carter stated:

“As a matter of fact, of the 92 elections that we’ve monitored, I would say that the election process in Venezuela is the best in the world.”

President Maduro was re-elected less than one year ago, in May, with 67 percent of the vote. That election was monitored by more than 150 observers who found the election to be transparent and in compliance with the law.

Despite sanctions and sabotage, the socialist governments in Venezuela have greatly uplifted the working class, Afro-Venezuelans and indigenous populations, in health and education and progressive labor laws, the point being that Venezuelans elect socialists for very substantial reasons.

Speaking of Jimmy Carter, in September 2017, he took the position that money in politics makes the U.S. more like an “oligarchy than a democracy,” the point being that we need to be fixing our own “democracy.” Leave Venezuela’s struggle to achieve independence from its own oligarchy alone. Venezuela is ahead of us in that department.

But here we have politicians of both parties and mainstream media taking every opportunity to call Maduro a brutal dictator, rarely acknowledging his re-election, and always when his election is acknowledged, referring to it as “widely viewed as fraudulent.”

In the name of democracy we have determined to install a 35-year-old puppet named Guaido from the Venezuelan National Assembly whom a vast majority of Venezuelans have never heard of, which is partly why Guaido boycotted the election last May.

That Guaido is operating according to our instructions is quite clear. A press release from our Dept. of State reports that Pompeo spoke by phone with Guaido on Jan. 10, 13 days before Guaido proclaimed himself president. The Wall Street Journal reported that the night before Guaido’s proclamation he was on the phone with VP Pence who then assured Guaido that the U.S. would back his seizure of power. Our plotting with the “opposition” began months before. It was back in August 2018 that Trump began referring to a U.S. military attack as an “option on the table.”

Two days after Guaido’s proclamation, Pompeo appointed Elliott Abrams special envoy to Venezuela saying Abrams would be a “true asset to our mission to help the Venezuelan people fully restore democracy …,” thereby demonstrating just how ignorant our government expects its citizens to be.

In the 1980s, Abrams was instrumental in covering up massacres committed by dictators in El Salvador and Guatemala. In 1991, Abrams was convicted of lying to Congress regarding our arming of the Contra death squads. Please recall that the Contras were our “opposition” in Nicaragua programmed to overthrow the democratically elected Sandinista government during the Iran-Contra scandal.

In 2002, as director of the National Security Council for “democracy, human rights and international operations,” Abrams oversaw the attempted coup that deposed Venezuela’s democratically elected President Chavez, but only briefly due to the response of a million Venezuelans descending upon the streets of Caracas.

In the meantime, the U.S. is waging “economic war” as characterized by Alfred de Zayas, an American lawyer, the U.N. Independent Expert on the Promotion of a Democratic and Equitable International Order.