A-Infos (en) Italy, FAI, Umanita Nova #32-25 - Venezuela: The Power of Oil. Narco-Priests of the World's Gendarmes (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Trump appears to be still undecided between launching a military strike 
or increasing pressure for Maduro to resign and install a friendly 
government in Caracas. Meanwhile, the largest concentration of naval 
forces and landing troops since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 has 
been deployed near Trinidad and Tobago, while the USS General Ford-the 
largest US aircraft carrier-has left the Mediterranean and is heading 
for the Caribbean. There are reports of 15 cruisers and guided-missile 
destroyers, a nuclear-powered submarine, and bombers of various sizes 
and types, ready for action at their bases on US soil, while 15,000 
Marines are stationed in Puerto Rico. There is also no shortage of 
covert operations by CIA agents infiltrated into the country.

Meanwhile, air strikes continue on fishing boats, small vessels sailing 
off the coast of Venezuela, accused-without evidence-of transporting 
drug quantities to Florida (to date, 16 boats have been hit, resulting 
in 64 deaths). These attacks violate all international law and 
agreement, although this shouldn't be particularly surprising, given the 
very nature of law, which is always the result of prevailing power 
relations.

The North American country is no stranger to these sorties: in December 
1989, 26,000 US soldiers invaded Panama to overthrow President Noriega, 
who had become ungovernable after years of service with the CIA, and to 
support, through drug trafficking, the Contras, who were working to 
defeat the Sandinista revolution in neighboring Nicaragua. Like Noriega, 
Nicolas Maduro is accused, without tangible evidence, of being a drug 
trafficker and the head of a drug cartel: he has a $50 million bounty on 
his head, obviously allocated by the US government. In this regard, it 
is worth recalling the statements of Pino Arlacchi, former UN 
Under-Secretary-General and Director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime 
from 1997 to 2002, a leading expert on drug trafficking. In an article 
published in "Il Fatto Quotidiano" on August 30, he recently cited the 
2025 World Drug Report, which highlights how Venezuela is only affected 
by the passage of a marginal fraction of Colombian drugs, confirming the 
content and analysis of the 30 previous annual reports. "Only 5% of 
Colombian drugs transit through Venezuela. A full 2,370 tons-ten times 
more-are produced or traded by Colombia itself, and 1,400 tons pass 
through Guatemala," Arlacchi reports in his article. Furthermore, the 
real problem facing the US is fentanyl, a powerful opioid produced in 
laboratories using chemical precursors from China and introduced into 
the country by Mexican drug cartels.

The question then arises as to what lies behind this military operation, 
which increasingly resembles the "special" operation inaugurated by 
Putin in 2022.

In recent years, South America-like Africa-has become part of China's 
development and influence plans: in Peru, the Asian country has built a 
port just north of Lima, reducing navigation times to the Far East by 
about ten days, attracting commercial traffic from both North and South 
America. Furthermore, Chinese investment is increasing, and 
consequently, its spheres of influence are expanding.

This is the case in Brazil, where Lula not only signs trade agreements 
with Beijing but also leads the BRICS, the grouping of countries with 
more than half the world's GDP.

In this context, Trump is moving to regain control of what, according to 
the Monroe Doctrine-named after the US president who developed it in 
1823-is the US's primary area of influence: Central and South America. 
Born with defensive intentions against the colonialist and imperialist 
will of European powers, this doctrine has gradually evolved with the 
transformation of the United States into an industrial and military 
power. As Theodore Roosevelt stated in 1904: "According to the Monroe 
Doctrine, chronic misconduct on the American continent requires 
international police intervention by a civilized nation." This statement 
captures all the arrogance and will to dominate of North American 
capitalism and white supremacy, which have led the US to assume the role 
of international policeman in its own area of influence and beyond.

With its support for coup leader Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, for Argentine 
President Javier Milei, who was guaranteed $25 billion to ensure his 
victory in the recent midterm elections, with economic and political 
pressure to increase the number of votes against (Argentina and 
Paraguay) and abstentions (Ecuador and Costa Rica) in the UN vote 
against the blockade of Cuba, with economic and political sanctions 
against Colombian President Gustavo Petro and his family, and now with 
the military threat against Venezuela, the US wants to regain control of 
its own backyard. Venezuela is particularly rich in one of Donald 
Trump's most coveted resources: oil. That oil has prompted him to 
threaten another military intervention, this time in Nigeria, another 
major oil producer, to "protect Christians"-in his words-from attacks by 
Islamist militias.

In Maduro's case, the growing military pressure may simply have the 
ambition of provoking the regime's implosion, with the overthrow of the 
maximo leader and the transfer of power to someone more acceptable, such 
as Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Corina Machado, the opposition leader, 
a hyper-liberal advocate, a member of a powerful property-owning family, 
and a staunch supporter of Trump, to whom she has promised parts of the 
Venezuelan oil industry.

Maduro's circle is a far cry from the beginnings of Hugo Chavez's 
so-called Bolivarian Revolution in 1999. The social-democratic approach 
of the first Chavista governments, supported economically by the 
enormous revenues from oil revenues, quickly collapsed in the face of 
fluctuating oil prices on the world market, resulting in cuts to 
services and subsidies, the closure of industrial plants, and the 
support of US sanctions and coup-preventative policies. The result: 
rising unemployment and inflation, a loss of purchasing power, and the 
impoverishment of the population, but also a disengagement of the 
military, state officials, and members of the Unified Socialist Party of 
Venezuela, defending their privileges and trafficking in oil, gold, and 
mineral products. Despite this, all attempts by the United States to 
support various right-wing opponents who ran in the various election 
campaigns have failed. Now, even the Norwegian Nobel Committee has 
joined in promoting Machado as the leader of the opposition against 
Maduro, a significant move aimed at reinvigorating the regime's internal 
enemies and providing some justification for external threats.

Many analysts argue that the military option is difficult to implement, 
both due to the country's size and Venezuela's widespread weaponry and 
the presence of various armed forces, both state and parastatal, as well 
as militias belonging to different factions currently linked to the 
regime but poised for an internal showdown over the division of the 
spoils. An armed invasion by the US could backfire on Trump and create 
repercussions within the MAGA movement, already reluctant to support his 
international activism at the expense of domestic issues. That said, 
while we must forcefully denounce the US imperialist operation against 
Venezuela-and obviously not only that-it is appropriate to question the 
state of the socialist opposition to the regime, in order to understand 
what room for maneuver they might have in the country's crisis to avoid 
handing it over to Yankee imperialism and its Venezuelan supporters. An 
opposition composed of ex-Chavista activists, grassroots militants from 
working-class neighborhoods and industrial facilities, facing increasing 
repression, consistent with Maduro's own definition of his system based 
on a "civil-military-police" alliance. This opposition, however, is 
weak, lacking the financial resources necessary to counter the power of 
the state, especially since the current regime in Venezuela is 
configured as a militarized and corrupt oligarchic regime, an 
increasingly authoritarian transformation of the populist state 
initially established by Hugo Chávez, with a liberal economy based on 
the dollar (while wages are in the inflated local currency), openness to 
transnational capital, privatizations, the promotion of special economic 
zones and areas reserved exclusively for foreigners, businessmen, and 
high-profile regime figures. Maduro's Venezuela is increasingly 
alienated from the logic and practices of social progress, increasingly 
distant from the needs of the population who had deluded themselves into 
thinking that Chávez and Chavismo were the key to their living conditions.

Massimo Varengo

https://umanitanova.org/venezuela-il-potere-del-petrolio-narcopretesti-dei-gendarmi-del-mondo/
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