The right-wing opposition also successfully lobbied to have the European Parliament, the Spanish lower house and the Senate in the Dominican Republic pass resolutions recognizing Edmundo González as president-elect of Venezuela. The resolutions in Europe were promoted by the far-right allies of Machado, including Vox in Spain and the Alternative for Germany (AfD).
While the immediate political and geostrategic context may keep Washington from escalating the measures against Caracas, this is temporary. It has spent billions over two decades to overthrow the Chavistas in order to gain unfettered control over the largest oil reserves on the planet, which lie under Venezuelan soil.
US imperialism considers China its main geopolitical rival and the ultimate target of the expanding global war. It concluded long ago that undermining Chinese economic and political influence in Latin America requires ousting the Maduro administration.
Despite lower production today due to sanctions, Venezuelan oil has historically been a key component of the global profits and power of US and British imperialism since the 1920s. During the 1973 oil embargo, triggered by the Arab-Israeli war, Venezuelan oil was crucial for the US and Europe to partially limit an increase in prices.
Sitting just across the Caribbean from Florida, Venezuela is also seen as a geopolitical beachhead in efforts to undermine regional and outside powers. These realities have cultivated dependency, corruption and submissiveness in the Venezuelan bourgeoisie and resulted in extreme levels of misery and inequality and a particularly explosive class struggle.
Writer Eduardo Galeano wrote in 1958, when more than half of the global profits for the US-based Standard Oil and British Shell came from the country: “Venezuela was a vast oil well surrounded by prisons and torture chambers, importing everything from the United States: automobiles and refrigerators, condensed milk, eggs, lettuce, laws and decrees.”
Periods of boom such as in the 1970s under Social Democratic President Carlos Andres Perez and the 2000s under Hugo Chavez allowed the ruling class room for limited nationalizations and social assistance programs. Chávez and Maduro also sought to gain better terms from US imperialism by seeking closer ties to Russia and China.
But at no point did the submissive character of the ruling class diminish, despite the radical phraseology of its Chavista faction, and there was never a sustained effort for actual economic and democratic development. The inevitable bust in the oil market led Pérez and Chávez to launch austerity measures. In the latest period, this has been combined with devastating US sanctions to produce the worst humanitarian disaster in the country’s history.
Maduro ultimately agreed behind closed doors to the entirely illegitimate elections in July as a cover to subordinate Venezuelan oil further to the diktats of Chevron and Wall Street, hoping that Washington would relent in its efforts to install direct puppets like Machado and González. This has been combined with the increased police state repression of opposition to the government’s left and within the working class, as well as restrictions on X, Signal and other apps.
Austerity and privatizations in the 1980s led to the massive workers’ uprising known as the Caracazo in 1989. A major strike and protest movement that continued into the 1990s was channeled behind the election of Chávez.
Like elsewhere in the region and internationally, the long history of imperialist oppression and extreme inequality is rooted in the crisis of revolutionary leadership of the working class in its objective struggle to overthrow capitalism. It is urgent that a new leadership be built as a section of the International Committee of the Fourth International, which is the only one that has drawn the necessary historical lessons of the betrayals at the hands of Social Democracy, Stalinism, Pabloism and the many variants of bourgeois nationalism like Chavismo that have characterized the history of Venezuela and the region.
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Publish date : 2024-09-20 11:35:00
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