US trying to starve Venezuelans to death with onerous sanctions: Don Debar

By Don Debar

Let's be clear about a couple of things with Trump's presidency in particular, but this is true really of the US government, of power institutions in general - in the United States particularly, but pretty much around the world. There is both a virtual reality, which is basically what's on TV and in the newspapers that is what people think constitutes the total of government activity and focus and concentration, etc., and interest. And then there's the actual stuff that people do when they go to work every day, you know, with instructions to them to come home with this that or the other from the people they work for.

Trump got elected, his virtual image - and his material one to a degree, because it scared the hell out of a lot of people - was saying we're not doing these invading other countries things anymore and we're going to stop wasting money, blowing up their countries and then trying to run them only to have them have it by themselves. So that meant, you know, no more Iraq, Libya, Syria, blah blah blah stuff. And, you know, there were seven or eight of those or ten depending on which ones you count - for example, nobody counts Congo, which is probably the most bloody war and longest-running one on the planet - but those were ongoing. But it meant at least "I'm not going to start another one."

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You know, Venezuela, since the election in 1998-99 when Hugo Chavez was elected, and then took office and then started the Bolivarian process there of applying the wealth of the country, particularly oil revenue, to developing the country for the people, building houses and all this, it took about two years to provoke in Washington a coup effort that took place in April of 2002. That coup failed ultimately after two or three days, people can look at a YouTube video - a movie on it that was shot from inside the palace with a European camera crew that got trapped behind the lines, called "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" to get that story. But since then, the Venezuelan government has tried to continue on that path. Hugo Chavez finally died about 10 years after that, we're seven years after that. And Maduro became president and they've tried to continue doing this.

The US, since then has imposed the most onerous sanctions on Venezuela, trying to choke it to starve to death, doing the same thing it has been trying to do to Iran and Democratic People's Republic of Korea, and to Cuba since 1960. And it hasn't worked yet. The people are suffering a great deal.

There is a constituency in politics here - electoral politics - a very strong one. And sort of connected to another strong one for the Venezuelan right-wing here in the United States. A lot of folks that fled Venezuela with their gold to the United States settled in Florida and Miami etc. Like the Cubans did after the fall of Batista. And there's very strong advocacy there for US military action to remove Maduro from power and put the right wing-back in power.

That has been resisted, and it runs counter to Trump's promises, but when he hired Bolton and Elliott Abrams and put Pompeo in charge of, ultimately, CIA, people wondered if he wasn't starting to gear up for that, to try to get the vote the Hispanic vote, the right wing Hispanic vote around Miami and promoting one kind or another. When they come up, this project developed Juan Guaidó ended up being the fair-haired child of Bolton, and Abrams, particularly last year, a virtual president for Venezuela. This guy is nobody but it's like if you grabbed the paperboy from outside of your house and declared he was president of Iran, you know, and tried to bring him to a TV station or whatever, you find out nobody will let you take him to the TV station because everybody hates him. That's what this guy is. He has control over no territory and no constituency in Venezuela, other than that he's president.

Well, you know, Trump got stuck with this, in a way, by letting Bolton and Abrams have free rein. This is the way that he does things. "You guys are the face of the right-wing position on this. Fine, here, go make policy" and they came back with a cartoon. So he let them hang the cartoon out there, they ended up hanging themselves. Now we've got Bolton, who is trying to hang Trump with the book before the election. But what we have really is the fruit of Bolton's policy in Venezuela, which is: Guaidó is nobody and Maduro is more popular, more powerful than he has been since the first time he was elected after Chavez died.

And now Trump is saying "Hey, you know what? Let's sit down and talk" and it's the same thing that he did with North Korea. And I think it's the same thing that's going to end up happening with Iran that he gets to play to all of the rubes on the right-wing here with this aggressive public relations stuff. There is the suffering imposed by the sanctions, but that is different from the wars that the US has been imposing instead before Trump came into power, and I'm hoping that this leads very shortly to resolving all of those and so normal relations between the US and some of these other countries and having missed out on the wars that we would have seen certainly if Clinton were president.

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Don DeBar is American journalist, radio host, and political commentator based in New York. He recorded this article for Press TV website.

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