Venezuela: Not counting votes, but smashing imperialism’s hybrid war is essential

By Narciso Isa Conde

Workers World publishes, unedited, several statements from anti-imperialist media to show the breadth of support for the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and opposition to the lies of the U.S. government and corporate media. The author of this analysis is a historic leader of the revolutionary movement in the Dominican Republic. Translation: John Catalinotto. 

‘Concede to imperialism not an iota’

In the infinite global war that U.S. imperialism, with its Pentagon, its CIA and its NATO, is waging to stop its inevitable decline, the Venezuelan chapter has a singular importance. This is extremely relevant in Our America for the destiny of its struggle for the second wave of independence and the social emancipation of its peoples.

Let us not remain on the surface, let us make an effort to get out of the rubbish, out of the votes and the documents. These are all tangled up, mixed up and contaminated by that war in the hands of the entire Western imperialist system, commanded by the USA.

Venezuela is a treasure of water, oil, biodiversity. … It has enormous deposits of iron, bauxite, nickel, coal, gold, diamonds, limestone and other non-metallic minerals, besides major deposits of asbestos, phosphate, manganese, sulfur and lead.

It is at these riches and against its new independence and the new continental impulses in the same direction that the voracity and brutal colonialism of a decadent imperialist system aims. Since 2002, U.S. imperialism has deployed a global multistage war with the impossible mission of reestablishing its diminished supremacy.

This is an unconventional war, which has been going on for more than two decades. It is a fifth generation colonial war. A multidimensional war: financial, economic, media, technological, cybernetic, psychological, paramilitary, guarimbera [street assaults], terrorist … lending itself to military invasion with the most modern weapons on the planet.

It is a war of progressive and ascending attrition, heroically resisted. Economic blockade, financial embargo, digital terrorism, a hyperbombardment of alienating lies, sabotage to the electric system, to the electoral system, to all the established systems.

It brings attacks and violent aggressions. Brutal shortages. Food suffocation and strangulation of the health system. Electrical and electronic sabotage. Massive forced migrations. Infiltration of Colombian military paramilitarism.

It supports and encourages neo-fascism to the point of turning it into a threatening, violent, destabilizing force, connected to Colombian paramilitarism, the CIA and the Israeli Mossad.

It includes hostile political encirclement from a chain of countries of the European Union and North and South America.

States, parties, media and corporate chains conspired in the infamous task of making Bolivarian and Chavista Venezuela succumb.

Plan Guaidó: establishment of a puppet government, stateless, with no real basis, ridiculously backed by the entire Western imperialist system and its allies, including the defunct Lima Group, all in the name of democracy and freedom.

This plan failed precisely because of the heroic resistance of the brave Venezuelan people, because of the firmness of a project with deep popular roots, impressive combativeness and formidable mobilization capacity; it was confronted with the boldness of a project of a hitherto peaceful, but at the same time armed, revolution.

A failed plan, but not definitively abandoned.

Towards a higher level of confrontation

We are now entering a higher level of imperialist aggression, a new phase of the war that has been unleashed and progressively intensified. That war has impacted more strongly than before on the electoral scene, under a clearly neo-fascist leadership, orchestrated by the U.S. and its entire hemispheric system with the complicity of Western Europe.

The electoral results, entangled by different aspects of war and forced confrontation, count for little.

The participation in the elections were only a pretext to burst in with a new Guaidó-like plan and a new continental Lima Group-like group expanding, under the iron rule of those like Milei, Noboa, Bolsonaro, Murillo  [pro-imperialist Latin American officials]… appealing to the scum of the Organization of American States and operating from the dome of the Deep State and the U.S. bipartisan clique.

The Corina Plan is underway, with even more dangerous ingredients.

In these circumstances, the ambivalence of Lula, the pro-gringo slip of Arévalo, the reiteration of the great betrayal of Gabriel Boric and the recidivist cannibalism of Luis Abinader and others of the same ilk have not been lacking.

A war that transcends the attack on Maduro

It is not a war simply against the demonized Nicolás Maduro who, with enormous limitations and difficulties of all kinds, has resisted the imperial onslaught together with his people.

It is a war against the self-determination of a people and a continent. It is a war to recolonize it, to impose ultra-neoliberalism and neocolonial fascism. Moreover, it is in no way a war to abolish an alleged dictatorship and to remove an alleged dictator.

Certainly, the condition of a blockaded country, subjected to that war, and the uneven evolution of a transforming process constantly assaulted by a powerful world system, has prevented the democracy embodied in the Bolivarian Constitution from being deployed in its full dimension and depth.

The current constitutional model has, moreover, liberal components in the institutional relations, in the electoral and party system, in the formulation of the separation of powers typical of representative democracy, which facilitate and are vulnerable to counterrevolutionary actions.

In no revolutionary transition, subjected to such degrees of violence, subjected to a war of this type — still with a strong presence of local and transnational big capital, which in turn sustains traditional partisanship and the new right-wingers — is it possible to apply these aspects of the established model.

Centralization has been forced by these adversities and by the delays in terms of direct democracy and socialization of property and power.

The defense of the threatened sovereignty has been accompanied by a brake on the socialist project and the type of democracy that corresponds to it, which has nothing in common with the liberal and neoliberal models, much less with the fascism disguised as democracy, which the Venezuelan ultraright and their tutors try to impose at any cost.

The war against Bolivarian Venezuela continues

All illusions of reconciliation and peace soon vanished. So have all attempts to insert itself quietly into the market and the economies of Western capitalism.

The U.S. is at war against everything that is not part of its increasingly precarious unipolar world; it is at war against everything that smacks of sovereignty and self-determination.

It is at war with different programs, ranging from those applied in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Palestine … to the war that was implemented in the former Yugoslavia and currently executed against Russia in Ukraine … since the one aimed against China and Iran … up to the ones deployed against Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Honduras, Haiti and Bolivia. If the enemy is at war, its victims must confront it or perish.

Thus, with such an enemy, no reconciliation is possible. This illusion must be discarded.

The longed-for peace can only be achieved by defeating the war waged by big capital and defeating those who use it to dominate and oppress.

This has been confirmed in Venezuela these days. The U.S. and internal fascism have escalated the war under the pretext of [electoral] fraud. Now, this is not a matter of looking for votes and voting records in the midst of the tumult. Much less to accept the claims of an opposition headed by CIA agents.

The new destabilizing plan — possibly with a new parallel government set-up and accompanied by a great regional and global orchestration — is underway to foster ungovernability and demand new elections intervened by the OAS and tutored by the pro-imperialist international community.

The new Guaidó is the CIA special agent, Edmundo Gonzáles, manipulated by María Corina Machado, similar to Guaidó and having a strong pro-coup and terrorist character.

This plan cannot be overcome by conceding, but only by putting in motion all the available armed, regular and militia power as a dissuasive factor; raising the levels of popular mobilization and the readiness to struggle, activating all the established communal power; closing the space to all who seek to crush the sovereignty of the people and who encourage imperialist military intervention; dismantling paramilitarism and outlawing all that is terrorist and neo-colonial fascism.

A Chávez-like strike at the helm (golpe de timón)

It seems to me that it is the time for a great strike at the helm along these lines, remembering also the postponed recommendations of Comandante Hugo Chávez [made in 2012]. It is time to rethink the democracy of the process of revolutionary transition as soon as the latest sedition is defeated and the situation is stabilized.

The original model, deformed by imperious needs and forced improvisations, gives the impression that it is already strained. It demands, in my opinion, a highly creative critical reflection, a different practice and a new constitutional reform.

In times of such a war, the democracy of the revolutionary transition must open itself more towards the people, create more spaces where people can participate and revitalize the popular and communal powers; at the same time closing spaces and unfruitful accommodations to the agents of the imperialist counterrevolution.

In Russia, China and Iran — countries compelled to achieve multipolarity and to distance themselves from the hegemonic drive of the U.S. — the Bolivarian revolution has powerful international allies; it also has the opportunity to be part of the new pole of the BRICS [which is] in the process of enlargement.

The Bolivarian process has a bastion of solidarity in Cuba and thus in all sovereign states and in the political and social movements of the anti-imperialist and anti-neoliberal camp.

In the framework of this new world correlation of power, the deployment on a larger scale of the political, social and military forces that have sustained the Bolivarian-Chavista process and the solidarity of states and peoples in struggle are a formidable combination that can resist, prevail and deepen the changes.

And on days like these, new visits of some Russian, Chinese or Iranian warships to Venezuelan ports would not go amiss.

Together with conceding “not an iota” to that insolent and aggressive imperialism in its decadence, it is necessary to show that the multipolar world has arrived to assert itself.