Venezuelan election: Machado, the hand of Washington and oil

By Carlos Fazio

Carlos Fazio, Uruguayan writer, journalist and academic living in Mexico, published this article July 12 in rebelion.org in Spanish. Workers World publishes a shortened version to inform our readers of the upcoming July 28 national election in Venezuela and U.S. intervention in that country. Translation: John Catalinotto. 

In a world marked by the contradiction between the hegemonic unilateralism of the United States and a new type of multipolarism centered on the expanded BRICS [Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa and now other countries] — to which the proxy war in Ukraine and the collective punishment and extermination of Palestinians by Israel in Gaza are no strangers — the presidential elections of July 28 in Venezuela acquire a renewed geopolitical dimension.

But the novelty now is that the Venezuelan extreme right has decided to participate in the elections after nine years of destabilizing and disruptive adventures. This hybrid war, designed by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Pentagon and the U.S. Treasury Department, combined psychological warfare operations (OPSIC) with insurrectional street actions (guarimbas); unilateral and extraterritorial economic and financial sanctions as tools of war by non-military means and collective punishment against the civilian population; false propaganda and disinformation (fake news, misleading information, rumors); sabotage; assassination attempts; abstentionism and electoral boycotts; and the “parallel government” made in the USA of Juan Guaidó. All these activities were aimed at a change of Venezuela’s political government. 

To these must be added, at this juncture, Washington’s request to the constitutional and legitimate government of President Nicolás Maduro to resume direct dialogue between the two countries, which demonstrates Washington’s need to ensure the flow of Venezuelan oil.

In the elections, just over 21.6 million Venezuelans are called to participate and will be able to choose between 10 candidates for the presidency of the Republic. Polls show that the leading candidates are the current President Maduro and the opposition Edmundo González Urrutia, representative of the Plataforma Unitaria Democrática/United Democratic Platform. The PUD groups are a block of 11 center-right and ultraright parties led by María Corina Machado, including Acción Democrática/Democratic Action, Un Nuevo Tiempo/A New Time and some leaders of Primero Justicia/Justice First.

True character of the “opposition”

Presented by CNN, BBC News, the German government news agency Deutsche Welle, France 24, Bloomberg, El País and AP as a “retired career diplomat” who is ahead in the polls, Edmundo González Urrutia, 74 years old, is a man with health problems, no charisma and low media profile.  María Corina Machado chose him as her replacement, with the endorsement of the United States.

Machado is a heiress of the Venezuelan oligarchic elite and the original candidate of the corporate and deep state circles in Washington. She was a signer of the Carmona Decree during the civil-military coup d’état against Commander Hugo Chávez in April 2002 and was received by President George W. Bush in the Oval Office of the White House on May 31, 2005. She asked Bush then to overthrow the leader of the Bolivarian Revolution and was disqualified [as a candidate] for 15 years by the Venezuelan Supreme Court of Justice for having participated in several coup attempts. 

As Panama’s “diplomatic representative” (sic) before the Organization of American States (OAS), Machado supported the foreign invasion of Venezuela in 2014; she received direct funding from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), old fronts of the CIA.  

Machado was for the corruption scheme orchestrated by the usurper Guaidó that propitiated the U.S.’s criminal blockade of the Bolivarian Republic. She also backed the millionaire plundering of wealth and state-owned companies (such as Citgo Holding Inc, Citgo Petroleum Corporation and Manómeros Colombo Venezolanos, S. A.), together with the seizure and theft of 31 tons of Venezuelan gold bullion by the Bank of England.

That Machado was disqualified from running in the election was the pretext used by the U.S. State Department, last April, to justify the reimposition of oil sanctions against the government of Nicolás Maduro. Despite all this, as the founder of the conservative party Vente Venezuela, Machado has toured several cities as if she were campaigning for the presidential chair of the Miraflores Palace, seat of the Executive Power.

González was the international representative of the Mesa de la Unidad Democrática (today PUD) between 2013 and 2015. During that period the Pentagon’s Southern Command intensified the hybrid war against Venezuela country within the framework of the fratricidal Operation Freedom Venezuela. He has been present at some rallies, but in a discreet and secondary manner despite being the candidate that will be judged at the polls. In fact, upon accepting the candidacy, Gonzalez indicated that he did not intend to campaign throughout the country and added that “Maria Corina is doing that very well.” 

And in another demonstration that he is nothing more than a spare part manipulated by Machado, he has said that his government program is identical to the one his superior presented for her own presidential candidacy.

‘Libertarian social brutalism’

With many points in common with Milei’s ultra-neoliberal program, Machado and Gonzalez’s “Land of Grace” plan replicates the model of “libertarian social brutalism” that has brought disastrous consequences to Argentina. They have a clear intention to push through fiscal adjustment policies, the eradication of subsidies and social programs, the search for international financing that could mortgage the country’s financial policy and, in particular, the idea of privatization of public companies and assets, especially the Venezuelan oil and gas industry. 

In essence, it’s a project of political, economic and ideological subordination that seeks the perpetuation of a model of plundering and exploitation of the nation’s strategic resources at the service of national and U.S. plutocratic interests.

Without the support of a strong political party, Machado, a polarizing figure with a Manichean discourse that counts on bipartisan Democratic-Republican support in the United States, embodies the ultra-right populism in vogue in South America. The Argentine president Javier Milei, the former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro and the former Chilean Pinochet candidate José Antonio Kast adhere to the same populism. 

Likewise, Machado’s defense of a laissez-faire type of capitalism in its most extreme form twins her with the conservative Spanish Popular Party and the ultra right-wing Vox party in Spain, led by her “friend” Santiago Abascal, as part of an emerging reactionary international [group of ultra right parties] that has just been partially stopped in France.

Along with their electoral discourse and their return to the institutional path after their abstentionist-insurrectionary failures that led them to lose all their positions in the scaffolding of the powers of the state, extremist groups of the opposition have not ceased in their destabilizing conspiratorial actions through several sabotages last June against the National Electric System in states like Nueva Esparta, Guárico and Zulia and against the Angostura Bridge that connects the states of Anzoátegui and Bolívar.

The refusal of the PUD candidate, Edmundo González, and of Enrique Márquez of the Centrados Party, to sign the agreement for the recognition of election results proposed by the National Electoral Council, added to the denunciations of electric war and new assassination attempts, reveal the true strategy: If Maduro wins, they will continue to bet on post-electoral political violence alleging “fraud.” This is the opinion pattern shown by The New York Times, El Tiempo of Bogota and other Western corporate media, which have unleashed a fierce saturation campaign against Chavismo and the Bolivarian Revolution and in support of the right-wing opposition, which they give as “sure” winner through repetitive adulterated polls. 

As an example, it is worth mentioning the newspaper El Tiempo, for whom Machado is “unbeatable,” “the political hurricane the regime fears the most” and considered as “the most overwhelming electoral phenomenon in Venezuela since that of Hugo Chavez in 1998.” According to polls published by the conservative media, Gonzalez leads Maduro by between 17% and 34%, while [pro-Bolivarian] Hinterlaces polling company places Maduro’s United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) with 52.1%, and Gonzalez’s United Platform with 13.45%.

Resumption of talks between the U.S. and Venezuela

In 2023, representatives of Washington and Caracas agreed in Doha, under the auspices of the Qatari government, to advance in the recomposition of their relations based on the lifting of the U.S. unilateral coercive measures and the resumption of Maduro’s dialogue with the extremist sector of the opposition. Although some progress was made, after the ratification of the disqualification of María Corina Machado, the U.S. State Department and Treasury reimposed the sanctions, alleging non-compliance by the Venezuelan side with the Barbados Agreements, a version that Caracas rejects.

On July 2, after reflecting for two months on a new U.S. proposal for a direct dialogue, Maduro accepted, exhibiting a strategic attitude, not an urgent need. A day later, negotiations were resumed, with the opposition marginalized from the dialogue table. The waning hegemony of the U.S. in the world is based on and has as its basis and purpose the domination of fossil energy. 

With the largest oil reserves in the world (the fourth largest in gas and gold, the sixth largest in diamonds, the eighth largest in iron and ample water, coal and biodiversity resources), Venezuela is currently negotiating from a position of strength with the energy factor as a means of pressure (without forgetting, of course, the poisonous and artful strategies of the U.S. in the cases of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya and the Minsk Agreements on Ukraine with Russia).

However, what reasons would Washington have for negotiating with a president who is about to lose the elections on July 28? Having overcome at this stage the multiform war, the toxic polarization of covert operations, hyperinflation in the economy and with an agro-industry that is now supplying 98% of the food to consumers, Chavism has accumulated institutional strength from deep Venezuela, and the forthcoming entry of the country into the BRICS will insert it into the new international order in the making. Hence the geopolitical importance of the elections. …