Alternative Media and the Coup in Venezuela

Recently I picked up Angus Mackenzie's Secrets again. I had started it several years ago and then set it down. The important message that Mackenzie has for his readers is that our current cult of government secrecy had its origins in the CIA's surveillance of the domestic alternative press in the Vietnam era, a.k.a., Operation MHCHAOS, sister to the FBI's COINTELPRO.

Yesterday morning I read the blog post from the alternative weekly newspaper The Stranger:

Venezuela has two presidents: President Nicolás Maduro has been in power for several years now and has overseen the complete implosion of the country’s economy. But they also have another president, Juan Guaidó, a 35-year-old National Assembly leader who has broad support among the people and the backing of powerful nations. One of those nations is the United States. After the Trump administration recognized Guaidó as Venezuela’s true president, Maduro tried to expel all U.S. diplomats and accused the U.S. of “gringo interventions and coups d’état.” Putin did more or less the same because Maduro is a Russian ally. Go figure.

Fifty years is a long time. So I guess it should be no surprise that an institution, the alternative weekly, which originally spread throughout the country because of opposition to the Vietnam War should now mindlessly parrot -- "Juan Guaidó, a 35-year-old National Assembly leader who has broad support among the people" [!] -- the legacy media and cheerlead another bloody foreign intervention. Nonetheless, it made me angry.

As Craig Murray writes in "The Coup in Venezuela Must Be Resisted":

Anybody who believes that a country’s internal democracy is the determining factor in whether the West decides to move for violent regime change in that country, is a complete idiot. Any journalist or politician who makes that claim is more likely to be a complete charlatan than a complete idiot. In recent years, possession of hydrocarbon reserves is very obviously a major factor in western regime change actions.

In Latin America over the last century, the presence of internal democracy has been much more likely to lead to external regime change than its absence, as maintenance of US imperialist hegemony has been the defining factor. That combines with oil reserves to make the current move a double whammy.

It is disheartening to see the Western “democracies” so universally supporting the coup in Venezuela. The EU in particular has leapt in to support Donald Trump in the quite ludicrous act of recognising corrupt Big Oil puppet Guaido as “President”. The change of the EU into full neo-con mode -so starkly represented in its bold support for Francoist violence in Catalonia – is what led me to reconcile with Brexit and a Norway style relationship.

When I was in the FCO, the rule on recognition was very plain and very openly stated – the UK recognised the government which had “effective control of the territory”, whatever the attributes of that government. This is a very well established principle of international law. There were very rare exceptions involving continuing to support ousted governments. The pre-1939 Polish government in exile was the most obvious example, though once Nazism was defeated Britain moved to recognise the Communist government actually in charge, to the fury of exiled Poles. I was involved in the question of the continued recognition of President Kabbah of Sierra Leone during the period in which he was ousted by military coup.

But I can think of no precedent at all for recognising a President who does not have and has never had control of the country – and has never been a candidate for President. This idea of the West simply trying to impose a suitably corrupt and biddable leader is really a very startling development. It is astonishing the MSM commentariat and political class appear to see no problem with it. It is a quite extraordinary precedent, and doubtless will lead to many new imperialist adventures.

One final thought. The right wing Government of Ecuador has been one of the first and most vocal in doing the West’s bidding. The Ecuadorean government has been colluding with the United States over the efforts to imprison Julian Assange, and at this very time has arranged for FBI and CIA personnel in Quito to take false and malicious statements manufactured by the Ecuador government in collaboration with the CIA, about Julian Assange’s activities in the Embassy in London.

Ecuadorean government documents had already been produced out of Quito, and shown to MI6 and CIA outlets like the Guardian and New York Times, purporting to show the diplomatic appointment of Julian Assange to Moscow in December 2017. I have believed throughout that these fake documents were most likely produced by Ecuador’s new CIA influenced government itself.

Today Ecuador, once a key part of the Bolivarian revolution, is simply a puppet of the CIA, voicing support for a US coup in Venezuela and working to produce fake testimony against Assange. I warn you firmly against giving credence to Luke Harding’s next “scoop” which will doubtless shortly emerge from this process.

To me it seems clear that the coup-planners had hoped to stampede the military into abandoning Maduro. That hasn't happened. The Times quotes a Venezuelan academic affiliated with a CIA-front called Citizen Control (the website, very slick, reminds me of the White Helmets website that appeared before that group became notorious) who outlines how the coup will proceed:

Rocío San Miguel, a defense analyst in Venezuela who studies the military, said it was notable that the military weighed in so long after Mr. Guaidó took the oath. For the time being, she said, commanders appeared to have concluded that Mr. Maduro has the upper hand.

While the armed forces “aspire to a peaceful resolution” to the crisis, they will “stick with the most concrete power structure, pragmatically,” said Ms. San Miguel, who runs an organization calledCitizen Control.

Ms. San Miguel said military leaders may ultimately flip. That, she added, would possibly happen if the rank and file were signaling clearly that they did not want to crack down on protesters.

“That would be the sign that Maduro has to leave,” she said.