Venezuela and the Zombie Politics of Death and Destruction

Sputnik has an interview with Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro which covers the U.S.-engineered coup underway. I've read the quotes about Venezuela possessing the world's largest proven oil reserves, but I had no idea about its abundance of other natural resources:

Sputnik: What do you think are the primary motives behind US actions in Venezuela? Oil?

Nicolas Maduro: There are a couple of goals. The primary goal is to get Venezuelan oil since we have the biggest reserves of certified oil in the world. We are certifying what is on track to become the biggest gold reserves in the world, we have a quarter of world's gas, we have vast reserves of diamonds, huge reserves of drinking water, aluminium, and iron. We are a power in the field of energy resources, natural resources. But there is a certain point that needs to be taken into consideration, which is more than 200 years old. Venezuela is the country where Bolivar was born, we have the strongest Bolivarian tradition here.

Over the course of 200 years, our revolutionary project has influenced Latin America and the countries of the Caribbean. They [the US authorities] fundamentally want to destroy the example, the idea, the spirit of Simon Bolivar. This is the second big reason — to kill this spirit — spiritually, culturally, politically. And to move without any resistance to neocolonialism in Latin America. They [the US] consider us their "backyard". And we say, we are not anyone's backyard, we are an independent republic. As you would say in Russia, we have a 200-year historical impulse, we are winning and we will win.

Yesterday Jacobin ended its silence on the coup. "The US Should Stay out of Venezuela" is an interview with former Ecuadorean foreign minister Guillaume Long. Long makes a couple of important points. The mainstream Western media makes it seem as if Maduro has no support; that Venezuelans uniformly favor the opposition. Long says that this is false, that there is still plenty of support for Chavismo. The country is split.

Long warns Europe of its drift to the coup camp:

As for the European Union, and its constituent powers, it is showing signs of adopting the Trump and Lima Group line. I think it is important that the European Union does not follow this path. Initially, they seemed to show restraint, but recent statements about recognizing Guaidó subject to elections within eight days fall in line with this hawkish approach.

Unfortunately, underlying all of this is a return to a kind of Cold War politics in Latin America. Bolsonaro has been the best example of this, saying he would not permit “communism” on the continent and vowing to rout out “the reds.” He said this with reference not only to the Workers’ Party (PT) and other left-wing parties in his own country, but also to left-wing governments like Venezuela and Cuba. This dynamic has been deepened by the United States’ intervention under Donald Trump and John Bolton, who have recently reintroduced figures like Elliott Abrams, one of the most notorious figures of the 1980s Contra dirty wars in Latin America, to the region’s politics.

I think Europe should be adopting a more nuanced approach which would allow it to play a more productive role in Venezuela, and indeed in Latin America, including even mediation some time down the road.

In the end, Long doesn't see Guaidó being able to topple Maduro, which means that the U.S. will escalate, which means death and destruction for Latin America:

It is hard to see how the Guaidó camp can succeed on its own, without the military and with society deeply divided. Even with the support of the Western powers. The escalation of sanctions is going to make the situation increasingly untenable. Economic sanctions always hurt the poorest in society and have been a substantial contributor to Venezuela’s economic crisis. They will also, in all likelihood, prevent the Maduro government from engineering the kinds of change that would increase its support base to pre-2015 levels.

The encouragement, particularly by the Trump administration, of further escalation in Venezuela is therefore extremely dangerous. It underestimates the resilience of the Chavista camp and rests on the idea of overwhelming popular support for the opposition. If Reagan-style policies from the 1980s are what the United States has in store for Venezuela, then it is very bad news for Venezuela and for Latin America as a whole.

Venezuela’s crisis has already produced a huge migratory crisis — and further escalation into violence would make this much worse. We have seen in Syria, Iraq, and Libya some of the potential outcomes in this regard. I don’t think even the continent’s right-wing governments have the stomach for that. This realization may eventually lead a growing number of Latin American states, including members of the Lima Group, to understand that the Venezuelan crisis should be resolved at the negotiating table.

The politics of death and destruction, this brain-dead march of the zombies, is on display in "Is There Room in 2020 for a Centrist Democrat? Maybe One or Two.," by Alexander Burns. The Democratic Party is fracturing. Both Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have captured the rank'n'file with promises to tax the rich. This is something the party's big donors cannot abide. The superannuated, Mike Bloomberg and Joe Biden, are being trotted out to defend a bankrupt neoliberal "centrism."

It is not going to work because the only audience that defense persuades is the 1%. Burns cites the polling on taxation:

Arkadi Gerney, a Democratic strategist who runs the Hub Project, a liberal advocacy group that has focused heavily on taxes, said that intensive issue polling had consistently found powerful support for raising taxes on the wealthy, not just among Democrats but also among working-class white voters in Mr. Trump’s base.

“The thing that was consistently the most popular in those experiments was: raise taxes on the rich,” Mr. Gerney said. “It is tapping into anger that a lot of people have.”

This anger is not going away. Mike Bloomberg complaining that Medicare For All will bankrupt the country after congress just gave trillions to corporations, Joe Biden saying he can reach across the aisle to work with Republicans -- that kind of hokum is not going to work.