An Ignoble Legacy

With the imminent threat of yet another United States engineered coup d' etat looming in Venezuela, the Trump administration is poised to join the ranks of several past US administrations in orchestrating a regime change in Latin America. The ongoing political chaos under the leadership of current president Nicolas Maduro is a result of an unhappy mixture of governmental mismanagement, crippling economic sanctions unilaterally imposed by the US without United Nations authorization, and a relentless internal opposition by the US backed ultra right resistance which successfully undermined a recent agreement by members of the moderate opposition to negotiate a peaceful settlement with the Maduro regime in a peace conference in the Dominican Republic. At this point the National Assembly leader, Juan Guaido, is being touted by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as the rightful heir to the presidency without the benefit of an actual democratic election...the classic trappings of a coup d' etat. Additionally, the election which brought Maduro to power was boycotted by the radical right opposition in an attempt to delegitimize Maduro presidency and pave the way for the coup we are now witnessing in real time.

This flaunting of international law which serves to protect the sovereignty of nations and protect against the illegal intervention of one nation into the internal affairs of another is, of course, perfectly consistent with past practice by the United States under the leadership of Democratic and Republican alike. The current inference of the US in the affairs of a sovereign nation reminds one of the CIA directed military coup against the democratically elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz, in 1954 under the leadership of President Eisenhower and his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles. It should be noted that an earlier attempt to unseat Arbenz was conducted during the administration of Harry Truman, which was successfully albeit temporarily thwarted by the Guatemalan government.

The Nixon/Kissinger regime became infamous in giving approval to the CIA backed assassination of the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvatore Allende, in September (11th, no less) of 1973. This resulted in one the most repressively brutal regimes of the 20th century under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

This legacy of illegal intervention continued under Bush the Elder (in 1991) and repeated itself during the regime of Bush the Lesser (in 2004) as they twice moved to undermine the popular presidency of Jean-Bertrand Aristide by presiding over his removal from office and his forced exile to Africa. It might be remembered with a degree of shame when then Secretary of State, Colin Powell, boldly announced on PBS, as an acquiescent Jim Lear passively looked on, that...'Aristide really has to go'. It was as if he was announcing to the world on behalf of the current, past, and future generations of American leaders that 'sovereignty be damned when we decide a regime change is in our best interests'! Of notable interest in the case of Haiti is that the ensuing chaos emanating from this coup led the way for the insertion of the Clinton Foundation in the 'rebuilding' of Haiti which resulted, instead, in further devastation of one of the poorest nations on the face of the Earth and the aggrandizement of Bush's predecessor.

A more recent example of our involvement in the removal of a democratically elected leader of a sovereign nation was 2009 military coup in Honduras, which ousted President Manuel Zelaya from office and replaced him with the US/CIA backed Roberto Micheletti with the full endorsement of then Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, under the direction of the Obama/Biden administration. The resulting dissolution of this society has brought endless suffering to the Honduran people and yielded an environment in which lawlessness and gang violence has thrived to this day. We see clearly the effects of this societal deterioration in the form of the multitudes of refugees fleeing the country, often seeking asylum in this country...a cruel example of the blowback from unintended consequences.

It cannot be lost on even the most inattentive reader that these examples of orchestrated regime change were perpetrated against leftists governments not ideologically allied with the United States. It follows that these incursions into the politics of these sovereign countries were done in order to re-assert a kind of ideological and economic hegemony in the Southern Hemisphere against the will of the people and in service of our more narrow geo-political ambitions.

The current situation is essentially no different than the cases cited above in that, however flawed the Maduro administration might be as a result of internally and externally imposed forces, Venezuela, much like Guatemala, Chile, Haiti, and Honduras before them, has its own unique set of issues with which it must deal and must be allowed, as an independent and sovereign entity, to resolve their challenges by reference to their own electorate, free from foreign interference, violence, and malicious intent.