Venezuela

[blindpig]

VIA BLOCKING PAYMENTS TO COVAX
HOW THE US TRIES TO PREVENT THE ACCESS OF VACCINES TO VENEZUELA
13 Jun 2021 , 9:39 am .


COVAX seeks to ensure the equitable delivery of vaccines for 20% of the population of the participating countries around the world (Photo: EFE

The second phase of mass vaccination against covid-19 in Venezuela began a couple of weeks ago, being a milestone in health in the country amid the multidimensional siege imposed by the United States.

Within the mass immunization planning, the Venezuelan government hopes to vaccinate the majority of the Venezuelan population by the end of this year, according to the words of the Minister of Health Dr. Carlos Alvarado : "We have planned to vaccinate 70% of the population here to December, as the vaccines arrive, we hope to create herd immunity. "

The plan of the government of Nicolás Maduro to obtain medical supplies and vaccines has been drawn up since last year in sync with Russia, China, Cuba and some multilateral organizations, specifically, with the World Health Organization (WHO), which In April 2020, it launched the famous vaccine access mechanism: Covid-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX).


Letter from the COVAX mechanism where it refers to the blocking of payments from Venezuela through UBS (Photo: COVAX)

However, Venezuela's efforts to pay and fulfill its commitments have been hampered by the unilateral coercive measures imposed by the United States. On June 10, Executive Vice President Delcy Rodríguez informed the country about the arbitrary blockade of the last payments made by the Venezuelan State to COVAX, calculated for about 10 million dollars.

ROADMAP FOR IMMUNIZATION IN VENEZUELA
Russia and China took the lead in the development of anticovid vaccines, becoming decisive instruments for the times to come at the geopolitical level. This move has been crucial to contain the common maneuver of Western corporatism in these circumstances: hoarding.

The Secretary General of the United Nations (UN), António Guterres, reported that 75% of the vaccines applied until February 2021 had been concentrated in just ten countries , leading the list to Israel, the United Kingdom and the European Union.

The United States was not far behind: in July 2020 it agreed with large pharmaceutical companies Pfizer and BioNTech to reserve 100 million doses of vaccines and the right to buy another 500 million doses if the White House deemed it necessary.

This marks the inequality gap in the distribution of vaccines, since countries with higher incomes accumulate doses of vaccines in order to bring countries that require them to their knees in the future, creating dire consequences for humanity.


Anticipating these scenarios, by October 2020 , Venezuela was the first country in Latin America to receive the Russian Sputnik V vaccine for the third phase of clinical trials. At that time, President Nicolás Maduro estimated that after carrying out the trials and proceeding with the cooperation efforts for the purchase of vaccines, the massive vaccination days would take place for the second quarter of 2021 , even earlier. That's how it went.

Based on this, it is considered pertinent to list the relevant global maneuvers made by the Venezuelan government to obtain vaccines with the great allies, despite the siege of any financial transfer made by the Venezuelan State.

President Maduro, in June 2020, raised the proposal to the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA-TCP) to coordinate efforts in the development of their own vaccine and treatment against covid-19.
From now on, at the close of 2020, the Venezuelan president continued the line of cooperation to face the pandemic, expressing again in ALBA-TCP that, through the ALBA Bank, the financing of the entire process of mass vaccination of the entire population of the member countries.
After carrying out the clinical trials for Sputnik V, in early 2021, it granted an authorization for the emergency use of the Russian vaccine in Venezuela.
In February 2021, Peter Grohmann, Resident Coordinator of the United Nations System in Venezuela, agreed with the Venezuelan government to create a 300 million dollar fund for Venezuelan vaccines with the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) and the WHO. That same month, the mass vaccination of health personnel in Venezuela with Sputnik V.
The Petroleum for Vaccines Plan is also announced as an alternative method for obtaining vaccines.
Following the arrival of a batch of vaccines from China in March, the purchase of the Sputnik Light vaccines and the Janssen vaccine are announced.
In April, the Venezuelan State made a deposit of 59.2 million Swiss francs , which represents more than 50% to participate in the COVAX mechanism. Gradually, the country was informed about the following payments made in recent months to receive 11 million covid-19 vaccines, a fact that was reconfirmed by PAHO's Director of Health Emergencies, Ciro Ugarte , estimating that the Johnson & Johnson's anticovid vaccine, as Venezuela made new payments to the COVAX mechanism.

THE CRIME
The Venezuelan State is informed on June 7 about " four payments blocked and under investigation ", payments destined to acquire vaccines through COVAX. This was indicated in a letter by Santiago Cornejo, director of the international mechanism in question. Namely:

April 21, 2021: more than 2 million dollars.
May 6, 2021: two payments totaling more than $ 800,000.
May 18, 2021: more than 1 million dollars.

The blocked money was courtesy of the Swiss investment bank UBS, a neutral and necessary body in the very dynamics of world trade for transactions between countries. This bank is renowned for the supposed principles that characterize it: the high levels of security and protection of the assets that it offers to companies, individuals and especially to the States.

As with the Venezuelan gold seized by the Bank of England, which refuses the alternative of facilitating Venezuelan reserve assets for the purchase of vaccines due to pressure from the United States, the UBS bank applies the same modus operandi : block the transactions made by Venezuela to a highly recognized international mechanism to gain access to vaccines against covid-19.


But it is not the first time that the UBS bank has been involved in these unilateral attacks against Venezuela:

In October 2017, the United States stopped deposits from the Venezuelan State to the UBS for the purchase of vaccines and medicines through PAHO's Revolving and Strategic Fund.
In 2020, UBS broke contracts with Venezuelan clients linked to PDVSA.

Despite the fact that UBS has several recent precedents in allowing the interference of US interference policies against Venezuela, the Venezuelan State relies on the security and neutrality standards of that bank, especially when it comes to food or medicine, trusting mainly in compliance with international law. There is no additional information that could confirm that the COVAX mechanism required payments through UBS, taking into account the anti-Venezuelan record of the Swiss bank.

Apart from delaying efforts to acquire vaccines, international law and monetary sovereignty are once again violated, including disrespect for UN General Assembly resolution 74/274, which calls for strengthening supply chains to guarantee universal and fair access to medicines and vaccines to face the current pandemic.

Likewise, within the framework of the "sanctions", the Swiss bank Hyposwiss Private Bank in 2019 arbitrarily closed the bank account of a major soybean food company, for the payment of 15.9 million euros for more than 90 thousand tons of soybeans transported by boat that came from Venezuela.

Neither Swiss banks, nor food and medicine, are spared from the outsourcing of attacks made by the United States against Venezuela.

The Russian think tank Valdai Discussion Club, in an event with several international experts , states that "'sanctions' inevitably affect the population. Restrictions on business operations lead to higher prices and inflation, while target states lose control. ability to trade with the outside world. " This occurs because the purpose of this type of financial coercion creates an atmosphere of insecurity and uncertainty in the business world, due to multi-million dollar fines or account blocking.

Faced with the imposition of US sanctioning bullets against any country that is not in sync with its interests, it creates an imbalance in the current dynamics of international relations and will lead to the implementation of other large payment mechanisms to balance the financial task between countries in international trade.

The initiatives of the digital yuan and the massive purchase of gold by Russia are some examples of the plans to shed the financial management of the United States. For this reason, an extensive list of countries considers it safer to abide by the agreements of these two great powers. The tests refer to this fact: Venezuela until a few days ago had 11% of the population vaccinated thanks to commercial and financial relations with Russia and China.

This other ominous experience of blocking assets to obtain vaccines should be added to the final report of the UN special rapporteur, Alena Douhan (participant of the Valdai event) that will be presented in September 2021.

https://misionverdad.com/venezuela/como ... -venezuela

Google Translator

What a shameful, hateful country the US is. Goddamn Amerika. And fuck the Swiss too, their sham neutrality in no way preventing them from participating in the class war.

[blindpig]

EXAMINATION OF A PRIVILEGED RELATIONSHIP
FORO PENAL: A US AGENCY FOR REGIME CHANGE
17 Jun 2021 , 3:26 pm .


Alfredo Romero and Gonzalo Himiob, directors of the NGO Foro Penal (Photo: Foro Penal)

In the era of globalization, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have become a very important actor in the international political arena. The governments of several Western countries, mainly the United States, have prioritized the incorporation of international NGOs at the service of their foreign policies, directly or indirectly achieving strategic objectives that are difficult to achieve through governmental channels.

The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), Human Rights Watch (HRW), Freedom House, are examples that beyond the facade of independence, self-styled independent NGOs are driven by Western power. In fact, it is never necessary to remember that the NED was started and established in the United States by the Ronald Reagan administration in 1983, but was registered as private, and that Congress gives it the majority of the 1,600 grants it receives annually to promote non-governmental groups abroad; or that Freedom House, established in 1941, is affiliated with the Department of Defense and 80% of its budget comes from the federal government.


The United States funds foreign NGOs to interfere where it cannot do so directly. (Photo: Associated Press)

The United States provides funds to these nongovernmental organizations to protect Washington's global and regional interests. So do European countries with other NGOs. When the target is governments that do not embrace Anglo-Zionist interests, most plans lead to actions of irregular violence combined with international isolation and "sanctions."

In fact, on a global scale, the coups and rebellions that have occurred in almost all countries in the last two decades are inextricably linked to the three organizations mentioned above, including the 2004 Haiti coup, the 2009 Honduran coup, the "color revolutions" in Eastern Europe, the "Arab Spring" in the Middle East, the violent escalation of secessionists in Hong Kong, the attempted coup in Nicaragua in 2018 and the coup against Evo Morales in Bolivia in 2019.

At the local level, international NGOs finance and cooperate with organizations "independent" from the territory in which they interfere. In the case of Venezuela, it is undeniable that an extensive list of anti-Chavista NGOs have acted as not-so-silent partners of the United States government and other Western countries.

From that list we are going to review the case of Foro Penal, due to the strength and prominence that it has accumulated in its years of operations in the country.

IT IS NOT AN IMPARTIAL ORGANIZATION
Created in 2002, it describes itself as a "Venezuelan organization in defense of human rights, with effective work for more than 15 years in Venezuela in providing free legal assistance and support to relatives and victims of arbitrary detentions."

The reality is that Foro Penal was launched that year defending anti-Chavez political operators, guilty of assassinations, in the context of the coup against President Hugo Chávez. His area of ​​activity involves building false complaints of political prisoners and refugees and human rights violations, with the aim of using them as weapons to manipulate public opinion (national and international) about Venezuela.

The interest in involving NGOs in US foreign policy programs is explained by the apparent impartiality of these parastatal institutions, which enjoy greater credibility in foreign countries than government agencies due to the amplification of their procedures in media spokespersons corporate. The executive director of Foro Penal, Alfredo Romero, is frequently quoted in Western media to give credibility to the story of "impunity" in Venezuelan institutions in situations of injustice, giving it a touch of systematization and structurality usual in failed or outlaw states.

Can someone who collaborates with seditious and terrorist actors have credibility? Let's review the links that Foro Penal has with the most extreme political groups of the anti-Chavista spectrum.

The NGO that Romero directs covered up the attempts at a color revolution led by the political party Voluntad Popular (in 2014 and 2017), resorting to " political prisoners " every time people involved in the armed phase of the guarimbas were captured. The names of those criminals were added to the list of reports from Foro Penal. He also sabotaged the calls for dialogue made by President Nicolás Maduro to stabilize the situation in the country in a context of extremist violence.


What Foro Penal names as "political prisoners" are anti-Chavez actors who were detained for crimes that generated social upheaval in the country (Photo: File)

Romero himself has close affiliations with the leader of Popular Will and a fugitive from justice, Leopoldo López. Although he stopped taking his portrait with the political leader as the NGO gained notoriety, when Voluntad Popular staged a false attack against its headquarters, a day before López turned himself in to the Venezuelan justice, Alfredo Romero appeared at the scene in quality of defense attorney.

The link remains to this day, as the two coincide in creating an atmosphere that favors the success of Washington's political and economic interests, poorly simulated in the promotion of human rights and democracy. That is why it is not surprising that Foro Penal has supported Juan Guaidó's coup process, or that it put the European Union "on alert" about the "dangers" faced by the former deputy precisely at his time of greatest political decline, also treating him as a lawyer client .

"THE EMBASSY" AND INTERNATIONAL NGOS: POLITICAL AND FINANCIAL SUPPORT

Foro Penal actively participates in the preparation and implementation of strategies to weaken the Bolivarian Government since the beginning of the 21st century, in exchange for funding and affiliation with the US government.

In a previous note, we exposed the maneuver that the United States plotted after the failed 2002 coup d'état. According to a cable published on the WikiLeaks portal, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), "between 2004 and 2006, donated some 15 million dollars to more than 300 NGOs in Venezuela, offering 'technical and training support', through its Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI), to undertake destabilizing actions. "

The US ambassador at the time, William Brownfield, was in charge of following up on the plan, according to the leaks.

Another Wikileaks cable reveals that, in 2005, Brownfield specifically met with the founders of Foro Penal, who told him that it was an "apolitical" organization whose intention was to focus "on the deterioration of the rule of law in Venezuela" and that it lacked resources to fulfill the campaign.

To work "independently", an "apolitical" NGO goes to the embassy of the US government whose foreign policy towards Venezuela is regime change, by any means, including the promotion of its ideology and values.

The text indicates that William Brownfield recommended that Foro Penal use "broad concepts and principles" instead of talking about individuals and asked them for a budget for financing. The Venezuelan NGO followed the recommendation, since from now on the collection of manipulated data fill in reports that always conclude in the "violation of human rights" and the breach of principles of "democracy and freedom" according to the nomenclature related to the spokesperson of the Department. of North American State.

A third Wikileaks cable confirms the links with Freedom House, beyond the training modules that the Foro Penal operators went through. In 2006, the US NGO helped organize a two-week tour of Europe for the NGO (and Iván Simonovis's wife, at the time imprisoned for two homicides in 2002) to boost the narrative of alleged political victims of a Authoritarian and repressive state.

The Freedom House organization is far from being a simple international association that pursues the fight for universal values ​​and rights. From 2002 to 2005, it was led by James Woolsey, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), an office implicated in hundreds and thousands of black operations and coups throughout the world.

The issuance of "investigation reports" and "investigation results" are the usual methods of Foro Penal, a characteristic shared with Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Amnesty International. On several occasions, both international NGOs have taken from the reports published by the Venezuelan organization to defame the governance in Venezuela.

Groups such as Foro Penal usually carry out pseudo-scientific investigations and publish reports with pre-established positions where the fundamental cause of the problems in the society of a given territory is the lack of "democracy", and the methods to achieve "democracy" are summarized in the change of government through a policy of isolation and "sanctions". They then hold seminars and forums focused on influencing opinion leaders and the media to build consensus.

By following this model to the letter, the NGO in question was able to achieve a privileged position among the United States' options to carry out its plans against the country.

INTERNATIONAL DEPLOYMENT
Foro Penal tried to approach regional leaders who had been summoned by the government of Hugo Chávez at the South American Energy Summit, held on Margarita Island in 2006. It wanted to arrange meetings with regional leaders, such as Michelle Bachelet, then president of Chile, to achieve expand their channels of communication and influence of anti-Chavista regimes.

A piece of information that shows that the criminalization plan against the country was launched before having the ideal conditions to impose the story. In the following decade, these appeared in the form of coup movements that attempted regime change in Venezuela after President Nicolás Maduro won the presidential elections for the first time in 2013.

The riots in 2014 and 2017 were an excuse for receiving resources from the NGO to increase the list of "political prisoners" and "human rights violations", since those who coordinated terrorist operations and threatened to produce a violent conflict of greater On a fratricidal scale, during those years they were the leaders of the most belligerent anti-Chavez movement.

The projection that western media with global reach provided to the manipulated data published in the reports of Foro Penal was vital , as was the reception given by the European Union.

On the other hand, the Organization of American States (OAS), Washington's channel to interfere in the region, endorsed Foro Penal by granting a continuous certification to the list of political prisoners they have managed for years, including data on subsequent attacks. to Venezuela.

The disposition of the OAS to exalt and project the Penal Forum, in contrast to the ignorance of the official authorities of the country (which had then activated the mechanisms to withdraw from the body), can be summarized in the celebration and accompaniment of the OAS secretary, Luis Almagro, to the executive director of the NGO when the latter received the award for the defense of human rights from the United States, on November 16, 2017.


With the privileged support of the OAS came the validation of Latin American governments adverse to Chavismo, mainly from the member countries of the Lima Group, to the screening of Foro Penal. It is curious that those leaders who echoed the accusations against Venezuela, based on questionable data from Foro Penal, are now facing complaints precisely in the area of ​​arbitrary detentions and human rights violations.

It is also necessary to highlight the amount of resources that the NGO has exerted on the Venezuelan migration issue. The goal set was for foreign countries to change the label from "migrant" to "political refugee" in order to add fuel to the story of the "crisis in the Latin American country."

In this context, Foro Penal reached the point of ambition that the manipulation of the migration issue would allow an international expansion of the NGO, "with the creation of chapters in different cities of the world where Venezuelans have been forced to take refuge", as it appears in an information note on the Foro Penal website, in 2018.

"The United States is an important place where Venezuelans are coming, not because they want to come, not even simply because of the country's social or economic situation. Many Venezuelans come out of a well-founded fear of being politically persecuted in their country," said Alfredo Romero in that post.

There are well-founded investigations on the migratory phenomenon of recent years in the country that affirm that Venezuelans have emigrated fundamentally for economic reasons, which are linked to the constant issuance of unilateral coercive measures implemented by the United States government against Venezuela. since 2014.

Suffice it to say that the "refugees" hypothesis fell under its own weight when in 2020 thousands of compatriots returned to the country, fleeing the political and economic instability of the South American countries that hosted them, in addition to the health crisis unleashed in the region by the effects of the coronavirus pandemic.

OBJECTIVE: CRIMINALIZE VENEZUELA
To want to bring a country to trial outside its national institutions, an international consensus would have to be at least created that the crimes allegedly committed have significance beyond its borders, and thus not make it so obvious that what is wanted is force a political turn in favor of Western power, breaking the existence of a sovereign state.

Regarding Venezuela, despite the propaganda, there was never global support (Western countries are not "the world") or uniform consent at the regional level (Luis Almagro knows very well about that failure in the OAS), but In any case, a review of the case was forced before the International Criminal Court (ICC), in the same way that the United States and the European Union have unilaterally issued economic and commercial restrictions against Venezuela.

Before the request to The Hague, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR), a body attached to the OAS, had already accumulated almost 200 sentences against the Bolivarian Government, all of them invalid because the country had made its departure official, several years before, of that corrupted commission. One of those sentences was a request to the Venezuelan State for " protection " of the members of the NGO, in the context of an alleged government threat to its operators.


Without international consensus, the way to push these processes, albeit in a flawed way, is through the intervention of multilateral organizations with manifest political interests (the OAS) and the "testimonies and complaints" systematized by local and international organizations that receive funds from States. United.

After years of instigations by Foro Penal and other important actors (Amnesty International, HRW, the OAS and countries of the Lima Group), the ICC opens the preliminary examination "Venezuela I" in 2018. Pressures have continued for The Hague to shorten the evaluation times (usually it takes years without a formal investigation to be concluded) to the point that in two years the case has reached phase 3 of the preliminary examination.

"Venezuela I" is based mainly on an OAS report , issued in 2018, which numbers in tens of thousands the "victims" of the government of Nicolás Maduro among the Venezuelan population. The document draws, among other sources, on ideological speculations that have been branded as facts of Foro Penal, whose opacity has been proven since its origins.

Venezuelan institutions have dismantled the accusations through cooperation with official channels and using truly scientific methods to clarify the social and political situation of the Venezuelan population. It can be mentioned, for example, that in the 2020 update of the report of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights of the United Nations, the term "political prisoners" and "human rights violations" does not appear to refer to situations and cases that said NGO does not take long to label them that way in a hasty manner, in addition to recognizing the impact of the economic blockade.

The Venezuelan government has also reversed the anti-Chavez strategy by denouncing the United States before the ICC for crimes committed against Venezuelans due to unilateral coercive measures (MCU), misnamed "sanctions", whose crimes can be classified as against humanity according to the Rome Statute .

Regardless of how the scenario unfolds in this political-legal chapter of the war against Venezuela, the point to be highlighted is the preponderant role that Foro Penal has had in that roadmap, due to the almost twenty years of work increasing the file against the country, because it is a United States token (due to the direct financing - through "The" Embassy "- and indirect - international NGOs - that it receives from Washington) and because of the alliances it has built in Europe and Latin America.

https://misionverdad.com/venezuela/foro ... de-regimen

Google Translator

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POLITICAL MANIPULATION AND COMMODIFICATION: THE DRAMA OF VENEZUELAN MIGRATION
21 Jun 2021 , 6:49 pm .

Venezuela's overexposure on the international media scene is still in vogue in a new intention to expose the country as a failed state experiencing a "humanitarian crisis" with serious consequences for the stability of the South American region and, beyond that, global. In particular, Venezuelan migration has been a point on the global agenda, not full of controversy if you take the case with a grain of salt.

The context in which migration began to attract the attention of Western organizations and media was conducive to the criminalization of the Bolivarian Republic, taking into account the deterioration of the economic, financial and commercial fabric of the country as a result of the increasing unilateral coercive measures that were issuing from the White House and the US Congress since the last administration of Barack Obama.

Undoubtedly this scenario, plus the political and institutional instability that society suffered from the outlaw attitude of the National Assembly controlled in its entirety by the most representative of the anti-Chavista leadership, today living off the sponsorships directed to the plans of "change of The regime "maintained by the Biden administration over the Bolivarian Government, have been decisive for a good part of the population to migrate to other countries.

But there is a politicized manipulation of the migration phenomenon that is visible if one takes into account not only the background factors that cause Venezuelan migration, but also the formal ones that are squeezed to the point of vitiating the discourse around the issue and degrading it. to the category of "diaspora".

Even the anti-Chavismo has in the classification of "refugees" a model for assembling files that serve as substance to the "Venezuela file." Such is the purpose of certain NGOs such as Foro Penal, which has taken advantage of its privileged relations with the United States and its operators to try to convince government representatives from different countries in South America, North America and Europe to politicize the Venezuelan migration issue in favor of their interests. .


Apart from the evident politicization that exists in the treatment of the subject, the expectations that the conditions of certain Venezuelan migrants in the region with financial capacity could be alleviated have been diminished. The Sures organization has been publishing reports with a special focus on the political and commercial variables that intersect in the anti-Venezuelan migration campaign, explaining that "concern for human dramas, which have not been few or negligible, degenerated into more use and abuse of its visibility rather than effective actions to support migrants ".

Indeed, since -especially- the year 2017 different figures have been exposed in relation to the amount of the Venezuelan population that has left the country, for different reasons, which has given rise to manipulation for propaganda purposes on the part of the anti-Chavism . The International Organization for Migration (IOM), the United Nations Agency for Refugees (UNHCR), the Colombian Foreign Ministry, Venezuelan opposition politicians and other entities have issued numbers that do not coincide by much. Many of its spokespersons have proclaimed that the main cause of migration is political and not of an economic nature, even ideological.

Sures briefly reviews an IOM report on migratory flow between Colombia and Venezuela from 2017, concluding that "in the critical year of Venezuelan emigration [2017], three quarters of the people who crossed over from Venezuela to Colombia in that period were from Colombian nationality, and for the moment nothing was detected in the motives for crossing the border that alluded to restrictions or political persecution ", very contrary to what was proclaimed in those months by Julio Borges, in search of promoting the financial blockade and the embargo oil tanker against the whole country.

The degree of distortions and manipulations in the whole issue had "two undesirable effects of international action on the issue of migrants and refugees: political mobilization in search of actions of ignorance of the legitimate Venezuelan authorities, and the capture and diversion of funds aimed at supporting migrants ", states the first installment of Sures," Political use and commercialization of Venezuelan migration (I) ".

This stumbling block around the figures has not allowed a reliable strategy that could mitigate the drama of Venezuelans outside their land. In the second installment of "Political use and commercialization ...", Sures analyzes the report of last May made by the Coordination Platform for Refugees and Migrants of Venezuela (R4V) where it affirms that there are more than 5 million refugees and Venezuelan migrants.

Sures dismantles the alarmism in the figures, taking into account the data provided by the same R4V on Venezuelan people with legal resident status, asylum seekers and those recognized as refugees in each country of destination, making details and calculating figures with greater rigor according to migratory situations. We recommend reading it for further study, as it exceeds the thematic limits of this note.

WHERE IS THE MONEY?
It is not only serious how the phenomenon in question has been instrumentalized around the respective figures, it has also been the fact that a lot of money has flowed to attend the Venezuelan "refugee crisis" in countries of the region, especially Colombia for its neighborhood relationship with Venezuela.

Although it is difficult "to quantify the amounts received by governments, NGOs and political factors for this concept," says Sures, due to the lack of oversight or comptroller, some accounts can be drawn on the amounts issued by the United States and other international entities to Colombia that have been reported by the media, compiled by the Venezuelan organization.

In a February 2020 report , the State Department during the Trump Administration released the amount of its contributions made since 2016 to "humanitarian assistance for Venezuelans": more than 656 million dollars.
Before delivering the Oval Office, last January, the Trump Administration announced that the amount contributed by the United States "in aid for vulnerable Venezuelans" was 1.2 billion dollars.
We quote Sures: "On March 30, 2020, the Uniminuto Radio portal carried out a count of the resources actually received, only by Colombia: the figure totaled 950 million dollars since 2017 , 'not counting that UNHCR, the Catholic Church and other Non-Governmental Organizations also contribute to the well-being of migrants. ”Among the most outstanding contributions of the report was one of 89 thousand dollars from the United States government to the Erasmo Meoz hospital in Cúcuta; 31.5 million dollars from the World Bank (July of 2019); 120 million dollars from the government of the United States to that of Colombia, delivered by the advisor and daughter of then-President Donald Trump, 'to serve the migrant population of Venezuela.'
The European Union, in September 2019, gave Colombia 30 million euros and, a month later, Spain 50 million euros .
The government of Canada convened the "International Conference of Donors in solidarity with Venezuelan refugees and migrants" done in collaboration with UNHCR and IOM with the intention of, as Sures states, "increase the amount allocated, at least in the statements and letters of intention, to the Venezuelans in the process of migration out of Venezuela ". Investors reportedly pledged more than $ 1.5 billion in grants and loans at the event.


The Bolivarian Government dismissed the event as a "media farce" and a "political propaganda operation" devised by the United States, and denounced that the participants manipulated the concept of "refugees" as so many times more in the past, making the economic and financial blockade invisible. and Western trade as a determining factor in the increase in Venezuelan migration.

On the website of the call for this year's International Donors Conference, they state that in a similar event held in May 2020, carried out by the EU and the Spanish government, "resulted in pledges of contributions worth 2,790 million dollars, including 653 million dollars in donations, a tangible demonstration of the solidarity of the international community in addressing urgent needs. This funding has improved the lives of 3.18 million vulnerable Venezuelan refugees and migrants, including women and girls, and their host communities:

*"1.9 million received food aid
*"1.2 million received healthcare
*"907 thousand received assistance in matters of protection
*"657 thousand received cash aid."

Although they assure that the donations serve "to mobilize additional resources that are so much needed", Sures declares that "the profusion and intensity of the attack and counterattack campaigns has focused on the recent cases of corruption around migration problems, linked , via political management, with the media agenda 'humanitarian aid' ".

"The ineffectiveness of the mechanisms of control and control of resources for these concepts, together with the imposition of a system of hierarchies in which the destruction of governments takes precedence over real human dramas, muddy the processes of effective aid and tend to erode the image of entities willing to provide resources and support, but at some point lose control over these effects, "concludes the report" Political use and commercialization of Venezuelan migration (III) ".

In the fourth installment of "Political use and commercialization of Venezuelan migration", Sures exposes the reasons why it is difficult to follow the monitoring and control of money and compiles the information available in the media:

"The main difficulty for the monitoring and control of these resources is that there is no single international legislation, nor mechanisms for access to detail of the receipts and disbursements for aid, contributions or specific donations for the assistance of migrants or in the process of displacement or mobility. Nor is it feasible to systematically approach communities, conglomerates and individuals in the migratory process, in order to obtain their testimonies on the amount, regularity or size of the aid received. As unstable and mobile as the target population Analysis is the course or destination of the funds lavishly granted to 'refugees and migrants from Venezuela and host communities'.

"Various journalistic investigations over the last two years can help to have at least an idea of ​​the history of contributions, on which there is no control, or probable method of quantification and verification of their correct use according to the concepts:

*"April 2018: ' UNHCR: The international community has provided 46 million dollars in aid and only 2.5 million come from the United States '

*"April 2018: Matthew Reynolds, regional representative for the United States and the Caribbean of the Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR): 'The crisis qualification is a necessary condition for greater disbursement of funds and access to resources from World Bank and IDB '.

*"December 2018: ' UNHCR: funding requirements of the Regional Response Plan for Refugees and Migrants from Venezuela is 738 million dollars '

*"October 2019: ' Spanish Foreign Minister Josep Borrell announced that his country will donate 50 million euros to pay for Venezuelan migration '

*"December 2019: " The World Bank's Million Dollar Donation '

*"From March 2017 to March 2020: ' Colombia has received some 950 million dollars to help Venezuelans '

*"February 4, 2020: ' US allocated more than 656 million dollars to humanitarian assistance to Venezuelans '

*"December 2020: ' UN requests $ 1.44 billion by 2021 '

*"January 2021: ' US Has Provided $ 1.2 Billion in Aid for Venezuela '".

Despite the fact that all the headlines highlight the fact that considerable amounts of money have been donated to attend to Venezuelan migration in different countries, it is not possible to carry out an inspection or control of these flows because in many of these news, Sures says, "verbal announcements or commitments, disbursements actually made, reports with honestly informative purposes and others evidently advertising are intermingled."

The truth is that, despite the billions of dollars that have gone to governments, various institutions, NGOs and banks, there has not been any improvement in the conditions of Venezuelan migrants in the region. In fact, the government of Iván Duque is constantly asking for financial aid and shows a situation that does not seem to improve, even though Venezuelan migratory flows have decreased, especially with the pandemic and the closure of borders.

It can only be concluded that the issue of Venezuelan migration, according to Sures, "has been and will continue to be propagandistically manipulated for political purposes, and even conspiratorial and destabilizing; it has been and will continue to be the object of distortions and distortions for chrismatic purposes; [ and] it escapes the traditional methods and channels of inspection, monitoring and control. "

The drama of the Venezuelan population outside the country has only been an excuse for the US aims of "regime change" and the accumulation of money, because for certain governments, political parties, NGOs and banks, such as the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) , all akin to international anti-Chavismo, this phenomenon is a capitalist "opportunity" that generates a lot of income and very few losses.

https://misionverdad.com/venezuela/mani ... venezolana

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THE SCAM OF THE "NATIONAL SALVATION AGREEMENT" IN CODES
28 Jun 2021 , 12:38 pm .


The end of the Guaidó clan is approaching without having been able to crystallize the departure of Chavismo (Photo: AFP)

On May 11, the fake government of Juan Guaidó launched the so-called "National Salvation Agreement", a kind of unitary approach to recover the country's democracy, get out of the complex humanitarian crisis and use the support of the international community to achieve these goals.


With this, the former deputy for the state La Guaira seeks to refloat his painful image, which had already been in decline since mid-2019 and was finally blurred with the election of the new National Assembly.

With the renewal of the Legislative Power, Guaidó ceases to have the only link that associated him with a state power. For a long time this fictitious government was only supported virtually by the media, the support of the United States government and some of its satellites, and that has also been declining.

But beyond the attempt to survive in the national political scene, it is necessary to ask if it is not a reissue of the refrain "cessation of usurpation, transitional government and free elections", which also passed into oblivion.

ANOTHER SCAM OF THE GUAIDÓ CLAN?

On the day of the launch, in a video Guaidó specified the importance of seeking "realistic and viable" solutions to the situation in Venezuela, whose proposal was based on the call for free elections and the massive entry of "humanitarian aid", according to him, to recover democracy.

But the reality is that the former congressman does not have the power even to unite the most extreme Venezuelan opposition, and he would have less power to seek those viable solutions that he mentions.

On the other hand, he refers that the interim government, the National Assembly and the unitary platform would participate in this lifesaving plan, in addition to the government of President Maduro and the international community.

DEMOCRACY AND FREE ELECTIONS

Regarding the first item, free and fair elections, he said that it was necessary to call a schedule of free and fair elections in the country. This demand is unconstitutional because, according to the calendar of the National Electoral Council (CNE), general elections have not been planned and so far they have complied with the provisions: the parliamentary elections were held in December of last year and the regional elections are scheduled for November this running.

The truth is that the sector that accompanies Juan Guaidó has been left out of the democratic game of its own free will, even when all the guarantees of transparency have been offered.

Let us remember that Venezuela is open to international observation as long as they do not intend to interfere in the internal affairs of the country. The Venezuelan opposition that does not follow the US agenda participated in the parliamentary elections and has considered joining the national dialogue without this meaning being bound by President Maduro's agenda.

HUMANITARIAN AID AND MASSIVE INFLUX OF VACCINES

With regard to "humanitarian aid" and the entry of vaccines into the country, the false internship raised the need for massive entry of humanitarian aid and anticovid vaccines. He also used as a flag the "few vaccines" that the Bolivarian Government has managed, the collapse of the health system, the shortage of supplies and the lack of medical personnel, among others.

We must remember that the Guaidó clan became even more blurred when the covid-19 pandemic was decreed. The one who assumed the management of the contingency was the Maduro government with the effective measures to stop the advance of the pandemic, whose effects can be seen in the global statistics where the number of infected and deaths is reflected. This, despite the evident deterioration of the health system as a result of the economic and financial blockade promoted by the (anti) political sector that he represents.

Meanwhile, he would eventually appear on social media giving orders and offering help that never materialized. His caricaturing was more notorious since his action as a "government" was limited to repeating, and only from the mouth out, what President Maduro was promoting.

It is also necessary to remember that Juan Guaidó sought prominence when the Bolivarian Government rejected the entry of the AstraZeneca vaccine through the Covax mechanism due to the record of irregularities and fraud of that pharmaceutical company, in addition to its use being suspended in several countries of the European Union (EU) and other parts of the world for being related to several deaths from thrombi after its application.

"Days before the PAHO announcement about the Covax mechanism and the questioned AstraZeneca vaccine, Juan Guaidó and his court of criminals rolled the news of the supposed 'agreement' to buy vaccines. They played an advanced position, taking into account that the Bolivarian Government I had already decided not to count on the doses from the British company, "says this platform in an investigation .


It was all an orchestrated operation to project the health crisis and the denial that the Chavista government was again preventing the entry of "humanitarian aid." Attempts were made to use the UN mechanism to extort and blackmail an already blocked country. If at that time when he was still a deputy, he could not manage something for the nation, using the supposed "power" he had and the "support" of the international community, now that he does not have the same support and legally does not have any position - even in an outlaw institution on account of US strategy - it is less likely to do so today.

The one who has managed the entry of vaccines to Venezuela has been the government of President Maduro, who has had to overcome all kinds of obstacles to achieve it, even during the pandemic the imperial blockade has not ceased, so the Bolivarian Government has had to triangulate with Russia, China and Cuba for the entry of vaccines, medical supplies and everything necessary to contain the pandemic.

END OF THE MIGRATION CRISIS

The other great promise of the "National Salvation Agreement" is to end the migration crisis, a narrative resource with which the Guaidó clan, the United States government and the NGOs linked to its influence have triangulated one of the largest corruption schemes .

In recent years, scandalous figures that border on the absurd have been used, without any support, to justify the illegal entry of resources, the distribution of thousands of dollars to Non-Governmental Organizations and the application of Unilateral Coercive Measures by the United States.

It has even become one of the most used wild cards every time there is a political objective against the Bolivarian Revolution or they seek to capitalize on more resources.

Recently, media corporations such as Fox News , Daily Caller , LMTonline , Reuters , among others, carried out extensive coverage on Venezuelan migrants who crossed the Rio Grande to reach the United States, a symbol of the freedom of those who escape from the Chavista tyranny.

The Sures organization , which follows the issue of Venezuelan migration in detail, details the contradictions of the scenes broadcast in Rio Bravo, "which differ from the characteristic conditions surrounding the passage of Central American migrants, the most frequent on that route":

*They cross during the day and under the focus of the cameras, even though it is an illegal passage for thousands of Central Americans who are arrested each year by the authorities of the North American country.
*They are not like the usual migrants looking for a better future, but tourists who are going to spend a vacation.
*They do not seem to have traveled long land journeys like the rest of the migrant populations, who suffer long hours in the open and in conditions that violate their human rights, neither reported by these media channels.
*The Border Patrol is receptive and does not present much resistance to the arrival of these migrants.

This staging was carried out within the framework of the " International Conference of Donors in solidarity with Venezuelan refugees and migrants, which took place on June 17, also putting the approach of the Venezuelan Government with the Administration as a focus of attack. Biden in the framework of the call for national dialogue called by President Nicolás Maduro ", refers this platform .


The issue of migration during the false interim was always treated as an exploitable resource to attack the Venezuelan authorities and obtain resources from US offices such as USAID. From the supposed power there was never any political will to offer solutions to a migration that - beyond the swelling numbers that are shown intermittently on all the websites of NGOs, human rights organizations and US offices - is real and the product of the blockade promoted by the sector led by Guaidó.

However, it is not just a matter of will. It is assumed that the self-proclaimed would be seen by the other presidents of the region as an interlocutor at the height of the position they represent and with this could, in theory, manage the necessary actions to attend to migrants.

But as we have said throughout this note, that foreign base of support was also lost. Not even the United States, the main executor of the imperial blockade against the country, saw in Guaidó a counterpart, on the contrary, it was a piece whose function was limited to endorsing the dispossession of Venezuelan assets abroad without being able to decide on them.

THE GUAIDÓ CLAN IN ITS LABYRINTH: TIME IS RUNNING OUT
Recently, the former deputy announced that a committee of Venezuelan opposition politicians would travel to Washington and Brussels "to seek support and consult their allies on their positions in the event of a possible lifting of sanctions."

As reported by Reuters , they would seek to establish a dialogue with the government of President Nicolás Maduro:

"We will discuss with our allies a framework under which they feel comfortable, for example, with that progressive lifting of sanctions based on (the government's) compliance with an agreement," Guaidó said on that occasion .

This reappearance of the self-proclaimed takes place in a context in which the main actors in the blockade against Venezuela (the United States, Canada and the European Union) seek to open the possibilities of "'reviewing' the coercive measures against the country, in a boast of sustaining the pressures in exchange for concessions in the Venezuelan sphere, "we recently reported in Mission Truth .

The possibility of a détente occurs not so much because of seeking a way out of the crisis that these same authors caused with the "sanctions", but because in this long race of pressure and wear and tear, the expected total collapse never came; The Maduro government resisted the pressure and Guaidó and his interim office were diluted.

The truth is that the supposed "National Salvation Agreement" does not enjoy autonomy either and it seems to be a resource to keep alive the voice of a fake government , which has been slowly fading. Extending their presence in the events that mark the possible solution to the Venezuelan crisis is another proof of the failure of those who bet on the parallel government.

It is worth remembering that the already diminished support for the figure of Juan Guaidó has an expiration date and it was Washington who established that its support lasted until December. According to PanAm Post , the decision was made by Joe Biden's administration and notified by the virtual ambassador for Venezuela, James Story, after a meeting with the so-called G4 that took place in Bogotá.

That is why any action taken by the fake government can be assumed as part of the rattle of a Venezuelan political sector that embodies one of the darkest periods for the Republic.

https://misionverdad.com/venezuela/la-e ... -en-claves

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THE TRUE ROLE OF NGOS IN VENEZUELA
5 Jul 2021 , 11:11 am .


It is important to identify that NGOs, here and wherever, are administrators of the global system, non-state agents that function as incubated centers for training, propagation and even involvement in legal matters (Photo: Juan Díaz / Misión Verdad)

Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) began to expand in the context of the Cold War and the globalization of neoliberalism, accustomed to firing as political parties but protected under the legal and supposedly impartial cloak that they hold. They are not innocent actors and in Venezuela they fulfill specific functions, determined by interests and tasks according to the imperial agenda.

The NGOs fulfill functions within the asymmetric resources (economic warfare, financial aggressions, media intoxication, perceptual sieges) of the war against Venezuela. Those focused on human rights, freedom of expression or political access to goods and services that receive promotion, media visibility and participation in whatever forum or multilateral convocation exists, here or abroad, will be able to preach everything, but they do not go beyond being operators within the hybrid war agenda against Bolivarian Venezuela.

Although here the NGOs proclaim themselves as the representatives of "civil society", in "defense of citizens' rights", these organizations are nothing more than "instruments of North American foreign policy", according to the research of the Canadian economist Michel Chossudovsky.


Since the seizure of power by the Bolivarian Revolution, NGOs have been fronts for receiving foreign financing; They have emerged as "citizen" elements that challenge national sovereignty; since many of them are nothing more than channels for distributing logistical and financial resources, with other purposes very far from the humanitarian, environmental, political or labor catechism that they preach.

THE ROLE OF THE NED

The NED, that " huge global operation " in the words of the writer William Engdahl, founded in 1983 under the government of Ronald Reagan, begins its operations and runs in parallel with the neoliberal expansion of that US president and the then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, as part of a series of asset privatizations and government ventures within the CIA.

Its creator, academic Allen Weinstein, declared in 1991 that "much of what we are doing now - with the NED - the CIA was doing undercover 25 years ago."

Its budget comes mainly from the US Congress, but it also receives funding from other friendly "entities" such as the Open Society Foundations of financial speculator George Soros.



As Engdahl recalls, his practice is that of the "democratic promotion" American version (armed human rights), pointing out that "the NED has been at the center of all the North American 'color revolutions' since the overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic in the year 2000 "to date.

From the NGOs that successfully managed to cause the process of complaints and "protests" to lead to coups and the installation of harsh neoliberal governments, in their participation in the 2002 coup against the Bolivarian Government, through the "Arab Spring" and reaching as far as Hong Kong, the binding activity of the NED is not only verifiable, but decisive. While the NGOs it finances are another instrumental arm of US foreign policy.

Other funding centers, apart from the CIA covertly and the NED explicitly, are the aforementioned Soros Open Society, as well as USAID (the United States Agency for International Development), the IRI (the Republican Institute International, bequest of the late John McCain) and the NDI (the Democratic National Institute for International Affairs, its president Madeleine Albright), the CIPE (the Center for International Private Enterprise, international wing of the United States Chamber of Commerce) and The Solidarity Center (international policy operator of the NED and the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, AFL-CIO).

The range of North American institutions for the financial contribution to destabilizing organizations, or that simply defend the interests of large corporations in different regions of the world, is varied in nominal terms, but deep down the imperial interest prevails and does not differentiate one from the other.

If the NED functions as a coordinating center, Freedom House (which also receives funding from the NED) serves as a training center for these NGOs, "observatories" or foundations. There are not a few organizations in Venezuela that have required the services of both centers.


Likewise, USAID has served as a privileged channel: let us remember its key role during the "humanitarian aid" operation (the so-called " Battle of the Bridges ") resisted by the civic-military union on February 23, 2019. Through USAID attempted to invade the country under "humanitarian" pretexts.

DOLLARS FOR A DOUBLE STANDARD POLICY

The rosary of NGOs that receive funding and support from the NED and other US and European institutions in Venezuela is wide and alien, as is also shown by the number of "funding areas" that they declare that they have been invested in 2020 in Venezuela (without specify the organizations that receive those thousands of dollars).

And in this case it is about the public and formal, because according to an investigation by the British newspaper The Guardian , published in May 2020, the NED provided funds in 2011 to Venezuelan rock festivals, through NGOs, foundations and civil associations, with the objective of culturally undermining the Bolivarian Government and attracting potential political operators among the youth of the opposition. The information was released through declassified documents.

The NGOs, in many cases, do not differ much from the political operators of any country: they attack as political parties and defend themselves with a supposed neutrality that their legal dress confers on them.

Organizations such as Súmate, born in 2002 and chaired by María Corina Machado until not long ago, which oriented its range of action to the attempt to discredit the National Electoral Council (CNE), and which received funding from the NED ; and as Humano y Libre, founded in May 2002, whose director was Gustavo Arroyo Tovar, who served as a financial channel for guarimber groups in 2007, are organizations that are today registered in the United States as corporations. These, in addition to being recognized for their shameless coup efforts, inaugurated the destabilizing role as an NGO in Venezuela.

The most talked about by the local mediocracy in recent years have been Foro Penal, Social Control and Provea. Each one has a specific media purpose and manages extensive resources to do destabilizing work with "civil" makeup included, and that serve as a panorama regarding the actions of NGOs in Venezuela.

*Foro Penal Venezolano is funded by various institutions and personalities, and was formed by Freedom House. He has an extensive record of support for the guarimbas agents in 2014 and the terrorists in the aftermath after the failure (2017, 2018). This NGO, which is managed by a large pool of lawyers, has among its directors Alfredo Romero and Gonzalo Himiob. His privileged relationship with the United States says everything about his behavior.

*Asociación Civil Control Ciudadano does not seem to have a very clear financing channel, since it does not declare on its page who receives money to be able to function. Rocío San Miguel heads this NGO, whose primary objective is to undermine the Bolivarian National Armed Forces (FANB) and the various intelligence and defense institutions in the country. Rocío San Miguel has managed and launched "classified information" and especially rumors on behalf of the "citizen comptroller" and "human rights" to the propaganda networks and media. His relationship with the United States is reflected in the cable he sent (leaked by WikiLeaks) in 2007, the former United States ambassador to Venezuela, William Brownfield, to the Southern Command and the Secretariat for Western Hemisphere Affairs (among others), where San Miguel is revealed as an "active member of USAID." Even during the VII Summit of the Americas, he had the opportunity to meet with Barack Obama.

*Provea , funded by Open Society and other institutions Like the Ford Foundation and the British Embassy, ​​it is one of the most active in the Bolivarian Revolution so far. He has been decisive for the local and international media with his reports on human rights in Venezuela, especially during the Guarimbera era (2014-2017). The complaints that Provea handles never extend to the transnational violence that paramilitarism develops in the country or the terrorist attacks that ultra groups finance and promote, such as the pupils of Leopoldo López. Like the Penal Forum, they necessarily defend the sedition of the extreme right to strike with the narrative of the ultra-police state, a tale that is oversized by the Organization of American States (OAS, or Washington's Colonial Ministry) with whom it also has a close relationship.

As "non-state agents", the NGOs have a double job that they have learned to oil over time, with Chavismo as the enemy: to build and promote the story of the failed state in Venezuela, even under the rhetoric of propaganda dirty and perceptual warfare, and to serve as a financing channel for other ultra-creole actors.

The public and private associations of the operators of these "non-state agencies" with political parties and antipolitical sectors of the Venezuelan opposition show their roles in this war. It remains for us to bare these resources of asymmetric warfare, who no longer have a political corner to hide from.

https://misionverdad.com/venezuela/el-v ... -venezuela

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HOW THEY TRY TO MAKE THE BLOCKADE AGAINST VENEZUELA IN WASHINGTON INVISIBLE
5 Jul 2021 , 1:17 pm .


"Sanctions Are a Crime" is a global campaign to raise awareness about the consequences of the imperial aggressions against Venezuela (Photo: MINCI)

The devastating consequences of the Unilateral Coercive Measures (MCU) by the United States for the operation of the Venezuelan State and its impact on the population are undeniable, especially in the last four years, when the blockade was amplified covering areas such as energy, transportation , services, health, among others, vital for the development of daily life.

That Jason Bartlett and Megan Ophel in a work entitled "Sanctions in figures: the focus on Venezuela" refer that the increase in MCUs has exacerbated the existing economic problems in the country, and that also "they have been caused by widespread economic mismanagement and the corruption of the increasingly authoritarian regimes of Nicolás Maduro and Chávez ", is a way to minimize the impact of the blockade.

BRIEF PROFILES

*Jason Bartlett is a research assistant in the Energy, Economics and Security Program at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). His research focuses on global proliferation finance networks, sanctions evasion tactics, security issues related to financial technology, and cyber-based financial crime, with a regional focus on North Korea, Venezuela and Iran.
*Megan Ophel is the Joseph S. Nye, Jr. Fellow of the CNAS Energy, Economics and Security Program.

The CNAS is a neoconservative think tank with strong influence in Washington. According to its website, it is an independent, bipartisan, non-profit organization that develops strong, pragmatic, and principled defense and national security policies. It also says it conducts research and analysis to shape and elevate the debate on national security and foreign policy in Washington and beyond.

"Our dynamic research agenda is designed to shape the decisions of the leaders of the United States government, the private sector and society to promote the interests and strategy" of the North American country, says the organization.

ARE THE "SANCTIONS" AN AGGRAVATION OF THE CRISIS?

"Venezuela's economy has struggled for years, primarily due to its decades-long over-reliance on its oil industry, which has contributed to astronomically high inflation (nearly 100,000 percent in 2018), as well as massive food shortages. and the weakening of Venezuela's private sector as oil prices decreased, "notes the recently published article.

Is the Venezuelan economic situation, inflation, food shortages, among others, really due to dependence on oil? What journalists do not point out is that since the arrival of the Bolivarian Revolution, and even more since President Nicolás Maduro assumed executive power in 2013, Venezuela has been subjected to all kinds of trials and attacks from outside to make a change in regime. And the economy has been one of the main targets.

Nor do they mention that for some years the value of a criminal dollar was imposed, whose fluctuation is controlled remotely and does not obey any economic and financial logic, but which is associated with other elements of the multiform war applied to Venezuela, such as increases. of salary, application of economic measures, attacks and electoral events.

"As the situation has become increasingly dire, the United States government has also greatly increased sanctions against the country over the past four years, exacerbating economic problems and making it almost impossible for Venezuela to access international markets." , reads the article, with which they locate the MCU not as directly responsible for the crisis, but as an addition that aggravated the situation.

Bartlett and Megan Ophel make a general breakdown of the MCU and establish a timeline where the evolution of the blockade against Venezuela can be appreciated:

Since 2009, the United States has imposed a total of 431 designations on Venezuelan individuals and entities, as well as foreign citizens associated with illicit activities sanctioned under Venezuela-related programs. Under the "maximum pressure" campaign of former President Donald Trump, the Treasury Department significantly expanded sanctions against the South American country, which were authorized through a robust legal framework of seven executive orders, three sectoral determinations, three statutes and dozens of general licenses.

Although later we will point out the particularities, it should be mentioned that from the first "sanctions", directed at drug-related offenders (which has not been proven) in 2009, until the blockade of sectors and financials in the last four years represents one of the most comprehensive MCU programs in America.

Likewise, the text calls into question that the Biden Administration, perhaps influenced by the covid-19 pandemic, could take a different course than its predecessor.

Another relevant detail is the participation of Russia, China and Iran, identified as US adversaries, as Venezuela's economic lifeline. They say that the "sanctions" have "reinforced the dependence of the Maduro regime" on the aforementioned countries.

This is not entirely true because, on the one hand, the South American country's relationship with the "enemies of the United States" is not recent and, on the other hand, it is not one of dependency, but of cooperation between equals. A relationship that is also given by the need to build an alliance different from the parameters of imperialism. That Venezuela, located in the "backyard" according to US logic, wants to establish ties with countries of the "axis of evil" causes much suspicion in Washington.


CHRONOLOGY OF THE BLOCKADE


Prior to the breakdown of the MCUs, they once again use as a prelude that "the country's deteriorating economic situation and the sharp drop in energy production pre-date the imposition of US sanctions." They also justify their imposition due to "the continuous deterioration of democracy and human rights in the country," which demonstrates the imperial character of punitive measures beyond its borders.

"From 2009 to 2015, the US government issued fewer than five Venezuela-related sanctions per year, primarily related to drug trafficking and for providing financial support to Hezbollah. The biggest change in US sanctions policy toward Venezuela it began in 2014 when Congress approved the Law for the Defense of Human Rights and Civil Society of Venezuela, "says the think-tank.

Later, this would serve as the legal framework for President Barack Obama to sign Executive Order 13692 in March 2015, which placed Venezuela as a threat to the security of the United States. This order, the researchers say, created a specific program for the country that allowed "selective sanctions" against people and entities involved in human rights abuses, anti-democratic practices, among others, and, finally, changed the trajectory towards a scheme of "sanctions. "about Venezuela.

This dynamic started by Obama, despite the change of administration, did not stop with the following Republican term. On the contrary, "Trump dramatically expanded the range of targets, imposing 46 designations on Venezuela in his first year, which was more than double the total (20) of all Obama-era sanctions against Venezuela. Following the continued deterioration of the Venezuelan democracy under Maduro in 2017, the Trump Administration further intensified its use of existing sanctions programs against government officials. " Blockade that is again justified according to the justice that the United States confers on itself.

The novelty of the president magnate, in addition to the volume of measures, was the implementation of sanctions in the gold, oil, financial and defense and security sectors. It also includes the category SDNTK (fight against narcotic drugs), SDGT (fight against terrorism) and IRAN / IFSR (related to Iran).

The goal of the MCUs? Financially isolate the country from the liberal world, and the effects are more than known. In addition to the direct and targeted attack against Venezuela's most important source of financing, the oil industry, it also effectively limited "the ability to reconcile its sovereign debt, since sanctions restricted its access to international financing."

*In August 2017, Executive Order 13808 prohibits transactions with the Venezuelan government and PDVSA within the US debt and equity financial markets.
*Later, Executive Order 13835 extended the restriction to the secondary market. This prevented the restructuring of the debt.
*Executive Order 13827 prohibited all transactions with the petro, the Venezuelan alternative to circumvent the financial blockade. "This demonstrated the global breadth of the US sanctions toolkit and its international financial dominance."
*In November 2018, a new sanctions program was created based on the VENEZUELA-EO13850 status, which gives the United States the ability to block assets and prohibit transactions with actors operating in select sectors of the Venezuelan economy or those involved in transactions. Only with this Executive Order 148 designations were issued. First it was against gold from Venezuela and then it expanded to the oil, financial and defense sectors.
*Throughout 2019, they sanctioned the main exporting sectors of the Venezuelan economy, including PDVSA and the BCV. Executive Order 13884 blocked assets and sanctioned those who have helped Venezuela. This caused the oil industry to collapse and the BCV was unable to carry out foreign transactions.

What has been described above can give an overview of the progressive hanging of Venezuela. Actions were also taken as a way to reduce "sanction" evasion tactics related to the export of oil and other sanctioned goods. For this reason, there were also measures against aircraft (57) and vessels (68) to cut off Venezuelan oil exports.

On the other hand, the blockade also against individuals, while the "sanction" for aircraft limits the ability to travel outside the country to citizens of any political color, as well as the company's access to the necessary maintenance services abroad.

In addition, the MCUs extend to other foreign elements, but that "help" Venezuela to avoid collapse. The most glaring case is associated with the imprisonment of Venezuelan diplomat Alex Saab, who used an intricate network of connections to contribute to the food subsidy program known as the CLAPs.


"THE AXIS OF EVIL"

As we said before, the United States does not like the alliance of Venezuela with countries called by them "Axis of Evil", but above all the greatest aversion is caused by the fact that the Bolivarian Revolution seeks alternatives to resist the blockade through other strategic triangulations.

"Over the past four years, stringent US sanctions have contributed to Venezuela's growing dependence on traditional US adversaries, posing significant sanctions evasion risks. Both China and Russia have sought ways to enhance their influence. in Caracas offering economic lifelines, advanced technology and military training programs, "says the think-tank .

In the particular case of China, experts suggest that Venezuela hired the company ZTE to "create a new smart identification card to monitor and control the behavior of citizens under the auspices of a government effort of $ 70 million that supposedly strengthened national security ".

Apart from the cyberparanoia characteristic of US neoconservatives, the resentment is because the Asian country "continues to violate US sanctions for the benefit of the Maduro regime."

The same is true of Russia. The North American country imposed four sanctions on Russian individuals and entities and two additional designations on the Swiss-based subsidiaries of Rosneft Oil Company, controlled by the State of the Russian Federation, for facilitating shipments of Venezuelan oil. They also accuse the Eurasian country of participating in the internal affairs of Venezuela, something that the United States has always done. The point is that they feel more entitled than others because of their imperial character.

COMING?

What has been said so far has shown that both Democratic and Republican politicians have maintained the imperial agenda against Venezuela, with Obama being one of the great promoters of the MCU legal framework that unleashed the subsequent financial attacks and the catastrophic consequences for the country.

Although the method has been different, the goal is the same: continue to suffocate Venezuela to force a regime change regardless of the hardships of the population that they claim to defend, even in a pandemic context where the difficulties are greater.

The revision of the "sanctions", at this time where there are signs of being able to be relaxed, is still to be seen. "Early indications suggest that the administration will continue to recognize Juan Guaidó as interim president of Venezuela and the United States will likely keep many sanctions in place while looking for ways to ease humanitarian sanctions issues," experts say.

Biden has not imposed new measures against the country, but neither has he reversed those that are still operating and that have caused the current crisis.

That the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has begun to "provide certain exceptions related to humanitarian aid in the US sanctions policy through a new general license, which authorizes certain transactions with Venezuela related to the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of covid-19 ", is a way to give a less savage tinge to the attitude adopted by Trump, but the bottom line remains.

It remains to be seen whether the actions of the new US administration will differ from the hard-line regime change or correspond to a facelift of imperialism. The report reviewed here realizes that many words can be thrown into a rhetorical vacuum, while the tragedy remains hidden by certain sectors that prefer that things do not change too much in the Caracas-Washington relationship.

https://misionverdad.com/venezuela/como ... washington

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DSA Delegation Meets with President Maduro—Uproar Already in US
July 7, 2021

Caracas, July 6 (special for OrinocoTribune.com)—This past Friday, July 2, the president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, received a delegation of representatives from the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) at the Miraflores palace in Caracas, where they held a cordial meeting in which political and geopolitical issues were discussed along with history, on the occasion of the 200-year anniversary of the Battle of Carabobo that consolidated Venezuela’s independence from the Spanish empire.

During the meeting, the activists told the president about their experience during their stay in the country, where they had the opportunity to learn about the advances of the Bolivarian Revolution in industry, social programs, and tourism.

Thus Venezuela strengthened its ties of cooperation and solidarity with activists and those in the US who struggle for democracy and values ​​including peace, and the sovereignty of the peoples of the world, to strengthen the fight against the blockade promoted by Europe and the United States.

RELATED CONTENT: Final Declaration of the Bicentennial Congress of the Peoples of the World

The DSA delegation arrived in Venezuela on June 20, to participate in the Bicentennial Congress of the Peoples of the World and fulfill an agenda that allowed them to visit various states of the Caribbean nation.


Among the activists who attended the meeting with the Venezuelan Head of State and top government officials were the president of the national political committee of the DSA, Jen McKinney; the representative of political training of the DSA, Carrington Morris; the representative for political work of the DSA, Sean Michael Estelle; the person in charge of foreign policy and bilateral relations of the DSA, Austín González; labor activist and member of the international committee, Candy Luisa Herrera; and Marvin Gonzalez, member of the secretariat of international relations.

DSA is a socialist and worker-oriented faction of the US Democratic Party with roots in the Socialist Party of America of Eugene V. Debs. Generally speaking, DSA’s ideology is described as social democracy or democratic socialism. As the largest socialist organization in the US, DSA is comprised of over 90,000 members including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, elected to the House of Representatives as Democrats in 2018, and again in 2020 when they were joined by Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman. The party currently has eleven members elected to state legislatures. Over the last few years, DSA has been noted for their ability to increasingly appeal to younger voters in the US.

Though many in the international left movement associate DSA with Trotskyist tendencies, its diversity makes it a complex mosaic of ideological tendencies ranging from liberals—as in the case of of its elected officials, broadly speaking—to Marxist-Leninists, who play a significant role within the organization.

US right-wingers (of all colors) attack DSA decision

The visit is already causing uproar in US political circles, where they are trying to associate the Democrats’ liberal elected officials directly with DSA, and among radical Trotskyists and “armchair” communists, who considered the decision inappropriate.

For example, in reference to the DSA visit with Maduro, Ronna McDaniel, GOP (Republican Party) chairwoman, wrote that “Maduro is a brutal dictator who has profited off the starvation of his own people. Yet DSA met with him. Make no mistake, Venezuela is the future DSA members in the ‘Squad’ like AOC want for the US. Their dangerous ideology should be rejected.” Of course McDaniel failed to mention that Venezuela’s current problems are the direct result of the US economic blockade against the Venezuelan people, a blockade made possible by illegal “sanctions” launched by the Republican Donald Trump.


Meanwhile, armchair communists, alleged Venezuelan “socialists” in the US and Trotskyists decided to organize a Zoom panel for tomorrow, Wednesday, July 7 to “inspire a discussion about our pending tasks here in the US to stand in solidarity with the Venezuelan people.” The sponsors are Tempest Magazine, Venezuelan Workers Solidarity (an unknown group of Venezuelan socialists in the US) and Internationalism from Below.

Another reaction to the DSA visit came from the infamous Elliott Abrams, who wrote a blog post entitled “Democratic Socialists of America Embraces Maduro Dictatorship” on behalf of the Council on Foreign Relations, in which he repeated the familiar script accusing President Maduro of being a despot and a dictator. Abrams parroted paid “reports” by Amnesty International and partial information from the Office of the UN Commissioner on Human Rights Office, and rattled off all the “human rights atrocities” allegedly committed by Maduro’s “regime.”

Abrams, the neoconservative responsible for heinous crimes in Latin America, convicted by US courts for lying to Congress, ends up issuing a tract in which he explains to his readers what real socialism is. Abrams laments how far the DSA and Maduro have strayed from actual socialism—according to his personal theoretical knowledge on the matter—and cites the Socialist International’s declaration of principles.

Can you imagine?



Featured image: DSA Delegation meets President Nicolas Maduro, July 2, 2021. Photo Presidential Press.

Special for Orinoco Tribune by Jesús Rodríguez-Espinoza

OT/JRE/SL

https://orinocotribune.com/dsa-delegati ... ady-in-us/

Well, I dunno if anyone profits from this meeting other than the US right wing. The DSA is about as socialist as FDR. Consider that Bernie is the premiere representative of DSA:

In a round of questioning centered on U.S. foreign policy in Latin America, veteran Univision anchor Jorge Ramos, who was briefly detained by the Venezuelan government earlier this year, asked Sanders about the differences between his leftist politics and those of the increasingly authoritarian socialist or communist regimes in Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela.

Sanders smirked repeatedly as Ramos continued his interrogative questions, including one about whether he considered Maduro a dictator. "Let me be very clear: Anybody who does what Maduro does is a vicious tyrant," Sanders replied.

Election 2020 Debate


Democratic presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, answers a question Thursday, Sept. 12, 2019, during a Democratic presidential primary debate hosted by ABC at Texas Southern University in Houston.
AP

The Vermont Independent said he would back an international campaign to help organize free elections in Venezuela so its citizens can determine which direction to take the country in as it reels from a prolonged economic and political crisis. He pushed back on the notion that his policies are similar to those touted by Maduro, who has managed to remain in power despite his country's precipitous economic collapse and a concerted campaign of sanctions and political pressure from the U.S. and dozens of other countries.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bernie-san ... at-debate/

Is the DSA going to go to bat for Venezuela within DEm in-house debate?

Wanna buy a bridge?

[blindpig]

Where is Socialism in Venezuela? Lessons from the Cultural Revolution
Chris Gilbert argues that building socialism depends on grassroots rebellion against the dominant capitalist order.


The flag of the Communard Union in Venezuela represents a fist striking a hand, a symbol that Hugo Chávez invented for revolutionary struggle. (@utopix_cc)

By Chris Gilbert - Counterpunch
Jul 6th 2021 at 12.01am

The Cultural Revolution in China raised a number of key questions about the construction of socialism and attempted (albeit with limited success) to solve them. For that reason, its legacy remains relevant to the present. Alain Badiou has claimed that we are still contemporaries of 1968. In effect, the questions raised at that time about how to build an egalitarian society – questions posed most palpably in China – are still ours. They are the order of the day, essentially unavoidable for the left, and any socialist project today will have to pick up on those issues, returning implicitly to that turbulent moment. Of course, to do so means going against the grain, since most people accept the idea that the Cultural Revolution not only failed, but was actually pointless and therefore is not worth studying.

One relevant lesson of the Chinese revolutionary experience in the lead-up to the Cultural Revolution is that building a socialist society cannot be left to any kind of automatic logic (whether the cunning of history, the necessary progression of historical stages, or the correspondence between growing productive forces and superior productive relations that supposedly come in their tow). Launching the Cultural Revolution, with its bold calls for popular rebellion against established power, was the acknowledgement that one cannot trust in the automatic course of history or any other kind of invisible or visible hand to lead us to socialism. Instead, there has to be ongoing experimentation and constant stirring things up. This is the practical counterpart to what Alessandro Russo calls Mao’s materialism of the exception that has “subjective invention” at its core and involves leaping from theory to practice and back again.

This brings us to Venezuela. The late Hugo Chávez was a constant and even troublesome experimenter. He was committed to inciting new forms of popular effervescence and to endlessly modifying the rules of a game in which the masses’ all-around development was both the means and the end. Chávez frequently paused in his discourses saying: se me ocurre (it occurs to me) that we should try or do x or y. Usually this happened on live television, and the president would then throw out the idea that such and such community organization should exist, or that we should try to build such and such new institution. Many people, even people on the left, criticized him for his lack of constancy in this regard. They felt that Chávez should have stuck to his initial projects, consolidating what he had begun before going on to the next thing. Why not perfect the consejos comunales before moving on to the communes and communal cities? Why not make the Universidad Bolivariana de Venezuela really function well and deliver quality education before jump-starting Misión Sucre (the huge university-level educational outreach program which he inaugurated hard on the heels of the former)?

Breaking the Rules
To the bewilderment of many of us, Chávez seemed to be always wiping the slate clean and beginning again. Some people felt him to be a hopeless improviser and a few even hinted that his impatience should be attributed to a weird personality trait. Leaving all that aside, and with the benefit of hindsight, I feel that one can see how Chávez understood that a constant push from below is necessary in socialist construction. Although neither Chávez nor Mao can justly be called “lords of misrule,” both realized that the logic that tends to consolidate if things are left to stagnate is always a pro-capitalist one. For that reason, people must be allowed and even encouraged to repeatedly mobilize. Mao once wrote that the logic of the people is to “fight, fail, fight again, fail again, fight again… until their victory.” The counterpart to this claim was Mao’s surprising admission that socialism would probably be defeated in China. In the face of probable defeat and without any guarantee of success, the people always need to struggle: “Never forget class struggle!” was one of Mao’s main lemmas from 1962 forward.

What is true of socialist projects in China or anywhere else is also true of socialism in Venezuela. The socialist project in Venezuela will probably be defeated (for both internal and external reasons). What does acknowledging probable defeat imply for those who believe in the project of constructing socialism in this country? I would argue that recognizing our probable defeat means there is no room for complacency, no space for riding on past successes, and little margin for the spirit of “consolidation.” Without advancing, without stirring things up from below, socialism will inevitably be buried by the spontaneous dynamic of history (the dynamic of history in a capitalist world). That spontaneous logic means more and more privatizations, more and more mercantilization, and a general drift toward situations favoring local bourgeoisies (both emergent and old) and international capital.

In Venezuela, all these phenomena can be seen occurring on a massive scale, even if they are mostly unannounced. Some people on the left see this as an outright counterrevolution, as evidence for an all-out capitalist restoration. By contrast, I believe it would be more correct to assume a broad historical perspective and consider that a Thermidor may have taken place. As Samir Amin has argued, a Thermidor is not the same as a counterrevolution, but rather a sweeping retreat from revolutionary aspirations that are not immediately attainable. In Venezuela, there has been a stepping-back from the most ambitious objectives that Chávez raised in the first decade of the century. No doubt this is conditioned by the tremendous pressure induced by the sanctions and other outside aggressions. Among the earlier objectives that have been radically back-burnered are socialism, participatory democracy, and the communal state.

Recovering Lost Ground
We may hope that this backpedaling is simply a tactical retreat, carried out with a view to keeping the process’s long-term objectives alive. In Venezuela many of us are prone to ask: Are these objectives simply being postponed in the Thermidor that we are now living through or has there been an irreversible turn to the right? This question is almost inevitable, given the apparent loss of a socialist horizon, which is frankly exasperating for the left. However, to pose the question this way is problematic. It is either to posit some false subject of “history” or to imagine a party or governmental leadership capable of grabbing the wheel and putting the boat once again on a socialist course. I think the previous discussion should show the falseness of either perspective. On the question of leadership, remember that, although Mao was sometimes called the “Great Helmsman,” in reality the only way he could try to redirect the Chinese revolutionary project toward socialism was by stirring up the masses and encouraging them to rebel, as he did most strikingly in the Cultural Revolution.

What, then, is the way forward for those committed to socialism in Venezuela? Near the end of his life Chávez began to ask a bizarre question in relation to different projects underway in Venezuela. He did it repeatedly. Chávez would visit a project site and turn to those present, usually including a few of his cadres, who would then become sheepish, querying: “Where is socialism here?” (¿Dónde está el socialismo?). I think that question was Chávez’s admission that only by finding those concrete points of rebellion against the existing order could socialism go forward in Venezuela. Remember that Chávez had already tried to decree socialism with the constitutional reform of 2007, which led to his first and only electoral defeat. That defeat presumably led him to realize that socialism can only be built by iteratively promoting concrete, grassroots experiments from below. Socialism would be built not by decree, but only through practice and struggle from the bases.

Today, in the face of the almost decade-long Thermidor in Venezuela, I think we should be asking the same question: Where is socialism? Certainly, it has little presence in the government’s main plans and programs, which represent at best a grim realism and the spirit of pragmatism. Rather socialism in Venezuela is to be found in those points of rebellion against the existing capitalist order: the few and always embattled communes, the campesinos who continue to seize and occupy land, the Pobladores movement that fosters self-organized housing projects, trying to reconceive and reconfigure urban life beyond the logic of capital.

Disturbingly, most people who engage with the Venezuelan project from abroad seem uninterested in the question of where socialism exists in the country or whether it can be recovered. Perhaps they never really cared about socialism, or they simply trust that some invisible hand can take us there, or they feel Venezuelan socialism is a merely local phenomenon that they, as outsiders, are not involved in. The latter perspective is a manifestly false one, since socialism, more than any other political project, is a shared and international endeavor. Adapting Chávez’s question and combining it with Mao’s injunction to remember class struggle, I feel that we should be asking ourselves: “Where is popular rebellion against the capitalist order in Venezuela?” It is only by asking this kind of question that we can begin to identify the foci that need to be made visible and encouraged in the Venezuelan project today.

https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/15251

[blindpig]

THE "DEVASTATING CONSEQUENCES" OF THE BLOCKADE: CHAPTER ONCOLOGY PATIENTS
22 Jul 2021 , 3:52 pm .


There are Venezuelan patients with leukemia and other types of cancer stranded abroad and at risk of losing their lives (Photo: David J. Phillip / AP)

As the US financial, economic and commercial blockade measures have raged on Venezuela in recent years, complaints about their consequences also emerged. Both the government and different public and private organizations and institutions showed redress for the impact that Washington's strategy for "regime change" had on the population, and not precisely on the supposed recipients of "sanctions."

In May 2019, the Latin American Foundation for Human Rights and Social Development (Fundalatin) warned at a press conference that there were cases of Venezuelan patients who were in Italy and Argentina whose lives were in danger due to lack of treatment, due to the denial of Venezuelan payments in international banks and the confiscation of resources.

The patients were beneficiaries of a program run by the Simón Bolívar Foundation, an institution for social and humanitarian purposes of Citgo Petroleum, a US subsidiary of Petróleos de Venezuela, SA (PDVSA). After the Citgo kidnapping via an Executive Order signed by then-President Donald Trump, the patients had not been able to receive a bone marrow transplant that they had already planned with the funds and support of the foundation.

Fundalatin asked at the time that the blocking measures be stopped to continue with their medical treatments and prevent the death of more children, adolescents and adults who are still waiting for treatment.

These complaints were also heard at the Human Rights Council of the United Nations (UN). The same foundation declared in December 2019 that 12 girls and boys, patients with leukemia, were waiting for a bone marrow transplant, receiving the direct impact of the "sanctions" for the refusal of the banks to carry out Venezuelan transactions for fear of reprisals from the Department from the US Treasury.

For months, after Joe Biden took office as president of the United States, the White House had said that they would review the scheme of unilateral coercive measures against the Bolivarian Republic in order to alleviate its impact on the population in the national territory. and internationally. But none of this has been evidenced, even when licenses are generated for the trade of some essential products for the domestic and economic life of Venezuela.

NO RELIEF

In fact, the US government has said that the priority is to moderate the sanctioning program in favor of humanitarian measures. Such an assertion has not been supported by reality, taking into account the latest complaints made by a group of independent UN experts, including special rapporteurs Alena Douhan , Nils Melzer, Obiora Okafor, Livingstone Sewanyana, Saad Alfarargi and Tlaleng Mofokeng.

The UN ensures that the special rapporteurs are part of the Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council , in charge of the independent investigation and monitoring mechanisms established by the UN system to address specific country situations or thematic issues around the world.

It should be emphasized that the Special Procedures experts work on a voluntary basis, they do not receive salary nor are they UN personnel. To be part of this organization, experts must be truly independent from any government and organization, and act in an individual capacity.


In a statement published on July 21 on the UN News website , the experts affirmed that the "excessively strict application of US sanctions directed at Venezuela and the state oil company Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA)" threatens the lives of hundreds of cancer patients.

"The lives of Venezuelan patients who have had transplants and are stranded in foreign countries is threatened, as is those who hope to travel abroad to undergo operations without which they would not survive."

As a result of the blockade, the health crisis in Venezuela has worsened in recent years and with it, the only way that some patients who are still in the country have to receive the appropriate treatments for their oncological diseases is by traveling abroad.

In this way, it is confirmed that there has been no relief in the financial, economic and commercial war scheme against the entire country.

The so-called "secondary sanctions" entail blocking threats for those who also dare to do some type of business, be it humanitarian or commercial, a key fact so that Venezuelan cancer patients cannot obtain treatment, just as the Venezuelan State does not. can have free access to the international market. Experts say:

"Third countries, banks, and private companies have been excessively cautious in their dealings with Venezuela because they fear inadvertently violating US sanctions. As a consequence, money cannot be transferred outside of Venezuela, and some patients have been stranded, destitute, in the countries where they went for treatment. "

The UN press release reports that, according to data provided by the group of special rapporteurs, some 190 cancer patients are on the waiting list to receive treatment abroad.

As a fatal consequence of the blocking of Venezuelan transfers and funds, some 14 children, three of them babies, died between 2017 and 2020, awaiting treatment under the Simón Bolívar Foundation program.

FOR PROFIT AND AGAINST THE COUNTRY

The statement's findings go to the heart of the US offensive on the Venezuelan economy, with the US hijacking of Citgo and the attacks on PDVSA at the center.

"Targeting PDVSA has been a way of controlling Venezuela's political agenda that has had devastating consequences for hundreds of people undergoing treatment for transplant rejection, both in Venezuela and abroad."

Independent researchers are not wrong when they name the oil industry as one of the factors that most affect the problem at hand. The Venezuelan state company was the main producer of foreign currency in the country, and with its decline both domestically and in the international market, it has degraded the quality of life of the Venezuelan population, at home and abroad.

Since the United States and the "Guaidó project" have Citgo in their hands, a fait accompli in February 2019, the Simón Bolívar Foundation claims to have donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Venezuela "to improve health programs," however not there have been signs of it or reports that support the financing. Rather, as documents obtained by the Venezuelan state show, millions of dollars from the foundation have ended up in the pockets of the main anti-Chavez extremist parties.


The president of the National Assembly, Jorge Rodríguez, denounced at the end of 2020 that operators of Popular Will have received money from the non-profit foundation of Citgo to invest it in private initiatives and destabilization of the country, according to a confession of the former journalist and anti-Chavista militant Roland Carreño.

"He used the money from the Simón Bolívar Foundation to buy a spa in the Paseo Las Mercedes Shopping Center (Caracas). He also used the money of children with cancer to buy a late-model truck for his partner," the deputy denounced.

"They used the facade to build hospitals, to help children, but they really use the money for political proselytism. (...) That money would have been used to treat children with leukemia and lung transplants. (...) Instead, they he transferred to the Futuro Presente foundation of Yon Goicochea in Colombia, to plan actions against Venezuela, "he added.

For this reason, the United States' sanctioning scheme serves both to cut off the economic oxygen to Venezuela and to finance "regime change" agendas, enrich operators directly connected with Washington and at the same time make the Venezuelan population suffer and kill them. crimes against humanity previously denounced by various actors at the international level.

https://misionverdad.com/venezuela/las- ... ncologicos

Google Translator

[blindpig]

Keys to Jesús Santrich’s Assassination in Venezuela
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JULY 27, 2021
Danna Urdaneta



To Jesús Santrich
the neo-baroque poet and communicator admired by the Venezuelan people
the Marxist thinker who gave his life for peace with social justice for Colombia.

Jesús Santrich’s assassination in Venezuela on May 17, 2021, constituted a serious violation of national sovereignty by the United States and Colombia. Despite blankets of silence being imposed by governments on both sides of the Colombo-Venezuelan border, contradictory versions of the events have come to light.

As was to be expected, press outlets associated with [hard-right former Colombian President] Álvaro Uribe claimed that Santrich’s death came as the result of a confrontation between illegal gangs and/or with the [dissident FARC-EP] guerrillas led by Gentil Duarte.

On the other hand, in an official war report, the [remobilized guerrilla movement to which Santrich belonged] FARC-EP Segunda Marquetalia denounced an “ambush carried out by Colombian Army commandos (…) on the direct orders of [Colombian] President Iván Duque” to assassinate a blind man that they were unable to capture alive.

Duque had previously responded to the constitution of the FARC-EP Segunda Marquetalia on August 29, 2019, on the same day offering an almost US $800,000 reward for the capture of [FARC-EP Segunda Marquetalia leaders] Jesús Santrich, Iván Márquez and other guerrilla leaders. On June 18, 2020, then US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also offered US $10 million for information that led to the capture of the guerrilla leader. In this way, the true objective of the dispute – the imperialist penetration of Venezuela – can be seen to be disguised by the fight against transnational terrorism discourse.

The excuses are “transnational threats,” the target is oil

On February 8, 2021, Duque announced the creation of a new ‘Commando Unit against Drug Trafficking and Transnational Threats’ (CONAT) from Tolemaida (largest US military base in Colombia). CONAT was to be made up of 7,000 men and women from the Army, a specialized body dedicated to liquidate “any transnational form of terrorism.” That is to say, the top leaders of the communist guerrillas. This elite commando unit began to operate in May.

Duque took advantage of the CONAT’s inauguration to threaten Venezuela for allegedly protecting “terrorists.” In response, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro denounced that five paramilitary camps in Colombia looked to overthrow the Bolivarian government at an international press conference. He added:

I wish there would be an independent investigation one day, because we have given the coordinates, we have revealed the names. And we have much more [evidence], we are going to bring it out at any time (…). Hopefully, Duque will take his role as president seriously and protect the Colombian border. He announces a special commando unit… How many commandos have they created in seventy years? And all have failed.

Santrich’s death in the binational strip of the Sierra de Perijá in Venezuela’s Zulia state constitutes a serious violation of Venezuelan sovereignty by the US and Colombia, who infiltrated an elite commando unit directed by General Eduardo Zapateiro and Duque himself. The commandos were extracted in a yellow helicopter bound for Colombia and apparently entered and left Venezuelan territory without being detected.

The war report presented by the FARC-EP Segunda Marquetalia confirms that the CONAT constitutes the vanguard of an invading army led by the Pentagon to intervene in Venezuela and seize its oil. This comes in addition to its official objective: fighting drug trafficking and persecuting insurgencies.

This military action is yet another escalation by the United States. It looks to test the operational capacity of the Venezuelan Armed Forces against any intervention aiming, for example, to take control of the eastern coast of Maracaibo Lake. This lake is where one of the most productive oil basins in the world in the 20th Century is located and is just a few kilometers from the site where Santrich was murdered. As such, it is impossible to speak of the social and armed conflict from a binational perspective without mentioning the dynamics of displacement and state abandonment on the Colombian-Venezuelan border.

Dynamics of the binational strip

Santrich’s assassination took place in one of the hardest-hit regions of the country in terms of the decline of public services, but also one of the most affected by the migration crisis.

The dynamics of the Catatumbo binational strip, to the south of the Sierra de Perijá, has been described by Colombia’s Ombudsman’s Office as follows:

Border transit for campesino and indigenous communities has formed part of the economic, social and cultural dynamics since before the creation of nation-states, as well as being a survival strategy for the population since the incursion of paramilitaries in the region at the end of the 1990s. As the violence intensified, a self-protection mechanism has been to move their villages to Venezuelan territory and then back again.


Sierra de Perijá National Park in the white circle. (Researchgate)Sierra de Perijá National Park in the white circle. (Researchgate)

Jesús Santrich found himself in a region where the population is binational: displaced from the conflict and poverty in Colombia and finding a place to live on the Venezuelan side, just as in recent years those displaced by capitalism in Venezuela have made their home in Colombia.

In this remote region of Venezuela, schools are improvised and it is common for rural teachers to be displaced and undocumented Colombian women. There are no local Cuban Medical Mission facilities, babies are born with midwives, often without a birth certificate or identity card. This year I heard an official from the region say “The Bolivarian Revolution has not arrived here.” In this context, government silence persists and stately reasons prevail in Venezuela regarding the death of Santrich.

The silence of the Venezuelan government and peoples’ diplomacy

If the Venezuelan government were to publicly confirm Santrich’s death in Venezuela, it would have been trapped between the following accusations:

a) “It is verified that drug criminals are sheltering in Venezuela” as stated by Colombian Defense Minister Diego Molano on May 18, 2021,

b) The [Caracas] government was permissive or complicit in his death,

c) The Venezuelan State is unable to defend its sovereignty.

Uribe, [former Ecuadorian president] Rafael Correa and Hugo Chávez set a precedent for the handling of these war scenarios. On March 1, 2008, in Sucumbíos, Ecuador, FARC-EP commander Raúl Reyes was assassinated defenseless after his camp was bombed (also in a binational zone between Colombia and Ecuador). The event generated a diplomatic crisis that caused the rupture of relations between these countries and the mobilization of Ecuadorian and Venezuelan troops to their respective borders with Colombia.

On March 7, 2008, at the Rio Group’s XX Summit, Chávez took the opportunity to promote a dialogue-based solution to the Reyes conflict and narrated his military experience regarding how the Colombian conflict was understood as a common conflict of both countries in the past. It is worth adding to this that the socioeconomic census of ex-FARC-EP combatants carried out by the National University of Colombia in 2017 showed that Venezuela is the country that has contributed most internationalist fighters to the Colombian guerrilla struggle with a total of 54. This does not include those who died with dignity in combat or were not tallied.

At the crossroads that the murder of Santrich has generated, the international Right intentionally “forgets” that any official admission by the Venezuelan government that the death occurred in its territory would also be confirmation that Colombia violated Venezuelan sovereignty and would force Bogotá to answer serious questions.

Faced with the Apure conflict, the position assumed by Venezuelan Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López has been based on the argument that the presence of Colombian irregular groups in Venezuela is a violation of the country’s sovereignty. This approach completely denies the fact that foreign policy towards Colombia has always been that of a dialogue-based solution to the conflict.

During the Caracas Dialogues (1991), the Simón Bolívar Coordinating Group and Colombian President César Gaviria officially met twice in the Venezuelan capital. In other words, former [Venezuelan] President Carlos Andrés Pérez turned the country into neutral territory to seek a way out of the Colombian war. Likewise, former President Rafael Caldera was also criticized on more than one occasion for having a FARC-EP office in Caracas.

This foreign policy logic has its counterpart in the popular movement and political parties of the Chavista and Venezuelan left. Peoples’ diplomacy paid tribute to the revolutionary leader Santrich via a Twitter storm on May 18, 2021, using the tags #JesúsSantrich and #ColombiaResiste. In Venezuela, these tags trended nationally thanks to the push of the Communist Party (PCV) and all the political forces grouped in the Popular Revolutionary Alternative (APR).

On May 27, Venezuelan organizations also celebrated the International Day of the Peoples’ Right to Armed Rebellion in the Manuel Marulanda Square in Caracas’ 23 de Enero parish. This activity was another tribute to the murdered guerrilla leader. Once again, in the face of the Venezuelan government’s silence over the assassination, the people imposed their diplomacy. Expressions of the rank and file of the United Socialist Party (PSUV), the PCV and the APR that join forces in the Continental Bolivarian Movement came together to express their solidarity and camaraderie with the guerrilla organization.

Apart from the murder of Santrich, there have been other cases of Colombian revolutionaries and guerrillas captured in Venezuelan territory.

Rodrigo Granda, Joaquín Pérez Becerra and Julián Conrado

This was not the first time that Colombia has carried out military operations violating Venezuelan sovereignty.

The case of the former FARC-EP commander Rodrigo Granda is the most striking. He was captured by Interpol on December 13, 2004, in Caracas before being illegally transferred to Cúcuta [Colombia] where Bogotá legalized his capture, with Uribe’s setup coming to light after the war trophy had been awarded. With the mediation of France and Venezuela, Granda was released by Uribe on June 4, 2007. His capture caused the rupture of diplomatic relations between the two countries.

Another emblematic case involving Venezuela, Colombia and the former FARC-EP was the capture of Julián Conrado on June 1, 2011. Conrado was detained by the National Bolivarian Intelligence Service (SEBIN) through January 10, 2014. He benefited from a solidarity campaign by the Venezuelan left and Chavista social movements that achieved his transfer to Havana as a member of the FARC-EP peace delegation. On October 27, 2019, he was elected mayor in Turbaco in Colombia, establishing himself as the first former combatant in a popularly elected position.

Also, the Swedish journalist of Colombian origin Joaquín Pérez Becerra, editor of the Nueva Colombia News Agency, was captured on April 22, 2011, at Venezuela’s Maiquetía International Airport and deported to Colombia three days later. His deportation continues to signify the re-victimization of a political refugee. Pérez Becerra’s capture and deportation forced one of the great self-organized marches held by the Chavista popular movement in the history of the Bolivarian Revolution. The mobilization did not have the support of the PSUV and marched to the National Assembly under the slogan “The revolution does not hand over revolutionaries!” Caracas’ response was to disperse the march with tear gas.

What was Santrich doing in Venezuela?

With the capture of Granda in Caracas, the imprisonment of Conrado and the handing over of Pérez Becerra to the Colombian government, it is laughable that imperialism and its allies in the region point to Venezuela as a promoter of “transnational terrorism.”

Paraphrasing Colombia’s National University professor Jairo Estrada in an interview with Semana Magazine, to speak of Jesús Santrich in Venezuela is to speak of the architect of the Havana Peace Accords in a country that, for years, has been a companion and promoter of the peace processes in Colombia. To speak of Jesús Santrich in Venezuelan territory is to speak of a man who returned to the armed struggle to save his life in the absence of political guarantees.

Santrich always made it clear that a new peace process would be possible with a government other than that of Duque. It is virtually impossible to know what the politically persecuted leader was doing in Venezuela, but his murder begs the question: is the social and armed conflict exclusively Colombian, or can we talk about a cross-border conflict in which Venezuela plays a part?

Reflections on this stage of the binational conflict

The hybrid war that we live in Venezuela — an armed conflict where all available means are used, including terror and insurgency — has an imperialist military expression on our borders, with permanent attacks in recent years. Faced by this and an unresolved armed conflict in Apure, it is essential to study the war that started in Colombia but that previous Venezuelan governments and combatants took on as a common conflict.

With this perspective in which Chávez himself confessed to having patrolled Colombian territory with Venezuelan and Colombian troops when he was an army captain, it is essential to remove the political and mental boundaries, and assume the resolution of the conflict in a joint fashion, without double standards or hypocrisies. As part of this, the Colombian oligarchy must assume its responsibility in the hybrid war against Venezuela and in its definitive solution for peace with social justice.

Chávez knew the border as a counterinsurgent who patrolled it, looking for guerrillas to assassinate. From this experience, he concluded that the only solution to war is peace. Santrich was a guerrilla leader and architect of the Havana Peace Accord. From this experience, he concluded that there can be no peace with perfidy and without social justice. In the Venezuelan scenario, it is essential to maintain this Bolivarian perspective.

Danna Urdaneta is a Venezuelan writer, poet and editor. She is a specialist in the Colombian social and armed conflict, on political prisoners, and in the international movement for peace with social justice. Her slogan is: Everything for poetry, nothing for war.

Translation by Paul Dobson for Venezuelanalysis.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2021/07/ ... venezuela/

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THE CONSTRUCTION OF A FOOD CRISIS IN VENEZUELA (I)
Clara Sanchez

6 Jul 2021 , 12:47 pm .


The United States seeks a "humanitarian intervention" at all costs in Venezuela (Photo: Fernando Vergara / AP Photo)

In 1985, the legendary band Queen participated in the Live Aid concert, an event held simultaneously between London, at Wembley Stadium, and Philadelphia, at John F. Kennedy Stadium, to raise funds for humanitarian aid in order to end hunger in East African countries, mainly Ethiopia and Somalia.


Freddie Mercury, lead singer of Queen at the Live Aid concert (1985) to raise funds for the hungry in Ethiopia and Somalia (Photo: File)

At this time, Queen assumed that the band was outdated and that it was time to give way to newer bands on stage, but Live Aid came to change that thinking and eventually became one of their most famous performances.

The collection in this concert broadcast live to more than 72 countries reached 100 million dollars, which did not serve to end hunger in Ethiopia and Somalia, although it did so that Bod Geldof, organizer of the concerts, was named Knight of Honor of the Order of the British Empire a year later, and to define July 13 as the date of International Rock Day.

FOOD AS A VEHICLE FOR HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTIONS

Two years after this spectacle, in 1987, the UN demanded participation in Ethiopia and Sudan in the distribution of international food aid to the population, and the following year France presented Res. 43/131 in the General Assembly, imposing the idea of a right to humanitarian interference so that the international community could freely access victims in natural disasters; being able to assume this action as the first antecedent in the UN in which the right of non-foreign intervention in the internal affairs of its members was broken, enshrined in the body's charter, according to article 2, paragraphs 4 and 7, which they even extended to humanitarian issues, while the Cold War lasted.

According to various approaches, this right of non-intervention was classified as an inaction of the UN, always supported by the search for consensus, which did not weigh the human rights violated, or the level of that violation, but rather considered the possible consequences of a violation. Military intervention; and with this, in times of the Cold War an escalation with the use of force was avoided and, therefore, a confrontation between superpowers or a nuclear war.

Three years later, in 1990, Res. 45/100 called "The humanitarian interference corridor" was added, limiting its scope in time and space; and later, in 1992, the United Nations Security Council approved, in its first Summit of Heads of State, "the use of all necessary means" to guarantee the distribution of humanitarian aid, in any case, the right intervention, even without prior request. Resulting from this, Res. 794 for Somalia.

With Res. 794, the use of force to guarantee the arrival of food was imposed on the United Nations Operation in Somalia I (UNOSOM-I), which had been running in the Horn of Africa country since April 1992. validating from the UN a maneuver whose conception, command and even the name "Operation Restore Hope" was imposed by the United States under the command of George Bush, thus becoming the UNITAF Mission (Unified Task Force), to carry out operations in southern Somalia through the use of a multinational force from December 1992 to May 1993, which allowed the distribution of humanitarian aid in which 37 thousand soldiers were deployed, of which 25 thousand were soldiers Americans, under the coalition of 24 countries and a cost of 42,9 million dollars.

Subsequently, UNOSOM-I and UNITAF were imposed by the UNOSOM-II humanitarian mission between 1993 and 1995, considered the first United Nations peacekeeping operation, also led by the United States, where 28 thousand troops were deployed at a cost of 1,643 million dollars, whose results were contrary to expectations, that is, non-humanitarian results; a massive failure, which left the country in a crisis greater than the one that existed before the humanitarian intervention.

EVOLUTION OF HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTIONS

This was a concrete fact of how the use of military force was conceived for humanitarian interventions, related to food aid, and then its evolution to the Agenda for Peace (1992), thus emerging new forms of use of the military instrument in operations finally established, in addition to food and humanitarian operations, the imposition of peace and the construction of peace. All, through the use of force in asymmetric contexts, finally modifying the UN intervention criteria.

And in the case of the flow of humanitarian aid to carry out these and other operations, its conditioning always to the degree of interest of donors, associated with the number of those in need.

This is how in the year 2000 the International Commission on Intervention and Sovereignty of States was established in order to face the challenge of the responsibility of the international community to act in the face of human rights violations, protecting the population from a State if your own government does not do so, even more so in a scenario of humanitarian crisis.

This principle of the "Responsibility to Protect" or R2P was incorporated in a final document of the United Nations of the year 2005, applauded by specialists in international affairs as the beginning of a new era of peace and security, in response to the humanitarian crises of the 90s in the world.

Principle put into practice for the first time to " alleviate the suffering of the Libyan population " through the country's military intervention in 2011, the result of which was a regime change imposed by NATO upon assassinating President Muhammad al-Gaddafi, on whom US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton shamelessly exclaimed: "We came, we saw and he died."


The truth is that, with this operation, the formal use of force for alleged humanitarian reasons was accentuated, serving up to now as a valid instrument to justify military interventions, particularly by the states of greater power, moved by their own interests. and on behalf of the international community.

THE DISCURSIVE CONSTRUCTION OF THE HUMANITARIAN CRISIS IN VENEZUELA: SOUTHERN COMMAND AND NATIONAL ASSEMBLY 2016-2020

It is precisely this principle that is suggested to be applied to Venezuela since the beginning of the economic, financial and commercial blockade imposed by the United States on the country, through which the standard of living of the Venezuelan population is violated as a factor of national power, with the in order to impose a regime change, while building the rhetoric of a food crisis that adds to a humanitarian crisis, where the international community needs to intervene "to alleviate the suffering of the population" that the government supposedly does not protect.

This is how this construction begins in October 2015, seven months after Obama declared Venezuela an unusual and extraordinary threat to the United States, when the then Chief of the Southern Command, John Kelly, asserted that "if there is any major humanitarian crisis in Venezuela ( …) To the point of desperately needing food, water and things like that, they could react through organizations like the UN, the OAS, or the World Food Program, FAO ".

Four months later, on February 11, 2016, the National Assembly of Venezuela, with a majority opposed to the national government, declared the existence of a humanitarian crisis and the need to request help from international organizations to prevent a threat of famine; As well as in April 2016, it turned to the construction of a food crisis in full coordination with the Plan Operation Venezuela Freedom-2 of the United States Southern Command.

At this time, in the midst of a shortage of basic foods, it was sustained by economists critical of the government, but also by national, transnationalized and transnational oligopolies in the food sector, that it was caused by the control of prices, which harmed national production, and the control of foreign exchange for the payment of its foreign suppliers, and not because of the imposition of economic war as economic options of the strategy against Venezuela, added to the unilateral coercive measures of the United States against the country.

Economic war that was constituted around basic foods as a programmed and selective shortage, not caused by a decrease in production, but through the alteration of distribution mechanisms, avoiding the timely and efficient placement of products on the shelves , inducing shortages and, with it, the appearance of long lines, rationing of purchases and illegal markets.

In May 2016, before the opposition National Assembly rejected the subsidized food program Local Supply and Production Committees (CLAP) launched by the national government, the then MUD deputy Freddy Guevara affirmed that the " Venezuela's food crisis was a consequence of corruption in the importation of food and the destruction of national production ", in an intervention he made in a forum called" Corruption and hunger in Venezuela. An inexcusable reality ", organized by this National Assembly as executing arm of the United States against the country, together with the NGO Transparencia Venezuela, where ex-nutritionist Susana Rafalli, a political activist closely linked to the interests of the United States in promoting unilateral coercive measures, emphasized the need to classify the situation in Venezuela internationally as a food crisis.


LUIS ALMAGRO'S CONTRIBUTION FROM THE OAS

For international projection, on June 23, 2016, the Secretary General of the Organization of American States (OAS), Luis Almagro, in his speech before the Permanent Council of the organization presented a report against the government of Venezuela with which he demanded to put An end to what he called a "humanitarian crisis", caused by a food and medicine crisis that was reaching a crucial point, and stating that these problems were not being caused by external forces but were the result of actions taken by those who were involved. in power, referring to the Bolivarian Revolution and the cycle started by Hugo Chávez since 1999.

In 2018, Almagro again shared "his opinion" in an article published in the Financial Times on the need to protect Venezuelans from a humanitarian crisis, using as a comparison a speech by Bill Clinton on Rwanda, and invoking the need to "act in accordance with public international law, including the 2005 United Nations 'Responsibility to Protect', "where it cataloged the Bolivarian Government as" a state-run killing machine, "a" dictatorship "that" deprived civilians of food and essential medicines ".

Therefore, the "Responsibility to Protect", according to him, "would put an end to the inaction of the international community to address the humanitarian crisis", just like the Cold War discourse, whose "commitment required leaving all options on the table" , just like Donald Trump, "to put an end to the suffering of the Venezuelan people", just like a preaching used for more than two years to impose the "humanitarian intervention" in Libya in 2011.

And in line with the speech of the National Assembly against the Bolivarian Government, it affirmed that "corruption is (ba) starving the entire population of a country", therefore it was necessary "to provide humanitarian assistance to those who need it ( ban) desperately. "

In the same vein, Fernando Cutz, former director for South America of the United States Security Council, in a conference at the Wilson Center, assured that an international military intervention was the best option at that time to remove President Nicolás Maduro from power, because this "He does not care (ba) that people were starving and fleeing the country", therefore, there was no other way out than the use of force.

THE USE OF "HUMANITARIAN AID" TO IMPOSE ANOTHER GOVERNMENT

Already in 2019, specifically on January 15, the opposition parliament agreed to the authorization of humanitarian aid days before the self-proclamation imposed by the United States through the figure of Juan Guaidó as "interim president or manager" of the country.

On February 19, a new agreement was resumed demanding the unblocking of the Las Tienditas International Bridge and other national border posts that would allow the entry of a supposed "humanitarian aid", whose ultimate goal, as was evidenced , was the violation of the territorial sovereignty of Venezuela. A day later, Senator Marco Rubio sent via social networks a message with images of Gaddafi, which was considered a direct threat to the Venezuelan president.


However, these statements have not been isolated to the siege imposed by the United States on the country. Since on May 18, 2017, Nikki Haley, US ambassador to the UN, stated that "Venezuela is on the brink of a humanitarian crisis and the international community should work together to guarantee the restoration of democracy." , in an attempt to discuss the issue of Venezuela in the Security Council. As well as in the Human Rights Council the same year.

Which did not happen only in 2017, since on February 26, 2019, days after the unsuccessful attempt to forcibly enter the supposed "humanitarian aid", mainly donated by the United States through USAID and through the figure of Juan Guaidó, a new resolution was incorporated by the North American country before the UN, in which it was requested to facilitate the entry of "humanitarian aid", but mainly requested the recognition before the body of an "interim president" for Venezuela, which Russia and China rejected it as a means of foreign interference.

On this occasion, Elliott Abrams, special representative of the State Department for Venezuela, affirmed that the rejection of his resolution prolonged the suffering of Venezuelans through a crisis "manufactured by man, which threatened to destabilize the region," while ensuring that States Unidos "would seek all avenues to increase humanitarian aid to Venezuelans inside and outside the country."

Of course, the Lima Group, which always opted to increase the siege against Venezuela, claimed that the "illegitimate regime of Nicolás Maduro intentionally subjected Venezuelans to a systematic deprivation of food and medicine, and access to basic services, to ensure his permanence in power, "that is, a" man-made crisis, "according to Elliott Abrams.

And in April of the same year, Luis Almagro desperately called for more economic "sanctions" and the use of force to resolve the situation in Venezuela, among several things, to address "the humanitarian crisis", insisting on the use of humanitarian intervention under the "Responsibility to Protect", at the same time that he considered that supporting the virtual figure of Guaidó was "the best way forward."

FROM LIVE AID (1985) TO VENEZUELA AID LIVE (2019)

But as the evolution of humanitarian interventions at the UN to the "Responsibility to Protect" began to position themselves worldwide thanks to the Live Aid concert for Ethiopia and Somalia in 1985, the application of the same script for Venezuela in 2019 could not be missed. .

In this case, Venezuela Aid Live (Venezuela Direct Help) was the charity concert, organized by British businessman Richard Branson, who assured that soon "Venezuelans would be on the brink of starvation or death." His goal was to raise 100 million dollars in 60 days to address the crisis in Venezuela, coincidentally the same amount raised for Ethiopia and Somalia but in 1985: 36 years ago.

Concert held the day before in Colombian territory to justify worldwide the entry by force of "humanitarian aid" in an attempt to violate Venezuelan borders with impunity, proclaiming "freedom" and the right to unblock limits for the "international community" to enter, represented in Sebastián Piñera (Chile), Iván Duque (Colombia), Mario Abdo Benítez (Paraguay) and the Secretary General of the OAS, Luis Almagro. The end: to qualify the non-entry as a "crime against humanity", finally set on fire by the supporters of the Venezuelan opposition.


Luis Almagro (OAS), Mario Abdo Benítez (Paraguay), Iván Duque (Colombia) and Sebastián Piñera (Chile) accompanying Juan Guaidó (Photo: Semana)

The donor of "humanitarian aid", the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) that sent , for example, vegetable oil, flour, lentils and rice for 5 thousand Venezuelans for 10 days, or soap, toothbrush and toothpaste for 7 thousand people for 10 days.


The most remarkable thing is that the amount that was intended to be collected in this concert barely corresponds to 6% of the total Venezuelan resources retained only in England, which exceed 1,614 million euros, protected by the economic, financial and commercial blockade that the United States imposes on the country.

Amount with which 10 million monthly boxes of the CLAP subsidized food program can be purchased and distributed to the Venezuelan population, or equal to 120 million CLAP boxes for families throughout the country for 20 months, at the current monthly coverage level (6 million families) and with the resources of Venezuelans themselves, without the need for USAID to make any effort to donate cereals and toothpaste for a handful of Venezuelans for just 10 days.

FINAL THOUGHTS
More than 35 years after the Live Aid concert, it continues to be affirmed that Ethiopia is one of the first ten countries in the world with a food crisis, where 3.1 million people are in crisis (phase 3 of the IPC - Integrated Classification of the Food Insecurity Phase ), 2.1 million in an emergency situation (phase 4 of the IPC) and more than 350 thousand people in the Catastrophe level (Phase 5 of the IPC) between May and June 2021, considered the highest number people in Phase 5 since the 2011 famine, which happened coincidentally in Somalia.

While in Somalia it is stated that there are 2.7 million people facing high levels of acute food insecurity (IPC Phase 3 or higher) until mid-2021, in the absence of humanitarian assistance.

And with regard to Libya, 10 years after the application of the UN principle or the "Responsibility to Protect" of the international community, the United Nations Secretary General has urged countries to support a new Humanitarian Response Plan of the organization for the country, concerned about "the serious and deteriorating humanitarian situation in Libya, estimating that 1.3 million people needed assistance, an increase of 400 thousand since 2020."


This shows that, behind humanitarian interventions, there are always strategic interests of the different actors of world power, whose results are generally non-humanitarian, deepening the crises in the intervened countries.

In the case of Venezuela, coincidentally, it is these "humanitarian interventions" that are being applied since the unmasked siege began by the first world power, where food and hunger are issues with which the country is constantly supported. on the international agenda, evolving, no longer on the number of people who suffer from it, but has risen to a higher level, with the supposed mortality from the scourge that in 2020 was expected to reach a level of collapse driven by the pandemic , whose predictions fortunately turned out to be wrong.

The objective: to lay the foundations on Venezuela as one of the largest food crises in the world, where urgent humanitarian assistance is required, inserting into the world imagination the need for a "humanitarian" military intervention or the "Responsibility to Protect" the It is a population that the United States violates, to cause it the suffering that allows it to achieve a "regime change."

Further development of the topic will be published in a second part of this research work.

This article was originally published on the Food and Power website on July 6, 2021 .

https://misionverdad.com/investigacione ... enezuela-i

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