The New York Times, the so-called US “newspaper of record,” carried an opinion piece by one of its columnists promoting “military intervention” to promote “democracy” by overturning the democratically elected government of Venezuela.
By Francisco Dominguez and Roger D. Harris
The central tenet of the NYT piece is that the moral basis for deposing the current president is clear because it claims that he stole the election, terrorizes his opponents, and brutalizes his people with no sign of letting up, much less letting go. Every other option for political change, it contends, has been attempted. Not only that, but Venezuela maintains friendly relations with “our enemies” such as China, Russia, and Iran.
We deconstruct this appeal for illegal regime change. For us solidarity activists, Venezuela is an independent country, totally entitled to find its own way of development to benefit its people. The US may be the hemispheric hegemon, but it does not have the legal and even less the moral right to determine who should rule another country.
The article admits that under the leadership of presidents Hugo Chávez and then Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelans for 25 years have been successful in defending their sovereignty and self-determination against violent regime-change efforts by the US and its allies. Punishing sanctions initially devastated the economy. But in a remarkable turnaround, Venezuela is experiencing among the highest GDP increases in the hemisphere.
All this is anathema to the US empire and is epigones. This “threat of a good example” emboldens other nations to be independent and serves as an inspiration to the over a quarter of humanity currently suffering under US unilateral coercive economic measures.
Overthrowing democracy to save it
The article is blatantly entitled “Depose Maduro.” It came out on January 14, four days after Maduro was inaugurated for a third term. Basically it argues that, because the Venezuelans elected the wrong person, democracy has to be promoted by foreign military intervention. Such an action, it argues, “is overdue, morally right, and in our national security interest.”
Author Bret Stephens had previously been deputy editor of the Wall Street Journal and later editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem Post. His neoconservative views on foreign policy are integral to the US media and political establishment. His call to oust President Maduro by force came a few days after former extreme right-wing president of Colombia, Álvaro Uribe, also called for an international military intervention, “preferably sponsored by the UN.”
The article laments that “coercive diplomacy” – a not so euphemistic euphemism for the hybrid war against the Venezuelan people which has had the collateral damage of over 100,000 mortalities – has “failed to bring the regime down.” US imperialism achieved this level of lethality with only four years of sanctions, whereas Pinochet took 17 years to murder 5,000.
Contested presidential election
The article claims that Maduro was fraudulently elected on July 28, 2024. It cites non-existent so-called “independent surveys,” which claim he lost by 35%.
The US has anointed Edmundo González Urrutia as Venezuela’s “rightful president.” He in turn is the surrogate for María Corina Machado. She is the US-designated “leader” of the far-right insurrectionary opposition. Machado had been disqualified from running directly for public office in 2015 for past constitutionally mandated offenses.
González’s electoral victory claims are not backed up by data in his campaign’s possession. Rather, Machado, who was in charge the election campaign, rejected the results on the evening of election day itself but failed to submit evidence to the election authority about her claim.
González refused to hand over these data to the investigation carried out by Venezuela’s supreme court. Regardless, Machado built a website which posted highly dubious election data falsely claiming that her surrogate won with 70 percent of the vote.
All the falsehoods fit to print
The appeal for regime change is bolstered by other falsehoods. Ten US mercenaries, the NYT article complains, are “languishing in Venezuelan jails on dubious charges” as “political hostages” In the real world, mercenaries in the pay of a hostile foreign power and caught intending to carry out terrorist actions would be immediately arrested and punished anywhere.
Another falsehood in the article asserts there are 1,800 “political” prisoners held in Venezuela. Most, however, have already been released after being initially detained for participating in the July 29 violent riots. These resulted in the death of 27 people and were fomented by Machado after González lost the election.
The article is correct that millions of Venezuelans have left the country. But it conveniently omits that worsening conditions were deliberately created by the US with over 900 illegal unilateral coercive measures. Such a charge is equivalent to blaming the governments of Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya and Syria for the approximately 5 million deaths caused by US military aggression.
The article is also correct that there was malnutrition among substantial sections of the Venezuelan population, especially the poorest. But typical of the corporate press, the article omits to mention that this was inflicted deliberately. Asphyxiating sanctions were imposed by the US precisely to cause pain in a policy which the Trump administration labelled “maximum pressure.” These were continued by Biden.
Furthermore, the article resorts to the fakest of fake assertions: Venezuela is a “global hub for cocaine trafficking and money laundering.” In fact, the US consumes almost all of the cocaine, which is produced mainly in Colombia. And the money laundering takes place primarily in the US.
In fact, the 2023 UN Drug and Crime Report shows that Brazil, Bolivia, Perú and especially Colombia are the actual hubs of cocaine traffic.
So how is it possible that the US has been able to stop Venezuela from trading oil and gold, while it has blocked Venezuela’s transactions, trade, ships, planes and just about everything except cocaine?
This is even more peculiar because the US has at least 10 military bases in Colombia, more in Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Panama, Puerto Rico, Haiti, Guantánamo, Dominican Republic, Aruba, Curaçao, Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Ecuador, Paraguay, Argentina, and Chile. Besides the US Fourth Fleet patrols the South Atlantic.
The NYT falsely maintains that the Venezuelan government encourages emigration because it is a “good way of depleting a nation of its most discontented, energetic, and talented citizens.”
In fact, Venezuela has been severely impacted by this induced “brain drain.”
To mitigate these losses the government has instituted a program called Misión Vuelta a la Patria, which by July 2024 had brought back a million Venezuelans. This has been achieved despite open sabotage by Washington and rightwing governments in Latin America.
Venezuela’s sovereign right to self-defense
We maintain that Venezuela has the right to adopt all necessary measures to defend itself. The quarter-century-long persistent violent regime change efforts by the US leave no option to countries such as Venezuela but to prepare for the very threats that the NYT article is promoting. Trump and his key security advisors kept threatening with the mantra “all options are on the table.” And these were seamlessly continued by the Biden administration.
The NYT admits that everything the US has tried have failed to destroy the Bolivarian Revolution Instead of creating disunity, the armed forces have remained loyal. The US’s objective is not just ousting the democratically-elected president but to destroy the Bolivarian Revolution by thoroughly reversing all the substantial social, economic, political, and cultural gains of the people. Yet the Bolivarian armed forces, united with the people and their political institutions, have prevailed.
What is now promoted by the NYT piece is akin to the violent US-orchestrated regime change, which brought nearly 5,000 murders in Chile (1973-1990) and 32,000 in Argentina (1976-1983). US direct or by-proxy military intervention have brought about in the recent past 5,000 deaths in Panama, over 50,000 in Nicaragua, 80,000 in El Salvador, and 120,000 in Guatemala in the 1980-1990 decade alone.
Audaciously, the article posits the 1989 US invasion of Panama as the military model to depose President Maduro. Without penitence, it pleads that the destruction of the Bolivarian Revolution “is a good way to start the new [Trump] administration.” However, given Venezuela’s military preparedness and popular support for their government, a US invasion will not be as easy as Panama 36 years ago.
In conclusion, the US does not have any legitimate moral or legal right to interfere in the internal affairs of Venezuela, let alone carry out a military invasion. The truth is that US imperialism intensely craves Venezuela’s oil reserves, the largest in the planet. And more to the point, the empire cannot tolerate independence and sovereignty in its backyard.
The only thing Venezuela is guilty of is developing and deploying “weapons of mass instruction.” They have free education at every level, more than a million children learning music in El Sistema, 5 million social housing units, free health care, and much more, despite all the nasty US sanctions. Rather, Venezuela’s robust economic recovery is what US imperialism finds insufferable.
In short, the president of Venezuela is not chosen by the US State Department or its stenographers at New York Times. Independently defying the US, the people of Venezuela chose to reelect Nicolás Maduro Moros as their president for another six-year term.
Francisco Dominguez is National Secretary of the UK-based Venezuela Solidarity Campaign, Roger D. Harris is with the Task Force on the Americas, the US Peace Council, and the Venezuela Solidarity Network, based in North America. Both authors accompanied the January 10th Venezuelan presidential inauguration and the concurrent World Antifascist Festival.
