The Trump Administration Is Intensifying Its Regime Change Efforts in
Venezuela
By Mark Weisbrot, US News and World Report
08 March 18
The Trump administration is intensifying its regime change efforts to
potentially include torpedoing Venezuela's presidential election.
In recent weeks, the Trump administration has stepped up its efforts at
"regime change" in Venezuela. In the past, Trump himself has even mentioned
military action as a possible option, but the most recent moves appear more
likely to be implemented, and some are already operational.
According to a source with knowledge of the matter, the leading opposition
contender for Venezuela's May presidential election, Henri Falcón, was told
by U.S. officials that the Trump administration would consider financial
sanctions against him if he entered the presidential race. (The U.S. State
Department did not return requests for comment.) The U.S. has backed the
main opposition coalition decision to boycott the election.
Falcón is a former governor and retired military officer. He is leading in
the latest polls, and according to the most reliable opposition pollster,
would defeat Maduro in the election by a margin of nearly 7 percentage
points.
Why would the Trump administration want to prevent an opposition leader who
could possibly win the presidency in Venezuela from running in this
election? There is no way to know for sure, but high-level sources from
inside the administration have stated that Florida Sen. Marco Rubio is
determining U.S. policy toward Venezuela. Rubio is a hardliner who does not
seem interested in an electoral or negotiated solution to Venezuela's
political crisis. On Feb. 9, he appeared to support a military coup when he
tweeted:
Such open support from Washington for a military coup against an elected
government before the coup has occurred is unusual, to say the least, in
the 21st century. But the Trump team is not just sitting around waiting for
it to happen. The Rubio/Trump strategy seems to be to try to worsen the
economic situation and increase suffering to the point where either the
military, or the insurrectionary elements of the opposition, rise up and
overthrow the government.
That appears to be the purpose of the financial sanctions that Trump ordered
on Aug. 24, 2017. These sanctions cut off Venezuela from billions of dollars
of potential loans, as well as from revenue even from its own oil company in
the U.S., Citgo. They have worsened shortages of medicine and food, in an
economy that is already suffering from inflation of about 3,000 percent
annually and a depression that has cost about 38 percent of GDP. These
sanctions are illegal under the Organization of American States charter and
under international conventions to which the U.S. is a signatory.
Now U.S. officials are talking about a more ferocious collective punishment:
cutting off Venezuela's oil sales. This was not done previously because it
would hurt U.S. oil refining interests that import Venezuelan oil. But the
administration has floated the idea of tapping the U.S. strategic petroleum
reserves to soften the blow. All this to overthrow a government that nobody
can claim poses any threat to the United States.
No one can pretend that the Trump administration cares about fair elections
in Latin America. The Honduran election of Nov. 26 was almost certainly
stolen, and even Washington's close ally who heads the OAS, Secretary
General Luis Almagro, called for it to be run again. But the Trump
administration went with the incumbent President Juan Orlando Hernández in
Honduras, a politician whose brother and security minister have been linked
to drug traffickers and whom Trump Chief of Staff John Kelly, former head of
the U.S. Southern Command, has described as a "great guy" and a "good
friend." The Trump administration did not object to their post-election
killings of unarmed protesters or other human rights abuses in fact, the
State Department certified the Honduran government as complying with human
rights obligations just days after the election.
There are certainly valid complaints about the upcoming election in
Venezuela. Some opposition candidates have been excluded, and the government
moved the election forward from its initially scheduled time in December to
April. The opposition had wanted it moved forward, but this was sooner than
they wanted. (On Thursday, Reuters reported that an agreement had been
reached between Venezuela's election board and some opposition parties to
hold the election in late May.)
Negotiations between the government and the opposition over these and other
problems broke down last month, although the government did agree to allow
election observers from the United Nations. With regard to the procedural
credibility of Venezuela's elections, in the past two decades there has
almost never been any legitimate doubt about the vote count, due to the
adoption of a very secure voting system. (The only exceptions were the
Constituent Assembly election of July 30 last year, which the opposition
boycotted and there was some question about the number of people who voted;
and one out of 23 governors' elections on October 15, where the local vote
count was not credible.) For the current negotiations, we cannot know if
other disagreements might have been resolved if the Trump administration had
not been pushing so hard to prevent elections from taking place, and
encouraging extra-legal "regime change" as an opposition strategy.
The main opposition coalition, the Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD, by its
acronym in Spanish), has as of now decided to boycott the elections. But
it's not clear that the voters will follow their lead. The most reliable and
recent polls, from Torino Capital and Datanalisis, show that 77.6 percent of
voters intend to vote in the upcoming election, with only 12.3 percent
planning to abstain. They should have that opportunity, and the Trump
administration should not be trying to take it away from them.
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