If Venezuela falls, humanity falls

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The Journey



John Pilger is a well-known Australian reporter and documentary filmmaker who received the UK Journalist of the Year award twice and two other UN Media Peace Prize awards.

Interviewed recently by TeleSur said: "the decent world must support Venezuela, now subjected to a virulent propaganda that is warfare through the media. If Venezuela falls, humanity falls. "

The Australian journalist's warning is far from disproportionate. What is at stake today in Venezuela is similar to the dilemma that humanity lived during the Spanish Civil War, or to which Latin America suffered as a result of the coup in Chile against President Salvador Allende.

In the first case, the triumph of the Franco regime opened the way to the expansion of Nazism and fascism in Europe. In the second, the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet was the turning point for the establishment of varied gorilatos and the wild expansion of neoliberalism in Latin America.

If the Venezuelan opposition allied with the United States triumphs in its attempt to overthrow the democratically elected government of Nicolás Maduro, the door will open to a new, brutally reactionary wave in the world.

The affinity of important sectors of the Venezuelan opposition with the Francoism and Pinochet is public, however much its image designers try to hide it. The two-time defeated presidential candidate by the MUD, Henrique Capriles, declared in July 2013 that "Pinochet was a Democrat in the service of the Chilean people." And Lilian Tintori, wife of Leopoldo López wrapped by the international right, justified "that Venezuelan opponents cheer Franco, it is normal: if he lived would support us like Rajoy."

Those who support this part of the Venezuelan (hegemonic) opposition unambiguously support both openly fascist forces and the interests of the United States in the region.

Without going any further, just last August 11 Donald Trump threatened to invade that nation militarily. "We have many options for Venezuela. And by the way, I will not rule out the military option.

We have many options for Venezuela. This is our neighbor. You know, we are all over the world and we have troops all over the world in places that are very, very far away. Venezuela is not far away and its people are suffering, and they are dying.

We have many options for Venezuela, including a military option if necessary, "he said.
And MUD, instead of confronting the explicit interventionist threat of the United States, not to mention Donald Trump, chose to denounce that "Venezuela has for years intervened militarily and politically for Cuba, not only affecting our sovereignty and independence, but also constituting one of The main causes of violence ". It could not be otherwise. His real bet is to a foreign war intervention.


According to Pilger, "the threat of a military invasion of Venezuela by Donald Trump is typical of US threats to the world in the past 70 years." And it's not even new. "The United States has already invaded Venezuela with subversive groups like the NED, which support a so-called 'opposition', which seeks to overthrow an elected government by force: a high crime under international law."

Interviewed also by Telesur about the bravado of the US president, linguist Noam Chomsky described Trump's statements as "shocking and dangerous." He added: "The best hope is that some of the generals around them, who presumably understand the consequences, manage to control it."

Trump's fears were preceded by the confessions of Mike Pompeo, head of the CIA. On June 20, at the Aspen Security Forum, the head of the agency said: "Every time you have such a large country, and with the economic capacity of a country like Venezuela, the United States has deep interests in ensuring that The country is as stable and democratic as possible. So we are working hard to do that ... we are very optimistic that there may be a transition in Venezuela ... I have just been in Mexico City and in Bogota, the ancestor week, talking about this precisely, trying to help them understand The things they could do to achieve a better result for their corner of the world and our corner of the world.

As the philosopher Slavoj Zizek recently recalled, the economic war that Venezuela suffers and that precedes recent threats of military invasion was designed and implemented in Washington. This was acknowledged in an interview with Fox News Lawrence Eagleburger, who was George W. Bush's secretary of state. "If at some point the economy starts to go badly," said the former official, "Chávez's popularity will begin to decline. These are the weapons we have against him, and that we should be using.

 That is, the economic tools to make the Venezuelan economy worse, so that the influence of Chavismo in the country and the region will go down ... All we can do to make the Venezuelan economy in a difficult situation It's well done; But we must do it in such a way that we do not enter into a direct confrontation against Venezuela, if we can avoid it. "

No matter how their intellectual allies pretend to present the Venezuelan opposition as modern fighters for freedom (as they did with the Nicaraguan counter or with the Taliban who fought in Afghanistan to the Soviet Union), that opposition, which admires Francisco Franco and Augusto Pinochet, represents, plain and simple, the interests of the United States in Venezuela.

John Pilger is right. If Venezuela falls, humanity falls.

P.S. To the memory of Jesus Aranda, exceptional journalist and magnificent companion. He always learned something from him.

Source: http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2017/08/22/opinion/012a2pol