Is Venezuela About to Face Another Regime Change Operation?

Note to readers: I penned this piece a few days ago before departing for a week’s holiday with my wife, her parents and friends of theirs in a small, remote fishing village south of Acapulco. However, the hotel we’re staying in is pretty rustic and does not have wi-fi, which means that: a) I should be able to properly disconnect from my work, and b) there will be no way of updating the article in the days before it goes live. In the interim, new developments may have occurred. I invite well-informed readers on the region to fill in any gaps. I also wish you all a very Happy New Year. Let’s hope (against hope) that it’s not as bad as 2024. 

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Will Trump take a more pragmatic approach to US relations with Caracas this time round? Or will he double down on an (until-now) failed strategy of sanctions escalation and attempted regime change?

“La madre de todas las investiduras!” (The mother of all investitures!)

That is how El País is describing the signing in of Nicolás Maduro for another presidential term on January 10, just 10 days before Donald J. Trump’s investiture.

As some are saying, there is a tense calm in the air in Venezuela. Just before Christmas, Venezuela’s de facto opposition leader (and long-time CIA stooge), María Corina Machado, published a curious audio message on X/Twitter. In it, she called on all Venezuelan families, in particular “relatives of Venezuelan soldiers and police officers”, to do their bit to ensure that Nicolás Maduro does not serve another presidential term.

In a hushed, insistent voice, Machado exhorted the mothers, sisters, wives and daughters of Venezuela’s military and police officers to speak to their sons, brothers, husbands and fathers and tell them to “serve the nation with loyalty and courage,” and help put an end to the Bolivarian revolution:

“[I ask] you to tell him that he is not alone and that there is an entire country that needs him today, a country that has given everything for a change towards the future of union and prosperity that we, as a people, deserve…

She then gave this message to Venezuela’s police and security forces:

We are one step… away from completing this long and arduous road that takes us back home, where we will finally hug each other again. The only wall that separates us from that longed-for end is that you, a solder, and you, a policeman, lose all fear of doing the right thing — that which you, in the bottom of your heart, know you must do.”

Venezuela’s (CIA-Sponsored) Iron Lady

Machado is the de facto leader of Venezuela’s main opposition coalition, the Democratic Unitary Platform (or PUD, for its Spanish initials), which claims to have won July’s elections. Unlike the PUD’s official candidate, Edmundo González Urritia, she is still in Venezuela, albeit in hiding. Often referred to by her supporters as “Venezuela’s Iron Lady”, she is also the CIA’s lady in Caracas. Her volunteer civil association, Sumate, founded in 2002, is directly funded and supported by the CIA, through the US’ soft-power arm, the National Endowment for Democracy.

As is common knowledge, González Urritia, whom the US government frecognised as Venezuela’s president elect in November, is a mere place-holder for Machado. As Alan Macleod of Mint Press News notes, Machado was barred from standing for election due to corruption charges and because, for years, she has toured the world, attempting to organize a US-led invasion of Venezuela:

In 2018, she also tried to convince Benjamin Netanyahu to greenlight an Israeli invasion of her country.

She supported the 2002 coup against Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chavez, and led waves of terroristic violence across Venezuela, that targeted schools, hospitals, universities, public housing, and any other symbol of the collectivist society the chavistas are trying to build. The violence killed huge numbers of people and done billions of dollars of damage to the country.

In any other country, she would have spent the rest of her life in prison, if not have been executed. But in Venezuela, her primary punishment is that she can’t hold office for a certain time period.

It is fairly clear what a González-Machado ticket will mean for Venezuela: a government in thrall to the US and Israel and at the service of Western banks and corporations. Like Milei’s government in Argentina, it will:

• Privatise state-owned companies and assets, including the jewel of the crown, Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA), and its vast oil fields;
• Rapidly cool relations with the US’ main strategic rivals, China and Russia;
• Lend its full support to Israel’s genocide in Gaza and wider territorial aspirations in the Middle East, as well as the US’ strategic interests in Latin America. Like Milei, González and Machado may even ask to join NATO as a global partner while no doubt supporting the military alliance’s operations in Ukraine.

Winning the Hearts and Minds of Venezuela’s Soldiers

It’s not hard to see why Machado is trying to win the hearts and minds of Venezuela’s security forces. Without substantial support from the rank and file of Venezuela’s police and military, her chances of toppling the Maduro government are wafer thin. And securing that support is not going to be easy: Maduro has been able to command the support of Venezuela’s armed forces throughout the vicissitudes of his 11 year-presidency, including the guarimbas (pitched street battles) of 2014 and 2017 and the Juan Guaidó-led coup attempt in 2019.

That trend looks likely to continue. In fact, one opposition figure, Andres Velasquez, recently lashed out at Venezuela’s military for continuing to stand by Maduro. Venezuela’s Minister of Defence, Vladimir Padrino López, has reiterated his loyalty to the government in recent months, stating before Christmas that the army will accompany Nicolás Maduro on January 10 in the inauguration for the next presidential term.

“We soldiers,” he said, “are aware of the great responsibility that means taking care of the decrees of popular sovereignty”.

In the meantime, González Urritia insists he will be back in Venezuela on January 10 to take the reins of power. After fleeing to Spain on a Spanish Air Force Jet in early September, it is unclear how he will pull this off. Since arriving in Europe, he has been feted by Spain’s conservative opposition parties. Both the US government and the European Parliament have recognised him as Venezuela’s true “president elect.” A week before Christmas, the European Parliament awarded González Urrutia and Machado with the Sakharov Prize 2024 for Freedom of Thought 2024.

The European Commission is hedging it bets, not recognising Maduro or González Urritia. But it has announced a fresh round of sanctions against senior Venezuelan politicians due to the country’s lack of “democratic transition.” Having tried, so far unsuccessfully, to overturn election results in Georgia, a country that is not even an EU member, and having successfully annulled elections in EU member state Romania because the wrong man won the first round, the EU is still trying to give lessons to the world’s uncivilised jungle on democracy.

As NC reader Vao recently commented, the EU’s dismantling of democracy in Europe long predates its recent election shenanigans in Romania and Germany, not to mention its attempts to create the world’s most powerful digital censorship regime. Brussels’ rejection of the results of consultative referenda in France, the Netherlands and Ireland on the EU Treaty of Lisbon, over a decade ago, should have served as ample warning that “European politicians abhor democracy — rule by the people… [P]oliticians really do not even want to hear an opinion that differs from what they have prejudged to be the ‘right way'”.

Back to Venezuela: it is clear that it is not going to be easy for González Urritia to get back into the country so that he can claim the “crown” that the US government, the European Parliament and other foreign governments have awarded him. The election results from July are still  disputed, even though Venezuela’s electoral authority gave the victory to Maduro. The Supreme Court has also supported Maduro’s claims while ruling that voting tallies published online by opposition parties showing Maduro lost by a landslide were forged.

Yet the Maduro government has still failed to publish the real voting tallies, perhaps because the data was corrupted by alleged cyberattacks against the electoral system during voting. It is also true that the PUD coalition has failed to present conclusive evidence that it won over 70% of the votes, as it claims.

“An Executioner… for Big International Capital” Offers to Help

While it is unclear exactly how Edmundo González will get back to Venezuela in time for January 10th, one thing that is clear is that he will be able to count on the help and support of Western governments and intelligence agencies. Former Spanish Prime Minister Felipe González (1982-96), a man who betrayed the left as emphatically as Tony Blair and Bill Clinton and whose friends include many of Latin America’s billionaire class, has offered to accompany González Urritia, “an old friend”, on his return to Venezuela.

It should hardly come as a surprise that Felipe González is willing to help out in this way. For over four decades, he has promoted the neoliberal agenda in both Spain and Latin America. There is even speculation that he was a CIA asset. In 1982, a secret report by the CIA described the then-presidential candidate González as a “moderate” who had distanced himself from the “leftist policies” he had proclaimed in the past.

In short, González posed no risk to US interests in Spain or those of its companies. That’s not all. In the words of James Petras, the US sociologist and expert on US imperialism in Latin America and the Middle East, González “signed the Moncloa Pact, in which all the crimes of Francoism were buried”, unleashed privatisations in Spain and awarded hugely favourable conditions to the big banks. On leaving office, González  “became an advisor to large companies and banks in Spain and internationally. Truly an executioner… for big international capital.”

In an interview with a Uruguayan radio station in 2013, Petras descibed Felipe González as not just a reactionary, but one of the most corrupt and immoral figures in the entire history of European social democratic politics.” At the time, González was advising Henrique Capriles, the former Venezuelan opposition candidate and scion of one of Venezuela’s wealthiest and most influential families, in the elections of that year:

“Felipe González worked with Álvaro Uribe, the assassin, narco-president of Colombia. Felipe González supported the pro-death squad groups in Central America. When I was in Spain and Greece, I could see how the right-wing parties in El Salvador and Guatemala welcomed the support of Felipe González… Felipe González is not for sale, he is for rent. Any right-wing ruler or leader can hire him for a fee. At least $300,000 are needed to secure Felipe González’s ‘advice’.”

It would seem that Venezuela’s PUD coalition has lined González’s pockets sufficiently to secure his advisory services, both in Spain and in Venezuela. Spain’s Congress and Senate have already recognised González Urrutia as Venezuela’s legitimate president elect. In recent days, Felipe González has urged the Pedro Sánchez government to do the same, so far to no apparent avail. On the contrary, just before Christmas the Sánchez government appointed Alvaro Albacete as Spain’s new ambassador to the Caribbean nation.

During his first meeting with Albacete, Venezuela’s foreign minister, Yvan Gil, expressed the Maduro government’s willingness to expand economic cooperation between the two countries. In the past year, Spanish imports of Venezuelan oil have surged by 136%, largely due to the temporary relaxation of US sanctions on Venezuela’s energy sector as well as the ongoing sanctions on Russian oil. Venezuela now accounts for roughly 5% of all Spanish oil imports.

What to Expect from Trump?

At first blush, it might seem that a new Trump administration is likely to raise the pressure on Venezuela, much as it has threatened to do against Mexico and Panama. Trump himself is apparently facing pressure from oil execs to maintain Biden’s policy of granting concessions to Maduro to secure oil imports from Venezuela. However, members of Trump’s incoming cabinet, including Marco Rubio, who will soon be secretary of state, have pushed for a harder line toward Venezuela, including reinstating the sanctions that Biden paused.

Trump has suggested his new government will stop buying Venezuelan oil altogether, just as his first government did, arguing, in classic Trump fashion, that the US has more oil than any other country on the planet:

We are going to use it. We don’t have to buy energy from Venezuela when we have 50 times more than them. It’s crazy what we’re doing.

The reality, of course, is that Venezuela has more proven oil reserves than anyone, including the US, which places ninth. Another problem for Trump is that he already bet the house on economic sanctions, Juan Guaidó and regime change last time round, and it was a humiliating disaster, culminating, in 2023, in Guaidó’s expulsion from Colombia and his return to Florida on a US government-paid flight. At Miami airport, he was met by no one but a few journalists.

After all the billions of dollars spent on project Guaidó and all the political capital expended to pressure dozens of countries to recognise him as Venezuela’s legitimate leader, Guaidó had finally outlived his usefulness. Ambassadors had been appointed in his name, assets, including Venezuela’s gold at the Bank of England, had been seized (stolen), and military interventions requested, with absolutely nothing to show for it. And this is how it all ended, with a lone Guaidó walking off into the Floridan sunshine:

El opositor venezolano Juan Guaidó fue expulsado este lunes de Colombia, porque "se encontraba en Bogotá de manera irregular", informó el ministerio colombiano de Relaciones Exteriores.
Así llegó anoche a Miami, completamente solo… pic.twitter.com/AMmYjDlnYH

— epigmenio ibarra (@epigmenioibarra) April 25, 2023

As for Trump’s escalation of sanctions, they may have made the Venezuelan economy scream, but they also backfired in their own way, sparking a massive wave of migration, with hundreds of thousands heading to the US. It was, in the opinion of John Bolton, Trump’s then-National Security Advisor, a price worth paying. Bolton is also on the record admitting that one of Washington’s driving goals behind the 2019 attempted coup was to get its hands on Venezuelan oil.

Ahead of Venezuela's election, John Bolton admitted to the Washington Post that he knew that the Trump admin's crippling sanctions and coup attempt against Venezuela would destroy its economy and force millions to flee:

“There was no doubt the sanctions, along with the general… pic.twitter.com/woW7cVYlf3

— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) July 29, 2024

Could things be different this time around?

This is a question many are asking. The Maduro government certainly appears to harbour hopes that relations could be improved. To that end, over the past month it has released hundreds of the roughly 1,800 people it took prisoner during the post-election wave of riots, arson and vandalism.

Days after Trump’s election victory, Michael Shifter, a renowned expert who chaired the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington, D.C.-based hemispheric think tank, told BBC Mundo that he doesn’t rule out the possibility of Trump executing a U-turn on Venezuela, much as he did on North Korea during his first term. Perhaps Trump “will try to accommodate the Maduro regime and even seek an agreement on the migration issue, which does matter to him,” said Shifter (machine translated):

Since this interview was published, however, the US has finally pulled off its regime change operation in Syria after eleven years of proxy war. And that, together with the rapid decline of the Communist government in Cuba, will have emboldened many of the Neocons in Washington, leading some to wonder whether Maduro will be next. This kind of thinking is exemplified by a recent Anne Applebaum piece in The Atlantic:

[T]he end of the Assad regime creates something new, and not only in Syria. There is nothing worse than hopelessness, nothing more soul-destroying than pessimism, grief, and despair. The fall of a Russian- and Iranian-backed regime offers, suddenly, the possibility of change. The future might be different. And that possibility will inspire hope all around the world.

In an article for the National Interest, Leo Fleischman, co-founder of the Palm Beach Center for Democracy & Policy Research, argues that “the Maduro regime will not collapse because of electoral processes” but needs to be pushed out with force:

It is a Cuban-type regime designed to perpetuate itself indefinitely. Cutting its source of support (which is no longer oil but drugs), taking advantage of its weaknesses, and organizing an armed opposition look like the only cards left in the hands of those who wish to see Venezuelan democracy restored.

More Mercenaries for Hire?

Former Blackwater founder and CEO Erik Prince has spent the past few months spearheading a go-fund me site for overthrowing Maduro called” Ya Casi Venezuela” (Almost There, Venezuela). Venezuela, you voted on July 28 for freedom,” he said in a video to mark the website’s launch in September. “Now, the time has come to vote with dollars. It’s not clear how the money is being spent, but given Prince’s traditional line of business, it will presumably entail hiring mercenaries. Lest we forget, Prince has (or at least had) the ear of President Trump.

Again, this has been done before, most recently (allegedly) in October, when the Venezuelan authorities arrested 19 mercenaries with purported ties to the US and Spain. Venezuela’s Chavista government has survived numerous assassination plots, a 2002 coup d’état against President Hugo Chávez, the attempted colour revolution of 2007, Operation Jericho in February 2015, the guarimbas (street battles) of 2014 and 2017, and the attempted coup of 2019.

It is still too early to tell whether a second Trump administration will mean more of the same policies of confrontation in Venezuela, though the tone set so far offers little hope of change. In November, the US House of Representatives’ passage in November of the bipartisan Banning Operations and Leases with Illegitimate Venezuelan Authoritarian Regime (BOLIVAR) Act suggests that Washington seeks to further strangle Venezuela’s economy — until the country a government it can approve of.

The bill seeks to complement existing sanctions regime by “prohibiting the US government from contracting with any person that has business operations with the illegitimate government of Nicolas Maduro, as well as any successor government of Venezuela not recognized as legitimate by the United States.” It also serves as a reminder that it there’s one thing the US government is still fairly proficient at, it is coming up with catchy (or in this case, catchy and offensive) acronyms for its legislation.

“We must maintain existing sanctions against the regime and seek to expand sanctions to minimize Maduro’s resources to abuse the freedoms and prosperity of the Venezuelan people,” said Mike Waltz, one of the bill’s co-sponsors who will soon be serving as Trump’s national security advisor. “This legislation sends a clear and powerful message to Maduro, as well as other dictators around the world, that there will be no appeasement, there will be no tolerance, there will be no reward for their rogue, illegal actions.”

In other words, plus ca change… Of course, this has nothing to do with restoring democracy in Venezuela; it is about restoring US domination over a country that boasts a dazzling array of mineral resources; has close ties to the US’ most important strategic rivals, China and Russia; and has, for decades, managed to withstand every single regime-change and assassination attempt by Washington.

It remains to be seen what will happen on January 10 if Edmundo González actually makes it to Venezuela and tries to claim the presidency, as he says he intends to. Will there be another explosion of violence, as has happened so many times before? Will there be snipers on rooftops shooting at protesters, as occurred in the attempted coup against Chavez in 2002, as well as in Ukraine, Syria, Lebanon…? Will foreign mercenaries pour into the country to sow chaos? Will the military stay loyal to the Chavista government, as it has done for the past 25 years?

Will tensions continue to escalate between Venezuela and neighbouring Guyana, following the Venezuelan military’s completion of construction of a bridge connecting mainland Venezuela with a military base on a river island in the disputed region of Essequibo? The US Southern Command is, by its own admission, “helping the [Guyanese Defence Forces] strengthen its technological capabilities, as well as directly supporting strategic planning, policy development, and coordination of military and security cooperation to strengthen the interoperability of its services in the face of new threats.”

How will Brazil, Mexico and Colombia, three key nations that in recent years have helped the Maduro government withstand the US-led siege against it, respond if violence explodes once again in Venezuela? Brazil’s embattled president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, already blocked Venezuela’s application for BRICS+ membership in late October, further exacerbating relations between the two countries. By contrast, the governments of Mexico and Colombia have both announced plans to send representatives to Maduro’s inauguration.

Dozens of other countries, including China, Russia, Qatar, Bolivia, Vietnam, Turkey and Indonesia, have in recent months recognised Maduro as the legitimate president of Venezuela. Many others, including the EU and the UK, which is still holding on to Venezuela’s gold, are still on the fence, refusing to recognise either Maduro or Gonzalez. But they do not include the US, the world’s regime change specialist.