Picture at top: French Magazine Le Parisien on the attack of German Boats on San Carlos de la Barra Fortress, Venezuela, 1903...

 

In 1666 the French pirate Jean David Nau El Olonés with a fleet of 8 ships and 650 men entered from the Gulf of Venezuela into to the mouth of Lake Maracaibo where the Castle of San Carlos was located armed with 16 guns and attacked the fort. After an exchange of artillery, the pirates captured the fort in less than three hours. In March of 1669, the town refugees took shelter in the fort during the sacking of Maracaibo by the English pirate Henry Morgan. Upon learning of the futility of escaping Lake Maracaibo by crossing the castle, Morgan tried to negotiate with the Spaniards by asking a ransom for hostages from the town. In response, Alonso de Espinosa, commanding officer of the castle, was given a large sum of gold and silver plus some cattle in payment, but Espinosa refused categorically to let them go. The next day, Morgan devised a trick to escape by simulate a ground attack on the site at night. The Spanish hurriedly abandoned the fort, while some soldiers remained in the castle attempting to block access back to the sea, without success. Morgan returned to Jamaica on May 14, 1669 under warnings from the English governor Thomas Modyford before claims of the misdeeds they committed were received in London. In 1823, the fort was attacked and taken by a Venezuelan squadron commanded by Admiral José Prudencio Padilla, in what was known as "The Forcing of the Barra de Maracaibo" which also allowed the Venezuelan ships to enter the lake and attack a Spanish fleet in the Battle of Lake Maracaibo.

In the nineteenth century Venezuela achieved independence and the fort continued to be maintained as part of the country's defences. It saw action in the Bombardment of Fort San Carlos when it was attacked by the Imperial German Navy during the Venezuelan crisis of 1902–03.

It also served as a prison, imprisoning such figures like included the writer Eduardo López Bustamante, who wrote poetry during his captivity.

 

Read more:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Carlos_de_la_Barra_Fortress

Trump losing interest in Venezuela, officials sayThe president has been frustrated about a foreign policy issue he “always thought of ... as low-hanging fruit” on which he “could get a win and tout it as a major foreign policy victory,” a former official said.
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You better not believe it. Trump is a trickster, saying one thing and doing another...

Elections and dialogue should be used to solve the crisis in Venezuela, Russia’s president has said, bringing up how opposition leader Juan Guaido proclaimed himself a president ‘before God,” but has yet to receive a response.

The long-term crisis in the South American country is very worrisome for Russia, as well as the repeated attempts to stir it up from abroad, Vladimir Putin said on Thursday at a joint press conference with Italy’s PM Giuseppe Conte.

Military intervention must be ruled out, but any political meddling bust be ruled out as well, Putin said, explaining that the standoff between the legitimate, elected President Nicolas Maduro and self-styled ‘interim-president’ Juan Guaido is damaging to the very concept of democracy.

The opposition leader Guaido went into a square, turned his eyes up and, addressing god, proclaimed himself a president. But god did not tell us how he reacted to this address, no signal was sent.

No “divine intervention” can fix that, Putin stressed, calling for Guaido to return to “our sinful earth” and to stick to well-trusted mundane procedures – “dialogue and elections.”

 

 

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/463404-putin-guaido-god-presidency/

 

 

 

https://www.voltairenet.org/article201100.html

This is the blueprint that is applied to China, Russia, Iran and a host of countries that do not lick the US arse. Despite the "corruption" as described by the Admiral Tidd, Venezuela managed to improve education amd health services for the poor while eliminating as far as possible capitalistic corruption of the elites — thus annoying the United Sates by trying to prove that socialism can improve the life of people...

 

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THE CHÁVEZ government managed to do what no other leader of Venezuela has done. Using the oil revenues that swelled during the early years of the 2000s, it expanded social programs to provide health care for millions of poor Venezuelans, dramatically increased access to education and attempted to include historically marginalized sectors into the national political process.

Additionally, Chávez's opposition to the U.S. and its neoliberal economic doctrines--openly expressed as opposition to capitalism--rightfully inspired millions of people around the world to reconsider socialism as a worthwhile project.

These are achievements worth celebrating. But they don't add up to socialism because Chávez never let real power spread to the grassroots of society. Indeed, any initiatives for popular power depended, to receive any funding or support, on loyalty to the government. This kind of clientelist relationship with grassroots campaigns has nothing to do with genuine socialism.

Once the boom in basic commodities ended, world oil prices plummeted, and the revenues used to expand social programs dried up, along with any leverage that the state had to hold Venezuela's private capitalists in check.

The response of the Maduro administration has been to crack down on opposition, both from the right wing that has always opposed the government, but also supporters of Chavismo that dissent from Maduro's direction for society.

This, too, must be completely rejected by revolutionaries. The fight for socialism should always stand for the expansion of democracy, not restrictions on it.

With Maduro, the bureaucratic layer that had already emerged under Chávez seems to have consolidated and strengthened its hold over state resources. Not only is it clear that there is massive corruption among "Bolivarian bureaucrats," but this layer has failed to challenge the Venezuelan capitalist class--something that Maduro has shown with his continual overtures and concessions to private capitalists, even as he cracks down on democracy.

Venezuela has remained a capitalist country, through and through, despite the social achievements of the last 18 years. What has failed is not socialism, but a system that has been capitalist in its economic and political domination by a minority over the majority.

To the extent that Chávez proposed a strategy for achieving socialism in the future by accepting compromises with private capitalist control and the political rule of a minority acting on behalf of the masses of people, that, too, has been proven lacking.

Relying on a minority, however well intentioned, to take over a capitalist state and reform the system into socialism has failed before. Socialism from above, in whatever form it takes, is not the successful shortcut we should keep trying.

To inspire a new generation of socialists, we need to be able to explain what happened in Venezuela--and to re-raise the banner of socialism from below. As Draper writes at the close of his The Two Souls of Socialism:

Since the beginning of society, there has been no end of theories "proving" that tyranny is inevitable and that freedom-in-democracy is impossible; there is no more convenient ideology for a ruling class and its intellectual flunkies. These are self-fulfilling predictions, since they remain true only as long as they are taken to be true. In the last analysis, the only way of proving them false is in the struggle itself. That struggle from below has never been stopped by the theories from above, and it has changed the world time and again. To choose any of the forms of Socialism-from-Above is to look back to the old world, to the "old crap." To choose the road of Socialism-from-Below is to affirm the beginning of a new world.

 

Read more:

https://socialistworker.org/2017/06/07/did-socialism-fail-in-venezuela

 

See also:

socialism has an image problem...

 

liberalism has a fundamental problem...

The Foreign Ministry expresses deep regret over the cancellation of the round of talks between the government of Venezuela and the opposition that was to take place in Barbados. Regardless of who initiated this decision, the main reason for the breakdown in the negotiating process is obviously Washington’s irresponsible policy regarding Venezuela and its legitimate authorities. The methods adopted by the United States to exert economic pressure, alongside other actions in stark violation of international law, are unacceptable. We firmly condemn the outright interference by the United States in the affairs of a sovereign state and Russia’s strategic partner.

It is highly regrettable that opposition politicians in Venezuela welcome aggressive unilateral action by a foreign government targeting the people of Venezuela. It seems that these politicians are ready to forgo the prospect of normalisation in the interests of their own ambition. We strongly believe that there is no alternative to dialogue between responsible political forces. Moving in any other direction would lead to chaos with unpredictable consequences.

We are alarmed by the irresponsible statements by US officials that the time for dialogue has passed and it is time to act. These power games and persistent attempts to escalate tension are a mere reflection of the United States’ aspiration to claim the role of a global “supreme arbitrator.” All reasonable politicians and responsible governments must combine their efforts to put an end to these practices.

The people of Venezuela must be given the chance to use their undeniable right to determine their future in keeping with the national Constitution and laws.

The international community must encourage these efforts by creating an enabling environment for finding peaceful solutions. Russia reaffirms its unwavering commitment to this policy.

 

 

Read more:

 

https://www.voltairenet.org/article207303.html

 

 

Read from top, especially comment above: 

how washington is doing it...

Leading English-language news organizations have provided extensive and dramatic coverage of anti-government protests in Venezuela, but mostly ignored large-scale rallies against US sanctions, which took place over the weekend.

Tens of thousands of Venezuelans flooded the streets of the country’s capital, Caracas, on Saturday to denounce the economic blockade and sanctions imposed by the US. Many were wrapped in national flags and sported red shirts, typically worn by the supporters of the government. The rallies were held under the slogan ‘No More Trump’.

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/466343-venezuela-anti-sanctions-rally/

 

 

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The head of US Southern Command said Tuesday the US Navy was ready to “do what needs to be done” if and when US President Donald Trump gives the order for them to move against Venezuela.

“I won’t speak to details of what we’re planning and what we’re doing, but we remain ready to implement policy decisions, and we remain on the balls of our feet,” Adm. Craig Faller told reporters in Rio de Janeiro on Tuesday. The annual UNITAS maritime exercises began off the Brazilian coast on Tuesday, in which the US, UK, Portugal, Japan and nine Latin American nations run naval drills.

“The United States Navy is the most powerful navy in the world,” Faller continued, according to AFP. “If a policy decision is made to deploy the navy, I’m convinced that we’ll be able to do what needs to be done.”

Faller said the two-week-long sea exercises would “send a message to [Venezuelan President Nicolás] Maduro and other partners that don’t share the same values … Naval exercises send a message to the world of what democracies that work together can do across a range of complex threats.”

Earlier this month, Trump instituted what amounts to a complete embargo of Venezuela, as Washington continues to try and force Maduro, Venezuela’s elected president, from power.

In January, Maduro’s legitimacy was challenged by Juan Guaido, a Washington-backed opposition politician who declared himself the country’s interim president and has mounted three failed coups d’etat against Maduro since then. The US has steadily increased its sanctions on Venezuela since then in a bid to make Venezuelans so miserable as to force Maduro from power in an effort to lower the trade barriers.

So far they’ve failed, and Venezuelans have rallied around their government amid the ensuring siege.

Earlier this week, Faller said SOUTHCOM officials were focused on preparing for “the day after” Maduro leaves office, criticizing countries such as Cuba, Russia and China for continuing to provide support to the Venezuelan government to offset US sanctions. The countries have provided essential food, medicine and trade since the US encirclement began, but US pressure is forcing some of them to step back somewhat, with China announcing over the weekend that US sanctions were forcing it to suspend oil purchases.

A Monday report by Axios revealed that Trump has raised the idea with his advisers of imposing a complete naval blockade of Venezuela’s 1,750-mile coast, only letting in approved shipments of goods.

"He literally just said we should get the ships out there and do a naval embargo,” an administration source told Axios; “prevent anything going in.”

"I'm assuming he's thinking of the Cuban missile crisis ... But Cuba is an island, and Venezuela is a massive coastline. And Cuba we knew what we were trying to prevent from getting in. But here, what are we talking about? It would need massive, massive amounts of resources, probably more than the US Navy can provide," the source said.

However, the Pentagon reportedly doesn’t take the idea seriously. Further, the move could be considered an act of war - one of the reasons that US President John F. Kennedy’s attempted blockade of Cuba in 1962 was so politically explosive.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov made it clear Tuesday that Moscow disapproved of the reported blockade proposal.

"We will certainly study the situation related to Washington's boosting of illegal, illegitimate sanctions pressure and attempts to impose a blockade,” Ryabkov said in a statement. “We warn Washington against incautious steps in this sphere.”

 

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/latam/201908201076596675-us-navy-on-balls-of-our...

 

A blockade is like a declaration of war.... Where is the fucking United Nations? I see... Navel gazing expedition to Grovelland...

 

 

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As Greg Grandin writes, Otto Reich, head of the administration’s Orwellian propaganda outfit known as the Office of Public Diplomacy, informed the public network that his office had contracted “a special consultant service [to listen] to all NPR programs” on Central America. Dependent on state funding, NPR promptly buckled under pressure, reassigning reporters viewed as “too easy on the Sandinistas,” and hiring conservative pundit Linda Chavez to provide “balance.”

Today, NPR needs no state coercion to toe Washington’s regime change line on Venezuela.

NPR published an exclusive interview on May 30 with Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó, in which the self-proclaimed “interim president” was described as “a fugitive in his own country” confronting “authoritarian President Nicolás Maduro.”

The article went on to state that Venezuela “is suffering from hyperinflation, power outages, and chronic shortages of food, medicine and fuel.” Strangely absent is any reference to illegal US sanctions, which have played an indisputable role in severely exacerbating the country’s crisis to the detriment of ordinary Venezuelans.

Additionally, the exclusion of Chavista voices is likewise endemic to NPR’s coverage of Venezuela, in gross violation of the outlet’s own ethics handbook.

An abused adjective

When it comes to covering Venezuela’s elected Maduro government, it appears that NPR’s favorite adjective is “authoritarian.”

The public news network has referred to President Nicolás Maduro and his administration as “authoritarian” and/or a “regime” no less than 26 times since December, with no explanation why the Venezuelan government merits an editorialized moniker that ideologically justifies US intervention.

Moreover, when the fact that Maduro was reelected last year is mentioned, it is generally accompanied by a vague reference to “fraud.”

Usually no effort is made to elaborate on the fraud allegations—which the opposition never presented substantive public evidence to support—and when additional context is provided, it generally amounts to a reference to NPR’s mendacious 2018 election reporting.

At the time, NPR’s Phillip Reeves (5/20/18) denied the legitimacy of the vote by claiming, “Nicolás Maduro controls most of the media, the electoral authorities.” He ignored the fact that most Venezuelan media is private and pro-opposition, while the National Electoral Council is headed by the same officials who oversaw the opposition’s 2015 landslide parliamentary victory.

Similarly, NPR’s Scott Neuman (5/21/18) wrote, “The opposition’s most popular leaders…were barred from running,” in reference to Leopoldo López and Henrique Capriles. The claim that these were the most popular potential opposition candidates is false: Datanalisis, the international corporate media’s most widely cited pollster, at the time had opposition presidential candidate Henri Falcon polling significantly above Capriles and López, at around 38%, in May 2018. By comparison, a Pew Research study conducted later in the year amid accelerating hyperinflation found that 33% of Venezuelans “trust their government,” roughly equivalent to the 31% of the electorate that voted for Maduro on May 20, 2018.

NPR suggests that López and Capriles were barred for extralegal political reasons, neglecting to mention that López was convicted of inciting violence during the 2014 protests aimed at ousting the government, while Capriles was previously indicted for allowing opposition supporters to lay siege to the Cuban Embassy in 2002, and was later barred from office by the comptroller general over alleged corruption, for which he is also being investigated by the opposition.

Moreover, NPR and other mainstream outlets do not regularly refer to Brazil’s 2018 presidential election as “fraud-marred,” despite the country’s most popular politician, Lula da Silva, having been jailed and banned from running in a baseless, politically motivated court case, as Glenn Greenwald has exposed. Lula did not participate in violent foreign-backed coup attempts, unlike López and Capriles, both of whom were active in the 2002 coup against Chavez.

This myth of electoral fraud embraced by NPR was “made in USA,” when the Trump administration threw its weight behind an opposition boycott, preemptively refusing to recognize the vote and threatening to sanction the independent opposition candidate. But no amount of US interference invalidates an election in the view of Western journalists, as the classic example of Nicaragua’s 1990 election of Violeta Chamorro illustrates. In 2018—as in Venezuela’s 2013 presidential election, which was recognized by every government in the world except the Obama administration—it would seem that a vote is only “free and fair” when Washington’s candidate is elected.

This systematic bias ridicules NPR’s professed commitment to “stick to facts and to language that is clear, compelling and neutral,” while the omissions and blatant factual distortions compromise its accuracy and completeness.

Lying by omission: US sanctions

NPR’s ethics handbook states:

Errors of omission and partial truths can inflict great damage on our credibility, and stories delivered without the context to fully understand them are incomplete.

While NPR has made scattered but repeated reference to US economic sanctions—predominately in the wake of the Trump administration’s January 28 oil embargo—nowhere does NPR bring up the fact that the unilateral measures are illegal under both US and international law, while only in a few cases does the public encounter a passing acknowledgement of the negative humanitarian toll. In the vast majority of stories, NPR rarely dedicates more than one line to US economic sanctions, which are routinely presented as “aimed squarely at [the] Venezuelan government” (8/25/17), ignoring the repercussions for ordinary Venezuelans. In no case does NPR present the public with perspectives opposing US sanctions as a matter of principle.

In a report on the nationwide March blackouts, NPR’s Sasha Ingber (3/8/19) manages to avoid naming sanctions as one of the key factors behind the outages, relegating them to an insignificant tertiary element “likely to increase the country’s economic plight,” but in no way responsible for Venezuela’s dramatically worsening crisis since Trump imposed direct economic sanctions in August 2017. In fact, according to economist Francisco Rodríguez of Torino Capital, sanctions not only prevented Venezuela from paying foreign companies for vital maintenance work on its electrical grid, but also barred it from importing sufficient diesel fuel needed to power thermoelectric generators.

The pattern is repeated in NPR’s coverage of Venezuela’s economic crisis through the lens of out-migration (6/21/19, 6/7/19), school truancy (6/29/19) or alleged “intimidation” of private charities (6/11/19). Here sanctions—which are set to cause Venezuela’s economy to contract by 37% this year—are either completely ignored, or their devastating social impact is  presented as a dubious “claim” by Caracas officials.

Like virtually every other mainstream international outlet (FAIR.org, 6/26/19), NPR has yet to cite—let alone actually report on—a recent study by acclaimed economists Mark Weisbrot and Jeffrey Sachs, which found US sanctions on Venezuela to constitute a form of “collective punishment” responsible for as many as 40,000 deaths through 2018. This omission is not surprising, given that NPR had previously joined major corporate outlets in systematically censoring the impact of Trump’s August 2017 financial sanctions, which cost the country at least $6 billion in lost oil revenue over the subsequent twelve months.

Exhibit A of this erasure is an article headlined “Venezuela’s Health System Ready to Collapse Amid Economic Crisis” (NPR, 2/1/19), in which Samantha Raphelson treats sanctions as a conspiracy theory on which “Maduro blames the country’s growing crisis,” despite the fact that US financial blacklisting, as well as plummeting revenue due to sanctions, hampered Caracas’ ability to import vital medicine and medical  equipment. At this point, NPR can easily cite the US government itself as a source for the claim that Washington is exacerbating the Venezuelan crisis, with the State Department publishing (and subsequently hiding) a fact sheet that boasted that “key outcomes” of US efforts included the freezing of “roughly $3.2 billion of Venezuela’s overseas” assets, and a 36% reduction in Venezuelan oil production in February/March 2019 (Venezuelanalysis, 5/6/19).

 

In an assessment of NPR’s Venezuela coverage (4/9/19), the network’s public editor, Juliette Rocheleau, recognizes an “imbalance” in which “opposition voices have outnumbered those of Maduro supporters in NPR‘s reporting.” The slant is fairly overwhelming, since Rocheleau can only name four occasions that NPR interviewed government supporters.

The public editor justifies NPR’s pro-opposition “imbalance’” on the grounds of journalists’ safety, quoting senior international editor Will Dobson:

“We want to plunge the depths of the pro-Maduro supporters.” But Dobson said NPR‘s responsibility to keep its journalists and sources safe is the top priority, and reporting safely from Venezuela is extremely difficult: Venezuela ranks 143 out of 180 countries in press freedom, with journalists risking violence at the hands of the state and some of its supporters.

This is a self-serving canard. Various independent outlets such as Venezuelanalysis (where I’m an editor), the Real News and Grayzone—all with far fewer resources than NPR—have frequently interviewed Chavistas from various political walks of life. The notion that Chavista “violence” keeps Western reporters at bay is rather fantastical, given that it’s opposition demonstrations, not pro-government ones, that have been the site of mob lynchings and attacks on journalists, including those from pro-opposition private outlets. Even if we take at face value NPR’s safety concerns, this should not stop the network from interviewing experts opposed to US regime change in Venezuela, such as Noam Chomsky, Mark Weisbrot, Jeffrey Sachs, Alfred De Zayas and Miguel Tinker Salas, whose voices are conspicuously absent, despite making regular appearances in independent progressive media.

Perhaps a more realistic explanation for NPR’s admitted “imbalance” is professional class bias. It seems that Western journalists bear an instinctual aversion to poor black and brown people organizing to defy the US Empire. Their natural sympathies appear to lie with lighter-skinned (preferably English-speaking) professionals or members of the elite who make them feel more comfortable. Despite their “progressive” reputation, NPR journalists are little different than their mainstream corporate counterparts when it comes to repeating Washington and the opposition’s anti-Chavista propaganda, in flagrant breach of their own ethics.

Read all:

https://therealnews.com/columns/npr-shreds-ethics-handbook-to-normalize-...

 

 

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In August 2018, the international press reported on a massive exodus of Venezuelans fleeing the famine and chavist dictatorship of Nicolás Maduro. There were 18,000 to cross the border each day. At the time, the UN predicted that there would be 5.3 million Venezuelan migrants and refugees throughout Latin America by the end of 2019. There was a major crisis.

Alas! These figures were pure propaganda: the Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees has just published its official statistics as at December 31, 2018. 

- 57% of the world’s refugees came from Syria (6.7 million), Afghanistan (2.7 million) and South Sudan (2.3 million). 

- Venezuelan refugees represented only 341,800 people (many of whom have since returned to their country).

The campaign of media disinformation, relayed in all the allied states of the Pentagon, was initiated in preparation for the destabilization operation targetting the Venezuelan State that began in December 2018. It was intended to convince the nationals that they no longer had a future at home and and the people abroad that President Maduro was illegitimate.

This is a clear application of the theory of "migrations as weapons of war" [1].

Translation 

Roger Lagassé

 

Read more:

https://www.voltairenet.org/article207536.html