Pattern of Pushing Overthrow of Venezuelan Governments
E
|
va Winifred Golinger on Venezuela’s veteran public official, 46th
President, Nicolás Maduro Moros
Eva Winifred Golinger prefaces these
2017 statements by saying that she knows Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro well,
which is more than any U.S. public official can state honestly. This is some of
what she had to say about Venezuela-U.S. relations in a 2017 interview.
President Nicolas Maduro “never aspired to be president. It’s not
something he dreamed of or worked for his whole life.” In his position, “he’s
become this international pariah in the Western world and he’s striving for
legitimacy, not just amongst his own people; but also internationally. And
that, unfortunately, starts with the United States.” Since 2016, they have made
“all kinds of overtures to the Trump Administration… — lobbying efforts; and
they even gave over a half a billion dollars to Trump’s inauguration fund.
… [I]t’s amazing the efforts people undergo to try to get on the good side of a government that’s clearly hostile as the U.S. has been to Venezuela.”
E
|
va Winifred Golinger on Venezuelan Elections
In “every election the opposition
has lost against the Bolivarian Revolution or the Chavez movement and now the Maduro
government,” the opposition “has cried fraud. It didn’t matter how bulletproof
the system was.
Now saying fraud and it may in
fact be fraud, it just seems like such a loss on the government side. They
should have accepted whatever numbers they had, and said, ‘Look, in the midst
of all this violence and this economic crisis, we were still able to garner
around 6.6 million votes.’ That should be a showing of force.”
However, concerning the opposition
in Venezuela, if the violent protests that involved the burning of buildings, burning
buses, burning people, often innocent people, had occurred in Washington D.C.
or on the streets of New York City, they “would not have lasted more than an
hour.” This is not to justify what was happening in Venezuela, Golinger said,
but rather “to show a more accurate picture of what’s going on.”
Violence has occurred “on both sides and overall and the opposition
leadership — the anti-government leadership in Venezuela (with which U.S.
leadership has joined forces) — have been reluctant to come out and fully
condemn the violent protests. In fact, they’ve been encouraging them.”
They have seen these protests as “sort of this way to heat up the streets to pressure the government …; that is, to force Maduro to resign, force regime change….”
E
|
va Winifred Golinger on U.S.- Venezuela relations
“… [T]he United States funds and
supports some of the worst elements of the opposition in Venezuela; (this) is a
fact. There is a long history of Washington meddling in the affairs of
Venezuela.”
There’s been an “ongoing escalation coming out of the United States
government against the Venezuelan government since Hugo Chavez was in power.
“From the time Chavez first was
elected in 1998 and those initial years when he didn’t comply with what the
U.S. was looking for … having always had in Venezuela a client state; that’s
when the U.S. backed a coup against Chavez in 2002.”
Over the years the Venezuelan government “has sort of dug in deeper
with their ideological model leaning more towards this anti-imperialist
alliance internationally. They’ve opened more to countries like Russia and
China and Iran as their trade partners” …; overall taking an “adversarial
position” toward the United States.
U.S. President Barack Obama during his tenure in office “declared
Venezuela an unusual and extraordinary threat to the United States and put the
first sort of sanctions on Venezuela officially.”
Those sanctions “were renewed” in
2017 before President Donald “Trump really had a full understanding of what was
taking place. So it’s really just been an ongoing escalation.”
There has been a definite escalation of aggression under President Trump
“because the people … who are pushing this particular escalation, right now—the
more reactionary sectors of the Republican Party … —have (U.S. President
Donald) Trump’s ear.” And this more reactionary sector has “been looking for a
way to push regime change in Venezuela.
Rising tensions between the two nations “has nothing to do with a change in policy.” It is regime change that has always been “a sort of (U.S.) state policy towards Venezuela since the Chavez government.”
But Venezuela is one of the principal suppliers of oil to the United States and the relationship between the two nations is “a commercial relationship.” Though a lot of rhetoric goes back and forth, the nations “are interdependent.”
E
|
va Winifred Golinger is a
Venezuelan-American lawyer practicing in New York and specializing in
immigration and international law. She is a writer and journalist; and since the
summer of 2017, she has been a host on RT’s Spanish language television network. She has
also been editor of the Correo del Orinoco International, a newspaper financed
by the Venezuelan government; and a writer with Venezuelanalysis.com.
Golinger was
born at Langley Airforce Base (Northern Virginia, USA) and is a graduate of Sarah
Lawrence College and City University of New York School of Law (Juris Doctorate
or JD, international human rights law.
Several of her books—published in multiple languages by different
publishers in several countries— focus on
“Hugo Chavez’s relationship with the United States, based on research using the U.S. Freedom of Information Act on what she describes as links between US government agencies and Venezuelan organizations, particularly in relation to the 2002 Venezuelan coup d’état attempt.”
Major works by Eva Winifred Golinger
- Fact Not Fiction - US Aggression Against Venezuela (February 2015), CounterPunch
- The Same Old Dirty Tactics - Venezuela: a Coup in Real Time (January 2015), CounterPunch
- La Agresión Permanente: USAID, NED y CIA, Caracas: Ministerio del Poder Poder Popular para la Comunicación y la Información, (in Spanish) (with Jean-Guy Allard), 2009
- La Telaraña Imperial: Enciclopedia de Injerencia y Subversión (Empire's Web: Encyclopedia of Interventionism and Subversion), Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, (in Spanish) 2008
- Bush Versus Chávez: Washington's War on Venezuela, Monthly Review Press, 2008
- Bush Vs. Chavez: Washington's War on Venezuela, Aakar Books, 2008
- The Chavez Code: Cracking US Intervention in Venezuela, Pluto Press, 2006
Sources
News
RT “Maduro orders ‘total revision’ of Venezuela-US diplomatic ties
after Pence calls for regime change” January 23, 2019
Vice President Mike
Pence
✔
@VP
.@POTUS & the US
stand w/ the Venezuelan people as they seek to regain their liberty from
dictator Nicolás Maduro. For the sake of our vital interests & the sake of
the Venezuelan people, we will not stand by as Venezuela crumbles. Read my
op-ed in @WSJ: https://www.wsj.com/articles/venezuela-america-stands-with-you-11548202850
…
10.8K 8:18 PM - Jan
22, 2019
https://www.rt.com/news/449458-venezuela-maduro-us-relations-pence/
The Intercept “The Battle for Venezuela and Its Oil,” Interview by Jeremy
Scahill with Eva Golinger August 12 2017, https://theintercept.com/2017/08/12/the-battle-for-venezuela-and-its-oil/
Wikipedia
Eva Winifred Golinger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eva_Golinger
Hugo Rafael Chávez (July 28, 1954
–March 5, 2013) was a Venezuelan politician and 45th President of Venezuela (1999-2013).
From 1997 until 2007, when it merged with several other parties to form the
United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV, Chávez was leader of the Fifth
Republic Movement political party. He led the PSUV until 2012. “Chávez
described his policies as anti-imperialist, being a prominent adversary of the
United States’ foreign policy as well as a vocal critic of U.S.-supported
neoliberalism and laissez-faire capitalism.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Ch%C3%A1vez
Nicolás Maduro Moros is a
Venezuelan politician and 46th President of Venezuela (2013-); from 2006 to
2013, he was Minister of Foreign Affairs; and from 2012 to 2013 Vice President of Venezuela,
serving under President Hugo Chávez. After the 2017 Venezuelan Constituent
Assembly election, the United States imposed sanctions on President Maduro, “freezing
his U.S. assets,” barring him from the United States, and erroneously labeling
Maduro as one of U.S. leaders’ favorite slanders, second to “terrorist,” “dictator.”
Western nations and many of the Americas followed the U.S. lead, “although
allies as well as China, Cuba, Iran and Russia offered support and denounced
the interference in Venezuela’s domestic affairs.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicol%C3%A1s_Maduro
Insight Beyond Today’s News, CLB - © All Rights
Reserved
