Venezuela: Regime change on the agenda?

[Judi Lynn]

Venezuela: Regime change on the agenda?

Apr Friday 8th 2016
posted by Morning Star

The Venezuelan right and the US president are ratcheting up the pressure on President Maduro. Solidarity is essential, writes TONY BURKE

VENEZUELA’S right-wing opposition last month launched a new campaign to remove President Nicolas Maduro from power, calling for his immediate resignation.

The last campaign to oust the elected constitutional president in 2014 led to a wave of violence.

“We call on the entire Venezuelan people in order to force Maduro to resign as the president of the country,” the executive secretary of the Democratic Unity Roundtable coalition Jesus Torrealba told reporters. Torrealba also called on Venezuelans to take to the streets to demand Maduro’s resignation.

Responding to the right wing, the Socialist Party’s Diosdado Cabello, who is former head of the National Assembly, said: “They want to organise street rallies to generate violence and bring about a coup, supported by the US.”

His latter point is given credence by the fact that, just days before the Venezuelan right confirmed its campaign to oust Maduro, President Barack Obama renewed an executive order that declared Venezuela “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”

The order allows the US government to impose sanctions on Venezuela. Its renewal was announced by the president in a letter to congressional leaders, which claimed that alleged conditions that had first prompted the order had “not improved.”

When the executive order was first issued by Obama in March 2015, leaders from throughout the region condemned the decree and massive mobilisations took place in Venezuela. Obama eventually responded to this by seemingly admitting that Venezuela “does not pose a threat” to the United States in an interview with the EFE press agency, but his actions this week would suggest that the US is still strongly backing “regime change” in Venezuela.

The nations of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States and the Union of South American Nations have again strongly criticised Obama’s move to renew the executive order.

It is true that Venezuela faces many problems, not least in terms of its economic difficulties. These are being exacerbated both by a conscious economic war — with echoes of the situation in Chile prior to the 1973 coup that brought General Pinochet to power — and the plunge in world oil prices. But the right’s programme of vicious neoliberalism — illustrated by its proposals for the mass sell-off of housing — will only make these worse, while reversing the gains in reduced poverty and inequality, plus increased labour rights, in recent years.

Throughout the labour and trade union movement, there is a collective memory of the awful developments that followed the overthrow of both Salvador Allende in Chile in the 1970s and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in the 1980s.

More:
http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-4cfd-Venezuela-Regime-change-on-the-agenda#.VwdCIOT2Yrk

[MisterP]

1. frankly the only thing they have any experience in is 1. rewarding cronies with oil money,

which is in shorter supply than it was before, say, the late 80s and 2. gunning down each other's lawyers and then buying the police (not policemen--the whole department)