YET ANOTHER attempt to assassinate Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and seize power in the country has been thwarted.
According to the Venezuelan government minister, Jorge Rodriguez, former soldiers and police were involved in the planned assassination and coup attempt which was scheduled to take place last Sunday or Monday.
Rodriguez added that Juan Guaido, the US stooge who declared himself acting president back in January, was planning a ‘bloodbath’ in the country. He also accused the governments of Chile and Colombia as being involved in the attempted coup.
Rodriguez also said the plotters planned to release former General Raul Isaias Baduel from prison and declare him president.
In a televised address Maduro held the US as being responsible, while he said of Colombian president Ivan Duque, that his ‘complicity’ was ‘evident’.
Maduro defiantly pledged that he would be unforgiving of any attempt at a coup d’état and that: ‘We would be ruthless in a revolutionary counter-offensive against an attempted fascist coup — ruthless!’ adding: ‘That’s not called politics, that’s called fascism.’
This latest assassination attempt is clearly a sign of the desperation of US imperialism following the pathetic crumbling of the attempted coup in February when only a pitiful handful of the military heeded Guaido’s call for a popular uprising to topple Maduro.
In March trying to take advantage of a massive power cut in the country after the failure at the Guri hydroelectric plant – a failure that left much of the country without power and which is now believed to have been caused by a US cyber attack – Guaido once again failed to get any support for a violent confrontation with the masses of people who support Maduro, creating the conditions for the US and its allies to intervene militarily.
Indeed such is the magnitude of the failure of US imperialism to carry out a coup and regime change in Venezuela that reports are now circulating that US president Donald Trump has ‘lost interest’ in it and has instead started to attack members of his own administration for their failure to get rid of Maduro.
A report in the Washington Post last week claimed that Trump ‘chewed out’ John Bolton (Trump’s national security advisor) and that apparently Trump believed that regime change would be ‘low hanging fruit’ (easily picked) and an easy win that he could ‘tout as a major foreign policy victory’.
While Trump may have viewed it in terms of a personal defeat for him, the reality is that the abject failure of US imperialism to effect a coup in Venezuela is a massive defeat of American capitalism desperate to get out of its economic crisis by regaining total control of the world’s resources.
This was made clear by John Bolton in an interview on Fox News where he stated that regime change in Venezuela was for the survival of American capitalism. Bolton admitted regime change ‘will make a big difference to the United States economically if we could have American oil companies invest in and produce the oil capabilities in Venezuela’.
Despite all the huge sufferings inflicted upon the Venezuelan people through the years of US sanctions, which according to a recent report by the Centre for Economic and Policy Research have led to the deaths of more than 40,000 people and inflicted shortages of food and medicines on the Venezuelan people, they have stood absolutely firm and resolute in their refusal to see their country handed over to be pillaged and raped by US capitalism.
Their heroic resistance has meant that US imperialism has exhausted all the old ways of effecting regime change through sanctions and stooge ‘opposition’ leaders and in its weakness is left with only a military invasion backed by its faithful imperialist ally the UK (which fully supports every coup and attempted regime change) as an option.
The working class in the US and Britain have a major responsibility to defend Venezuela from a military intervention by US and UK imperialism.
The trade unions must tell the US and UK governments that any military intervention in Venezuela will be met with general strikes at home!
