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On the Need for Transparency in Venezuela
Following a disputed election, the government of President Nicolás Maduro has yet to publicly release the full tally sheets of the results. Meanwhile, U.S. officials are keeping quiet about their links to the opposition.
Aug 06, 2024
Since the disputed July 28 presidential election in Venezuela, U.S. officials have been calling for transparency from the Venezuelan government while keeping quiet about their efforts at regime change.
Claiming that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has stolen the election, U.S. officials have been working to bring to power the Venezuelan opposition. With nothing to say about their decadeslong relationship with opposition leader María Corina Machado, who has previously benefited from U.S. funding, U.S. officials have been portraying the opposition as a popular movement that won the election, all without external support or interference.
“The Venezuelan people deserve an election that genuinely reflects their will, free from any manipulation,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on the day of the election.
If U.S. officials are serious about wanting to see an election free from any manipulation, then they must be transparent about the U.S. role in the country. While it remains important for the Venezuelan government to release detailed voting results, just as several leftist leaders in Latin America have requested, it also remains critical for the United States to release detailed records about its relationship with the opposition, something it has spent years trying to keep hidden.
U.S. Manipulation
For decades, the United States has been the primary source of manipulation in Venezuela. With the goal of achieving regime change, the United States has been supporting an opposition movement that has been trying to mobilize the Venezuelan people against the Venezuelan government.
During the early 2000s, U.S. officials worked closely with Machado, the current opposition leader, who has long faced allegations of trying to overthrow the Venezuelan government. With funding from the U.S. government and support from U.S. diplomats, she and her organization Súmate led an effort in 2004 to oust then-Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez in a recall referendum. When it failed, Machado repeatedly cast doubt on the results, even though data collected by her organization indicated that Chávez had won, just as election monitors found.
At the time, former President Jimmy Carter charged members of Súmate with deliberately distributing misleading data for the purpose of manipulating the election. “There’s no doubt some of their leaders deliberately distributed this erroneous exit poll data,” Carter said, as reported by The New York Times.
Since then, U.S. leaders have overseen many additional efforts at regime change, targeting both Chávez and Maduro, all of which have failed. In 2019, the Trump administration made one of the most audacious moves, rallying behind opposition leader Juan Guaidó, who led a failed uprising and later fled the country.
At the same time that they are demanding that the Venezuelan government be transparent about the results, [U.S. officials] are keeping quiet about their own efforts to empower the opposition and achieve regime change.
“Our conundrum, which is to keep the opposition united, has proven devilishly difficult,” then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo lamented, as reported by The Washington Post.
In the July 28 election, the Venezuelan people voted in the context of widespread social and economic collapse, which has been facilitated by the United States. During the Trump administration, U.S. officials imposed severe sanctions on Venezuela, trying to make life so miserable for the Venezuelan people that they would turn against the Venezuelan government.
As former officials in the Trump administration recently acknowledged, they expected their approach to cause the Venezuelan economy to collapse and many people to flee the country. Not only did their actions push Venezuela into the one of worst economic collapses in modern history, but they made life so difficult that more than 7 million Venezuelans fled the country in one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world.
Many Venezuelan migrants have sought entry to the United States, driving the large increase in border crossings, all of which had been anticipated.
The Venezuelan people who have remained in their homeland are still suffering from the effects of U.S. sanctions. Even with the recent election, they have faced few good options, having been forced to deal with a hostile United States.
One of their options has been to support Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, the current target of the United States. A vote for Maduro could lead the United States to preserve its sanctions, all but guaranteeing more years of suffering.
Another one of their options has been to side with the U.S.-backed opposition. A vote for the opposition could lead to relief from U.S. sanctions, but it risks bringing to power a right-wing regime that will prioritize U.S. interests and perhaps even transfer the country’s oil wealth to U.S. corporations. Machado, for example, has insisted that she will privatize PDVSA, the state oil company.
Although the Venezuelan government barred Machado from running for office, she remains the main opposition leader, being the driving force behind little-known opposition candidate Edmundo González, who has been serving as her proxy.
U.S. officials have said that public opinion polls display widespread support for González, but critics have questioned their reliability. Analysts at the Center for Economic Policy and Research have reported that support for González has been overestimated, largely due to polling bias.
U.S. Secrecy
Through it all, U.S. officials have been highly secretive about their actions, even while calling for transparency. They have not disclosed which opposition groups they are funding, a longstanding practice.
Neither have they been open about their links to Machado, perhaps due to a critical change in their approach that they began to consider after the 2004 referendum. Once the Venezuelan government began publicizing Machado’s connections to the United States, even charging her and her colleagues with treason, U.S. officials began to consider how they could empower her without appearing as if they were her puppet-master.
During a private meeting on January 10, 2005, then-U.S. Senator Christopher Dodd (D-CT) floated one possibility, advising Machado and her colleagues “to seek international financing from non-U.S. sources” so that the Venezuelan government “cannot credibly label Súmate as a USG-backed organization.”
Machado rejected the advice, however, insisting that Súmate should be able to openly receive funding from the United States, including from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). “Foreign financing for NGOs is legal, despite the GOV’s contention to the contrary,” she claimed. “Súmate will continue to apply for NED and other grants.”
Initially, the U.S. government supported her approach. In 2005, then-President George W. Bush welcomed Machado to the White House, where he openly supported her. Not long after the meeting, Machado announced that the United States would provide Súmate with additional funding.
Concerned about how the Venezuelan government might respond, U.S. diplomats in Venezuela, who were closely coordinating with Súmate, called for some adjustments. Their main advice was to continue supporting Súmate while making it appear as if there was some distance between Súmate and the United States.
“A continuing, too evident, public identification with the U.S. could now be counterproductive,” the diplomats warned. “At the same time, however, we need to ensure that Súmate has the resources it needs to exploit this new vantage point it enjoys.”
Not only have U.S. officials remained silent about these past moves, but they have been employing many of the same tactics. Taking the approach favored by U.S. diplomats, officials in Washington have been trying to appear distant from the opposition while remaining supportive.
During the most recent election, the Biden administration prepared for multiple scenarios, including ways of supporting the opposition in the case that Maduro was declared the winner. With its public diplomacy, it has framed the vote as a struggle by an admirable and heroic opposition against a corrupt and fraudulent government, just as past administrations have done.
In perhaps its most striking move, Biden administration declared that the opposition won the election, even without having access to the data that administration officials repeatedly said is necessary for confirming the results. After spending days demanding that the Venezuelan government release detailed polling data, the administration went ahead and announced the opposition’s victory anyway.
“Venezuelan opposition and civil society provided decisive evidence showing that Edmundo González received a majority of the votes in this election,” State Department Spokesperson Vedant Patel claimed.
Indeed, U.S. officials are once again throwing their support behind the opposition. At the same time that they are demanding that the Venezuelan government be transparent about the results, they are keeping quiet about their own efforts to empower the opposition and achieve regime change.
Until the United States lifts its sanctions and ends its meddling, the people of Venezuela will never participate in elections that are free from manipulation, just as Secretary of State Antony Blinken insisted they deserve.
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10 Reasons the OAS Secretary-General Must Go
He is quite possibly the worst leader since the OAS was founded in 1948.
Jan 15, 2022
The Organization of American States (OAS) has never been a friend to the peoples of the Americas. This institution, ostensibly a space for multilateralism, has instead always been a tool for the U.S. Department of State. As Fidel Castro said in 1962, it is nothing but the U.S. Ministry of Colonies. That is truer now more than ever under the leadership of Secretary General Luis Almagro, who has been at the helm since March 2015. He is quite possibly the worst leader since the OAS was founded in 1948.
Here are ten reasons Almagro has to go:
1. Almagro and the OAS lit the fuse for the 2019 coup in Bolivia. They falsely claimed the presidential results showing Evo Morales being re-elected were "inexplicable", which set off unrest and activated a plot that overthrew him. These claims were so thoroughly debunked that members of the U.S. Congress requested an investigation into the OAS's role in the coup. Almagro immediately recognized the coup government, which committed "summary executions and widespread repression" during its year in power. After saying nothing about the coup regime's victims, the OAS issued a statement condemning Bolivia's judicial system the day after coup leader Jeanine Anez was arrested. This blatant interference in the domestic affairs of a member state runs counter to the OAS charter and led Mexico to chastise the OAS for its behavior towards Bolivia.
2. Almagro's cravenness helped legitimize four more years of the Honduran narco-dictatorship led by Juan Orlando Hernandez. The 2017 elections in Honduras were actually riddled with fraud, and initially, Almagro and the OAS did the right thing: they denounced the fraud and called for new elections. But the Trump administration was happy with the results and recognized the elections. Within a month, Almagro backtracked, which "called his own credibility into question" according to diplomat Sir Ronald Sanders. Despite the documented crimes of the Juan Orlando Hernandez regime, Almagro embraced and legitimized the Honduran government.
3. Almagro continued the OAS's long history of interfering in Haiti. In 2020, when President Jovenel Moise ruled without a parliament and gave himself an extra year on his term, the OAS issued a press release telling Haitians they should "comply." Almagro, acting without the approval of OAS member states, sent a delegation to Haiti (which was in the country for just five hours) to prop up the Moise government in the face of intensifying protests. Just before Moise's assassination in 2021, the OAS recommended that he appoint a new prime minister and set elections before the end of the year - precisely what the majority of Haitians did not want.
4. Almagro embraced the 2016 coup and the Temer regime in Brazil. Right after a meeting with Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff before her impeachment, Almagro denounced the proceedings against her as politicized and without merit. But once the coup happened, he had nothing to say about it and was quick to accept the Temer regime, visiting his government less than two months after the coup. When wildly popular former President Lula da Silva was arrested in 2018 and barred from upcoming elections, Almagro and the OAS did nothing. This paved the way for right-wing extremist Jair Bolsonaro to win the presidency. Almagro has had little to say about Bolsonaro's horrible treatment of Indigenous peoples, Afro-Brazilians, peasants and the environment, among others.
5. Almagro ignored human rights abuses by security forces during massive protests in Haiti, Honduras, Ecuador, Colombia and Chile. Almagro visited Ecuador in 2019 to congratulate the government of Lenin Moreno for its handling of protests that left 11 dead, over a thousand injured and hundreds arrested. He would later say that Chilean President Sebastian Pinera "efficiently defended public order" - the same Pinera who declared war on his country's protesters and whose police forces targeted their eyes. Regarding the protests in Colombia that left at least 80 dead, dozens disappeared and thousands assaulted by police, Almagro limited his criticism to a tweet condemning both the excessive use of force by police and protester violence, drawing a false equivalence between extrajudicial killings and vandalism. Almagro has yet to say anything about the 171 social leaders murdered in Colombia or the 96 massacres the country had in 2021 alone. While ignoring violations in member countries, Almagro and the OAS condemned the Cuban government over the July 2021 protests, despite the fact that Cuba isn't a member of the OAS.
6. Almagro is waging a hybrid war against Venezuela. Under his watch, the OAS violated its own charter and procedures time and time again to attempt to intervene in Venezuela. He tried to invoke the Inter-American Democratic Charter against Venezuela, a tool meant to be used as a response to coups, not to spur coups. He immediately recognized fake "interim president" Juan Guaido and accepted his fake diplomats into the OAS, although Venezuela had formally left the organization by then. Almagro also tried to invoke the Rio Treaty, a defense pact that could have opened a path for a regional invasion of Venezuela, and has said "all options" should be considered for overthrowing the Venezuelan government. He told former Spanish President Jose Luis Zapatero "Don't be stupid" when Zapatero pushed for a negotiated solution to the crisis in Venezuela.
7. Almagro is also one of the main drivers behind the attempts at regime change in Nicaragua. Almagro and the OAS strongly supported the attempted coup in 2018, in which the U.S. was heavily involved. The violence of the protesters (who killed at least 60 people, including 22 police as well as government officials and supporters) was deliberately ignored to frame a narrative around government human rights abuses and justify intervention. Almagro smeared Nicaragua's presidential elections as part of a campaign to delegitimize President Daniel Ortega. Just like in Venezuela, he has been a cheerleader for illegal U.S. sanctions meant to cripple the economy.
8. Similar to Trump and Bolsonaro, Almagro lashes out at the media and punishes those who criticize him. In response to questions raised about OAS allegations of fraud in Bolivia's 2019 elections, Almagro published a bizarre rant that invoked Nazis, attacked scholars and made absurd allegations against the New York Times. He failed to respond to letters sent by members of Congress, demonstrating a total lack of accountability. Almagro denounced two OAS electoral observers as "spies" for disagreeing with his false claims of fraud in the 2019 Bolivia elections. He essentially fired Paulo Abrao, the head of the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights (IACHR), because under Abrao the IACHR denounced the Anez regime's human rights abuses in Bolivia.
9. Plus, he's likely corrupt. In 2018, Juan Jimenez Mayor, spokesperson for the Mission to Support the Fight against Corruption and Impunity in Honduras (Maccih), resigned from his post because of lack of institutional support from Almagro and alleged corruption in the anti-corruption campaign. Prosecutor Julio Arbizu also resigned from the commission, claiming that "conversations between Almagro and [President Juan Orlando] Hernandez" were about using the Maccih to divert criticism from Hernandez. The Mission lined the financially broke OAS's pockets with millions of dollars in dedicated aid from the U.S. and EU. Arbizu alleges that Almagro had "arbitrary use" of these funds and that he hired two unqualified friends to work at the Maccih, one of whom was openly racist and classist towards Maccih staff. Almagro promised to serve only one term as OAS Secretary General, but his reelection in 2020 prompted an anonymous source to publish a widely-circulated letter that detailed cronyism and conflicts of interest in Almagro's hires for important OAS positions, as well the deep divisions within the OAS caused by Almagro's decisions.
10. Almagro apparently has nothing to say about the statue of Queen Isabella in front of the OAS. At a time when governments all over Latin America are taking down statues that pay tribute to perpetrators of genocide, racism and colonialism, Almagro has ignored a July 2021 request from CODEPINK to meet to discuss removing this symbol of the centuries-long holocaust unleashed on the indigenous people of the Americas. He will also likely ignore an upcoming open letter from prominent figures throughout the Americas calling for the statue's removal.
Have more reasons why Almagro has to go? Post them on Twitter with #AlmagroRenuncia #AlmagroResign.
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The Imperialist Agenda of the Organization of American States (OAS)
OAS has always functioned as foreign policy arm of the imperial overreach of the United States government
Dec 09, 2021
After being sanctioned by 25 of its 35 member countries, on November 19, 2021 the government of Nicaragua announced that it was withdrawing from the Organization of American States (OAS). In explaining the decision to leave the OAS, Nicaragua's Foreign Minister Denis Moncada said, "The OAS continues to be an instrument created by the US to project its meddling and hegemonic policy of intervention, of threat and of aggression against the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean."
Both the United States government and the Latin American ruling class subsequently exploited anticommunist paranoia to justify opposition to left-wing movements and governments that challenged capitalism's hegemonic control over Latin America.
Many people are only vaguely if at all aware of the OAS, and if they know anything about it, it is mostly an assumption that it is a type of "United Nations" for the hemisphere. But both in its structure and trajectory nothing could be further from the truth. Whereas the United Nations largely functions along the principles of one country one vote, as its largest financial contributor the United States controls the OAS agenda. The result is that the OAS has always functioned as foreign policy arm of the imperial overreach of the United States government.
The OAS has its roots in a series of U.S.-led meetings. In 1890, United States Secretary of State James G. Blaine organized a meeting of eighteen American republics at the First International Conference of American States in Washington, D.C. A goal, in keeping with the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, was for the United States to exercise diplomatic and military leadership over the hemisphere in a manner that would serve its narrow economic and political interests. The delegates at the 1890 assembly founded the International Union of American Republics, which twenty years later became the Pan American Union and in 1948 the OAS.
The OAS came into being at the Ninth Pan-American Conference in Bogota, Colombia. This meeting of foreign ministers marked the termination of a brief post World War II "democratic spring" and the heating up of what came to be known as the Cold War. United States Secretary of State George Marshall traveled to Bogota with the explicit and singular purpose of passing an anticommunist resolution. As soon as the delegates approved the resolution, Marshall left the country, highlighting that was the extent of his interest in "Pan-Americanism."
That resolution, known euphemistically as "The Preservation and Defense of Democracy in America," claimed that the "anti-democratic nature" and "interventionist tendency" of international communism was "incompatible with the concept of American freedom, which rests upon two undeniable postulates: the dignity of man as an individual and the sovereignty of the nation as a state." The newly founded OAS promised to take "urgent measures" to "prevent agents at the service of international communism or of any totalitarian doctrine from seeking to distort the true and the free will of the peoples of this continent."
Both the United States government and the Latin American ruling class subsequently exploited anticommunist paranoia to justify opposition to left-wing movements and governments that challenged capitalism's hegemonic control over Latin America. The OAS remained a central factor in that process, as soon became readily apparent in Guatemala.
In June 1944, a popular uprising removed the popular U.S.-backed dictator Jorge Ubico from power in Guatemala. This opened up a unique ten-year period of progressive reforms that came to be known as the "Guatemalan Spring." The reforms radicalized with the election of Jacobo Arbenz in 1950, and the promulgation of a new agrarian law two years later. Decree 900 redistributed unused land that the Boston-based United Fruit Company owned to impoverished Maya peasants. Both U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother CIA director Allen Dulles had close relations with and vested interests in the banana companies, which led them to oppose Arbenz.
Arbenz's reforms famously led to a CIA-backed military coup that overthrew his government, undid his progressive reforms, and led to decades of bloody military dictatorships. In order to justify the intervention in the internal affairs of another sovereign country, U.S. president Dwight Eisenhower had turned to the OAS. Several months earlier, in March 1954 at the Tenth Inter-American Conference held in Caracas, Venezuela, seventeen countries voted in favor of a United States resolution that condemned international communism. The U.S. government used this resolution as diplomatic cover to justify the overthrow of Arbenz's democratically elected government.
Building on its successes at using the OAS to advance its anticommunist agenda and imposing its imperial agenda on the rest of the hemisphere, the U.S. government attempted to use the Eleventh Inter-American Conference to be held in Quito, Ecuador in 1959 to overthrow the new revolutionary government in Cuba. Already in Caracas, the United States had faced intense opposition from Latin Americans to the imposition of its imperial agenda, and those sentiments only increased. To the chagrin of U.S. policy makers, the planned assembly in Quito was repeatedly delayed and eventually never happened.
Even with its imperial plans disrupted at Quito, the U.S. government continued with its use of the OAS to isolate Cuba. An August 1960 OAS meeting in Costa Rica declared that Cuba's revolutionary government presented a threat to the Americas because of its alleged links with the Soviet Union. On February 4, 1962, the John F. Kennedy administration convinced the OAS to expel Cuba from its membership. Over the course of the next several years, the United States strong-armed most of the other American republics to break diplomatic relations with the Cuban government.
Half a century later in a dramatic decision at a June 2009 meeting in Honduras and over the opposition of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the OAS general assembly lifted Cuba's suspension. The Cuban government responded that it had no interest in rejoining the OAS, which Fidel Castro called a "Trojan horse" for the U.S. imperial agenda. A month later, Clinton backed a military coup that removed Honduran president Manuel Zelaya who had hosted the meeting. On September 11, 2001, the OAS had approved the Inter-American Democratic Charter that pledged non-recognition of coup-led governments, but the United States had little interest in pressuring the new rightwing government in Honduras. They hypocrisy and double-standards that the OAS applied as it advanced U.S. interests were blatantly obvious.
In 2015, the progressive Uruguayan administration of Jose "Pepe" Mujica nominated their foreign minister Luis Almagro as OAS secretary general. Initially his election appeared to represent a change in the OAS as symbolized by the readmittance of Cuba, but once at head of the organization Almagro took an unexpectedly and unexplainable sharp rightwing turn and became a loyal lackey of U.S. imperial interests. Because of his interventionist comments and attitudes against the leftist Venezuelan government, in 2018 the ruling Broad Front party in Uruguay expelled him from its ranks. Almagro's fellow compatriots actively campaigned against him when he ran successfully for reelection as head of the OAS in 2020. Calls have steadily increased for his resignation.
Among the most objectionable actions of the OAS under Almagro's mandate was support for a military coup in Bolivia. On October 18, 2019, the leftist president Evo Morales narrowly won a hotly contested presidential election, but the OAS claimed that he had done so through fraudulent means. A careful study from the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) conclusively demonstrated that no statistically significant evidence of fraud existed that would have altered the outcome of the election. Nevertheless, the OAS had emboldened violent right-wing protests and the military. Their pressure forced Morales to resign on November 10, 2019 even though his current term of office had not yet expired and no one had questioned the legitimacy of his presence in that position. With the backing of the U.S. government and the OAS, a minor conservative senator named Jeanine Anez claimed the role of interim president even though she had no constitutional legitimacy to do so.
Earlier in 2019, the OAS has similarly recognized the claim of another minor conservative congressional representative named Juan Guaido as interim president of Venezuela. It did so even though that country's president Nicolas Maduro remained firmly in power. As in Bolivia, Almagro claimed that the 2018 elections that Maduro had won were fraudulent, even though he failed to provide any evidence to back up that claim. Instead, together with the U.S. government, he insisted on recognizing Guaido as president even after any constitutional claims--as tenuous as they were--had evaporated. But that made no difference to those who wished to overthrow a leftwing government by any means necessary.
In 2017, Venezuela had begun a two-year process of withdrawing from the OAS, the same procedure in which Nicaragua is now engaged. Instead of allowing that process to proceed, in January 2019 the OAS refused to recognize Maduro's legitimate government and instead admitted Guaido's envoy Gustavo Tarre as Venezuela's representative. Guaido loyally supported U.S. imperial interests in the OAS, including voting against progressive administrations in Bolivia and Nicaragua.
Almagro continued his active campaign against leftist governments in Latin America, including his refusal to recognize Daniel Ortega's victory in the November 7, 2021 election in Nicaragua. The role of the OAS as nothing more than a tool of U.S. imperialism has not changed since its founding as the Pan American Union more than a century ago. Leftists have long denounced the organization as only serving U.S. imperialist aims in conspiring against democratic governance in the region. Given that reality, it should be little surprise that the Nicaraguan government decided that it was time to leave.
An alternative pan-Americanism that runs counter to the interests of the United States as channeled through the OAS has always existed, and in fact predates that organization. Dating back to the movements for Latin American independence in the 1820s, Simon Bolivar proposed the creation of a league of American republics. His dream of a "United States of Latin America" was partially and briefly realized with the establishment of Gran Colombia, but that effort floundered and soon disintegrated into the separate countries of Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador.
The Bolivarian dream of an independent and unified Latin America that would stand up against the looming presence of United States imperialism never disappeared. More than anyone, former Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez sought to advance this agenda with initiatives such as the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) that pledged regional integration on an equitable basis. Similarly, the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) provided alternatives to the OAS that promised to advance Latin American interests without overt U.S. imperial intervention.
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