There is hardly any room for surprise in the forced exile of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and the way the ruse of anti-narcotics operations was used to interdict oil tankers and to kill civilians on boats in Caribbean waters. Because to cut a long story short, the U.S. administration and military, has resorted to a huge variety of killing machines including the use of napalm, white phosphorous, bunker-busting bombs, cluster bombs, radioactive weapons such as depleted uranium shells, and weapons of mass destruction that have over the last 50 years left millions dead.
It had armed and funded death squads in places such as East Timor, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras (especially the CIA-created “Battalion 316”), Colombia, Bolivia, Angola, and Mozambique with an enviable degree of impunity. Ever since the election of Hugo Chávez, Washington has been trying to overthrow the Bolivarian Revolution but in recent years, regime-change efforts have mostly relied on an all-out economic war against Venezuela. And in case we are overawed by the US operation to capture Maduro carried out by the Army’s elite Delta Force and the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, known as the Night Stalkers, we have seen massacres carried out by the infamous “Tiger Force” of the US Army’s 101st Airborne Division before; not to speak of extra-legal operations such as the CIA’s Operation Phoenix that assassinated between 20,000–40,000 civilian Vietnamese “activists” between 1967 and 1971; the American-style death squads of Iraq’s “Salvador Option”, and last but not the least, executive assassination rings under the aegis of the Joint Special Operations Command that engage in pre-emptive and proactive attacks on foreign nationals in their own countries.
America has been a nation of moralisers since the days of Benjamin Franklin who would surely say that America did it for the good of Venezuela. Nevertheless, the truth is, armed with what is unmistakably the most feared and powerful war machine ever created, America has been the leading violator of international legality and prime perpetrator of international outlawry. Therefore, the apprehension and forced exile of Maduro being violative of international law and Article 2 of the UN Charter is of a piece with the character of an American administration regardless of its dispensation. So it suits the narrative that the pre-dawn US operation to capture and transport Maduro to New York on charges of drug trafficking was conducted to make Venezuela a safer place.
One could see it coming the way Trump kept claiming that the Venezuelan leader was funneling drugs and criminals into the US based on which the US carried out more than two dozen strikes in international waters against vessels it alleged were engaged in drug smuggling, killing over 100 people. The US has a penchant for fighting wars in areas of petroleum reserves with the aid of drug-trafficking allies or drug proxies. While Trump’s National Security Strategy calls for “a hemisphere whose governments cooperate with us against narco-terrorists,” it is well documented how the CIA has made systematic use of drug trafficking forces to increase its covert influence – first in Thailand and Burma, then in Laos and Vietnam, and later in Afghanistan. Since World War II, more and more covert programmes and agencies have been employed using drug traffickers to different and opposing ends as part of the American expansion overseas.
Colombia is “very sick,” and its government is run by “a sick man who likes making cocaine and selling it to the United States,” President Trump said recently and when he was asked about a military intervention in Colombia, his response (“Sounds good to me!”) had a stark foreboding. Therefore, the capture of Maduro cannot but be unrelated to the oil (and gold) assets of Venezuela. In fact, President Trump said Washington would take control of Caracas’s oil sector and that American majors would pump in billions of dollars to revive the struggling Venezuelan oil industry and ‘fix’ its broken oil infrastructure. That the US is always ready and willing to employ vast arsenals of death to protect its geostrategic and financial interests around the world is common knowledge.
That this American enterprise has created huge numbers of potential terrorists all over Latin America during a half-century of American actions far worse than those perpetrated in the Middle East is beside the point. It is imperative to watch what the US is doing to the five countries where more than 50 per cent of the world’s remaining conventional oil is found: Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates. Besides going into war against Iraq on the pretence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, it has long been threatening war against Iran while seeking to establish permanent US military facilities across the region, including in Kuwait and the UAE. Alongside supplying arms to Saudi Arabia it bargained hard for greater access to that nation’s oil for US oil companies.
If one considers fourteen other countries where the rest of the world’s conventional oil is found ~ Venezuela, Russia, Libya, Nigeria, Kazakhstan, the United States, China, Qatar, Mexico, Algeria, Brazil, Angola, Norway, and Azerbaijan ~ one might map the massive increase in construction of US military bases and installations and military deployments around the world based on prominent oil locations and oil transit routes. The threat of new military action raised by the US military installations in Central and South America, West Africa, and elsewhere, proved once again by the instance of Venezuela, cannot be ruled out, not to speak of the mounting costs to people who live in those countries and along those routes, in terms of human rights abuses, environmental destruction, military occupation, and war.
Venezuela has the largest oil reserves globally, estimated at over 300 billion barrels or a fifth of the proven oil reserves all over the world. In the Western Hemisphere, most of the oil reserves are concentrated in Venezuela and Mexico besides the US and Canada. Trump broadly hinted that the US would be running Venezuela and extracting oil from its huge reserves ensuring that the interim government of the country ~ all former loyalists to the now-imprisoned Nicolás Maduro ~ give the US “everything that we feel is necessary.” “We will rebuild it in a very profitable way,” Trump said, “We’re going to be using oil, and we’re going to be taking oil. We’re getting oil prices down, and we’re going to be giving money to Venezuela, which they desperately need.” America’s long “regime change” century dawned in 1893 with the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy.
A clutch of regime changes happened in subsequent years. To name just a few, way back in 1909, William Howard ordered the overthrow of Nicaraguan president Jose Santos Zelaya. John Foster Dulles ordered the 1953 coup in Iran, which was intended in part to make the Middle East ‘safe’ for American oil companies by unseating of Mohamad Mosaddegh, Iran’s duly elected prime minister, for his extra-legal pursuit of power, leftward political reforms, and nationalisation of the British-built Iranian oil industry. A year later under his watch, the CIA deposed the government of Guatemala in 1954, where a nationalist government had challenged the power of United Fruit, a company his old law firm represented. In 1963, the John Kennedy administration backed a Vietnamese army officers’ coup d’état that evicted and murdered South Vietnam’s President Ngo Dinh Diem. Salvador Allende, Chile’s elected leader, known for his socialist agenda and ‘bourgeoning’ ties with the Soviet Union, was killed in a coup in 1973. America never fails to cast an evil eye on any country or its intransigent dispensation that is not favourable to its lust for oil.
Getting rid of hostile or outright aggressive regimes was nothing new to Washington decision-makers even in the course of the bipolar competition with the erstwhile USSR. It nursed itself to the fantasies of ‘remaking’ the world by militarily invading a host of nations beset with civil wars, ethnic cleansing, brutal dictators, and devastating humanitarian conditions while ushering in far-reaching consequences evident from what transpired after the US carried out interventions in the name of Western-style democracy, humanitarianism, and liberal internationalism in Panama, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo in the post-Cold War years, not to speak of its larger-scale military incursions in Afghanistan and Iraq, while fighting small-footprint conflicts in Africa, Asia, and Arabia.
American policymakers of yore ~ from Warren Harding and Herbert Hoover to Dwight Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson ~ came to support authoritarian governments that promised stability, anti-Bolshevism, and trade with the United States. And if Maduro was a dictator, America has a venerable tradition of aiding, supporting and rewarding handsomely to some of the world’s most repressive dictators, tyrants, torturers and corrupt puppet-presidents simply for unwavering anti-communism and a willingness to provide unhindered access for American business interests to exploit their countries’ natural resources and cheap labour.
The writer is a Kolkata-based commentator on politics, development and cultural issues