Today was the great day. The Nobel Peace Prize was formally awarded to the Venezuelan Ms Dracula. If you watch the video in Ben Norton’s article about her, you will hear her promise that Venezuela’s riches are up for grabs, if the USA manages to topple Maduro.

I am talking about a $1.7 trillion opportunity, not only in oil and gas, which is huge, and you know that there are opportunities, because we will open all, upstream, midstream, downstream, to all companies; but also in mining, in gold, in infrastructure, power….

This woman openly supports war against her own country! SBen Norton adds:

Machado stressed that, if Trump and Rubio can help her overthrow Maduro, she would cut Venezuela’s ties with China, Russia, and Iran, and their next plan would be to work with Washington to topple the leftist governments in Nicaragua and Cuba.

So this is what Norway is applauding? What does that make Norway?

To my knowledge handing the Nobel Peace Prize to this creature is the most ignominious official act that has ever been performed by Norway. I may well be wrong; in fact I probably am, because most Norwegians including myself have no idea of what goes on behind the scenes. Investigative journalists in Norway are few and fearful.

Discussing Venezuela’s socialism is an arduous task at the best of times in most NATO countries. NATO was, after all, formed to protect the imperial powers from the Soviet Union, although the USSR did not represent a military threat. (There is a great deal of literature on this score.)

The main danger from the Soviet Union was not military, as we were led to believe, but political: It was very important that we should not be taken in by ideas vaguely reminiscent of “communism. Yet, when the Soviet Union was dissolved, NATO was not.

So we must ask: Who was now being protected? Against what? And Why?

We know about much of USA’s active interference in European politics after the war: Operation Gladio, for instance, and US support of the brutal Greek dictatorship (1967-1974). There are plenty of declassified documents. (See f. inst. David Gibbs: Guide to using declassified documents).

There is no reason to imagine that the US is any less interested in protecting “US interests” now than it has been in the past, though we do not have access to “declassified documents” about current events.

Again, we must ask ourselves: Whose interests are “US interests”? I put to you that they are certainly not mine, probably not yours either.

At any rate, one way of protecting them appears to be by making sure that Venezuela has as few friends as possible. The Western press has been notoriously biased against Venezuelan socialism from day one of Hugo Chavez’s popular coup.

What do we hear about the so-called “democracy” that preceded the Chavez coup? Did the Venezuelan people actually benefit from it? At the time of the El Caracazo, there were no poverty statistics in Venezuela. But the very fact that traffic and business was paralysed by the sheer number of people protesting the price hikes suggests that poverty was indeed very serious. The army was ordered to suppress the protests, and when its massacres had ended, a heading read: “Venezuela obeys the IMF, pays debt with cadavers.” To this day nobody knows how many people were killed. The then Venezuelan government said: 262. Subsequently, hundreds of unmarked graves containing multiple corpses were found.

Yet, Venezuela presented itself as an “oasis”. Caracas was a copy of Miami where some people lived in the lap of luxury while the lives of the majority was as described by Dickens in Bleak House. Chavez changed that! I urge you to see John Pilger’s film The War on Democracy.

Democracy is a badly abused word. Used as an excuse to rape countries, support dictatorships, misappropriate resources, it has become a contradiction in terms. No wonder, then, that President Trump does not even pretend to attach importance to it. In the new National Security Strategy he makes no bones about intending to help himself (and the 1% in USA) to whatever a Latin American country has to offer, by hook or by crook. The document has been dubbed the Donro doctrine in that it considers Latin America USAs back yard.

Trump’s absolute disregard for formerly hyped “values” is highlighted by both the Greyzone and Geopolitical economy in articles about the release from prison of a former Honduran president and convicted drug cartel leader.

However, what Trump is doing is not new. The rape of Latin American and Caribbean countries has been going on for almost as long as the USA has existed. Take Haiti, for instance, conquered by the US in 1915 and occupied for 19 years with enforced racial segregation and violently suppressed rebellions resulting in the death of thousands. This disastrous period was followed by various US-supported dictatorships. You may have read the novel (or seen the film with Elisabeth Taylor):The Comedians by Graham Green, about Papa Doc and his obedient assassins? Papa was followed by an equally unappealing Baby Doc.

Finally, in 1990, Aristide won an apparently free and fair election. Alas, Aristide had some slightly socialist tendencies, so President Clinton put an end to his presidency after only a few months. And things have not improved for Haiti.

Of all the Latin American and Caribbean countries, Haiti was probably the most mistreated, but it was not the only US victim.

We know quite a lot about the coup against the Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz, who wasn’t even a socialist. (We know, for inst., about the link between the Dulles brothers and United Fruit.). Everywhere in the area designated by the Monroe Doctrine as USA’s back yard, there was lucrative business for US capitalists, not for the workers nor for other stake holders. To preserve this state of affairs, a number of brutal military coups were carried out under the aegis of USA.

  • 1959‑65 Operation Rough Rider, Operation Mongoose – large‑scale sabotage, subversion, and assassination attempts against Fidel Castro’s regime
  • 1965‑70 Operation Condor, dictatorships (Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil, Bolivia)
  • 1965‑68 Dominican Intervention (Operation Power Pack) – 22,000 troops landed to prevent perceived communist takeover
  • 1973 Operation Mongoose (continued) – intensified sabotage of Cuban sugar industry
  • 1979 Operation Just Cause (planning stage) – intelligence gathering for eventual 1999 Panama invasion
  • 1980‑84 Iran‑Contra Affair – illegal arms sales to Iran, proceeds to Contras in Nicaragua
  • 1983‑85 Operation Urgent Fury – invasion of Grenada
  • 1985‑87 Operation Phoenix – continuation of anti‑communist paramilitary support in El Salvador
  • 1989‑90 Operation Just Cause – invasion of Panama to depose Manuel  Noriega

But apart from these known coups, a lot of sneaky business has surely been going on that we don’t know much about. There was for instance Marco Rubio’s visit to Equador the other day. I don’t imagine for a moment that he went to enjoy polite conversation over a cup of coffee.

There have been at least two US-backed coup attempts in Venezuela, one in 2002 and the other in 2020. Then there was the unelected Juan Guaido whom the western powers, including Norway, ignominiously decided to consider Venezuela’s president, but who was being investigated by the FBI for aid embezzlement. He is currently still under FBI investigation. He’s in Miami, of course, that’s where upper class Venezuelans feel at home.

When the Western press explains the dramatic immigration flows from Venezuela over the past years, they refer to the disastrous economic policies of the Venezuelan government. This explanation is, however, a very cynical falsehood. The US-imposed economic sanctions, cf. the Lancet, have been strangling the economy and more or less starving the population. For years! One study affirms that sanctions caused 40,000 excess deaths in Venezuela in just one year, from 2017 to 2018.

Not only are the US 1 % and their various puppet presidents determined that a socialist government must not under any circumstances succeed, must not be allowed to inspire neighbouring nations; they are determined to get their hands on Venezuela’s oil and gold, which is precisely what Ms Dracula is promising.

President Trump’s truly hilarious excuse for forcing the USA to engage in extra-judicial killings in international waters and thus turning his country into an international pariah state is that Venezuela’s president is a “narco-terrorist”. The claim is so ludicrous it does not even deserve to be responded to yet Responsible Statecraft made the effort.

My final point is, however, not hilarious. My country’s blessing to Ms Dracula fills me with immeasurable sadness, shame and fear.