Since September, President Trump has authorized a series of U.S. military strikes on small boats in the Caribbean off the coast of Venezuela and in the Pacific Ocean, which he claimed were being used to smuggle drugs from South America into the U.S. These drone and missile strikes launched in international waters has as of Oct. 28 killed at least 57 people. While the Trump regime has designated drug cartels as “unlawful combatants” to justify these deadly military actions, legal scholars and human rights experts have widely condemned this reasoning as a clear violation of international law.
On Oct. 24, the president ordered the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford and its strike group with dozens of stealth fighter jets and surveillance aircraft from Europe to the Caribbean to expand military operations against drug traffickers there. But Trump has repeatedly indicated that the real target of his military deployments may be to remove Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro from power. Earlier in the month, the president authorized the CIA to conduct covert actions inside Venezuela. For the people of Latin America, this is an alarming echo of America’s “gunboat diplomacy” where the U.S. military had intervened dozens of times across the hemisphere beginning in the early 19th century to foment coups, depose heads of state or install Washington-approved right-wing dictators.
Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with David Paul, a member of the Task Force on the Americas, who assesses the Trump regime’s escalating military threats against Venezuela, Columbia and Latin America and the reaction of the Venezuelan military and ordinary Venezuelans who would likely suffer in any future U.S. attack or invasion of their country.
SCOTT HARRIS: David, I did want to ask you, from your understanding inside Venezuela, is the nation’s military solidly behind Nicolás Maduro and his government? Or are the U.S. threats succeeding in sowing discord among commanding officers, which is a tactic that the U.S. has long employed against many nations, particularly in Latin America with 100 years or more of intervention and military interventions and sponsoring coups by dictatorships and the like. But that’s specifically a tactic that the U.S. has tried since Hugo Chavez was elected (in 1998).
DAVID PAUL: Yeah, well, as you said, it’s a tactic. They approach governments. They try to bribe them, threaten assassination, threaten coups, strikes. Giving money to the opposition and also going to the military to try to divide them and buy some of them off. In Venezuela, the military is very solidly with the government. One difference between the military there compared to what was in Chile when (Gen. Augusto) Pinoche overthrew (President Salvador) Allende’s government, was most of the military were these professional officers, more middle-class officers. Most of the military in Venezuela are of working class origin, and they’ve seen and grown up with this political revolution that Chavez began showing that the government does care about the working class and even under all the economic hardship and blockade, showing a willingness to create social services for the people. When push comes to shove, people are human beings, and there’s always going to be some who turn to the other side out of fear or persuasion, but we haven’t seen that in any degree as yet.
SCOTT HARRIS: Well, if the U.S. launches either very specific attacks against Venezuelan infrastructure or the like, or a full-blown invasion, how do you think the population will respond given that there’s a split in Venezuela— opponents and supporters of Maduro? Certainly the economic problems in Venezuela exacerbated by U.S. sanctions have caused many people to emigrate to the United States and many of them now have been deported back by the Trump administration. What’s your sense of the nationalism in the country to oppose a foreign invasion versus people in the country who are opponents of Maduro? And you’ve got people like the pre-eminent leader of the opposition, Maria Corina Machado, who just won the Nobel Peace Prize welcoming an invasion.
DAVID PAUL: The opposition is divided, but most of the opposition—by even opposition surveys and studies just in the last year—have shown that the great majority of the opposition are against any invasion. They’re actually against sanctions and agree with what Machado has been saying, going around the world, asking Netanyahu and Israel to help invade their own country. They object to that and it is a polarized society.
There’s a large section of the private businesses that are mostly against the government and there’s a lot of opposition media. But if an invasion happens, I think it will be pretty much a bloodbath. I mean, if they actually took out the leadership and took over the country, it’d probably be worse than what we saw with Allende, with the torture and disappearing of tens of thousands of people. Even during these violent riots in 2014, 2017, the violent opposition headed by Machado sought out people who were Chavista supporters. They burned a number of them alive on video, burned government buildings. That’s just a little taste of what we could see if an actual invasion happened and those right-wing forces in Venezuela were given arms and supported by invading troops, it would be just a horror for Venezuela.
For more information, visit Task Force on the Americas at taskforceamericas.org.
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