(By the way, Donald, when you announce a âcovertâ operation, itâs no longer covert. But never mind.)
For years, I was BBC Televisionâs correspondent covering Venezuela and US attempts to overthrow their elected government. Trump invented nothing. This is at least the fourth US-backed attempt at overthrow and assassination of a Venezuelan president.
The first attempt was in March 2002 when I was tipped off that ChĂĄvez would be overthrown in a military coup. Indeed, in April of that year, he was kidnapped by renegade officers who had the fantasy, shared by the US State Department, that the public hated Chavez and would celebrate his overthrow.
But it turned into another Bay of Pigs after tens of thousands of angry Venezuelans surrounded Miraflores Palace while the coup leaders âinauguratedâ Exxon Oilâs lawyer as âpresident.â George W. Bushâs Ambassador to Venezuela attended this wacky inauguration of the faux president.
But then the plotters, with Exxonâs man and the US ambassador, fled the Presidential Palace after the coup leaders, fearing for their lives, returned ChĂĄvez, by helicopter, safely to his Oval Office.
(Download the film of my BBC reports, The Assassination of Hugo ChĂĄvez, produced with Oscar-nominated cinematographer Richard Rowley. If youâd like to make a tax-deductible donation, we would truly appreciate it.)
I met days later with ChĂĄvez, who told my BBC audience that while he was in the helicopter, he clutched his rosary because he expected to be pushed out into the sea.
Instead, he was returned safely by the frightened coup leaders back to his office. ChĂĄvez then chose to let his kidnappers escape without punishment.
In 2004, Maduro, the future president, was sent by ChĂĄvez to meet with me at my office in New York to review the evidence that Wackenhut Corporation (now called GEO, a major operator of ICE detention centers) had planned to assassinate ChĂĄvez.
Venezuelan intelligence had secretly taped US Embassy contractors in Caracas talking in spook-speak: âThat which took shape here is a disguised kind of intelligence⌠which is annexed to the third security ring, which is the invisible ring.â (âInvisible Ringâ? Someone at the State Department has read too many John le CarrĂŠ novels.)
The State Department under George W. Bush also tried to purge voters from Venezuelaâs election files (and those in Argentina and Mexico) using the very same company, Choicepoint, that purged voter files in Florida in 2000 to hand Bush his baloney election âvictory.â
Third try: During Trump I, the US attempted to bully Venezuelans into electing a white guy named Juan GuaidĂł (who lived in the US) whom Trump hoped would defeat Maduro in an election. But the Black and Indian population of Venezuela, after they finally elected one of their own, ChĂĄvez, were not going back to white minority rule which had crushed them for 400 years. GuaidĂł never even ran for president, but the US government nevertheless declared him the true president and gave this grifter all the US assets of CITGO, the Venezuelan oil company.
Today, we are at the fourth attempt to overthrow Venezuelaâs government by kidnap (again?!) or assassination.
This time is different, because President Maduro really did lose his third re-election bid for the presidency but has simply refused to leave office. (Hey, youâd think Trump would admire that.)
No question, Maduro has become a dictator. But if the US thinks it can invade Venezuela, or appoint Maduroâs replacement, you donât know Venezuelans. They are patriots and they are all armed. How many Americans will Trump send to their deaths to get his hands on Venezuelan crude?
Democracy
The saddest thing is that Maduro has corrupted and destroyed the robust democracy that ChĂĄvez brought to Venezuela. In 2006, I joined ChĂĄvezâs opponent Julio Borges, a decent guy, on the campaign trail. Borges would get just two or three supporters in a town. Then I joined ChĂĄvez who, in the same town, would appear and draw thousands.
ChĂĄvez was wildly popular because, as an opposition journalist told me, derisively, âChavez gives them bread and bricks!â â that is, he gave the public food, housing and medical care by using the nationâs massive oil proceeds for public services. Under the old regime, the oil wealth was siphoned into the pockets of wealthy Venezuelans in Miami.
I have little sympathy for Maduro, who like Trump has taken office through vote manipulation. But the invasion or assassination of either head of state should scare and horrify us all.
Why not Saudi Arabia?
Trump and our National Security Advisor, Marco Rubio, have said that Maduro must go because he has threatened democracy in Venezuela and is trafficking fentanyl into the US.
Think about it. If Trump wants to save democracy, why attack Venezuela, not the dictatorships of Saudi Arabia or Abu Dhabi or the Emirates? Letâs not forget that Arabian Peninsula âroyalsâ are merely dictators in bathrobes.
Why Venezuela and not the Arabian Peninsula potentates?
Let me count the ways: Qatar has bought $2 billion of Trump crypto coins that will go into Trump family pockets. And thereâs that little gift from Qatar of a 747 jet for The Donald, not the US government. And thereâs the $2 billion in easy squeezy from the Saudis for Jared Kushner.
A 'narco terrorist'?
Trump has accused Maduro of running a cartel dumping fentanyl into the US, an accusation as credible as Trumpâs claim against that other alleged narco-terrorist nation, Canada.
I am no fan of my once-friend Maduro, now a brutal authoritarian and vote thief, a Venezuelan Putin. But drug lord? No sane drug dealer would run drugs from Caracas to Miami. In fact, according to the latest UN World Drug Report, Venezuela is neither a major drug producer nor a key trafficking corridor to the US.
Trumpâs troops have slaughtered more than two dozen people who were supposedly running drugs from Caracas to Miami. While Trinidadâs president is a Trump ally, that government stated that the two dead who could be identified, Chad Joseph and Rishi Samaroo, were simply commuting from work, like many workers, across the seven-mile strait between the countries. Even our Secretary of State, âLittle Marco,â said the boat was merely heading to Trinidad then changed his statement to âMiamiâ after Trump announced their supposed destination.
And did you notice? Every time a US prosecutor interdicts a drug shipment, they proudly display the drugs and cash and the names of the dealers obtained in the haul. Yet after these little commuter boats were attacked, not sunk, we were never shown the drugs, the evidence.
There was indeed a drug boat, a submersible, attacked by the US. But American media generally failed to mention that, unlike the fishermen and commuters killed coming from Venezuela, the one real drug haul came from Colombia and was captured in the Pacific Ocean, not the Caribbean.
So where are the drugs coming from, if not Venezuela or Canada? According to a New Yorker investigation, one of the worldâs largest and most violent cocaine cartels, the Kinahan Organized Crime Group, is run out of â you guessed it â Abu Dhabi.
Act of war
Thereâs no doubt why most Venezuelans want to see Maduro go. The economy is on its deathbed. Why? Because a US blockade, basically a siege of Venezuela, has caused the near total collapse of Venezuelaâs source of wealth, its oil industry. By blocking oil equipment from going in, and an embargo of oil going out, the nation is being strangled. An embargo is a globally recognized act of war which Americans (let alone Venezuelans) never authorized.
Greg Palast meets NicolĂĄs Maduro. Picture: Palast Investigative Fund 2004.
The idea that Maduro wrecked the economy is b------t through and through. Imagine if America laid siege to Texas, allowing no goods in, blocking oil from going out.
Nevertheless, the public, hoping the embargo would lift, voted out Maduro. He must go. But by Venezuelan ballots, not American bullets.
And let me tell you as an energy economist that the embargo of Venezuelan oil, cutting the nationâs exports 74 percent from 2.4 million barrels a day to 735,000, has easily added nearly a dollar to the price paid by Americans at the gas pump.
ChĂĄvez told me that he knew the limit of how far he could push the US and its oil companies. âIâm a good chess player,â he told me. Not Maduro. For example, Maduro turned down British Petroleumâs request to take over the oil fields once operated by the French national oil company. Britain later seized $10 billion in Venezuelaâs gold reserves held in the British Exchequer.
As youâll see at the opening of my film The Assassination of Hugo ChĂĄvez, the whacko idea of murdering Venezuelaâs president was first floated on television by none other than televangelist Pat Robertson, whom inside sources told me was furious that he was turned down in his request to the ChĂĄvez government for a diamond mining concession.
To his TV audience, Robertson said, âYou know, I don't know about this doctrine of assassination, but if [ChĂĄvez] thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It's a whole lot cheaper than starting a war.â
Thatâs true, I suppose. But why start a war at all?
Oil and diamonds. How much blood are they worth?
May I suggest that we return democracy to Venezuela with ballots, not bullets.
