This morning's New York Times reports on the violent repression of the Venezuelan left by the Maduro regime. The popular socialist radio personality José Carmelo Bislick was abducted and murdered in August, apparently for criticizing corruption by local party leaders. Socialist TV personality Osvaldo Rivero is receiving death threats for saying the same things on a national scale. Jose Pinto of the left Tupamaros Party was jailed on trumped-up murder charges. Isabel Uzcateguí of the Communist Party was detained repeatedly and threatened with death. There are more examples of the same thing. So why does the US left still defend Nicolás Maduro's violent, crony-capitalist government?
First, anti-imperialists in the US have a long history of confusing the need to oppose intervention with the desire to lionize the subjects of that intervention. Authoritarian leaders shouldn't become our heroes just because American monopoly capital doesn't like them. Yes, the United States has waged economic warfare on Venezuela for years and under both political parties. The current sanctions began with an executive order by President Obama in 2015. Trump accelerated this with threats of invasion after Juan Guaidó declared himself President in 2019. Some of this was Trump's blah-blah: John Bolton writes that Trump bizarrely claimed that Venezuela is "part of the United States" and that invading the country would be "cool." But he also derided Guaidó as "weak" and a "kid," comparing him unfavorably with the "tough" Maduro. And there was no invasion. But it is also clear that Senate leaders like Marco Rubio really wanted one and that the CIA was recruiting Venezuela's neighboring states to do the job. So the imperialist threats were real. But we also saw American leftists go beyond resisting attacks on Venezuela to defending Maduro.
Second, Venezuela has become a sort of bogeyman to the American right. Yesterday the official GOP Twitter account retweeted a weird claim by one of Trump's attorneys that the US election was stolen by software designed by former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez! To my knowledge, Chávez never had any particular expertise in coding. Oh, also, he died in 2013. When Bernie Sanders was a viable candidate for the Democratic nomination his opponents seemed to think that yelling "Venezuela!" was an argument against a Green New Deal, student debt forgiveness, and a $15 minimum wage. In September and October the GOP's entire election strategy in Florida seems to have been yelling "Venezuela!" at - of all unlikely targets - Joe Biden. So I suppose it's not a stretch for actual leftists to think it must be an unintentional compliment. Maybe not true of centrist Democrats, but definitely for "real" ones.
Third, Venezuela has continued to masquerade as socialist. Even with the profound disparities of wealth between favored cadres and every other Venezuelan, even with the legalization of the black market, the Maduro regime has been able to rely on socialist support by claiming that they, too, are socialists... at least until recently. I suppose it's easier for socialists in the US - who are completely unaffected by the corruption, failures, and violence of the regime - to believe these claims. And both at home and abroad Maduro can blame all those failures on imperialist sanctions. The fact is that under Chávez the Venezuelan economy never broke its reliance on oil while prices hovered around $100 a barrel. They plummeted with the Obama Administration's embrace of shale and are currently about $36 a barrel. But, no, those are inconvenient facts... for everybody, both supporters and opponents of Maduro. In any case, American leftists may think Venezuela is "imperfect" but they seem reluctant to recognize that it is no longer socialist at all.
Fourth, the expose of Maduro's attack on the left was published in the New York Times, that tireless apologist for imperialism. Why should anybody believe it? This is the newspaper that defended last year's military coup in against President Evo Morales in Bolivia, saying that the difference between a "popular uprising" and a coup is "blurry." This is the newspaper that less than two weeks ago described Bolivia's reception of Morales's return as "wary" after his party overwhelmingly won the elections... again. This is the newspaper that claimed the US opposed the 2009 military coup in Honduras. That coup installed President Juan Orlando Hernández, whose brother was convicted a year ago by a Manhattan jury of running tons of cocaine into the United States. That coup resulted in a soaring crime rate that has fueled the unprecedented flight of Hondurans across Mexico asking for sanctuary in the US. And Hillary Clinton publicly acknowledged her support for that coup in her 2014 memoir, Hard Choices. I could go on. So it's easy for people who don't want to accept the truth of Maduro's antidemocratic violence to dismiss today's article as one more piece of pro-imperialist disinformation. And, frankly, there is a strong whiff of schadenfreude in that article. I, for one, would rather read about it elsewhere.
What about NACLA Report, the progressive journal on Latin America? Would that be an acceptable source. I did not find a discussion of repressive violence against the left, but I found this discussion of racist police violence in Venezuela from this summer. It reveals that nearly a third of homicides in Venezuela are committed by state security agencies. It reveals that Venezuela's police kill as many people as Brazil's: a country with a population seven times larger. It reveals that the victims of this police violence are overwhelmingly young, overwhelmingly poor, and overwhelmingly Native and Black. So, while the Venezuelan regime can hypocritically denounce the US for the murder of George Floyd, neither the Venezuelan government not the Venezuelan opposition can honestly say that Black Lives Matter to them.
My friend Ingrid was murdered in Colombia by FARC in 1999. The American right cried crocodile tears because they could use the death of an Indigenous human rights activist as a bludgeon against the left. The left was largely silent. In fact all I remember hearing from Democracy Now! was the FARC's initial denial. I have no interest in defending people who denominate themselves "socialists" or "leftists" if their actions are corrupt and anti-human. You can oppose US intervention in Venezuela and Nicaragua without pretending that Nicolás Maduro and Daniel Ortega are people's heroes... or even decent human beings.
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