The Secret War on Venezuela and Western Double Standards

By Carlos Fazio on September 5, 2024

Drawing Adán Iglesias Toledo

Just over a month before the US presidential election, Venezuela is in a state of relative peace and tranquility, despite the destabilizing efforts of the US, which is ultimately responsible for the sabotage carried out on August 30. in collaboration with agents of the local far-right army, against the Simón Bolívar hydroelectric plant (Guri), with the aim of permanently disabling it and leaving large parts of the country without electricity, including Caracas, the capital.

The Guri reservoir, located in the state of Bolivar, is the main source of electricity in Venezuela. Its infrastructure suffered in 2019 from a combination of electromagnetic and cyber attacks, in the context of Juan Guaidó’s self-proclamation as “president in charge” of the country (without any elections, by the way, and no “democratic” government in the West protested), leaving 80 percent of the country without service for several days.

The criminal attack on Guri, the largest ever recorded attack on that hydroelectric plant, is part of Washington’s covert actions, which are conceived as a broader multi-pronged strategy against Venezuela.

One of these fronts, condemned on August 28 by Ambassador Samuel Moncada, Venezuela’s representative to the United Nations (UN), was the covert US action in the electoral system “as a technique for the coup d’état in 2024”. During his intervention in the extraordinary session of the local National Assembly, Moncada said that together with other public and coercive measures, Washington’s covert action on election day was not only intended to frustrate and destabilize the electoral process, but also to “overthrow” the National Electoral Council. (CNE)

Typical of cyber warfare was Washington’s intervention in the Venezuelan elections. It included two main aspects of covert operations. According to Directive 10/2 of the US National Security Council (established in 1948), these operations are characterized by their planning and execution, which aim to conceal the identity of the sponsor or make its participation plausible: interference and subversion.

Foreign interference is defined as the intervention of one country in the affairs of another, usually without permission and with the intention of destabilizing and/or dominating it. While subversion refers to the attempt to overthrow the authority structures of a government or state – in this case the National Electoral Council (CNE) of Venezuela -, through the erosion of the institutional bases and outside the country’s constitution, and the creation of social conflicts.

When a subversive action is carried out against a government – such as that of Nicolás Maduro now – the intention is to help with advice, financing and political and moral support from outside to groups, organizations and political parties and individuals, and to promote its overthrow with violent and destructive urban actions, such as those carried out on July 28 and the two days after the elections with the excuse of “fraud”, by neo-fascist paramilitary gangs in the service of María Corina Machado and her frontman, Edmundo González.

Moncada stated that the operation against the CNE to favor Machado and the popular far-right party was financed by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), following the pattern used by Washington in the “color revolutions” (soft coups) in Serbia, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan, and also in the 2014 Euromaidan in Ukraine, as well as in the previous Mexican elections to favor the opposition alliance of the National Action Party (PAN), the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD), which led to a diplomatic letter of protest from President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to the US State Department.

According to Moncada, the US strategy in the ongoing coup against the governments of Hugo Chávez and Maduro in Venezuela (2002-2024) was an “influence operation” that “exploits the electoral process with its local agents to destroy the source of legitimacy of the authorities.”

This plan has used a combination of tactics, including psychological operations, espionage, economic sabotage and illegal extraterritorial coercive measures (with “blacklists” of officials), media and network warfare, assassination attempts, paramilitary urban warfare, aircraft theft, cyber attacks and even the implementation of a parallel voting system, like that of Machado and Gonzalez, designed for destabilization purposes from abroad, which Washington’s vassal regimes in Europe and Latin America have adhered to. The ultimate goal of these actions would be to replace the CNE with a parallel ad hoc system serving the opposition, thus endangering the integrity of the democratic process in the country.

In its unconventional, hybrid or fourth generation warfare variables, black, gray or white propaganda and deception and lies are important instruments to generate a certain perception of the facts. But the most novel aspect is that information warfare is no longer an addition to broader military objectives, but is an end in itself. From this point of view, the appropriation of a simplistic story that avoids argumentation and exploits the emotional is the fear of the other and prejudice, is fundamental to fabricate and impose a certain perception of (virtual) “victory” over the “real” reality. An example is the supposed “victory” of the opposition Edmundo Gonzalez in the elections of July 28, multiplied by a broad Western ideological alliance and imposed in the US, Europe and Latin America through the hegemonic mass media. Thus, the fabrication of a false or imagined “reality” has taken precedence over the configuration of reality on the ground.

The double standard of the European and Latin American governments that have joined the US in the post-28 July destabilization scenario in Venezuela – which seeks a “regime change” with an eye on oil and other Venezuelan geostrategic resources under the guise of defending freedom, democracy and human rights – is exposed by the recent French elections, where those in power not only refuse to accept their defeat, but also try, through technical and narrative means, to discredit the victors of Jean Luc Mélenchon’s Unsubmissive France, which led the New Popular Front that formed a “republican front” with Emmanuel Macron’s party under the premise of the “fight against fascism”. Macron used the left to buy time and retain power in the face of the imminent victory of Marine Le Pen’s neo-Nazi Rassemblement National, only to undermine its legitimacy and regain power through extra-political means at the expense of votes. Fifty days after the dissolution of the National Assembly, Macron refuses to appoint a left-wing prime minister, despite the verdict of the ballot box and the constitutional mandate. So if it loses, the right refuses to give up power; or as in the cases of Mexico and Venezuela, it cries “fraud!” Only that, in the latter country, with or without action, what the US wants is oil.

Carlos Faziois a Uruguayan writer, journalist and academic living in Mexico.

Source: Mate Amargo, translation Resume Latinoamericano – English