US favors destabilized Venezuela

US favors destabilized Venezuela

A Latin America expert tells Press TV that the United States is engaged in ‘destabilization efforts’ against Venezuela.

Venezuela’s electoral authority has declared Nicolas Maduro the winner of the presidential election. The elections come just over a month since the death of Venezuela’s charismatic leader Hugo Chavez, who handpicked Maduro to be his successor. The new Venezuelan president has promised to continue the socialist policies of Chavez, who lost a two-year battle with cancer on March 5.

Press TV has conducted an interview with Gloria Estela La Riva, Latin America expert from San Francisco. La Riva is joined by George Lambrakis, a former US diplomat from London. The following is a rough transcription of the interview.

Press TV: Ms. La Riva let’s look at the significance. I want to look at it in a couple of different parts, first of all for Venezuela itself and then to Latin America as a whole as far as the results of this election and the direction of the future of Venezuela.

La Riva: Well I believe that there’s a completely different trend happening in Venezuela and the countries that are allied with it in Cuba, Nicaragua, Ecuador and Bolivia. And that is that the social conditions, economic conditions are greatly improving for the population, whereas we see in Europe and the United States and other Western powers a real degradation in the conditions of the working people.

I was just recently in Venezuela and I would say that yes, things like this change, but I believe what’s taking place in Venezuela is a consolidation of the revolution which is heading toward socialism. In the streets of Caracas for example, you can see the youth popularizing and handing out the literature of what socialism really is. Therefore, even though Venezuela has enormous resources of oil, natural gas as well as water and minerals, it will necessitate, I think, a process of further socialization, so that the corporations or the landlords do not continue having the power over the people to disrupt, destabilize and basically cause deliberate economic disruptions in the country.

Press TV: Your take in general as far as the United States, do you think that it is concerned with this continued direction that if Maduro is elected that most likely he will be able to continue in the direction of Chavez? Interestingly enough our guest said in London, they are dictator like; he talked about Chavez. However, if this is a dictator and we see as far as the poverty level being reduced and the hunger being reduced. Why would the United States have a problem with a leader, who actually is improving the lifestyle of its countrymen?

La Riva: Well I believe that many of the economic improvements [in Venezuela] were because the government took on Big Oil (the five global petroleum and gas super-majors), which is what dictates in US government policies… And in Venezuela, they [Big Oil] can continue to exploit oil, but they have to pay a higher price of royalties to the country as it should, so that the people can benefit from their own resources. The oil can no longer be privatized as was the intention of the rulers before Chavez.

Speaking of dictatorship or democracy; where else in the world do you see 13 elections in referenda that were proved by the overwhelming majority of the population in Venezuela since 1998 when Chavez was first elected? So every step of the way whether it was the first constitution in Venezuela out of 26 total in that country the one under Chavez was the first one in 1999 that was approved by the population in a referendum and also drawn up by the population in a constituent assembly. And from that constitution the rightwing opposition has been forced to acknowledge the justness of it even though today we believe that what we will see is another defeat for the rightwing.

The United States is, by the way, pumping in tens of millions of dollars every year into the opposition of Venezuela, which includes destabilization efforts, so-called democracy programs as well as terrorism against Venezuela.

I think Venezuela is under a danger and risk by US foreign policy, not because of Venezuela being a threat to the US, but because it represents Latin America’s independence. It’s not anti-Americanism; it’s independence from corporations that have been so used to seeing Latin America as their backyard.

Press TV: Basically that the United States foreign policy is not run or controlled by oil they respect independent countries, are not threatened by independent countries. I’ll let you respond to some of the comments our guest just made in London.

La Riva: Well first I’d like to say through mentioning [former dictator of Nazi Germany Adolf] Hitler in the context of the whole situation in Venezuela is really an outrage and I think we should reject that outright.

The other is, well I’ll make a little revision to what I said about the oil companies dictating the US policy, I would add to that; the military contractors, the 70 thousand and more US corporations that are just making trillions of dollars on the wars abroad. So it’s oil and military contractors and related corporations that dictate US policy.

The US gunboat diplomacy, thinking of Latin America as their backyard, has continued and has even intensified.

You only have to read all the history from the Monroe Doctrine onward and what the US has done to Latin America in the 60s and 70s [to find out] it was military dictatorships imposed by the United States backed up by that terror campaign called operation Condor, and today we can bring it all the way up to the present, where the US was involved in the coup against Chavez.

The two-day coup of April 11 to 13, 2002 and the oil sabotage of late 2002 – early 2003 all the way up to now, where in 2009 when there were elections to be held in Venezuela; that one terrorist [Francisco] Chavez Abarca from El Salvador, who is an admitted mercenary and was involved in directly planting bombs in the late 1990s in Havana hotels. He entered Venezuela with the purpose of disrupting and carrying out terrorist attacks and he was arrested by Venezuelan police, deported immediately to Cuba, where he openly stated that was his intention, to carry out terrorist activity inside Venezuela and this was in the decade of the 2000s, of not even five years ago.

So, that policy still continues and I would really say that I don’t think anyone who knows about American history could say that the US policy is one of tolerance or of independence.