photo: ap photo...American special forces execute Nicolas Maduro;...
Since when United States of America (USA) attacked Venezuela and captured the president Nicolas Maduro, in order to transfer him to New York under the charge of "narco-terrorism", the polarized world public generally agrees that the main reason for the American exhibition is not drugs but oil.
photo: ap photo…Donald Trump beaming with happiness
And oil is the devil's excrement, said the Venezuelan minister Juan Pablo Perez Alfonso in the 1960s. His country nationalized the oil industry in 1976, well before Maduro and his predecessor Hugo Chávez. However, during the reign of these two socialists, relations with Washington were so strained that it was easy for the Americans to find or invent a reason to intervene in Venezuela, following the tried-and-tested Latin American recipe. Let's remind you, on the same day 36 years earlier, the American army invaded Panama and captured President Manuel Noriega, who was tried in Miami for drug trafficking. Therefore, Venezuela is just the latest in a long list of examples of American interventionism in Latin America.
photo: ap photoDEFENSE OF THE ARRESTED PRESIDENT: Maduro with his wife in 2017;…
MATURE - DICTATOR AND ANTI-IMPERIALIST
The answer to who Nicolás Maduro is and what his merits and legacy are depends on who you ask. Right-wingers, gathered among other things around opposition leaders, such as last year's Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Corina Machado, say that this is a dictator who carried out a "coup d'état" in March 2017.
Such a claim is based on a series of events that followed after the opposition in Venezuela won a large majority in Parliament in 2015. As this meant she could pass laws and appoint officials without the support of the ruling party, the BBC recalls that Maduro appointed loyal judges to the Supreme Court before the new Assembly began work. Thus, "Maduro's judges" blocked the powers of the Assembly and suspended three opposition MPs, in order to thwart the qualified majority, and the Assembly later declared it invalid, thus annulling all its decisions.
Various Latin American governments condemned these actions, but at the end of 2016, the courts blocked both the impeachment referendum and attempts to hold Maduro's political trial, writes the BBC.
Maduro's grip on power weakened after Trump won a second term, but also after disputed election results from July 2024, when Maduro declared victory but without announcing official results. The opposition in Venezuela claims, for example, that in more than 80 percent of the counted ballots, its candidate Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia was the clear winner.
It is undeniable that Maduro is the heir to the policies of Hugo Chavez, the previous leader of Venezuela and a sworn enemy of US imperialism. Even Chavez on his deathbed personally chose Maduro as his successor. Trump's recent action in Venezuela actually called into question the permanence of Chavez's famous maxim "Commune or nothing!" Namely, the previous Venezuelan leader had a vision of reducing dependence on oil and developing a kind of self-management system. It sounds natural against those in power in Washington, although Trump's invasion of Venezuela has opponents both among political opponents in the US, as well as among American citizens who took to the streets to protest.
photo: ap photo...people on the streets of Venezuela;...
DIVERTING ATTENTION FROM THE EPSTINE DOCUMENTS?
In the days after the attack on Venezuela, some other theories (conspiracies) appeared, as well as the interpretation of the strategist of the American Democratic Party, James Carville, who successfully led Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign.
He claims that the attack on Venezuela is actually a diversion, to divert public attention from the documents of Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted sex offender who committed suicide while serving a sentence for pimping minors.
The US Department of Justice is reportedly inundated with more than five million pages of Epstein documents, which could include the names of many public figures, including Donald Trump. The US president has been photographed in Epstein's company in the past. At first, he opposed the publication of the document, and in the end he declared that he had nothing to hide and signed the law, which was voted for by both houses of Congress, and which mandates the publication of the file.
photo: ap photo...protests in front of the White House in Washington
WHAT IS THE UNITED NATIONS FOR?
Regardless of the consequences of the release of the Epstein dossier, the truth is that Trump wants oil, including Venezuelan oil. A few hours after US military forces captured the country's leader, Trump said that the US would run Venezuela, fix the oil industry and start making money. He also, in his recognizable populist and often fact-free style, stated that American oil companies are ready to invest billions of dollars in Venezuela. On the same day, "Politico" interviewed the CEOs of the aforementioned companies, who politely but clearly stated that Trump's statement was not true. The investment plan in Venezuela's oil industry is not easy to achieve at all, experts warn, recalling the billions of dollars spent on the recovery of the Iraqi oil industry after the US and its allies invaded that country in 2003. It was the military intervention in Iraq, without the consent of the United Nations (UN) and the Security Council resolution, that opened the door for all subsequent illegal interventions and military actions.
The former president of the UN Court for war crimes in Sierra Leone, lawyer Jeffrey Robertson, explained to the British "Guardian" that the USA "violated the Charter of the United Nations by carrying out aggression against Venezuela, which, according to the Nuremberg court, is the supreme crime, the most serious of all". The UN Charter, signed in October 1945, aimed to prevent a new conflict on the scale of World War II. A key provision of that agreement, known as Article 2(4), stipulates that states must refrain from using military force against other states and respect their sovereignty.
Susan Brough, a professor of international law and senior fellow at the Institute for Advanced Legal Studies, agrees that an attack could only be considered legal if the US had a UN Security Council resolution or acted in self-defense.
"There is absolutely no evidence for one or the other," said Bro decisively in an interview with the Guardian.
The problem, however, is that the US will not, as it has not until now, bear any consequences for the violation of international law, for the numerous deaths, suffering of civilians and destruction around the planet. He will not tolerate condemnation.
Of course, the opponents of American politics - China, Russia, Iran - condemned the invasion and the capture of the president of the sovereign state of Venezuela, but that's why it was difficult for the European Union, and especially for British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, to say anything other than "we are monitoring the situation". As one colleague on her X account would say, "vassals with a non-existent capacity for independent thought, let alone politics".
PETRODOLLAR AS THE BASIS OF AMERICAN DOMINATION
The huge oil reserves in Venezuela, discovered in 1922, were managed by British and Dutch companies. When nationalization followed in 1976, all foreign oil companies were compensated, according to historian Miguel Tinker Salas.
"Trump is wrong and lies when he says that the oil companies were stolen from the Americans. Those companies, like Standard Oil, which is now ExxonMobil, received compensation and were fully compensated. They received compensation again and again, on top of everything they previously extracted from Venezuela through profits. In 2006 and 2007, Chávez removed any possibility from Article 5 of the Nationalization Reform from "In 1976, existing oil companies continued to operate in Venezuela as partners and operators together with PDVSA. Chavez imposed joint investments on those companies, but with the mandatory participation of PDVSA, that is, the Venezuelan state oil company," explained Professor Salas in an interview for Demokrasi nau.
The American company "Chevron" currently operates in Venezuela, producing a quarter of the oil in that country. Production in Venezuela, however, has dropped from three million barrels a couple of decades ago to one barrel a day. The US, for example, produces 13 million barrels per day. In the past, oil from Venezuela, which is heavy, dirty and thick, was mainly transported to American refineries. Today, most of it is transported to China.
Special refineries are necessary for Venezuelan oil, to make it physically lighter and ready for processing. At the same time, the oil from Venezuela is extremely dirty, which makes it unacceptable for those companies, mostly European, that have to comply with the regulations in accordance with the green agenda of the fight to slow down global warming and climate change.
When the international certification of oil reserves was carried out in the period 2007-2010, Venezuela jumped from sixth to first place in the world with 300 billion barrels or about 18 percent of world reserves. By way of comparison, Saudi Arabia, with which American diplomat Henry Kissinger made the famous agreement to sell oil on the world market exclusively in dollars, has 270 billion barrels. Many believe that Kissinger's 1974 "deal" with the Saudis is key to understanding the recent attack by US forces on Venezuela.
Then, after a five-month embargo on oil for the European and American markets, the Saudis agreed to operate in the petrodollar system, that is, to sell oil exclusively in dollars. In return, they received American military and economic protection. Kissinger ensured the dominance of the dollar and the US, because every country in the world that wanted to buy oil had to provide a sufficient amount of dollars. That dominance was seriously challenged when several countries with large oil reserves, including socialist Venezuela, began trading oil in Chinese yuan, sometimes in euros. Hence the clear message that Donald Trump sent to the world just a few hours after the attack on Venezuela. "American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again," he said.
But as China has provided significant support to Venezuela in recent years, granting it loans worth billions of dollars to finance development, the question is how Beijing will react to the growing geopolitical risks. Bloomberg reported that China's top financial regulator has asked state-owned development banks and other big lenders to report how much risk they are exposed to through loans to Venezuela.
The concern of the Chinese is that the Americans could become priority creditors of the Venezuelan debt, which could potentially lead to delays, or even non-payment of loans.
Just hours before he was abducted by US soldiers, Nicolás Maduro met with the Chinese government's special envoy for Latin America. That partnership between Venezuela and China, above all in the field of energy, has been constantly strengthening. That is why there is a fear that Venezuela could represent a strategic loss for China, and for the rest of the world an unknown about Beijing's possible reaction. Of course, Donald Trump tried to allay Chinese fears by saying that he has "a good relationship with Chinese President Xi and that the Chinese will get oil".
LET COLOMBIA AND GREENLAND GET READY
A precedent has certainly occurred in Venezuela, which some call aggression, some intervention, some insist that Nicolas Maduro was kidnapped, while others stick to the term "captured". He certainly couldn't have been "arrested", although some domestic media thoughtlessly use that very term. The behavior of the media, above all the leading ones - the New York Times and the Washington Post - which were allegedly aware of the White House's plans to invade Caracas but did not inform their readers about it, deserves a special analysis. Speculations currently refer not only to the future of Venezuela and its citizens, but also to other Latin American countries such as Colombia, Cuba and Mexico, against which the US could act.
Something similar is possible in Europe itself, given that the autonomous Danish territory of Greenland "caught Trump's eye" before. The Arctic island, which is mostly covered with ice, has a lot of uranium and iron, so the Danish Prime Minister quite openly said that Donald Trump should be taken seriously, although the inhabitants of Greenland have repeatedly declared that they do not want to be part of the American empire. But the question is no longer what the Americans could do, but whether Venezuela opened the door for the Chinese takeover of Taiwan and how much it relativized Putin's military intervention on the sovereign state of Ukraine.
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