ON Monday, January 5, I was one of the three people responsible for organising the Hands Off Venezuela protest of hundreds of people outside the US consulate.
The other two organisers were Vinnie Molina of the Australia-Cuba Friendship Society and ex-Fremantle councillor Sam Wainwright of Socialist Alliance.
The following Friday I found in the Herald pages interviews of Venezuelan emigres in Perth who support Trump’s kidnapping of President Nicolas Maduro.
How could such diametrically opposed viewpoints emerge in the small town of Fremantle, on the other side of the planet from Venezuela?
The answer is the intensity of the class struggle that has been going on in Venezuela ever since former president Hugo Chavez was decisively elected in 1998 with a mandate to enact social reforms.
Those reforms sparked a process, known as the Bolivarian Revolution, which has continued during the presidency of Nicolas Maduro from 2013.
The Venezuelans who spoke to the Herald chose to leave Bolivarian Venezuela; I was one of hundreds of Australians who, over many years went there to see for themselves what was going on.
What I saw was great masses of the poorest and previously marginalised people coming to determine their own lives and govern their communities. They named their Revolution after El Libertador of Latin America, Simon Bolivar, who was born and died in Caracas.
He led the independence struggle that expelled the Spanish colonisers.
I met a 72-year-old woman in a poor barrio of Valencia who had been illiterate before the Revolution, thus excluding her from voting.
She also was a single mother.
Within the pre-revolutionary, machismo-dominated Venezuelan culture, men often left their pregnant women partners to fend for themselves and their children.
The men demonstrated their virility while the women became poverty-stricken social outcasts.
After the revolution this woman learned to read and write though a mass literacy program.
She went through primary school and then high school.
The night I met her she was half-way through a law degree, all free of charge.
Not only that, but she was an organiser of Las Madres del Barrio (the Mothers of the Barrio) that consisted of deserted mothers and grandmothers.
Through the Bolivarian Revolution these women became respected as the matriarchal backbone of the community.
In the language of the Christian Liberation Theology that pervades the Bolivarian process, the “stone that the builders rejected”, the poor and downtrodden, is now the “corner stone” of society.
The poor were empowered and elevated while the rich railed against their lost power and privilege.
These social and economic gains have been sabotaged by the US government, which culminated in the January 3 kidnapping of president Maduro.
While Venezuelans want to run their society peacefully, US interference has promoted violence and conflict.
The US has imposed economic sanctions and funded right-wing opposition leaders who have organised violent riots and murders.
In 2019, all Venezuelan foreign holdings, including its gold reserves were seized under the direction of the US.
National trade has had to be conducted outside of the dollar system, compelling the use of barter swaps (oil for services, etc.) or operating outside of normal channels.
Imagine what would happen to Australia’s iron ore trade in such circumstances!
Think of the social dislocation and enforced poverty.
That has been Venezuela’s lot thanks to Uncle Sam.
The US-contrived economic chaos has resulted in huge numbers of Venezuelans leaving the country.
Poor people have moved to the US without papers, only to be greeted by Donald Trump with slanders, ICE thugs and transfer to tortuous prison conditions in El Salvador.
Middle-class Venezuelans, opposed to their country’s socialist trajectory, have relocated their professional lives. Many, coming from the oil sector, have arrived in Perth to work in oil and gas here.
These are the people who thank Donald Trump for attacking their country.
In the days since, they would have learned a painful lesson: neither Donald Trump nor the imperialist state that he represents care if Venezuelans live or die, whether they be pro- or anti-Bolivarian Revolution.
The sweep of his hand with which he dismissed his right-wing mouthpiece, Maria Corina Machado, proved that.
The Venezuelan right wing had every expectation that by pandering to Donald Trump they would assume power following the arrival of US boots on the ground.
Instead, they find that their great and powerful friend has no need of them.
The US knows that the right-wing forces cannot mobilise support within the country, while the Bolivarian forces can.
Millions of poor Venezuelans have joined the militia, been issued with weapons and received military training.
No dictatorial government, living in fear of its population, would arm the people like that.
The US grand strategy is to control the world oil trade and compel the contractual use of dollars, which have a habit of sticking to the ledgers of US banks as they pass through international transactions.
In this game Venezuelans are simply mice to be crushed if they are revolutionary or minions to be manipulated if they are right-wing.
Trump was prepared to slaughter people on the high seas, accusing Venezuela of drug running, but not risk a single hair of a US Marine’s head in an invasion.
In a final demonstration of Trump’s dishonesty, when Maduro was dragged into court in New York, all mention of running a drug cartel was missing from his charge sheet!
It is extremely dangerous to be an enemy of the United States, especially in this era of US-fostered war and fascism.
However, it is also dangerous to be an ally of the United States.
The USA does not have allies, it has interests and when it feels like it, it discards its allies like a used paper tissue.
by BARRY HEALY