The Venezuelan people reelected President Nicolas Maduro on July 28, precipitating outrage from the right-wing opposition and US imperial power, which in the past few weeks has tried every strategy to topple the government of Maduro. This includes the US State Departments’ delegitimizing of the election results, the opposition calling for global right-wing protests, vast cyber attacks, and violations of Venezuela’s sovereignty by unlikely perpetrators: Colombia and Brazil.
Earlier this month, Peoples Dispatch editor Zoe Alexandra conducted an interview with Carlos Ron, Venezuela’s Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs and President of the Simon Bolivar Institute on the ongoing effort to topple Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution. Read the first part of our interview here.
Read more: Carlos Ron on the democratic tradition of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution
In this second part of the interview, Ron goes in depth into the Bolivarian project, how it materially transformed the lives of Venezuelans, and how this inoculates the people of Venezuela to neoliberal propaganda.
Read the full interview below, which has been lightly edited for clarity:
ZA: When you read the mainstream media, you’re often only getting one side of the story, which is that Maria Corina Machado was disqualified, that Venezuela is in an economic crisis. But they don’t talk about the other half of it, which is that there have been ten years of the most restrictive sanctions campaign in the country’s history, a complete embargo on the oil sector.
Another thing which is really obscured, which you would never really read about in mainstream media and which is often hidden from us, is why is there so much interest in Venezuela? Why is the US making so many statements about Venezuela? Why are all of the countries in the region so determined to unite against Venezuela?
We know that in 2017, many countries in the region were part of the Lima Group, which had the sole purpose of attacking Venezuela. This doesn’t happen with any other country. I don’t think we’ve seen similar blocs forming against Peru, whose coup government assassinated 50 protesters. This is exclusively for Venezuela.
It’s crucial to understand that as we’re reading this media, that actually there’s a political interest and there’s an economic interest behind these attacks. It’s so important, especially for people in the United States, to understand this seemingly mythical political project that the Venezuelan people of all sectors of society have been humbly building for the past 25 years, which is called the Bolivarian Revolution.
What is this project and why does it threaten US interests so much?
CR: There’s an economic interest, because we sit on the largest oil reserves in the world. Even people like Elon Musk, who who engaged in this campaign actively against President Maduro, but who had also been engaged in the coup against President Morales in Bolivia, they reflect that at this at this point in time when we were living under hyper-imperialism that is trying to collect all resources for itself.
But then there’s the other thing, which is the political aspect of the Bolivarian project. It’s a project that has been deepening democracy in Venezuela, it’s a project that has a strength in the combination of the political will of a government to make social transformations and the organized population to carry them out. It’s the combination of these two things that have made things happen during the last 25 years.
People tend to forget, when they cover the election now, that during these 25 years, Venezuela was able to get rid of illiteracy. There were people in Venezuela who had never seen a doctor in their lives, but because of the relationship that Venezuela has with Cuba, we were able to bring Cuban doctors to inner cities, to rural areas, and give them health care for the first time.
We improved in healthcare, we improved in nutrition, we improved in all these things, where people actually saw that there were real transformations in their lives. There were transformations in decision making, because you have spaces of direct democracy through the community councils, through the communes, which is an aggregate group of different councils where people are actually making decisions.
The last election before this recent election was an election carried out on April 21. This was a national level election where people in the commune were able to vote, out of seven projects, which project they considered a priority, so that government funding would go to that project and actually make it happen.
This level of participation at the community level also brings about a new view of what democracy is. Not a democracy where you have representatives you elect for four years or whatever, and then they just make decisions for you during that time. It’s a democracy where you are able to participate and engage.
Venezuela has independent international politics, independent international affairs. We realized that it was not healthy for Venezuela to have a complete dependency on the United States, but rather needed to have other partners throughout the world. We decided that we needed to have a relationship with China, a relationship with Russia, relationship with Iran, Turkey, Cuba and other countries that were not in relationships that were well looked upon by the United States, but we didn’t do it because we were attacking the United States. We did it [for] the interests of Venezuela.
With China, we’ve developed a space program that allowed us to launch satellites for our independence and communications. With Russia, we were able to have developed agricultural cooperation. With Cuba, [we collaborate on] literacy, sports, medicine and so forth.
Before [the Bolivarian Revolution], we were basically doing everything according to what the State Department had laid out for us.
ZA: The powers that be seemingly can’t wrap their head around the impact that this Bolivarian process has had on the people. How has Venezuela been able to resist this economic siege, these destabilization attempts, and why do so many people actually remain committed to defending the revolution 25 years later and after a lot of difficulties?
CR: At the same time that all these social policies were taking place in Venezuela, there was also a raising of consciousness. We realized that it is through this model that we were actually able to make transformations.
Take a look at the region right now. Take a look at the other countries that went neoliberal. It would have been much easier for us, rather than resisting sanctions, to give in, go with whatever Washington wants to do.
Look at what Argentina is going through. Massive inflation. We’ve actually controlled hyperinflation. Argentina’s inflation started kicking in as soon as Milei started being president, with massive layoffs of different sectors of state employees.
Whereas in Venezuela, despite the economic hardships that we face, we try to compliment people’s salaries with subsidized food programs like the CLAP program, which was also sanctioned by the US, by the way.
We protected employment, we’ve tried different ways to compensate for the loss of salary income, because salaries are low in Venezuela today, because the state is sanctioned.
How do you make up for that? It’s difficult, because nothing is coming into the state. We approved the anti-blockade law that allowed us to engage in negotiations for oil with different countries, and allowed us to bring some of that revenue back for the social programs that then had been affected.
We as a people managed to address problems such as food shortages by turning to our own agriculture. Today, a country that five, six years ago imported 80% of its food, now produces the food it needs locally. And in most cases even cleaner than before, because we have a seed law that is against transgenics, even because of the blockade, we weren’t allowed to import a lot of the pesticides and all these chemicals that make food production even more dangerous for consumption. This is all because of the consciousness of the Venezuelan people.
Both Ecuador and El Salvador, for example, are almost police states guided by the FBI. You have the raids and persecutions in El Salvador against everybody that may fit into a jail cell, including political parties. We didn’t allow ourselves to be dragged into that model. We are defending the principles of the Venezuelan Revolution, we are defending our commitment to democracy.
The people understand that despite the difficulties, whatever changes and transformations we’ve been able to achieve, we’ve actually been able to achieve them in revolution.
And not being in revolution, allowing these extreme right people to come and take over the government, will be a complete loss of all the things that we have gained all these years.
ZA: Can you tell us what happened in 2019? What was the US actually trying to achieve by recognizing Juan Guaido? What impact did this have on Venezuela’s economy?
CR: This [current] strategy is sort of a repetition of what we saw a few years ago. In 2019, [the US] decided to recognize a self-proclaimed president who was a member of the National Assembly.
Through this recognition, they were able to take control of Citgo, which is the subsidiary [of PDVSA] that is in the United States, and was a major source of income for Venezuela. They have been controlling it ever since, because US courts recognize a board named by this fake president and not by the actual authorities of Venezuela. They were able to freeze our accounts, over USD 6 billion in assets and or in accounts in the United States and other countries were frozen.
And this was very important for the Venezuelan people in times such as the pandemic, when we were trying to buy vaccines for our population. The fact that we couldn’t purchase something that we had the money to buy, to guarantee the safety of our people, because the money was frozen by the United States and because they will only give it to Guaido, shows how criminal these measures are. They were willing to sacrifice people.
If it wasn’t for the help that we received from Cuba, China, Russia and Turkey and other countries that managed to get vaccines to Venezuela, we wouldn’t be telling the story the way we are. Venezuela actually was one of the best countries in managing the pandemic despite all these actions.
The position the United States government has today is not the result of Sunday’s election. The position they have today is a result of an ongoing practice of coup d’etat against Venezuela that they engaged in in 2015 when they first started supporting the opposition in that assembly.
They already set out to delegitimize Venezuelan elections. They didn’t recognize the results of the elections of the National Constituent Assembly in 2017. They didn’t recognize the election of 2018. They’re not going to recognize these election results. So it’s not related to the results.
It’s related to the already set plan that they have for reconquering Venezuela into the sphere of influence of the United States. That can only happen when somebody else is placed in government.
What they’re going to do from now on is to continue questioning the results, to continue talking about transition, but they’re never going to recognize the will of the Venezuelan people.
