by Rafael Bautista S., published on Resumen English, August 13, 2024
The alignment of certain governments to the crutch of “fraud”, to delegitimize the last elections in Venezuela, is seriously fracturing the region. The consequences of this new conformation of a bloc aligned with the geopolitics of the dollar, only outlines a scenario, analogous to the one that gave rise to the process of balkanization of the former Yugoslavia which, to this day, makes coexistence impossible among those who once converged in a federative state.
It was geopolitical reasons that drove a war that lasted more than a decade; there too, bringing democracy made in the USA only meant unleashing infinite chaos. Washington and NATO set out to wipe out the former USSR, encircling it on its immediate borders; that is also the reason why both recently pushed for war in Ukraine, sacrificing an entire nation to produce strategic advantages (over the Russian Federation) which now appears to them as a resounding failure, but for Ukraine means only incalculable losses.
Similarly, Washington’s immediate response to the Chinese and Russian expansion in our region has already been openly expressed by the head of the Southern Command Laura Richardson. That is why we have already said that it was, in reality, a threat accompanied by a series of “diplomatic” measures to discipline governments, especially the so-called “leftist” ones. This context should have provided Lula (as an expression of the BRICS+ in Latin America) with the decisive elements to lead a gradual disengagement from the geo-economy of the dollar at the regional level, but his own alignment to the gringo “democratic” mythology not only makes him lose this possibility, but also contributes to regional destabilization, as the appropriate scenario to become cloistered, outside the economy of the 21st century, that is, disconnected from the Pacific and Asia.
Needless to refer to the opportunistic approach of the leftist travesty of the Chilean government; but in reference to the alignment of the other countries, it should be noted that the power of the dollar has, today, kidnapped our region and that, to a greater or lesser extent, it acts over our own sovereignty. In South America, it has managed to constitute a majority bloc, leaving Bolivia and Venezuela to hang on a Manichean isolation (which feeds the reborn Russophobia in our countries, expressed in anti-communism and aporophobia). In this way, the aim would be to legitimize an escalation of regional conflict, straining diplomatic relations themselves.
Ecuador, Peru and Argentina are already laboratories where the Southern Command operates a series of counterinsurgency tactics and strategies; let us not forget that Ecuador has already ceded its military sovereignty to the USA in agreements (such as the “status of forces” agreement) of 2023, the same as Milei’s vice-president, Victoria Villarroel, with the slogan of “modernizing and strengthening Argentina’s Armed Forces“; and the coup government of “Balearte” in Peru, with the consent of Congress, by allowing the entry of more than a thousand gringo military instructors. Therefore, the “moderation” of Colombia and, above all, of Brazil, results in a loss of sense of the dramatic present we are facing as a region. The South American arc is gambling its destiny while calibrating particularist options that no longer make sense in the unfolding of the new multipolar geopolitics. Today, more than ever, it is an unobjectionable truth that our liberation will have to be continental or it will not be at all.
The story of fraud, which was set up in Bolivia to legitimize -in the “color revolution” style- the coup d’état of 2019, had and has the purpose, among other things, of wearing down and discrediting any popular project, once the doubt has been sown in public opinion. That is why the appearance of Milei expresses a resolute phase of the fascist bet in our continent; because it is not an irrational madness but very well calculated by the plans of regional balkanization. Something that was implanted in the very process of our independence, in the 19th century. That is why the famous “Monroe Doctrine” was, in reality, the bet of the gringo political elite to balkanize a joint project that would bring us together in a unified way and with dissuasive capacity before the imperial powers. The “Great Colombia” project was that and the Bolivarian ideal is the current referent that makes the need for continental union re-emerge. Meanwhile, further south, the government of Argentina seems inclined to set up a scenario equivalent to the war of the Triple Alliance. Then, as can be seen, both Venezuela and Bolivia would find themselves geopolitically encircled by a potential belligerent threat from their own neighboring nations.
In this sense, we affirmed that the coup in Peru was, in reality, a threatening blow to Bolivia, constituting the preamble to a lithium war; just as the disregard of the elections in Venezuela would end up being a regional coup to the Venezuelan State. And this is what would unleash an exponential conflict already demarcated by the fracture that is taking place at the diplomatic level. The fact that Lula does not notice the risks that all this points out, not only shows the absence of a critical perspective, or of continental leadership, but more worrisome, his strategic geopolitical blindness. These risks only undermine the possibility of a sovereign regional entry into the emerging multipolar world and leave us at the mercy of a unipolar order that can only survive by systematically destroying us.
The dollar is and represents, as an economy and as a way of life, war by all means. To provoke infinite chaos in our region is what Washington is proposing as the only means to resist the expansion of the BRICS+. They are losing the world, having already lost Ukraine and barely sustaining a dying credibility in their engagement with the Zionist government. They are left with their so-called “backyard” and the submissive complicity of our oligarchies; and, even when they find themselves in a possible scenario of civil war where, Democrats and Republicans, are barely the cohort of an establishment shattered in its own imperial confidence, the restrained servitude of the regional right is very useful to them, playing with fire, unconsciously believing that it will not affect them.
All governments, now forming a new “Lima Group” subject to Washington’s orders, do not realize that, by defenestration of the Venezuelan electoral system (long ago endorsed even by the Carter Center), they are only sowing seeds of destruction in their own institutions. That is the price of fake news: they do not make you believe in anything. If they can disregard any government, for any reason, and thus stoke internal conflicts, what makes them think that this will not be replicated in their own states? That is part of the hidden agenda of the imperial agenda of infinite chaos: they are not interested in keeping anyone but in unleashing an exponential chaos that condemns us to the hell of war and, thus, guaranteeing them an unprecedented dispossession of all our strategic resources to leverage their decadence.
Financial power, which is the self-consciousness in the phenomenology of the spirit of capital, reaches a point of no return, because it is confronted with the real limits of the world and life, but it is no longer interested, because war is its paradigm, which supposedly offers it an infinite field of opportunities. That bet constitutes imperialism and that is what drives it to destroy any possibility of a shared world and that, too, is the idiosyncrasy reborn as “libertarian” of a will to absolute domination. In the midst of the imperial collapse and of the unipolar geopolitical design, Chinese expansion is presented to the Empire in decline as an existential issue. That is why it no longer bets on competing (which is what it supposedly promotes as “free market”) but on destroying. What, once again, we are witnessing in Venezuela, with the guarimbas stirring up the streets, show a reiterated picture of social conflict as the only reasons the “free world” has to intimidate us.
It is the West that expressed itself in Netanyahu’s mouth in front of the US Congress and everyone cheered that ontological arrogance of those who spit their nonsense to the sky. And it is not only Corina Machado but all the prelates of the democratic Inquisition made in USA, who “order” the verification of the vote. The Venezuelan National Electoral Council has its own protocols and responds above all to the Venezuelan State and not to the whim of anyone who, from the experience we lived in 2019, even if the absence of fraud is demonstrated to them, will never give way to any other certainty than their own. To this day they have never been able to demonstrate the famous fraud invented by the Bolivian right wing under gringo script.
Now that the Venezuelan opposition claims to have won with 73% of the votes, it is the one in serious trouble, because proving that would mean something like inflating the electoral roll by 100%. Maduro’s 51% remains within the margins of the historical vote of the PSUV and this already disproves any kind of manipulation of the electoral process. To this we must add the following: the opposition has as “source” of the accusation of fraud the gringo company Edison Research, a company that worked in the generation of public opinion perceptions in Ukraine, prior to the Maidan, which resulted in the resignation of President Yanukovich.
While the pollster Hinterlaces gave an approximate 54% in favor of Nicolás Maduro and 42% to the opponent Gonzales Urrutia, media such as the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal or Reuters, only disclosed the Edison Research version, which gave 65% to Gonzales Urrutia and 31% to Nicolás Maduro. The clients of this gringo company are propaganda media managed by the CIA itself through the US Agency for Global Media (among them, Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Middle East Broadcasting Network, etc.) This data is not minor and already shows a premeditated rhetoric which, to top it all, is not new, but always serves to disseminate the politics of hate in urban societies crossed by imperial prejudices. That is why it is embarrassing to listen to Spanish geopolitical analysts, for example, who denounce European submission to Washington, but are incapable of at least relating it to what Latin America is suffering. Their own naturalized colonization of those prejudices may make them claim the loss of democratic values within their borders or show solidarity with Gaza but, in the same way, makes them ignore the rights of the periphery and think that, if the latter proposes a true democratization inward and outward, from their Eurocentric perspective, they are only expressions of jungle barbarism, Borrel dixit.
When Europeans think of a revolution, what do they think of? When they call the Bolivarian government a dictatorship and a regime, what do they imagine? Even when some denounce the fallacies that NATO and Washington spread against Putin or in favor of Israel against Palestine, what does their hypocrisy really denounce? The criterion they never accept is the basic one: the hard benchmark of the democratic equation is not set by the included but by the excluded. Now, if the Europeans want to give us lessons of democracy (and all their entourage of branch offices in Latin America), it seems that it is pure nostalgia, besides something they have never really known. What they do not understand and do not want to understand is that, thanks to the periphery, they have enjoyed what they now claim but, even so, they refuse to admit that we claim qualitatively what they are beginning to yearn for reductively. The decadence of the West and of the modern world cannot be greater.
And if we are talking about revolution, revolution is what we are beginning to taste in our lands. Because the true revolution is the one that revives the ancestors. They come back to take the streets, to harvest the seeds that their trust in the people has sown, and then Bolivar and Chavez, like the wind in the savannah, raise the dawn of a whole people that has found, at last, its true destiny. Now is the time, they proclaim. Because we did not liberate ourselves to be free but to redeem ourselves, redeeming our dead. For the dead are not dead if we, the living, make a nest of their cause in our lives. Now it is our turn, they tell us. So do not faint, do not give up, for you are not alone. Because when the dead dream of the living, that is when the revolution has awakened.
Rafael Bautista S. is the author of “The Angel of History, Volume II: The dispute between the South American arch and the geopolitics of the global reboot”. He can be reached at
Source: Rebelion, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – english