The US Failed to Coup Maduro Because He Has the Respect of the People
03:44 GMT 01.08.2024 (Updated: 04:34 GMT 01.08.2024)
© AP Photo / Matias Delacroix
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On Monday, the National Electoral Council of Venezuela announced that incumbent President Nicolas Maduro had won reelection. The opposition disputed the result and received significant public support from Western countries.
The United States hoped to overthrow Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro by supporting a coup. It failed because the people of Venezuela support Maduro and the Bolivarian revolution, researcher and geopolitical analyst Christopher Helali told Sputnik’s The Critical Hour on Wednesday.
“Of course, we’ve seen this playbook before… not only in Latin America, we’ve seen it in Eastern Europe, we’ve seen it in the Caucasus in Georgia, we’ve seen it all throughout Central Asia,” Helali explained. “Anywhere the United States feels that its interests are threatened, or that a country doesn’t kowtow to Washington or Brussels.”
On Monday and Tuesday, supporters of the opposition started violent riots in the streets, utilizing Molotov cocktails and firearms to fight police. By Wednesday, the government had regained control and tens of thousands of Venezuelans from across the country traveled to the capital Caracas, and took to the streets supporting Maduro. The President joined them in what appeared to be a jubilant and peaceful celebration.
Tens of thousands of Venezuelans are now marching through Caracas in support of the Maduro government
— Wyatt Reed (@wyattreed13) July 31, 2024
Another massive rally that will be completely ignored mainstream media & mainstream Twitter: pic.twitter.com/EPvOGWbiM6
🇺🇸🇻🇪🚨‼️ “Like Cassius Clay”
— Lord Bebo (@MyLordBebo) July 31, 2024
— Maduro showed off his boxing technique a while ago.
Is Elon training? LMAO pic.twitter.com/AtihnkwxBP
“[The West] already were giving people the heads up that there was going to be chaos and disorder if President Maduro was reelected. And, lo and behold, it happened. They said it. It happened,” he explained. “They’re trying to spin it as a crackdown by the government, but that’s not the case. In fact, the government is trying to maintain peace and order. It’s the opposition that wants disorder and chaos, [which is] just the recipe for the US to come in and gobble up all of Venezuela’s oil and natural resources and begin plundering the country like they did before Hugo Chavez’s time.”
While the United States has a long history of successfully supporting coups in other countries, it has had a string of failures that raise the question of whether it is as effective as it used to be.
“You’re seeing that if a county is isolated and it remains isolated, it is weak and it’s ripe for the US and its proxies to come in and dismember it. We remember what happened with Chile in the 1970s,” Helali began. “Now you’re see that these multilateral relations, this emerging multipolar world, it’s strengthening those countries that are most under threat, that are most under assault, that are the most sanctioned, so it provides for greater stability and ultimately each of these color revolutions in most of these countries have failed because [the governments] have the support of the people. They have the support of the everyday working class.”
Helali noted that they may not have the support of “the elite” in the countries who have “dreams of plundering the countries once more with the help of the West.” However, the working class is “fighting to defend their sovereignty and their territorial integrity and their own mode of development and prosperity outside of Western imperialism.”
Ultimately, the people decided that they were “not going to allow some gringos from the north to come and take [Venezuela] and plunder it,” Helali said.
The United States has been trying to overthrow the democratically elected government of Venezuela since Hugo Chavez’s time and the leader of the opposition, Maria Corina Machado, was arrested for taking payments from the US-funded Non-Governmental Organization National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in the early 2000s and met with then-US President George W Bush in 2005.
President George W. Bush welcomes Maria Corina Machado, the founder and executive director of Sumate, to the Oval Office Tuesday, May 31, 2005.
© Eric Draper / White House
Diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks revealed that the meeting was primarily designed to strengthen the opposition and anger then-Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.
“Opponents of President Chavez greeted the May 31 meeting with high fives for poking Chavez in the eye, and momentarily put aside differences, reveling in having one of their own being received at such a high level,” the diplomatic cable read.
“On balance, in our judgment, the attention the White House meeting brought Sumate [the Venezuelan NGO founded by Machado] has been exceptional. It is important now to let the organization ride this surge largely on its own. A continuing, too evident, public identification with the U.S. could now be counterproductive. At the same time, however, we need to ensure that Sumate has the resources it needs to exploit this new vantage point it enjoys.”
As was the case during the Cold War, the United States remains desperate to stop socialist countries from succeeding, particularly in the Western hemisphere, because they fear success could cause it to spread.
“Why does America fear little Venezuela? Because they know that if Venezuela becomes a shining beacon, an example, it will be another pink tide across Latin America. They don’t want that. They don’t want the Venezuelan people to stand up and that’s the real point of this. It’s the Monroe Doctrine continued on. This is the United State’s hemisphere and nobody can go beyond that," Helali explained.
