Venezuela’s Opposition Used UN Meeting to Lobby for US Coup

The United Nations General Assembly, held in late September, offered a stark panorama of competing global visions. US President Donald Trump’s address was a characteristically bombastic, comically terrifying display of imperial nostalgia and hate-filled paranoia, including claims that climate change is a con and that London is no longer London because of Muslim immigration and “sharia law.”

In contrast, Colombia’s Gustavo Petro, Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and Chile’s Gabriel Boric each used their time on the international stage to defend democracy and humanism, take action against climate change, and oppose rising global authoritarianism.

Meanwhile, the Venezuelan opposition, led by former presidential candidate María Corina Machado, the far-right extremist who just won the Nobel Peace Prize, used the UN General Assembly (UNGA) as a lobbying platform, courting the Trump administration and sympathetic foreign governments to support a coup to depose President Nicolás Maduro. She has been part of multiple calls for US interventions in Venezuela, including to, in her words, secure the "total asphyxiation of the Venezuelan economy."

The opposition organized demonstrations in front of the Secretariat Building to denounce Maduro and call for the world to intervene. Pedro de Mendonça, Press Director for Machado’s campaign, hosted a protest saying, “Maduro is not the legitimate president of Venezuela, but the head of the Cartel of the Suns and the Tren de Aragua.” Mendonça called for “a free Venezuela and a secure West” through an “international coalition.” This is as direct a call for intervention as you could get. Machado retweeted it.

Machado has been a central figure to the Venezuelan opposition for more than two decades, helping push the opposition much farther to the right.

She says she models herself on Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and has championed “Popular Capitalism,” a philosophy pioneered by dictator Augusto Pinochet in Chile, seeking to privatize all sectors of the state, and would give priority to American oil, gas, and mining companies in “free Venezuela.”

She has herself met with American oil executives during her campaign. Her proximity to the US is crystal clear; she has previously worked with the US Agency for International Development, the National Endowment for Democracy, and the International Republican Institute in Venezuela, and served as a Yale World Fellow. She was quite close to the George W. Bush administration during this period.

Machado was also part of the 2002 coup attempt against Hugo Chávez, signing the Carmona Decree to suspend the constitution, dissolve the National Assembly, and appoint oligarch Pedro Carmona as president. The coup collapsed within 48 hours due to immense popular backlash (some anti-coup protesters were also killed in the process).

This kind of rhetoric by the Trump administration, echoed by the Machado camp, has helped legally justify actual military operations on both American and foreign soil.

Parallel to the UNGA sessions, representatives of the opposition allegedly met with members of the Trump administration, while Machado herself and prominent opposition figures saturated social media with calls for a global movement to remove Maduro.

During the UNGA, Juan Guaidó, the former opposition leader whom the US was pretending was the legitimate president of Venezuela, also met with Trump administration officials to lobby for more “counter-narcotics” operations in Venezuela and to depose Maduro. Machado and Guaidó have recently labeled the Venezuelan government “criminal” and “illegitimate,” and Maduro a “drug trafficker and terrorist.” Dozens of tweets, press statements, and interviews echoed the same talking points during the event; and urged the world to end his “regime.” To an American audience, this all sounds eerily familiar. It’s no coincidence that the Trump administration has merged the War on Drugs with the War on Terror. This is why calling Maduro a “narco-terrorist” is so dangerous (and wrong), and can open the door to more military action by the US.

Despite what the opposition wants to portray, these protests are not organic, and neither has been the US response. In fact, many of them are rooted in American energy and defense profits, and backed by hawkish think tanks. They circulate these postures within their circles to give an allure of a global movement, but most Americans and Venezuelans oppose US military involvement in Venezuela.

The allegations that Maduro heads the “Cartel of the Suns” (debunked by the very InSight Crime that receives State Department funding, as well as several Latin American governments) serve as a cudgel against any measured approach to dealing with Venezuela, reminiscent of how any opposition to intervention in the Middle East post-9/11 was met with accusations of support for terrorism.

Never mind the fact that Venezuela is nowhere near the most important drug trafficking port in Latin America, that the War on Drugs doesn’t work, that the US is allied with bigger drug-supplying countries, or that this all comes from the fact that the US can’t decrease its own demand for drugs.

Earlier this year, in February, the Trump administration officially designated Tren de Aragua (TDA) as an international terrorist organization, claiming it operates with support from the Maduro government. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, one of Washington’s most vocal Venezuela hawks, has himself called Maduro a narco-terrorist and an illegitimate dictator, and has long lobbied for regime change. Attorney General Pam Bondi has also echoed these claims, as have many other key members of the Trump administration.

This kind of rhetoric by the Trump administration, echoed by the Machado camp, has helped legally justify actual military operations on both American and foreign soil, including a series of drone strikes against fishing boats, which, yes, are war crimes.

The Trump administration has cited alleged TDA ties (without much evidence) to carry out deportations of Venezuelan migrants, with the deportation advertised by Homeland Security through cruel and disgusting meme videos they share on social media. Machado and her ilk have helped make all of this a reality.

We also have to remember that all of this is not in the name of democracy or protecting against drug trafficking. The Trump administration is invested in dismantling American democracy at home and supporting tyrants abroad. Until two seconds ago, the Trump administration was signing numerous deals for cheap oil and for deportation flights with Maduro, the very dictator it now wants to depose.

The US has a long history of supporting drug traffickers when it serves their interests. This includes the Contras and the far-right Paramilitaries in Colombia, now the largest drug traffickers in South America. The American security state has shown no interest whatsoever in pursuing actual solutions to the drug crisis, including decreasing demand, making supply less appealing by providing better ways of life, improving safe supply, or drug legalization.

The opposition’s proposed total economic surrender to US corporate interests would doom Venezuela to the same conditions that led to Chavez’s rise to power.

This is about protecting power and profits, including the profits of big oil, gas, and mining companies (Venezuela has some of the world’s largest reserves in all), and those of the military-industrial complex. A full coup would be a disaster and another bloody coup added to the United States’ long history of calamitous military interventions in Latin America.