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juan guaido
'Surreal': Biden Invites Venezuelan Coup Leader Juan Guaido to US 'Summit for Democracy'
Around the same time, Biden, whose 2020 electoral victory was almost overturned by a pro-Trump mob and lawmakers from the increasingly anti-democratic GOP, invited Guaido, a key player in the unsuccessful Trump-backed effort to overthrow Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in 2019, to the Summit for Democracy hosted virtually by the White House from December 9-10.
"Surreal," is how Adler responded after news broke that Biden had asked Guaido--an unelected and unpopular opposition figure who participated in a failed coup attempt--to represent Venezuela at an ostensibly pro-democracy gathering, just weeks after Venezuelans reelected Maduro in a contest that U.S. legal observers called fair.
Notably, in the wake of the deadly January 6 insurrection, Maduro's government issued a public statement that condemned then-U.S. President Donald Trump's brazen attempt to hold onto power, expressed sympathy for victims of the assault, and criticized Washington for routinely supporting efforts to subvert democracy abroad.
U.S. lawmakers from both major parties, by contrast, gave Guaido a standing ovation when Trump, during his 2020 State of the Union Address, erroneously described the self-anointed leader as the "true and legitimate president of Venezuela."
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The U.S. has an extensive history of imperialism, and in his Al Jazeera appearance Tuesday, Adler pointed to its ongoing abuses of power throughout the world, as well as the fact that its policies rarely reflect the will of the majority, to explain why Biden's summit is "cynical, hypocritical, and completely counter-productive."
Although U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has promoted the Summit for Democracy, he plays a key role in facilitating corruption in countries across the globe, said Adler. "We are the central node, for example, in a network of illegal, kleptocratic finance that passes through our financial system en route to financing those autocratic regimes... rising around the world."
In addition, Adler questioned why only 100 world leaders were invited to Biden's table. "We've been here before," Adler said, alluding to the fact that the world was divided into supposedly good and bad camps during the Cold War, with disastrous effects that persist today.
In a co-authored essay published by The Guardian in December 2020, Adler and Stephen Wertheim, deputy director of research and policy at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and research scholar at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University, argued that because it is "animated by an antagonistic impulse, the Summit for Democracy is liable to make the world less safe."
"It risks hardening antagonism with those outside the summit, reducing prospects for truly broad collaboration," the pair wrote. "The coronavirus, this generation's deadliest foe to date, pays no heed to whom the U.S. deems its ally or its adversary. The same is true of a changing climate."
In addition, Adler said Tuesday, the U.S. has a "systematic inability to pick good allies abroad."
Adler went on to repeat points that he and Guillaume Long, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and former foreign minister of Ecuador, made last month in an essay introducing Progressive International's new global observatory to defend democracy.
"The Biden administration continues to put the U.S. on the wrong side" of what Blinken has called a "democratic reckoning" in the Americas, the pair wrote in The Guardian.
For example, the pair noted, Blinken recently "lavished praise" on the right-wing presidents of Ecuador and Colombia, who have engaged in anti-democratic repression. Moreover, the U.S. remains a "leading member" of the Organization of American States, which has facilitated multiple anti-democratic interventions in Haiti and played a decisive role in the far-right coup in Bolivia in 2019.
On top of those foreign policy failures, Adler said Tuesday that Biden's "betrayed campaign promises" at home exemplify the absence of substantive democracy in the U.S.
Many voters cast ballots for the president based on his pledge to ban the sale of new fossil fuel leases on public lands and waters, Adler pointed out, and yet his administration has approved drilling permits at a faster rate than its two immediate predecessors and last month held the largest offshore oil and gas lease sale in U.S. history, just days after Biden vowed at COP26 that he would address the climate crisis.
In light of the current barrage of voter suppression laws being enacted and gerrymandered maps being drawn by state-level Republicans nationwide, an annual study published last week for the first time characterized the U.S. as a "backsliding" democracy.
Although Biden has acknowledged that U.S. democracy is under threat, he has yet to make a strong public push for repealing or reforming the Senate's 60-vote filibuster rule, a prerequisite to passing voting rights legislation.
In their essay, Adler and Wertheim argued that "rather than fixate on the symptoms of democratic discontent--the 'populists, nationalists, and demagogues' whom Biden has pledged to confront--his administration should attack the disease."
"He can start with political and economic reforms to make democratic government respond again to the popular will," they wrote. "Second, the United States should make peace in the world, rather than wage its endless wars... Finally, the United States should reinvent a system of international cooperation undivided by the 'democratic' fault line that the summit seeks to impose."
UN Rebuke of Crushing US Sanctions on Venezuela Met With Stunning Silence
"The [Venezuelan] government's revenue was reported to shrink by 99%, with the country currently living on 1% of its pre-sanctions income," Douhan found, impeding "the ability of Venezuela to respond to the Covid-19 emergency."
Douhan thus urged
the governments of the United Kingdom, Portugal and the United States and corresponding banks to unfreeze assets of the Venezuela Central Bank to purchase medicine, vaccines, food, medical and other equipment.
The campaign to overthrow the Venezuelan government, Douhan added, "violates the principle of sovereign equality of states and constitutes an intervention in domestic affairs of Venezuela that also affects its regional relations."
Douhan's report follows a Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) paper that estimated that sanctions were responsible for over 40,000 deaths in Venezuela in 2017-18 (FAIR.org, 6/14/19). Though sanctions were not the only factor driving economic hardship, CEPR found that they
exacerbated Venezuela's economic crisis and made it nearly impossible to stabilize the economy, contributing further to excess deaths. All of these impacts disproportionately harmed the poorest and most vulnerable Venezuelans.
Like the CEPR study, Douhan's report has been categorically ignored across establishment media.
By omitting the devastating impact of sanctions, corporate media attribute sole responsibility for economic and humanitarian conditions to the Venezuelan government, thereby using the misery provoked by sanctions to validate the infliction of even more misery.
Collective punishment
US and European officials have long admitted that the sanctions regime against Venezuela is collective punishment by design. Speaking to G20 foreign ministers in May 2018, then-British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson announced:
The feeling I get from talking to my counterparts is that they see no alternative to economic pressure--and it's very sad, because obviously the downside of sanctions is that they can affect the population that you don't want to suffer. But in the end things have got to get worse before they get better--and we may have to tighten the economic screw on Venezuela.
On March 22, 2019, a senior US government official bragged:
The effect of the sanctions [against Venezuela] is continuing and cumulative. It's sort of like in Star Wars when Darth Vader constricts somebody's throat, that's what we are doing to the regime economically.
A year later, as the Covid-19 virus spread globally, US Attorney General William Barr gloatedthat the pandemic was
good timing, actually.... The [Trump] administration is taking a kind of "kick them while they're down" approach, seemingly with the hope that by piling on sanctions and other actions, the administration can capitalize on the virus in Iran and Venezuela to spur greater public opposition to the incumbent governments and perhaps regime change.
"Although sanctions do not seem to be physical warfare weapons," the Lancet (3/18/20) noted, "they are just as deadly, if not more so. Jeopardising the health of populations for political ends is not only illegal but also barbaric."
Media silence
Many Western journalists, however, appear not to have seen these overt declarations of collective punishment against the Venezuelan population--a crime against humanity under Article 7 of the Statute of the International Criminal Court, according to former UN Expert Alfred de Zayas.
Loath to abandon belief in the fundamentally benign nature of Western foreign policy, corporate scribes have typically presented the devastating effects of sanctions as a mere accusation of Nicolas Maduro. "Maduro...said US sanctions were hurting his administration's ability to buy medicines and foodstuffs" was the next-to-last paragraph of a Guardian piece (3/17/20) on Covid in Venezuela whose subhead read, "Continuing chaotic situation under Nicolas Maduro leaves hospitals and health services desperately unprepared."
Often, they fail to mention sanctions at all. In June 2019, for instance, the Guardian's Tom Phillips reported that "more than 4 million Venezuelans have now fled economic and humanitarian chaos," citing would-be coup leader Juan Guaido's claim that the country's economic collapse "was caused by the corruption of this regime," without making any reference to Washington's campaign of economic warfare.
Keeping with tradition, Douhan's damning report has been met with stunning silence by establishment media outlets. Neither the Guardian, New York Times, Washington Post nor BBC reported on Douhan's findings, leaving the task primarily to alternative media (Venezuelanalysis, 2/15/21; Canary, 2/13/21). (CNN--2/13/21--had an exceptional report focused on the UN report, which noted Douhan's statement that sanctions "constitute violations of international law.")
The issue is not that Western media are uninterested in Venezuela. In February 2019, the month after Juan Guaido declared himself president, the Guardian published 67 separate articles about Venezuela, regularly citing the UN on Venezuela's economic and humanitarian conditions--signaling Maduro's sole responsibility for a crisis about which something must surely be done.
For example, the Guardian (2/27/19) reported in 2019, "The UN's political and peace building chief, Rosemary DiCarlo, depicted a devastating collapse in Venezuela's health system"--while making no reference to sanctions.
Similarly, the New York Times, whose editorial board had supported 10 out of 12 US-backed coups in Latin America since 1954, has regularly covered the deteriorating economic situation in Venezuela with--at best--only fleeting reference to US and European sanctions.
The New York Times (12/5/20), for instance, described how "Yajaira Paz, 35, has lost nearly everything" to the Venezuelan economic crisis: "her mother, dead from a heart problem she could not afford to treat; her brothers, to migration; her faith in democracy, to the nation's crippled institutions"--omitting any mention of sanctions.
The Washington Post Magazine (3/3/21) ran a similarly emotive article, noting how "the pandemic wore away even more access to basic necessities in a country racked by deepening poverty and crisis," blaming "the national mismanagement of resources" and, again, ignoring the existence of sanctions.
Corporate media thus consistently emphasizes the gravity of Venezuela's humanitarian situation while overlooking crucial evidence on the catastrophic impact of sanctions, fortifying the very narratives deployed to justify the economic siege against Venezuela.
The collective silence over Douhan's report is only the most recent case of propaganda by omission on Venezuela. By refusing to acknowledge Washington and London's fundamental role in making Venezuela's "economy scream," corporate media play a key part in manufacturing consent for regime change.
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