The Yankee intervention strategy in Venezuela and Brazil

Appearances can be deceiving. Those who see the Venezuelan crisis as a result of Nicolás Maduro's alleged authoritarian excesses are just as wrong as those who point to corruption as the cause of Brazil's political disaster. Not that Maduro hasn't made misjudgments, and while corruption in Brazil is undeniably endemic in public-private relations, it's true that it's been present for a long time. But neither the Venezuelan president's possible mistakes nor misconduct by government officials were sufficient causes for the debacle now being witnessed in both countries.

There's something in common in the events here and there, a social dynamic of polarization and radicalization that bears the same mark. The patterns are very similar in the proto-right-wing demonstrations of 2013-2016 and in the streets of Caracas these days. The undisguised and blatant direct US interference in the Venezuelan crisis is perhaps the only difference. Here, Uncle Sam was more discreet, but no less effective. How to explain this?

Political crises can be manufactured to produce specific strategic results. From the Sudetenland crisis in Czechoslovakia in 1938, through the Polish Corridor crisis of 1939; the Gdansk uprisings of 1982, which resulted in the dictatorship of General Wojciech Jaruzelski; the Maidan Square uprising in Kyiv, Ukraine, in 2013; to the so-called "Arab Spring" of 2011, to cite just a few examples at random, one can perceive the self-serving invisible hand of some foreign power in domestic social dynamics.

But let's stick with the first example, since all the scenarios mentioned have a Konrad Henlein who best fits them. For those who don't know, Henlein, during the Sudetenland crisis, was Adolf Hitler's man, a German leader in Czechoslovakia. At Hitler's behest, he promoted local political radicalization in such a way that it seemed as if the Prague government, led by Edvard Beneš, was persecuting Germans in the country, even with all the official efforts to include them in Czechoslovak society as an autonomous group with their own cultural and political rights. In the end, Nazi Germany invaded Czechoslovakia with the approval of France and England, to incorporate the Sudetenland into the Reich's territory.

Returning to our America, Brazil didn't have just one Henlein to destabilize its young and nascent democracy. It had several, acting in diverse fields. The invisible hand behind it had clear interests in the pre-salt oil reserves, the dismantling of Petrobras and the Brazilian construction industry, as well as the subcontinental leadership role the country plays, for better or for worse. Everything was handed to it on a silver platter from the moment the coup government of Michel Temer, one of our Henleins, was installed. But the geographical location of this hand is uncontroversial, because it was from there that the vain and corporatist federal public ministry, under the command of another Brazilian Henlein, Rodrigo Janot, was subsidized with intelligence information about less-than-kosher practices in the Brazilian oil company: Uncle Sam's land.

However, it wasn't the illicit practices of the state-owned company's directors and business leaders of service providers that worried the Americans. Petrobras had always been known as a cash cow for many dishonest people, without causing any concern. What caught the attention of the Americans was, much more, the company's efficiency and its technological capacity for prospecting at great depths in the sea, coupled with the fact that it was privileged in the distribution of the oil found.

Petrobras's malpractice quickly became the trigger for a scandal orchestrated in the midst of a presidential election campaign, with invaluable help from a judiciary very accustomed to cinematic tactics. The alliance between the media and the bureaucratic establishment of the judiciary was the necessary fuel to boost the candidacy of yet another Brazilian Henlein, Aécio Neves. Demonstrations without a specific agenda soon managed to transform into a reactionary and moralistic mass movement, demanding the removal of the government in power. The 2014 election campaign was extremely polarized, with hate speech dominating anti-PT (Workers' Party) propaganda.

But the Henlein family lost in this first instance. The widespread anger generated by the media-judicial-street-opposition campaign was not enough to break the hegemony of progressive forces in Brazilian politics. It is true that the incumbent victory was by a small margin and that a weakened government would emerge from the elections, without a parliamentary majority capable of facing the challenge of the corrupt clientelism of the new Speaker of the House, Eduardo. Henlein Cunha, who began to systematically inflict defeats on the legitimate President, Dilma Rousseff.

In the midst of the storm, the enemies of democracy and traitors to the national interest joined forces with a large number of corrupt politicians to depose the honest head of state, all under the impassive gaze of the head of the public prosecutor's office and the top brass of the judiciary. Moreover, the judicial actors, with their greedy leniency, encouraged the reckless actions of a narcissistic provincial judge who made public illegally intercepted conversations between the President and her predecessor. These conversations contained nothing out of the ordinary, but their meaning was distorted by the media to attribute to the government a conspiracy against the scandalous ongoing investigations against Petrobras.

What was expected came to pass: the president's removal from office for a frivolous matter is irrelevant, the alleged "fiscal maneuvers" in budget execution. The public prosecutor's office and the judiciary remained inert and condoned the parliamentary coup, handing power to the small group of unscrupulous politicians who took advantage of Eduardo's unbridled greed and ambition. Henlein Cunha. The government measures now announced pleased the true patrons of the crisis: the opening of the pre-salt reserves and the dismantling of the national technological infrastructure. Nothing happened by chance.

The coup government was a nightmare for Brazilian society, with setbacks in public policies and the rise of fascist and fundamentalist discourse as something acceptable in the halls of power, as long as it served to destroy the political hegemony of progressive forces. Nothing was done to stop those who attacked women as "not deserving of being raped," LGBT activists, indigenous people, or landless peasants. Hatred became part of the current discourse, with a smirk on the lips of the coup's protagonists.

And then came 2018 with a new presidential campaign. The important thing for the reactionary forces was to keep the PT (Workers' Party) out of power at all costs. Lula's candidacy, clearly destined to win, had to be blocked. The flimsy conviction over an apartment that never belonged to him was, even without any evidence to corroborate the extravagant supposition of the trial judge, confirmed by a trio of judges colluding amongst themselves, with a speed that would make the Finnish judiciary, perhaps the most efficient in the world, envious.

The intention was to impose the restrictions of the Clean Record Law on Lula. However, even if appeals had a good chance of being successful if judged impartially, he was not granted the right to remain in the campaign until the final judgment of the candidacy registration process. The TSE (Superior Electoral Court) effectively ended the participation in the electoral process of the candidate who had the best chance of winning, frustrating a significant portion of the electorate.

It turns out that the main protagonists of the coup against democracy lacked the stamina to win and split into several ambitious groups. Only the far right, centered around retired captain Jair Bolsonaro, taking advantage of the wave of hatred spread against the PT (Workers' Party), and Fernando Haddad, the candidate who succeeded Lula, supported by progressive forces, remained to seriously contest the election.

The fascist campaign knew how to take advantage of an alleged knife attack against its candidate, who, hospitalized, was out of circulation for the entire campaign period and, in addition to being treated as a victim in the eyes of public opinion, was spared the confrontation of ideas, in which he would inevitably have displayed his crudest side. To keep the flame of hatred against the PT (Workers' Party) burning, the right-wing candidacy flooded social media with fake news, on a scale of boosting never before seen in a Brazilian election. The recipe worked, and Jair Bolsonaro, the senseless military man who boasts of being in favor of torture as a method of repressing his ideological enemies, became president of the Republic, without any project for the country or society, besides ostentatiously demonstrating, of course, his subservient attitude towards the American government and interests. Definitely, Uncle Sam has established his presence in Brazil, without brandishing a rifle, without firing a bullet.

And Venezuela? It's no surprise that the fascist government of Brazil, which managed to be elected and installed thanks to Yankee machinations against the legitimate government of Dilma Rousseff, now positions itself as an interventionist arm of the United States of America, led by Trump's unbridled anger.

Unlike Brazil, Venezuelan progressive forces were never deluded by any attempt at an agreement with their wealthy elites. Under Hugo Chávez's government, the latent, sometimes even blatant, hostility of the Venezuelan establishment towards the socialist orientation of Bolivarianism was known from very early on. For this very reason, institutions underwent profound re-engineering, in a broad constitutional refounding. Not a single stone was left unturned of the plutocratic state, and the forces that attempted to destabilize the new order were confronted in a way that led to their permanent neutralization.

It is clear that, in Venezuela, the elitist reaction was proportionally more fierce than in Brazil, without any possible dialogue between the government and the coup-plotting opposition. The latter refused to participate in the last elections which, perhaps for that very reason, gave Nicolás Maduro a new term and, always in an attempt to delegitimize the elected government, did not grant it "recognition," with the president of the Parliament, disempowered by the Constituent Assembly, proclaiming himself interim president of the country, following a suggestion from the scoundrel Donald Trump.

The self-proclaimed interim president, a thirty-five-year-old with hatred in his speeches and actions, Juan Guaidó, the Caribbean Henlein, has shown himself to be in league with the right-wing forces of the region gathered in the "Lima Group," led by Uruguayan Luis Almagro, Secretary-General of the OAS, who decided to recognize him as the "legitimate representative" of the Venezuelan people, despite him having no constitutional mandate to do so. Subservience to the US president prevailed, who once again called the shots on the political chessboard of the hemisphere.

President Maduro, faced with the shameless American interference in the country's internal affairs, broke off relations with the United States of America and ordered the withdrawal of his diplomats within seventy-two hours.

But, to worsen the bilateral crisis, the US Secretary of State refused to withdraw the diplomats, saying he did not recognize the Venezuelan government's action because it did not recognize Maduro as its leader. At this point, there is no longer any doubt about the real Yankee intention: to provoke a large-scale intervention to remove the constitutional government of Venezuela and impose its interests on the country's economy. In Venezuela, the elite was not as efficient as the Brazilian one and left the dirty work to be done, without intermediaries, by their bosses in the North.

The strategies were distinct, given the political peculiarities of each country, but in the end, Brazil and Venezuela are in the same boat, with the systematic destruction of their national projects for economic development and social justice. The hegemonic power of the United States prevails, very well served by our own [opponents/opponents]. Henleins of life, who may be called Temer, Janot, Moro, Cunha, Aécio or Guaidó. And there are still those who believe that the problem of our countries is the corruption of the left or its authoritarian hostility to democracy.