New U.S. Law Sharpens Unilateral Coercive Measures
- Misión Verdad -
While the U.S. increases its coercive measures
against Venezuela, the United Nations accepts the
credentials of the Bolivarian Government of
President Nicolás Maduro, December 18, 2019,
validating it as the only representative of
Venezuela at the UN.
The Venezuela Emergency Relief bill,
Democracy
Assistance and Development Act, or the VERDAD
Act, its acronym in English, was approved
on December 16 by
the Senate Foreign Relations Commission, and on
December 19, by
the full Senate.
U.S. Senators Marco Rubio (Republican) and Bob
Menendez
(Democrat), the main architects of the siege of
Venezuela from
the U.S. Congress, are the visible faces of this
initiative, which
also involves Democratic representatives for
Florida, such as
Donna Shalala, Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Debbie
Mucarsel-Powell.
This bill is a bipartisan and bicameral
initiative, which
represents a maneuver by the U.S. deep state to
legally shield and
perpetuate the siege and strategy of asphyxiating
the Bolivarian
Republic of Venezuela.
The VERDAD [meaning truth, in English
-- TML
Ed. note] Act seeks to escalate and
sharpen unilateral
coercive measures against the country. Although
its scope of
application supposedly falls on the leading layer
of the
Bolivarian Government, it actually aims to
strengthen the
economic asphyxiation measures and the all-out
blockade of the
Venezuelan economy.
It also provides for expanding the resources
allocated to the
vaunted "restoration of democracy in Venezuela."
Translation:
they are trying to strengthen the allocation of
resources for the
destabilization of the country through Congress.
Money and Background
In June 2018, the Senate approved $20 million and
the
House of Representatives approved an additional $15 million for these purposes.
To this set of resources must be added the 400
million dollars
that will be destined under the VERDAD Act
to the
Venezuelan coup leaders led by Popular Will
(Voluntad Popular),
using the traditional cover of providing supposed
"humanitarian
aid", which is how this expenditure is indexed in
the Budget for
the fiscal year 2020.
And still there are journalists, analysts and
other social
media personalities who ask where Juan Guaidó
& Company get all
the resources for their travels abroad and
luxuries that have
been exposed, apart from their much talked-about
corruption
schemes.
Because of its similarities, for being a
bipartisan
initiative, with sponsorship in both houses, for
its allocation
of resources for destabilization, for creating a
false legal
framework to apply an economic blockade, the VERDAD
Act is
similar to the Helms-Burton Law that has been
applied against
Cuba since 1995.
The VERDAD Act also bears similarities to
the law
approved in 2015 by the U.S. Congress, under which
war was
authorized against the Islamic State in Syria. In
that one they
referred to alleged human rights violations by the
Bashar
al-Assad government to wage a war on two fronts
and allocate
resources for "the restoration of democracy" in
the Arab
country.
That is, the similarity between the two decrees
also lies in
channeling resources to an opposition ready to
take the armed
road and insurrection as a method of political
combat.
In relation to Venezuela, the said law obliges
the State
Department to work in coordination with
Non-Governmental
Organizations (NGOs), "independent" media and the
National
Assembly (in the majority anti-Chavista),
with the
objective of politically undermining Chavismo
and the
Bolivarian Government.
Those resources will be allocated to these
"civil" arms and
instruments of U.S. interventionism in order to
strengthen the
case that points to the government of Nicolás
Maduro as one that
commits "human rights violations" and "crimes
against
humanity."
The United States strategy is to finance the
construction of a
custom-made case to demonize the Chavista
leadership, for
the purpose of in the medium term prosecuting it
in international
instances, such as the International Criminal
Court in The Hague
(Netherlands).
Institutional Damage Control
The VERDAD Act would be the first in the
U.S. Congress
to sanction a cryptocurrency, in this case the
Petro, launched by
the Venezuelan State in 2018 to underpin the
country's economic
recovery from its strangulation by Washington's
financial
sanctions.
It is a "novelty" in legal and political terms in
U.S. foreign
policy, in that it turns the Venezuelan Petro into
a means for
applying restrictions to a new international
financial order on
the rise, based on cryptocurrencies and challenges
to the
punitive control of U.S. corporate banking.
It also authorizes special financial
investigations to
restrict, control and seize "Venezuelan assets"
that have
allegedly been co-opted by the "corruption of the
Maduro regime."
In this way, the looting of Venezuelan national
assets is legally
protected, based on the false interim status of
Deputy Juan
Guaidó.
In addition, it establishes that individual
sanctions will be
removed from all government officials who withdraw
their support
for the legitimate government of Venezuela, thus
offering an
incentive for the fracture of Venezuelan
institutions.
The VERDAD Act also obliges the State
Department to
work closely with governments allied with the
United States
(European Union and Latin American countries
joined in the
phantasmagoric Lima Group) to expand the sanctions
against
Venezuela.
Along the same lines, it can also be seen as a
means for
putting pressure on China and Russia, aimed at
getting them to
withdraw their support for the Maduro government
in the medium
term.
With the VERDAD Act the appetite for a
conventional
military intervention in Venezuela in the short
and medium term
is reduced, since it replaces the hard power route
with one of
soft power, using NGOs, sanctions, communications
media and the
National Assembly as political, economic and
institutional means
of combat tailored to an unconventional war.
All this only confirms the failure of the White
House hawks'
and Washington national security establishment's
plan against
Venezuela.
Seen this way, the VERDAD Act is an
exercise in damage
control that the War Party (the sum of the
warmongers among
Democrats and Republicans) is undertaking in the
institutional
sphere to save the U.S. empire's credibility in
the face of the
Venezuelan resistance.
Venezuela at the U.S. Crossroads
The fall of Chavismo was offered by these
actors
(Rubio, Menendez) as a "war trophy" that would
immediately result
in the election of Donald Trump in the strategic
state of
Florida, where the Cuban-Venezuelan diaspora which
demands a
fatricidal war against Venezuela resides.
Taking advantage of Trump's focus on the
impeachment process,
the Democratic Party seeks to take control of the
foreign policy
towards Venezuela in Congress using sanctions and
economic
pressure as soft power mechanisms to consummate
the coup under
the narrative of pursuing a "peaceful and
diplomatic
negotiation."
In terms of domestic policy, Florida's Democrats
seek to
undermine the monopoly that Republicans have
exercised over
foreign policy towards Venezuela since Trump's
rise, offering
with the VERDAD Act a "more effective"
route than that of
the Republican president, in an attempt to
translate such a
manoeuvre into hard votes against the current
occupant of the
White House ahead of the 2020 elections.
Consequently, Venezuela could reconfirm its role
as the
political centre of the continental diatribe in a
stage of
escalation and pressures that will be framed by
the fight for the
U.S. presidency.
This means that 2020 will be a year of increased
pressure,
where Congress and the Democratic Party's
institutional war
against Trump will be defining features.
For the purposes of Venezuelan internal politics,
the U.S.
Congress is trying to recalibrate the failure of
the Venezuelan
opposition.
Divided, involved in innumerable cases of
corruption,
delegitimized and unable to consummate the coup
d'état, now the
U.S. Congress comes "to the rescue", promoting
these mechanisms
to revive the pressures and accentuate the
resources for
destabilization, supporting the figure of Juan
Guaidó .
Even though the VERDAD Act is projected
as a triumph of
bipartisanship and those involved in coup plotting
against
Venezuela, the internal problems between U.S.
factions suggest
otherwise.
This same year, the draft Temporary
Protection Status Act (HR549), the
Venezuela Arms Restriction Act (HR920),
the Humanitarian Assistance to the Venezuelan
People Act (HR854) and the Russian-Venezuelan
Threat Mitigation Act (HR1477), have not
prospered due to the control that
Republicans exercise in the Senate.
The VERDAD Act is the last project that
can be realized
with the previous four having failed.
The long-term problem of the so-called VERDAD
Act will
be that it precludes political agreements and
discretionary
actions of the U.S. Executive, whether by the
Trump Administration
or another, from decreasing or repealing the
blockade against
Venezuela.
The inconveniences experienced by Barack Obama's
administration in its managing of the detente with
Cuba subject
to the Helms-Burton Act stand out as the best
example of
that.
This shows how the U.S. Congress uses its power
to regulate,
block and reorient the actions of the Trump
presidency and the
coming ones, giving an air of legality to the
anti-Chavista crusade.
It is a big political problem for Venezuela,
given the
prolongation and perpetuity of the factors of the
U.S. deep state
as essential elements that control the levers and
discourse of
the U.S. establishment, protecting its
geopolitical war plans
from any change in direction by the White House.
This article was published in
Volume 49 Number 32 - December 21, 2019
Article Link:
New U.S. Law Sharpens Unilateral Coercive Measures - Misión Verdad
Website: www.cpcml.ca
Email: editor@cpcml.ca
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