Thread: U.S. Venezuelan Relations: Imperialism and Revolution

U.S. Venezuelan Relations: Imperialism and Revolution


by James Petras
Global Research
January 5, 2010


Historically, Latin America has been of great importance to the United States on numerous counts: the region has in the past, provided the US with a trade surplus; its outflows of licit and ill-begotten funds to US banks, numbers annually in the tens of billions; the US has been, up to recently, the major trading partner in the region; Latin America has provided a lucrative outlet for US buyouts of oil, telecoms, banking and related strategic mining companies during the golden age of imperial pillage (1975 – 1999). Throughout most of the 20th century the US could rely on the vote of its client regimes in the United Nations (UN), the Organization of American States (OAS) and in the international financial institution (IMF, WB, IDB) to back its efforts to sustain its global political and economic expansion.

In the latter half of the 20th century Latin America was an important target for the expansion of US based agro-mineral, transport (Ford, General Motors and Chrysler), farm machinery and other multi-national manufacturers. Within this regional pattern of US empire building, each country played a different role: Argentina, Mexico, Brazil and Columbia were targeted by manufacturing multi-national corporations (MNC) banks and exporters; Central America and the Caribbean for tropical fruits, tourism and export platforms, Bolivia, Peru and Chile for minerals; Venezuela, Mexico, Ecuador for oil and gas. Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean, were principle suppliers of cheap labor in the agricultural, construction and low paid service sector.

Within this imperial matrix, Venezuela was of special importance as the most important provider of petroleum. This was especially true in times of heightened US and Israeli induced political hostility and military warfare in the Middle East, with the onset of the US invasion of Iraq and sanctions against Iran, Sudan and other Muslim oil suppliers.

Under US hegemony Venezuela was a major player in the US effort to isolate and undermine the Cuban revolutionary government. Venezuelan client regimes played a major role in support of the successful US led effort to expel Cuba from the OAS; in 1961 and brokering a deal in the early 1990’s to disarm the guerillas in El Salvador and Guatemala without regime or structural changes in exchange for legal status of the ex-combatants. In short, Venezuelan regimes played a strategic role in policing the Central American-Caribbean region, a supplier of oil and as an important regional market for US exports.

For Venezuela the benefits of its relations with the US were highly skewed to the upper and the affluent middle classes. They were able to import luxury goods with low tariffs and invest in real estate, especially in south Florida. The business and banking elite were able to “associateâ€

The centralality of military driven policies against Chavez was dramatically evident in the seven base military treaty signed by Obama and Alvaro Uribe, Colombia’s infamous narco-president. Colombia ceded several naval, air and special forces bases to the US, including one proximate to the Venezuela boundary. Once again neither Uribe nor Obama consulted with the rest of the OAS: it was presented with a fait accompli, a unilateral violation of the regional organizations’ charter. The reaction from Latin America was almost universally negative, varying in intensity between Brazil’s demand for details on the agreement, the purpose of the bases and guarantees that the bases would not be used to invade neighboring countries to Venezuela’s robust denunciation that the bases were a platform for an invasion. Once again Obama brushed off the negative response and proceeded with the militarist option as a top priority over diplomatic isolation in the hemisphere.

As the US ‘outsider strategy’ turned toward a massive and sustained military buildup of Colombia – over $6 billion in military aid over the decade – with the introduction of modern fighter planes, drone reconnaissance planes and several thousand advisers and sub-contracted private “securityâ€