By Tim Young, Venezuela Solidarity Campaign for The Morning Star
Early signs of what the incoming Trump administration in the US has in store for Venezuela were revealed in mid-November with the approval by the House of Representatives of a new Bill tightening the existing blockade against Venezuela.
The Bill, which still requires Senate approval, is entitled Banning Operations and Leases with the Illegitimate Venezuelan Authoritarian Regime Act, known by its deliberately offensive acronym, the Bolivar Act.
The Bill was introduced by two representatives from Florida — Democrat Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Republican Mike Waltz, nominated as Trump’s national security adviser, who has said that the Bill “sends a powerful message to Maduro that there will be no appeasement.”
The Bill is also endorsed by Florida senators Marco Rubio and Rick Scott, who supported an earlier version of this Bill in 2021. Rubio, picked by Trump as the next head of the State Department, has long been an impassioned campaigner for tougher sanctions against Venezuela to achieve the long-held US objective of “regime change.”
The new Act aims to convert into legislative norms the executive orders that have underpinned US policy of applying illegal coercive sanctions against Venezuela over the past 10 years. This will limit the US executive branch’s ability to temper or eliminate sanctions in the future.
The Act also expands the scope of sanctions by employing a wide definition of those at risk of penalty, covering individuals, private entities, governmental bodies and their extensions. This is aimed not just at US domestic targets but those anywhere in the world who might or currently trade with Venezuela.
Under the first Trump administration, the initial wave of sanctions introduced by Barack Obama was ramped up into a series of increasingly severe measures against individual government members and the country as a whole.
Starting in 2017, Trump barred the Venezuelan government from borrowing from financial markets, blocked assets, and prohibited US businesses from dealing with Venezuela’s oil company, PDVSA, the state’s largest source of revenue.
The disruption to Venezuela’s reliance on oil exports, by cutting PDVSA off from international markets and blocking it from servicing debt, cost Venezuela billions of dollars in revenue.
Under threat, too, foreign companies started pulling out, disrupting supplies of essential goods. Foreign banks became reluctant to handle transactions involving Venezuela.
It has taken nearly a decade of sustained effort to bring about recovery in Venezuela’s economy. On the trading front, this has involved Venezuela engaging with Brics members and particularly with Russia, China and Iran to mitigate the impact of sanctions and diversify its commercial options.
Recognising this, in the continuing drive to achieve regime change, the new Act significantly expands the extraterritorial reach of the US’s secondary sanctions to further choke Venezuela’s economy and disrupt its trade dynamics.
In response, Venezuelan National Assembly President Jorge Rodriguez has proposed a “Special Law of Liberator Simon Bolivar against the Blockade and for the Defence of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela” to protect Venezuelan interests against US economic aggression.
The law would bar permanently from office those Venezuelan politicians who have called for US sanctions and also aim to recover assets from opposition actors abroad engaged in a conspiracy against Venezuela.
The new sanctions approach is not the only act of aggression Venezuela is currently facing. In August, the country suffered a nationwide electricity blackout caused by an attack against the Simon Bolivar Hydroelectric Plant, the country’s main source of electricity.
In September, Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello reported three arrests had been made of foreign nationals accused of plotting to assassinate President Maduro and other high-ranking Venezuelan officials, including Vice-President Delcy Rodriguez and Cabello himself. Four hundred firearms linked to the plot were also seized.
A month later, Cabello announced the arrest of a new group of foreign nationals for alleged involvement in a terrorist plot to destabilise the country and overthrow the government, bringing the total of foreign citizens captured since September to 19.
Behind these plans, Cabello argued, lay Spain’s National Intelligence Centre and US agencies, engaging in recruiting mercenaries and facilitating arms trafficking for supplying criminal gangs inside Venezuela.
Cabello’s further charge that the conspirators aimed to attack public infrastructure, including water supplies, electricity, and transportation, was borne out in early November when terrorist attacks were launched on oil and gas plants and refineries.
In addition, it is strongly rumoured that the US mercenary Erik Prince, founder of the US private military contractor Blackwater, is seeking political support — and cash — to land a private army in Venezuela to assassinate Maduro and topple the government.
Prince was previously implicated in the failed Operation Gideon, involving the hiring of a mercenary corporation on behalf of Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido, to assassinate President Nicolas Maduro in 2020.
A crucial date for any such manoeuvre is January 10, the inauguration day for President Maduro, who won July’s presidential election with 52 per cent of the vote, an outcome subsequently audited and confirmed by the Venezuelan supreme court.
Defeated former presidential candidate Edmundo Gonzalez, who stood as extreme right-wing opposition figure Maria Corina Machado’s proxy owing to her legal disqualification as a candidate, has said he intends to return to Venezuela from Spain to take office as “elected president.” However, he currently faces an arrest warrant from the Attorney General’s Office on a range of charges.
The US only recently (November 19) declared Gonzalez as the legitimate president-elect of Venezuela, with the G7 group of countries also backing Gonzalez and promising to continue supporting “efforts by regional partners” to facilitate a “peaceful transition.”
Were Gonzalez to return for Maduro’s inauguration, the scene would be set for the extreme right-wing opposition to try to instigate violent street protests as it did in the days immediately following the July 28 presidential election, in which 27 people died, and extensive damage caused to public property was extensively damaged in several cities.
The solidarity movement in Britain must be prepared to defend Venezuela’s sovereignty against US interference in its affairs, including any renewed offensive of economic aggression by Trump when he assumes the presidency in 2025.