Natural disasters reveal more than the movement of tectonic plates: the strength of societies, the resilience of communities, and the political fault lines that shape whose suffering is seen and whose suffering is exploited. Within hours of the devastating earthquakes that struck Venezuela on 24 June 2026, social media and sections of the international press were already circulating familiar narratives. Before rescue operations could even begin in earnest, the disaster had been transformed into another battlefield in the long US-led campaign to undermine the Bolivarian process set in motion by Hugo Chávez’s election in 1998.

None of this should diminish the immense tragedy facing the Venezuelan people. Entire neighbourhoods have been devastated. Hundreds of buildings have collapsed. Hospitals, roads, bridges, and other public infrastructure are in ruins. Families continue to search for loved ones while rescue workers struggle against rain, aftershocks, and difficult road access. But solidarity requires more than sympathy. It requires truth. That is why red alert no. 22, ‘Truth Amid the Rubble’, examines some of the most common myths circulating about the earthquake and places them against the available evidence.

Myth One: Venezuela’s government has failed to respond effectively to the earthquake.

The scale of the catastrophe must be understood before any serious judgement can be made. The death toll climbs every day as first responders and volunteers sift through the debris, with tens of thousands still missing. Nearly two hundred buildings collapsed completely, with hundreds more partially destroyed. Hospitals that would normally receive the injured were themselves damaged. A major bridge and several roads were damaged in the state of La Guaira, where the earthquake struck the hardest of the six impacted states, making it extraordinarily difficult to move rescue equipment and teams into affected areas. Continuous rainfall and nearly 800 aftershocks have further complicated rescue operations while the partial collapse of the Caracas airport has forced international rescue teams to arrive via more distant airports and then travel by road. No country has unlimited emergency capacity in the face of destruction on this scale.

Yet Venezuela entered this disaster carrying an additional burden that few countries have ever experienced at this scale: years of economic warfare through unilateral coercive measures imposed principally by the United States and its allies. These measures have frozen more than $30 billion in Venezuelan public assets that could otherwise have strengthened disaster preparedness, modernised infrastructure, and financed emergency reserves. They have severely restricted the country’s ability to purchase specialised rescue equipment, heavy machinery, medicines, replacement parts, and construction materials and driven mass migration.

The tightening of US-driven sanctions in 2017 drove emigration and led to a profound drain of workers from key public services. United Nations Special Rapporteur Alena Douhan reported that by 2021 public services had lost between 30% to 50% of their personnel, including many doctors, nurses, engineers, teachers, judges, and other skilled professionals, and many public hospitals reported that between 50% to 70% of specialist posts were vacant. This loss of personnel weakened the country’s emergency capacity: fewer trained workers, heavier workloads for those who remained, and public services less able to respond when disaster struck.

The effects of natural disasters cannot be separated from the political and economic conditions under which they occur. Yet Venezuela is not a helpless victim. Despite the devastating toll on human life, the country slowly began to recover. After a 75% contraction in GDP between 2013 and 2021, Venezuela’s GDP grew by around 9% in 2024 and again in 2025. It moved from importing more than 70% of its food supply in 2017 to producing 96% domestically by March 2026. Oil revenue, which had fallen from $93 billion in 2012 to $4.2 billion in 2020, had recovered to around $18 billion in recent years. Life was not without significant challenges, nor had the country returned to pre-crisis levels, but – despite around 1,000 unilateral coercive measures that remain in place – Venezuela’s economy, infrastructure, public services, and the quality of life of many of its people had begun to improve – including disaster response.

Myth Two: The Venezuelan government is blocking humanitarian relief.

Perhaps the most widely circulated claim has been that Venezuelan authorities have deliberately prevented volunteers and aid from reaching affected communities. Yet modern search-and-rescue operations depend on careful coordination. Rescue dogs require silence to detect survivors beneath rubble. Heavy machinery needs clear access routes. Ambulances require roads free of congestion. The uncoordinated movement of thousands of civilians through disaster zones, however well intentioned, can obstruct rescue operations and cost lives.

Reports from the ground indicate that rescue vehicles were becoming trapped in civilian traffic. Journeys that normally take forty minutes took hours. Ambulances carrying critically injured victims were delayed by congested and impassable roads. Restricting access to disaster zones is, therefore, not evidence of repression but rather a standard emergency practice employed around the world.

At the same time, organised volunteer participation has been extensive from the start, with thousands formally registering after 26 June for coordinated relief efforts alongside professional emergency services, ensuring that solidarity strengthens rather than disrupts rescue operations. The question has never been whether civilians should help but whether assistance is organised in ways that save lives.

Myth Three: Affected communities are being neglected by the Venezuelan government.

On the first day of the tragedy, joint efforts by Civil Protection, the Bolivarian National Armed Forces (FANB), police, and victims’ families and communities responded and helped rescue 2,407 people from the most affected areas in La Guaira. By 1 July, one week after the earthquake, approximately 26,000 personnel from civil protection agencies, emergency services, the police, armed forces, and other public institutions had been deployed across the disaster zone. Roughly 17,000 volunteers had formally joined relief operations. Across the affected areas, 6,461 people have been rescued. Authorities have coordinated rescue efforts with over 4,000 foreign rescue personnel and at least 41 international delegations participating in humanitarian efforts. The humanitarian response has already directly delivered nearly 9 million kilogrammes of food, around 28,000 food parcels, and 3.2 million litres of drinking water to affected areas – numbers that rise significantly every day with ongoing relief efforts and daily reports from the National Assembly. More than 80,000 families have received assistance including food, transportation, medical care, psychological support, and emergency shelter.

Medical teams have treated more than 17,000 people in hospitals, field clinics, and emergency triage centres. Electrical service has largely been restored across affected areas. Claims that homes built through Gran Misión Vivienda Venezuela – the government’s flagship housing programme, which has provided housing for 5.2 million families – were poorly constructed fell apart when those built under prior governments and by private contractors suffered similar damage. Thirteen large shelters have been opened in La Guaira, with twelve more operating across Caracas, Miranda, and other affected states and expansion efforts underway. None of these achievements erase the enormous suffering that remains. But they show that, far from standing aside, Venezuela’s public institutions and thousands of organised citizens continue the relief effort under extraordinarily difficult conditions.

Myth Four: US concern for Venezuela can be separated from US hybrid warfare.

Every genuine humanitarian contribution deserves recognition, regardless of its source. But humanitarian gestures cannot be separated from the broader political reality nor from the historical record. The United States continues to impose sanctions that have systematically weakened Venezuela’s economy, restricted its access to international finance, blocked imports of critical goods, and frozen billions of dollars belonging to the Venezuelan people. One cannot simultaneously praise humanitarian assistance while maintaining policies that make humanitarian emergencies more severe.

Sanctions and other unilateral coercive measures are often politically effective precisely because they are invisible. Unlike bombs, they rarely produce dramatic images. Instead, they slowly erode public health systems, infrastructure, productive capacity, and state institutions over many years. When disaster eventually strikes, weakened institutions are then presented as evidence of governmental incompetence rather than the cumulative effect of deliberate economic warfare. The human cost of this economic warfare has been devastating, with US sanctions causing more than 40,000 deaths between 2017 and 2018 and placing 300,000 people at risk of the same fate because they lacked access to essential medicines or treatment.

Approximately 31 tonnes of Venezuelan gold – valued at about $1.95 billion in 2020 – remain held at the Bank of England after the United Kingdom aligned itself with Washington’s pressure campaign against Venezuela. The country also faces a reported debt burden of around $240 billion, including defaulted sovereign and PDVSA bonds, accrued interest, unpaid invoices, arbitration awards, and bilateral loans. Though the financial sanctions imposed in 2017 did not create this entire debt burden, they cut Venezuela off from US financial markets and severely constrained its capacity to service and restructure its obligations. The continued withholding of assets and the debt overhang hinder the country’s efforts to rebuild infrastructure, provide housing, and care for survivors with dignity.

The most meaningful humanitarian gesture today would not be another statement of concern. It would be the immediate lifting of all unilateral coercive measures and release of Venezuela’s frozen sovereign assets for reconstruction.

Myth Five: The earthquake proves that the Bolivarian process has failed.

The disaster has revealed the capacity of an organised society capable of collective action under extraordinary pressure. Communes, neighbourhood organisations, public health networks, food distribution systems, volunteer brigades, and local institutions built over decades have become indispensable to the emergency response. Across the country, organised communities have mobilised food, shelter, transport, medical care, and volunteers through structures that long predate the earthquake.

No society can eliminate the suffering produced by a disaster of this magnitude. But societies with organised communities are generally better able to withstand and respond to such crises than those that rely exclusively on markets and private initiative. This resilience did not emerge spontaneously. It rests upon decades of investment in public education, literacy, healthcare, and community organisation. Since the beginning of the Bolivarian process, millions of Venezuelans have gained access to education, illiteracy was eradicated, new public universities have expanded higher education, and public investment in healthcare has increased dramatically. Despite the damage inflicted by US-led hybrid warfare, these advances have strengthened not only social indicators but also the forms of collective organisation that become indispensable in moments of national emergency.

For the Venezuelan people, the following measures must be undertaken:

1. All unilateral coercive measures, including economic sanctions, imposed on Venezuela must be lifted immediately, and Venezuelan public assets that remain frozen, withheld, or otherwise inaccessible abroad must be released.
2. Foreign intervention of all forms must be ended.
3. Venezuela’s foreign debt must be cancelled.
4. Humanitarian assistance must be coordinated with Venezuela’s public institutions and organised communities rather than used as an instrument of political or military intervention.
5. International movements must continue to support the Venezuelan people long after international media attention inevitably shifts elsewhere.

Natural disasters cannot be prevented. But whether they become humanitarian catastrophes is shaped by political choices. The Venezuelan people now confront the immense challenge of rebuilding homes, schools, hospitals, and communities while bearing the consequences of decades of economic warfare. International solidarity must therefore mean more than sympathy: it must reject the myths pushed by Venezuela’s enemies, demand an end to the sanctions and asset restrictions that have weakened Venezuela’s capacity to respond, and defend the country’s right to recover, rebuild, and determine its own future free from external coercion.

Listen to ‘Santo José Gregorio’ by Daniel Santos.

If you enter a typical Venezuelan home, you’ll likely encounter a portrait or small statue of a distinctive, slender man in a black suit and hat, with a neat moustache, hands clasped behind his back, and a candle glowing beside him. Known affectionately as ‘The Doctor of the Poor’ and ‘The People’s Saint’, Saint José Gregorio Hernández (1864–1919) is not only a figure of Catholic devotion but one of the most recognisable images in Venezuelan popular culture, especially among the working class, who have long turned to him for healing and protection. In recent years, and particularly amid the Trump administration’s escalated attacks on Venezuela, this popular saint has taken on a new meaning.

Over a century after his death, Hernández’s canonisation by the Vatican on 19 October 2025 coincided with a new wave of imperialist aggression against Venezuela. In March 2025, the Trump administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act to target supposed members of Tren de Aragua as ‘alien enemies’, alleging – without presenting any evidence – that Venezuelan migrants in the United States had ties to the gang. Earlier that same month, around 250 Venezuelan migrants were deported to Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s Terrorism Confinement Centre (CECOT), a mega-prison condemned by human rights organisations for its concentration-camp-like conditions. Then, in late August 2025, the US began amassing the largest military deployment in the Caribbean since the October Crisis of 1962 (known in the West as the Cuban Missile Crisis). In the months since, the US has carried out a series of illegal strikes on small boats in waters off Venezuela that have killed more than eighty people. In this context, many Venezuelans have further embraced Saint José Gregorio as a symbol of their country’s steadfast capacity to overcome these great challenges.

Though he was not an artist, the significance of Saint José Gregorio for us lies in how a people under siege have made a religious figure into a symbol of popular devotion and national resistance. Today, representations of Saint José Gregorio are no longer confined to churches and the homes of devotees but appear on murals and billboards across the country and in the prints and figurines sold by street vendors, weaving his image into everyday life.

A Life in Service of the People

Sculpture by Francisco Narváez in honour of Saint José Gregorio Hernández, Central University of Venezuela, 1950.

José Gregorio Hernández Cisneros was born in 1864 in the small town of Isnotú, nestled in the Venezuelan Andes, just as the country was emerging from the devastation of the Federal War and refounding itself as the United States of Venezuela under a fragile federal constitution. One of seven children, he was the son of a pharmaceutical and livestock salesman and a housekeeper. From a young age, Hernández demonstrated exceptional intellectual promise. By the time he graduated as a medical doctor in 1888 – in the early years of the liberal modernising project that followed the long dictatorship of Antonio Guzmán Blanco – he had mastered English, French, Portuguese, German, and Italian, and had a working knowledge of Hebrew. Hernández had also studied philosophy, music, and theology at a time when the Venezuelan state was expanding secular education while negotiating its fraught relationship with the Catholic Church.

After graduating in 1888, Hernández briefly practised in Caracas, sharing a small room in La Pastora that served at once as bedroom, surgery, and even a makeshift tailor’s shop, and often giving his own meals to the neighbourhood’s poor. When his mentor, Dr Santos Dominici, offered to help him set up a proper consulting room in the capital, Hernández refused, saying that he wished to return to his native Isnotú. ‘One day, my own mother asked me to return to alleviate the pains of the humble peoples of our land. Now that I am a doctor, I realise that my place is there amongst my own’, Hernández told Dr Dominici. That August, he undertook the long, uncomfortable journey back to the Andes – travelling by boat from La Guaira along the coast and through Curaçao, across Lake Maracaibo to La Ceiba, then by mule into the interior – to work as a rural doctor. In letters from this period, he described caring for patients suffering from dysentery, asthma, tuberculosis, and rheumatism and struggling against the deeply entrenched superstitions that complicated people’s trust in medical treatment.

Hernández’s exceptional skill as a doctor and dedication to the people did not go unnoticed. While he was still searching for a place to establish his practice in the Andes, a decree by President Juan Pablo Rojas Paúl created the new Vargas Hospital in Caracas and authorised the state to send a young Venezuelan doctor of ‘good conduct and recognised aptitude’ to Paris to study the latest experimental sciences – microscopy, bacteriology, histology, and experimental physiology – and then return to modernise medical education at home. Hernández was chosen for this mission. In 1889 he travelled to France and worked in the laboratory of the eminent histologist Mathias Duval. Hernández returned home, bringing some of the first microscopes to the country, and became one of the pioneers of modern scientific medicine in Venezuela, especially in the fields of bacteriology and histology.

Alongside his scientific achievements, Hernández twice sought to join the priesthood, in 1908 and again in 1912. However, his own frail health kept him from completing his studies both times. He continued practising medicine, gaining widespread fame in Caracas for his selfless care for the poor, often covering the cost of his patients’ treatment himself. He also played a critical role tending to patients when the devastating Spanish flu pandemic ravaged the country in 1918, which claimed over 25,000 lives (around one per cent of the population).

On 29 June 1919, Hernández died tragically after being struck by a car. His life of selfless service and religious devotion, combined with his sudden death, immediately transformed him into a people’s saint whose significance for popular religion soon transcended Venezuela’s borders. Long before the Vatican deemed him a saint, the people had already canonised Saint José Gregorio.

The Splendour of Being

Palmira Correa, José Gregorio Hernández, n.d.

While primarily a physician, Saint José Gregorio also engaged with philosophy, developing a profoundly humanistic view of art that refused to separate beauty from ethics. In a society marked by liberal oligarchic power, latifundista (landowning) culture, and the uneven advance of capitalism, he treated aesthetics not as escape but as a question of how human dignity is defended and enlarged.

For Saint José Gregorio, beauty was the ‘esplendor del ser’ (splendour of being), which can only be given material form through actions oriented toward the good. In other words, beauty – as ethics – is not only something to behold but something to do in the world.

In 1912 he wrote the prose essay ‘Visión de arte’ (Vision of Art), which culminates in the narrator’s exalted reaction to a scene in which Christ performs the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes. The essay was originally published alongside a reproduction of Arturo Michelena’s monumental La multiplicación de los panes y los peces (The Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes, 1897), painted for the Basílica Menor de Santa Capilla in Caracas. In Michelena’s work, the miracle unfolds amid a gathering storm by the water, framed by palm trees, as people distribute food among themselves while Christ stands at the centre. This image grounds Hernández’s aesthetic ideal not in detached classical theory, but in the highest form of divine compassion and justice extended to those in need. Read through his understanding of aesthetic beauty as ethical action, the scene becomes an argument for social justice as splendour: beauty is realised when the hungry are fed, scarcity is answered by shared provision, and compassion takes material form among ordinary people. Splendour, then, is not confined to the canvas or the chapel. It is realised in acts of collective dignity – often forged amid turbulence, when the demand for it becomes most urgent.

A People’s Saint in Art and Culture

Mural of Saint José Gregorio Hernández by artist @hamktrazos, 2025. Photo: Daniel Hernández García.

The veneration of Hernández was, from the beginning, a grassroots phenomenon. While the intellectual elite also mourned his passing, it was the artisans, industrial workers, small business owners, and domestic workers who, in gratitude for his service and in awe of his piety, transformed him into a popular saint.

Newspapers reported that at his 1919 burial the crowds were so large that they prevented the motorcade from reaching the cemetery in Caracas. Some people insisted on carrying his coffin themselves, while others dropped flowers from their balconies as humble offerings. Tributes at his grave quickly turned into pilgrimages, with people travelling long distances to his grave site seeking improved health through his intercession. Belief in his power to perform miracles spread rapidly – stories of prayers answered and of dreams in which he appeared performing intricate medical operations on the sick. By the 1970s, the sheer number of candles burning near his tomb posed a fire hazard, and in 1975 his remains were moved to a church in central Caracas.

Hernández’s status as a popular saint was so immense that it transcended institutional opposition. In 1957, renowned Puerto Rican nationalist and singer Daniel Santos, known as a voice of the Caribbean working class, recorded the bolero ‘Santo José Gregorio’. In response, the Catholic Church pressured the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez to ban the song in Venezuela because the Vatican had not yet approved Hernández’s canonisation. Yet the song continued to circulate, a reminder that popular devotion and culture move faster than ecclesiastical approval.

Moreover, Hernández was incorporated into Venezuela’s largest popular spiritual movement, the syncretic devotion to María Lionza. He became a figure in one of the movement’s spiritual ‘courts’ – revered groups of spirits recognised for specific attributes – and was especially venerated for his healing. In neighbouring countries like Colombia, there is even a self-proclaimed congregation of gregorianos (followers of José Gregorio) who perform rituals in his name. These associations with spiritism and the esoteric world delayed his formal recognition by the Church. In October, President Nicolás Maduro even publicly criticised Church authorities, including Venezuelan Cardinal Baltazar Porras, for trying to obstruct the process. In the end, however, popular fervour prevailed.

Today, as imperialist aggression has intensified against Venezuela, Saint José Gregorio has arguably become one of the most represented figures in Venezuelan popular art, second only to the national hero Simón Bolívar. Weeks before he was canonised, hundreds of murals, graffiti, and sculptures of Hernández appeared throughout the country. Countless everyday artists and artisans created images of him, alongside works by famous sculptors and painters like Francisco Narváez, Marisol Escobar, and Alirio Palacios, further cementing his place in the national consciousness. Once a religious symbol of solidarity with the poor and the sick, Saint José Gregorio has become an expression of national pride, unity, and a people’s stubborn insistence on their own dignity in the face of imperialist aggression.

A Saint in Times of Peace and War

Left: Rosana Silva, Goyito Miliciano, 2025; Right: Giuliano Salvatore, José Gregorio Hernández, 2024.

Saint José Gregorio is often regarded as a man of peace, a notion fuelled not only by his pious life but also by the fact that his death coincided with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles on 28 June 1919, which ended World War I. Among his devotees, this coincidence is not accidental but providential: many believe that he consciously offered his life as an act of intercession to bring the war to an end. However, the saint’s actions during his life reveal not only a commitment to peace but also a profound commitment to national sovereignty. In 1902, when Britain, Germany, and Italy imposed a naval blockade on Venezuela to demand payment for foreign debt – an early example of the sort of gunboat diplomacy we are seeing today – President Cipriano Castro called on all citizens to unite and defend the homeland. According to historian Miguel Yaber, Saint José Gregorio was the first man to enlist for the militias in his local recruitment office, answering the call to take up arms to defend his country.

Perhaps today – as Venezuela once again faces an imperialist siege, with over eight million Venezuelans voluntarily joining the popular militias to defend the nation’s sovereignty – Saint José Gregorio still has a message for his people: sometimes we must fight to defend life and guarantee peace. The same image that once stood for quiet devotion now looks out from barrio walls and banners as a collective declaration that the Venezuelan people will not surrender.

Carlos Ron
Co-coordinator of Tricontinental Nuestra América

In February 2006, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez travelled to Havana to receive the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation’s José Martí Prize from Fidel Castro. In his speech, he likened Washington’s threats against Venezuela to dogs barking, saying, ‘Let the dogs bark, because it is a sign that we are on the move’. Chávez added, ‘Let the dogs of the empire bark. That is their role: to bark. Our role is to fight to achieve in this century – now, at last – the true liberation of our people’. Almost two decades later, the empire’s dogs continue to bark. But will they bite? That is the question that this red alert seeks to answer.

The Sound of Barking

In February 2025, the US State Department designated a criminal network called Tren de Aragua (Aragua Train) as a ‘foreign terrorist organisation’. Then, in July, the US Treasury Department added the so-called Cartel de los Soles (Cartel of the Suns) to the Office of Foreign Assets Control’s sanctions list as a ‘transnational terrorist group’. No previous US government report, either from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) or the State Department, had identified these organisations as a threat, and no publicly verifiable evidence has been offered to substantiate the claimed scale or coordination of either group. There is no evidence that Tren de Aragua is a coherent international operation. As for the Cartel de los Soles, the first time the name appeared was in 1993 in Venezuelan reporting on investigations of two National Guard generals – a reference to the ‘sun’ insignia on their uniforms – years before Hugo Chávez’s 1998 presidential victory. The Trump administration has alleged that these groups, working with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s government, are the primary traffickers of drugs into the US – while providing zero evidence for the connection. Moreover, reports from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and the DEA itself have consistently found Venezuelan groups to be marginal in global drug trafficking. Even so, the US State Department has offered a $50 million reward for information leading to Maduro’s arrest – the largest in the programme’s history.

The US has revived the blunt instrument of the ‘War on Drugs’ to pressure countries that are not yielding to its threats or that stubbornly refuse to elect right-wing governments. Recently, Trump has targeted Mexico and Colombia and has invoked their difficulties with the narcotics trade to attack their presidents. Though Venezuela does not have a significant domestic drug problem, that has not stopped Trump from attacking Maduro’s government with much more venom. In October 2025, the Venezuelan politician María Corina Machado of the Vente Venezuela (Come Venezuela) movement won the Nobel Peace Prize. Machado was ineligible to run for president in 2024 largely because she had made a series of treasonous statements, accepted a diplomatic post from another country in order to plead for intervention in Venezuela (in violation of Article 149 of the Constitution), and supported guarimbas (violent street actions in which people were beaten, burned alive, and beheaded). She has also championed unilateral US sanctions that have devastated the economy. The Nobel Prize was secured through the work of the Inspire America Foundation (based in Miami, Florida, and led by Cuban American lawyer Marcell Felipe) and by the intervention of four US politicians, three of them Cuban Americans (Marco Rubio, María Elvira Salazar, and Mario Díaz-Balart). The Cuban American connection is key, showing how this political network that is focused on the overthrow by any means of the Cuban Revolution now sees a US military intervention in Venezuela as a way to advance regime change in Cuba. This is, therefore, not just an intervention against Venezuela, but one against all those governments that the US would like to overthrow.

The Bite

In August 2025, the US military began to amass naval forces in the southern Caribbean, including Aegis-class destroyers and nuclear- powered attack submarines. In September it began a campaign of extrajudicial strikes on small motorboats in Caribbean waters, bombing at least thirteen vessels and killing at least fifty-seven people – without offering evidence of any drug trafficking links. By mid-October, the US had deployed more than four thousand troops off Venezuela’s coast and five thousand on standby in Puerto Rico (including F-35 fighter jets and MQ-9 reaper drones), authorised covert operations inside the country, and flown B-52 ‘demonstration missions’ over Caracas. In late October, the USS Gerald R. Ford carrier strike group was deployed to the region. Meanwhile, Venezuela’s government has mobilised the population to defend the country.

Five Scenarios for US Intervention

Scenario no. 1: the Brother Sam option. In 1964, the US deployed several warships off the coast of Brazil. Their presence emboldened General Humberto de Alencar Castelo Branco, chief of the Army General Staff, and his allies to stage a coup that ushered in a twenty-one-year dictatorship. But Venezuela is a different terrain. In his first term, Chávez strengthened political education in the military academies and anchored officer training in defence of the 1999 Constitution. A Castelo Branco figure is therefore unlikely to save the day for Washington.

Scenario no. 2: the Panama option. In 1989, the US bombed Panama City and sent in special operations troops to capture Manuel Noriega, Panama’s military leader, and bring him to a US prison while US-backed politicians took over the country. Such an operation would be harder to replicate in Venezuela: its military is far stronger, trained for protracted, asymmetric conflicts, and the country boasts sophisticated air defence systems (notably the Russian S-300VM and Buk-M2E surface-to-air systems). Any US air campaign would face sustained defence, making the prospect of downed aircraft – a major loss of face – one Washington is unlikely to risk.

Scenario no. 3: the Iraq option. A ‘Shock and Awe’ bombing campaign against Caracas and other cities to rattle the population and demoralise the state and military, followed by attempts to assassinate senior Venezuelan leadership and seize key infrastructure. After such an assault, Nobel Peace Prize winner Machado would likely declare herself ready to take charge and align Venezuela closely with the US. The inadequacy of this manoeuvre is that the Bolivarian leadership runs deep: the roots of the defence of the Bolivarian project run through working-class barrios, and the military would not be immediately demoralised – unlike in Iraq. As the interior minister of Venezuela, Diosdado Cabello, recently noted, ‘Anyone who wants to can remember Vietnam… when a small but united people with an iron will were able to teach US imperialism a lesson’.

Scenario no. 4: the Gulf of Tonkin option. In 1964, the US escalated its military engagement in the Vietnam War after an incident framed as an unprovoked attack on US destroyers off the country’s coast. Later disclosures revealed that the National Security Agency (NSA) fabricated intelligence to manufacture a pretext for escalation. The US claims it is now conducting naval and air ‘training exercises’ near Venezuelan territorial waters and airspace. On 26 October, the Venezuelan government said it had received information about a covert CIA plan to stage a false-flag attack on US vessels near Trinidad and Tobago to elicit a US response. Venezuelan authorities warned of US manoeuvres and said they will not give in to provocations or intimidation.

Scenario no. 5: the Qasem Soleimani option. In January 2020, a US drone strike ordered by Trump killed Major General Qasem Soleimani, head of Iran’s Quds Force. Soleimani was one of Iran’s most senior officials and was responsible for its regional defence strategy across Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza, and Afghanistan. In an interview on 60 Minutes, former US chargé d’affaires for Venezuela James Story said, ‘The assets are there to do everything up to and including decapitation of [the] government’ – a plain statement of intent to assassinate the president. After the death of President Hugo Chávez in 2013, US officials predicted that the project would collapse. Twelve years have now passed, and Venezuela continues along the path set forth under Chávez, advancing its communal model whose resilience rests not only on the revolution’s collective leadership but also on strong popular organisation. The Bolivarian project has never been a one-person show.

China and Russia are unlikely to permit a strike on Venezuela without pressing for immediate UN Security Council resolutions, and both routinely operate in the Caribbean, including joint exercises with Cuba and global missions such as China’s Mission Harmony 2025.

We hope that none of these scenarios come to pass and that the United States takes its military options off the table. But hope alone is not enough – we must work to expand the camp of peace.

Alejandra Laprea (Venezuela), El acuerpamiento de las mujeres es nuestra estrategia de defensa (Women’s Embodied Solidarity Is Our Defence Strategy), 2022.

They say we are an unusual threat, and it is true. We are an unusual threat because we are politically educated, because we are conscious, because we don’t want to keep being [the US’s] backyard, and because we want to continue being free, sovereign, and independent.

– Ayarit Rojas, spokeswoman for the Antímano Ecosocialist Revolutionary Infantry for Habitat and Housing (Infantería Revolucionaria Ecosocialista por Hábitat y Vivienda Antímano), Venezuela.

A clear reconfiguration of global power relations has been underway since the first decades of the twenty-first century, marked by the weakening of the United States’ unipolar dominance. Its crisis of hegemony is as ferocious as its response: together with its allies in the political, military, and economic bloc that makes up the Global North, the US has tried to compensate for its loss of economic and technological power with militaristic domination.² These countries have a shared history of violence against the peoples of the Global South, such as the genocide of the indigenous peoples of the Americas in the colonial era, the transatlantic slave trade, the use of nuclear bombs against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people.

This exercise of disciplining and subjugating entire populations takes many forms, such as territorial occupation and militarisation, imposing unilateral coercive measures (UCMs),³ sanctions, and genocide. This unbridled phase of capitalism, in which cruelty is wielded as a form of control and domination, is what we have designated as hyper-imperialism.⁴

A distinctive feature of UCMs as an instrument of power is that they do not kill people directly – instead, they operate by financially, commercially, and politically isolating the targeted countries, triggering supply shortages and economic strangulation. UCMs prevent targeted countries from accessing financial resources as well as the most fundamental goods and services necessary for sustaining life, such as water, food, electricity, medicine, and medical supplies. Beyond the impact of the decreed sanctions and UCMs, there is often overcompliance by the individuals, companies, and organisations with whom impacted countries seek to establish relations, whether economic, political, or cultural. In other words, for fear of becoming the target of sanctions and UCMs themselves, these entities choose to avoid or limit their relations with the countries subject to them beyond the confines outlined by sanctions and UCMs.

This model of intervention has intensified exponentially as global disputes have sharpened. In the past two decades alone, sanctions have increased by 933%.⁵ The United States is leading in their application, imposing over three times more sanctions than any other country or international body (15,373 as of April 2024). These measures are inflicted upon one third of all countries, including more than 60% of all low-income countries.⁶ The countries with the most UCMs are Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Syria, and Venezuela.

The isolation that UCMs produce is a form of collective punishment: they are mechanisms of political control used to violently discipline and subordinate entire populations and disconnect them from global networks of commercial, financial, and political interdependence. Furthermore, UCMs are deployed alongside media campaigns aimed at stigmatising the targeted countries. In a cunning reversal, the imperialist power accuses the governments and populations affected by UCMs of being responsible for the very violence to which they are subjected. These countries are typically accused – without any evidence – of not supporting the war on drugs or fighting organised crime, of being undemocratic, etc. – and the accusation alone is enough to warrant the punishment. This reversal provides cover for the criminalisation of and discrimination against populations, leaders, and governments that do not align themselves with the interests of the hegemonic powers. These countries are targeted because they resist the neocolonial, capitalist, and patriarchal power of hyper-imperialism by working to build their own sovereignty.

UCMs are considered a strategy of ‘hybrid warfare’, ‘asymmetric warfare’, or ‘unconventional warfare’. They operate on all areas of social life – especially on the bodies, hearts, and minds of the population. They are an undeclared part of war that does not recognise borders, permeating the entirety of society and exerting control over all spheres of social reproduction and organisation.⁷ All studies and reports from national and international experts and UN agencies consulted for this dossier highlight that sanctions as well as UCMs disproportionately impact the most vulnerable sectors of the population – in particular, women, children, the elderly, persons with disabilities, and LGBTQIA+ people. While the lack of employment and sources of income impact the entire population, women are disproportionately impacted by the destruction and weakening of the infrastructure of social services. This process directly affects social reproduction, especially care work, which is performed almost exclusively by women. Sanctions and UCMs clearly reinforce patriarchy and other forms of social discrimination.

In 2023, the third Dilemmas of Humanity Conference took place in South Africa. At the panel ‘Feminism and Struggles against Patriarchy’, the lasting impact of imperialism on the lives of women and the LGBTQIA+ people came up repeatedly. Women from the Arab Maghreb region and Palestine described the horror of imperialist territorial occupation, the difficulty of surviving in conditions of inhumanity, the permanent threat of death and sexual violence, the collapse of health services, the cutting off of water supplies, and the consequences that these conditions have on social reproduction and women’s lives. Although they may not all face the constant threat of death from weapons of war, according to participants from Venezuela, Cuba, and other African and Asian countries, the UCMs imposed by the United States have a similar impact on women’s social reproduction and their ability to organise popular struggles and participate in political life in each territory. In this dossier, we analyse, from a feminist perspective, the economic and political impact of UCMs as imperialist mechanisms of subordination and control on women in some of the most targeted countries.

The process of engaging in dialogue with women from impacted countries involved overcoming various logistical and contextual barriers. Nonetheless, we established spaces for meaningful exchange in Venezuela, where women shared their experiences and strategies for resistance, reaffirming their commitment to sovereignty and communal life. We interviewed feminist leaders from various popular peasant and worker organisations, including the Antímano Ecosocialist Revolutionary Infantry for Habitat and Housing, the Venezuelan Housing Assembly Jorge Rodríguez Padre (Asamblea Viviendo Venezolanos Jorge Rodríguez Padre), and the Heroines Without Borders Organisation (Organización Heroínas sin Fronteras). The Simón Bolívar Institute for Peace and Solidarity among Peoples (Instituto Simón Bolívar para la Paz y Solidaridad entre los Pueblos), based in Venezuela, provided key support facilitating opportunities for connection and exchange, including in the most adverse circumstances. This process also reinforced the importance of documenting these struggles in order to advance collective resistance.

Valentina Machado and Valentina Lasalvia (Uruguay), Untitled, 2021.

Economic Impact: Forced Underdevelopment and Economic Decline

UCMs are usually directed against countries that attempt to affirm their sovereignty by prioritising self-sufficiency and resource nationalisation. These countries resist integration into the neocolonial economic structure that seeks to maintain Western dominance while keeping Global South countries underdeveloped and economically dependent through mechanisms such as debt, trade imbalances, and foreign control of resources. The goal is that economic decline will provoke social uprisings that facilitate regime change to governments that are friendly to imperialism.

UCMs have adverse economic impacts on targeted countries, such as by reducing per capita GDP, increasing inflation rates, and causing fluctuations in foreign direct investment, foreign aid, and financial subsidies. Income inequality rises, manufacturing sector employment drops, and household consumption declines, among other disruptions. Together, these impacts provoke economic collapse and a consequent increase in poverty. Here are some examples:

Cuba. The six-decade-long US-imposed economic, commercial, and financial blockade against Cuba is structured around the longest-standing and most comprehensive UCMs in modern history. The blockade was intensified when US President Donald Trump reversed the measures implemented by his predecessor, Barack Obama, to ease restrictions and placed the country back on the US State Department’s list of supposed state sponsors of terrorism in 2021. This act of hostility continued under Joe Biden, who left Cuba on this list until his final week in office, and was again repeated on Trump’s first day in office during his second term, on 20 January 2025, when Cuba was added back to the list just days after it had been removed. The blockade inflicts monthly economic damage of US $421 million and to date has cost the Cuban economy an accumulated total of $1.5 trillion. Without the blockade, it is estimated that Cuba’s GDP would have grown by 8% in 2023.⁸

Venezuela. More than 1,000 UCMs and other punitive and restrictive measures have been imposed on Venezuela, which have severely impacted its oil and other productive industries as well as foreign trade since 2014.⁹ In 2020–2021, the oil sector produced less than 500,000 barrels per day, compared to the 2.2–2.3 million barrels per day produced between 2008 and 2016. Losses range from 797,000 barrels per day, equivalent to $16.4 billion per year at current prices, to 1,800,000 barrels per day, equivalent to $48 billion per year at current prices.¹⁰ In 2021, the Venezuelan government’s revenues totalled 10% of those in the year that UCMs were first imposed. Hyperinflation has provoked the devaluation of the national currency, with a consequent decrease in wages, and has affected imports.¹¹

Iran. From 2010 to 2015, Iran exported between 700,000 and 1.4 million barrels of oil per day. Following the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (commonly known as the Iran nuclear deal) in 2015, this increased to 2.5 million barrels per day from 2016 to 2018. With the return of sanctions and UCMs after the US withdrew from the agreement, crude oil exports fell by 57% in 2018–2019 alone. Between 2005 and 2021, the country’s estimated annual foreign exchange earnings fell by more than 62%, from $66 billion (2005–2011) to $25 billion (2019–2021).¹²

Syria. Once one of the largest oil producers in the region, with 385,000–500,000 barrels per day (of which it exported about 100,000 until 2010), the country has become a net importer of crude oil since 2011, when the conflict began. From 2000 to 2010, the Syrian economy grew an average of approximately 5% per year. In contrast, its GDP fell from $252.5 billion in 2010 to just $11 billion in 2020 – 4% of its 2010 level. The conflict has caused severe damage to and destruction of productive capacity, property, and infrastructure, with a large section of the population becoming displaced and entering refugee status. UCMs compounded the situation, causing the economy to shrink by around 90%. Between 2016–2019, the economy improved slightly, with a weak average annual growth of 0.6%. However, the intensification of UCMs and the state’s inability to access a large part of its resources because they were outside the territory it controlled, along with the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, caused an economic contraction of 3.9% in 2020.¹³ UCMs were eased once a pro-Western government came into power in Damascus at the end of 2024.

Zimbabwe. Since 2001, the country has faced UCMs imposed by the US and its allies directed at key sectors of the productive economy such as mining, manufacturing, tourism, and agriculture. In 2000, the country registered a trade surplus of $155 billion (around 74% of GDP), with an increase of 1.44% in overall production. In 2010, following the imposition of additional UCMs and other measures, the country’s trade balance fell to less than 23.8% and has remained in the negative ever since. The deindustrialisation caused by UCMs has resulted in severe economic contraction (from −3.1% in 2000 to −17.7% in 2008). The economic collapse has provoked acute unemployment, a drop in per capita income, and the loss of skilled professionals (currently, vacancy rates range between 30%–50% in different sectors). Furthermore, company closures and worker layoffs affected more than 610,000 people between 2005 and 2020. In 2008, inflation soared from 56 percent to over 230 million percent, causing the public system to collapse and rendering the government incapable of providing essential services, from healthcare and transportation to electricity and education.¹⁴

Export disruptions caused by UCMs severely impact women’s livelihoods because women in targeted countries in the Global South are overrepresented in both precarious and formal work in export-oriented industries such as textiles, garment production, leather goods, and electronics assembly.¹⁵ When UCMs create economic hardship, women are the first to be laid off from their jobs, which increases their dependence on family members for financial support and thereby restricts their autonomy.¹⁶

The growing economic crises faced by targeted countries force many people to emigrate in search of better working conditions. Through this process, women, children, and gender-diverse populations are at risk of becoming targets of human trafficking, illegal exploitation, organised crime, xenophobia, and gender-based violence.¹⁷ The refugee and migrant population is relegated to informal, unskilled, and low-paid jobs where, due to discriminatory hiring practices, women are again disproportionately affected.¹⁸

Luana Fernandes (Brazil), Mujeres resistentes (Resistant Women), 2022.

Induced Shortages and Food Insecurity

From the moment Comandante Chávez died, the onslaught began to intensify with an economic war against the national currency that caused hyperinflation, and everything became more expensive and then grew scarce. All of this rearranged the social dynamics. … As women who were at the forefront of the Bolivarian Revolution… we had to withdraw from the community struggle, the social struggle, from our own organisations, from our own dynamics of regular meetings, assemblies and everything, to go wait in long lines to be able to buy food. … Lines of three or four hours in the sun, waiting to see if they’ll sell me flour, sugar, oil, or whatever was available at the moment.

– Laura Franco, Simón Bolívar Institute, Venezuela.

Restrictions caused by UCMs also impact food production, in many cases imposing bans on the import of farm machinery, fertilisers, and seeds and leading to shortages in fuel and water for irrigation. These factors result in higher food prices, increased inflation, the creation of parallel markets, and a profound food crisis that disproportionately impacts the most vulnerable sectors of the population. UCMs also include extortion mechanisms, such as restrictions imposed on private food providers, the criminalisation of businesses, and confiscation by the international financial system of money intended to pay food suppliers.

In Cuba, in 2019–2020, fuel shortages prevented 12,399 hectares of rice from being planted, causing the production of this staple good to fall by more than 30,000 tonnes. Similarly, the lack of fuel affected transport, impeding the production of 2 million litres of milk and 481 tonnes of meat, compromising the country’s basic food supply.¹⁹ Furthermore, the absence of fertilisers and pesticides has led to a 40% drop in the historical yield of various crops, leading to a 81%, 61%, and 49% decrease in the production of rice, eggs, and milk respectively since 2019.²⁰

In countries impacted by UCMs, food insecurity is also intensified because of restrictions on the import of food and the collapse of direct investment in the sector. In Venezuela, there has been a severe drop in food imports since 2014, from $10 billion that year to less than $1 billion in 2019 – a decrease of more than 90%.²¹ Cuba reports paying 76% more for the same amount of food imports in 2024 compared to 2019.²²

According to UNICEF, between 2016 and 2022, restrictions on food imports in Venezuela caused a steady increase in malnutrition, with over 2.5 million people facing acute food insecurity.²³ In 2019, there was a sharp decline in food imports of almost 90%, resulting in widespread undernourishment.²⁴ In 2017, the US financial system blocked the shipment of 18 million boxes of subsidised food to Venezuela from the Local Food Production and Provision Committees programme (Comités Locales de Abastecimiento y Producción, CLAP), a programme launched in 2016 in response to the food shortages caused by the economic war. The same year, a total of 23 Venezuelan financial operations intended for the purchase of food, basic supplies, and medicine were suspended by international banks.²⁵ Food supply has been further compromised by the operational collapse of state-owned enterprises, the agricultural sector’s lack of access to intermediate products, fuel shortages that impede both production and the distribution of finished products to markets, and a drop in workers’ purchasing power.

Under UCMs, Syria also confronted a severe food crisis. According to the World Food Programme (WFP), 12 million Syrians – over half of the population – experienced food insecurity in 2021, up 51% from 2019. As part of her report on Syria, the UN special rapporteur on the negative impact of unilateral coercive measures on the enjoyment of human rights, Alena F. Douhan, revealed that between 2020 and 2021, there was a 48% increase in malnutrition among children under five years of age while over 10% of pregnant and breastfeeding women were malnourished.²⁶

The food crisis has also been a key concern in Zimbabwe since 2001, both in terms of accessibility and affordability, with a 29% increase in the proportion of the population experiencing food insecurity from 1995 to 2003. The situation was even worse by the end of 2020, reaching over 60% of the population. By 2017, 30% of the rural population required food assistance.²⁷

Food insecurity hits the most vulnerable sectors hardest, where women are overrepresented. In Venezuela, 65% of poor households are monoparental, with single mothers as the head of the household.²⁸ In these homes, access to food is largely dependent on women, a task to which they dedicate a large amount of time and effort and is the cause of significant stress. Thus, the impact on access to food also results in a differential impact based on gender.

In these situations, food distribution policies are extremely relevant. As of 2020, 88% of Venezuelan households (7.5 million families) were receiving food supplements provided by CLAP.²⁹ In addition to food distribution and supply policies to address food insecurity, in some of these countries government policy to ensure food and agricultural self-sufficiency have become a priority. In Iran, food self-sufficiency rates ranged from 53–82% between 2000 and 2012 according to the WFP. Currently, the country is still dependent on food imports, with a self-sufficiency rate of approximately 85%.³⁰ However, the reimposition of UCMs in 2018, together with trade and financial restrictions by foreign banks, has significantly disrupted the supply of seeds, fertilisers, and agricultural equipment needed for production.

The Venezuelan government has made significant efforts to reverse its dependence on food imports. According to the National Superintendency for Agrofood Management (Superintendencia Nacional de Gestión Agroalimentaria), in just a few years Venezuela went from importing 85% of food for domestic consumption to producing 97% of the food that the Venezuelan people take home every day.³¹

Daily Guerrero Hernández (Cuba), Habla, callar duele más (Speak Up; Staying Quiet Hurts More), 2021.

The Dismantling of Social Infrastructure

Beyond impeding the transport of people and goods like food, the lack of fuel and inability to obtain parts for strategic areas of production and infrastructure affect the sustainability of hydrocarbon, energy, and drinking water production and distribution systems. This process has a critical impact on the population’s access to essential services.

Special Rapporteur Alena Douhan noted that UCMs prevent targeted countries from acquiring parts to maintain infrastructure vital for everyday life. In acts of overcompliance, foreign companies and financial institutions refuse to supply construction materials, replacement parts, and software for power plants, refineries, and water pumping stations – or they block financial transactions for the purchase of such goods and services.³² As a result, due to their inability to provide maintenance and improvements to distribution plants and infrastructure, these countries face severe shortages of electricity, fuel, and drinking water, leading to frequent power outages.

In Syria, electricity is available between two and four hours per day on average.³³ In Cuba, the energy crisis has worsened, and in 2024, days were recorded in which over 50% of the island was without power. In both countries, the outages are mainly due to a shortage of fuel, resulting from the lack of foreign currency to import it; frequent breakdowns in the country’s thermoelectric power plants; and a chronic lack of investment. In recent months, Cuba has received solidarity aid from the People’s Republic of China, which donated 69 tonnes of radiators, motors, parts, and other accessories to support the recovery of the island’s electrical system.³⁴

Trade and financial restrictions resulting from UCMs also create challenges for acquiring mechanical and electrical equipment for water and sewage projects, which affects populations’ access to water and sanitation. In Venezuela, though an estimated 90% of households are connected to the national water system, there are frequent disruptions to the electricity supply. According to Douhan’s 2021 report, the minister responsible for water services disclosed that 52% of the technology used in the water distribution system was from the US, while 29% was from Germany and Switzerland. Because of the increasing difficulty of procuring replacement parts and carrying out maintenance work, only 50% of distribution stations were operational. This meant that water had to be rationed in order to ensure that it reached everyone.

In Syria, only 50% of the country’s water and sanitation systems work properly due to the destruction and lack of maintenance of the power system and reduced electricity generation capacity. In 2022, Douhan visited the country and observed that, in addition to having only two hours of electricity per day, primary and secondary schools serving hundreds of students in the rural city of Homs have no running water. Drinking water allocation has been reduced to 30–40 litres per day, compared to 130 litres per day prior to 2011.³⁵

In Zimbabwe, water scarcity also has severe consequences. Reports indicate that in 2019, 77.1% of households lacked access to improved sources of clean water, with disparities between rural (67.9%) and urban (97.3%) areas. The water shortage has aggravated epidemics such as cholera and typhoid fever (especially in 2008 and 2018), with a combined death toll of more than 3,000 people, while putting more than 100,000 others at risk.³⁶

Paulina Veloso (Chile), Untitled, 2021.

The Precarisation of Health

UCMs reduce states’ capacity to sustain public services that are essential for their most vulnerable populations. Their right to health is hindered because of restricted access to electricity, water, food, personal hygiene products, diapers, sanitary pads, medicine, health clinics, and more – all of which are necessary for a healthy life.

In Venezuela, for instance, the ban on imports of supplies and replacement parts affects the operation of medical equipment, currently only 20% of which is in optimal working order. Another consequence was the shortage of vaccines against measles, yellow fever, and malaria in 2017–2018.³⁷ Furthermore, UCMs impeded the operation of the Venezuelan Institute of Social Security’s High-Cost Medication programme (Medicamentos de Alto Costo): while in 2014 the programme distributed 535,071 medications, in 2020 it provided a mere 64,078 – an almost 90% reduction in coverage.³⁸ Yirley Rodríguez, a Venezuelan social worker, popular feminist, mother, and caregiver, told us how, while she was pregnant, she worried about ‘not being able to get things needed for the birth and the baby. … I couldn’t get all the food I needed, [and there were] medicines I couldn’t find’. Douhan reports similar conditions in Syria.³⁹

CITGO, a US-based subsidiary of Venezuela’s national oil company, financially supported key social programmes to vulnerable populations, such as making treatment available to persons with disabilities – especially for complex medical and surgical procedures outside the country. When it was usurped as part of the UCMs imposed on the country, this had a particularly harsh impact not only on vulnerable populations but also on their predominantly female caregivers.⁴⁰

In the face of these difficulties, one solution has been to turn to natural medicine to alleviate some of the harmful effects of the blockade. Marta of the All Hands on the Harvest Programme (Programa Todas las Manos a la Siembra) described the importance of using plants to treat illnesses, without denying the importance of conventional medicine: ‘Scientific, technical, ancestral, and popular knowledge should go hand in hand, always working in conjunction to obtain better results’.

The reproductive health of both women and sexually diverse populations is particularly affected by UCMs in a number of ways, such as by limiting access to Pap tests, thereby making the early detection of cervical and breast cancer difficult for thousands of women and in many cases resulting in their deaths, and impeding the acquisition and free distribution of antiretroviral therapy for treating HIV. Similarly, the free and mass distribution of oral contraceptives, condoms, intrauterine devices, and other forms of family planning and STI prevention have been hindered, increasing the chances of unplanned pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections.⁴¹

Venezuela’s maternal mortality rate, which had been decreasing until 2014, started to rise again after the application of UCMs and only returned to previous levels after the pandemic.⁴² In Zimbabwe,⁴³ where health indicators have declined to critical levels since the imposition of UCMs, the maternal mortality rate was 614 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2014 and may have reached as high as 314 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2020 according to World Bank model estimates, still among the highest in the world. The infant mortality rate is also very high: 29 per 1,000 live births.⁴⁴

Cuba’s free and universal healthcare system, one of the pillars of the revolutionary process, has also been devastated by the embargo. However, even after the COVID-19 crisis, the country maintains an elevated life expectancy of 73.7 years, similar to the average for the Americas and higher than the world average.⁴⁵ Because of the excellent training of Cuban healthcare workers, 71% of whom are women, healthcare services account for 71% of the country’s total exports. Cuba’s medical missions reached sixty countries during the pandemic but had to withdraw from some because of the ‘sustained smear campaign by the Trump administration’, as a 2021 OXFAM report stated.⁴⁶

UCMs severely affect access to medicine in Cuba, where 51% of the 651 medicines included on the country’s National List of Essential Medicines (Lista Nacional de Medicamentos Esenciales) are not available. There is also a scarcity of contraceptives, condoms, medicines for pregnant women, diagnostic tools, pregnancy tests, and tests for sexually transmitted diseases.⁴⁷ As Indira Pino describes, ‘We suffer because of medicine shortages. The pharmacies are empty because it’s hard for our country to get the raw materials. For example, the materials used to make sanitary napkins aren’t good quality, and that causes problems for women during their menstrual cycles’.⁴⁸

Though Iran produces around 95% of its medications and basic vaccines as a measure to alleviate the impact of UCMs, like Venezuela it suffers from a lack of access to life-saving medicines, supplies, and equipment for more rare or complex diseases.⁴⁹ Meanwhile, in Zimbabwe, 70% of essential medication depends on imports, and there is an alarming shortage of healthcare workers, with an 89% vacancy rates for midwives, 64% for doctors in the public healthcare sector, and 49% for clinical nursing instructors.⁵⁰ Syria’s pre-war pharmaceutical production exceeded 87% of the country’s needs and provided exports to seventy-three countries, but today it suffers from a significant shortage of medical equipment and a severe deterioration of the public healthcare system. This forces people to turn to the private system, which the most vulnerable populations, including women, cannot afford.⁵¹

The genocidal intentions of the blockade became clearer when, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, additional UCMs were imposed on Cuba – including banning the import of ventilators and oxygen ­– making it more difficult to obtain test kits and personal protective equipment.⁵² Venezuela and Iran experienced similar difficulties.⁵³

The Added Burden of Care Work

The burden of domestic, caregiving and work-related tasks has, of course, increased. First, we women go out to work all day with two or three jobs, then at night when we get back we have to do domestic work, not just washing, scrubbing, cooking, but also we have to study with our children… if we have parents or grandparents at home, we have to take care of them; they are our responsibility. That takes a toll, and, well, lastly, we must also be wives to our husbands.

– Commune resident and peasant leader (44 years old).⁵⁴

Imperialist war, in its hybrid form, has a significant impact on daily life and the ability to balance work, care, leisure, and political participation. This silent war has reaffirmed the sexual division of labour, impacting how time is used and lengthening women’s unpaid working hours as they take on a greater burden of care.⁵⁵

This situation has a profound impact on women, who absorb part of the crisis through unpaid work. Women’s responsibility to manage the needs of the household demands more and more time as the crisis deepens, to the detriment of time spent on paid work and other activities. This is evidenced, for instance, in the day-to-day difficulties caused by water shortages. Women are generally responsible for obtaining and managing drinking water for their families, which can be much more demanding when water is scarce. As Yirley Rodríguez told us in the case of Venezuela:

The lack of water disrupts our daily lives, and much more time is needed for care work because getting water has become very different. It has become very difficult to balance our responsibilities as mothers with the time spent working at our jobs and the time doing political work – it’s a mess. Because the priority is water, when the water arrives you have to go out and wash and store [what’s left], regardless of what time it is. This has a negative impact on our ability to organise and balance our time and leads to an overload of care work.

Elsa Rakoto (France/ Sawtche Afro-feminist Collective), Todas las feministas en lucha contra el imperialismo (All Feminists in Struggle against Imperialism), 2021.

Women at the Forefront of Social Organisation

Indeed, in the face of adversity caused by sanctions and UCMs, women become a safety net, providing collective solutions within the framework of community organisation and ensuring the sustainability of life within their territories. When life becomes difficult, women step up to organise the provision of healthcare in their communities as well as distributing food and handling problem-solving. In so doing, they demonstrate resistance, reinvention, and resiliency in myriad forms.

In the most difficult moments of the economic war against Venezuela, women who lead processes of community organisation became key in the implementation of state food distribution policies throughout the country. For instance, in 2016, the CLAP programme was created to replace private food distribution networks. This new public distribution mechanism incorporated community participation with a novel component of popular oversight. By promoting the delivery of food baskets directly to households without the private sector as an intermediary, this programme helped build social and familial organisation, especially among women, who are still largely responsible for the unpaid tasks linked to social and domestic reproduction. It is not a coincidence that women anchor the front line that, through the CLAP programme, ensures food distribution to communities in the city and the countryside. Furthermore, over 70% of the people who participate in communes (comunas) and communal councils (consejos comunales)⁵⁶ are women, who have a leading role in resisting imperialist aggression and patriarchy. ⁵⁷

The All Hands on the Harvest Programme (Programa Todas las Manos a la Siembra) was created by the Ministry of Popular Power for Education in 2009 during Venezuela’s oil crisis to increase knowledge in schools about food sovereignty, sustainable production, and environmental issues. It was also created to support local food production processes and projects. Marta, a member of the All Hands on the Harvest Programme, told us that during the worst moment of the economic war, with the support of the Sovereign Country Markets (Ferias del Campo Soberano) programme, agroecology schools organised local popular markets where they sold food at lower prices. This programme, which ended up being an important strategy to alleviate the inflation crisis and food shortages, was also the government’s response in rural areas to distribute low-cost protein, fruits, and vegetables in 1,500 prioritised rural communities in which women farmers played a leading role.

Nevertheless, it is important not to romanticise these efforts. Although women are exemplary for their work sustaining life in the midst of crisis, this tendency also reinforces the sexual division of political labour. While women have an important presence and leadership role in community organising, this does not necessarily extend to other spheres of political representation and state management. Community tasks extend women’s unpaid workday beyond the home. They widen the gender inequality gap in relation to work and income, with its correlate represented in the feminisation of poverty and overrepresentation in informal labour markets. Furthermore, these tasks often obstruct women’s right to leisure, recreation, and a good life.⁵⁸ As the Cuban transportation organiser Yunisleydis Duvergel explains: ‘It is much harder for women, as they generally have the weight of domestic responsibilities; not being able to rely on transportation generates greater stress’.⁵⁹ The blockade doesn’t create gender inequalities, but it does worsen the conditions under which women must perform the domestic and care work that is traditionally assigned to them.

Conclusions: Resistance and Community

Women besieged by hyper-imperialism have developed forms of resistance and confrontation based on a return to the land and an alternative, familial, and cooperative economy. Women’s work as the connective tissue of society and communal organisation has played a central role in sustaining and deepening revolutionary processes and confronting external and internal attacks that seek to create terror and discourage hope. This work has taken place in the face of great adversity. Ayarit Rojas is a spokeswoman for the Antímano Ecosocialist Revolutionary Infantry for Habitat and Housing, a Venezuelan women-led grassroots organisation that has implemented more than 1,600 projects to construct new ecosocialist communities and housing based on a system of participatory design since 2011. She tells us about the projects that the organisation has managed to complete through effort, creativity, and courage, despite the severe lack of access to imported construction materials as a result of the blockade:

We were classified as an unusual threat. The induced shortages, the hyperinflation, all of this, led us to become stronger every day and look for alternatives to continue moving forward. In terms of construction, the UCMs were chaotic and we as women were the ones with the triple burden of home, work, and construction duties on our shoulders – it was too much. Nevertheless, we achieved our goal: today we have our dignified housing and habitat thanks to this revolutionary process.

Despite facing adverse economic, productive, and social consequences, women play a decisive role in the face of the psychological war that this reality provokes. Women’s participation, which on a daily basis politicises precarity and collectivises survival, is a critical factor in resisting the neoliberal pedagogy of cruelty, abandonment, and hyper-individualism. As Yirley Rodríguez told us:

The strength to move forward in this difficult context [comes from] community relations and this common sense that still prevails in Venezuela, this great consensus for collective life, to solve problems in community, to support each other, like this great social fabric that the Bolivarian Revolution has been constructing… What gives me strength is that, here, there are political conditions to communalise life; there is a different proposal for the world, for a different society and social relations, which is to communalise [life and labour], instead of the major capitalist powers’ proposal to liberalise [them]. This is what gives me strength: that there’s a possibility to create, to struggle, without it costing us our lives, to engage with those who are in positions of power, of decision-making. This political and social scenario is what gives me strength to continue believing and continue supporting structural changes through popular feminism and to confront the situation we live in today in the face of economic sanctions and this psychological war that they wage against our emotionality and spirituality.

As Yirley reminds us, the strength to resist in the worst conditions comes from the conviction that it is possible to build a different world, one that is not based on exploitation or on the destruction of the social fabric, but rather on the possibility of building a life in community, that is led by the people, and where everyone can live with dignity.

Sarah de Roure (Brazil/World March of Women), Equipo de lucha (Tools for Struggle), 2021.

Notes

Bibliography

Interviews, Carried out in 2024

Prologue

Simón Bolívar Institute for Peace and Solidarity Among Peoples

Hugo Chávez emerged in the history of Venezuela, the Global South, and the international revolutionary movement when the thesis that ideological disputes throughout the world had ended was most entrenched. History had reached its end, as Francis Fukuyama decreed, and the only path forward for the progress of humanity was the one paved by US-imposed unilateralism. Far from being over, however, history had an important task for the Venezuelan people, who rose up against neoliberalism in 1989 and who continue to build a project of twenty first-century socialism today.

Reflecting on the importance of the leader in a revolutionary process, historian E.H. Carr pointed out that Lenin won the support of the Bolshevik Party not through rhetoric, but through his ability to persuade and present arguments clearly and to have a ‘unique mastery of the situation’¹.He also highlighted Lenin’s clarity of vision, pointing to his ability to internalise the interests of the working class and trust its potential to take power. It could be said that Hugo Chávez’s role in the Bolivarian Revolution was precisely that: he used his ability to interpret the needs and aspirations of the Venezuelan masses and trusted their creative powers.

Chávez led a social process that not only vindicates its own anti-colonialist tradition by renewing the ideas of Simón Bolívar (1783–1830) – the struggle for independence, the struggle for the unity of the Latin American nation, and the struggle for social justice – but also rescues the people’s historic struggles of the twentieth century against U.S. imperialism. Based on its Monroe Doctrine, the United States intended to make Nuestra América² – ‘Our America’ – part of its domain. Under the guidance of Hugo Chávez, the popular Latin American process defies the neoliberal avalanche by:

1. Calling for the recovery of sovereignty over the nation’s resources and decisions;
2. Promoting regional unity and integration to jointly confront the challenges of history;
3. Putting into motion a pedagogical process to counter the manufactured consent of the mainstream media and to democratise communications;
4. Putting into a place a democracy where people have direct participation and are leading agents of their own transformation; and
5. Consolidating the popular character of the armed forces within the revolution to guarantee the project’s comprehensive defence through civil-military unity.

Chávez strengthened the Venezuelan revolutionary project, whose roots lie, above all else, in the Bolivarian premise of independence; the Robinsonian concept of the ‘originality’ of America, that is, the need to find formulas of our own – not imported or imposed ones – to govern our society; and the egalitarian principle of popular democracy, embodied by Ezequiel Zamora’s slogan, ‘Free Lands and Men! Terror to the Oligarchy!’. Having rebuilt the path to defend national interests and the struggle against neoliberalism, Chávez took the course of ‘twenty-first-century socialism’, bringing together elements of the current Venezuelan and Latin American reality and elements of the historical struggles of the working class in the twentieth century to build a process that is feminist, ecological, and led by the working class, with a sense of spirituality rooted in ancestral traditions and liberation theology.

In practice, Chávez undertook a political process that recovered and brought new meaning to its own identity and seized its ample resources to demonstrate that it is possible to build another society where the basic aspects of human life are not commodified. Healthcare, food, housing, and access to technology, to sports, and even to culture, within the framework of the social missions that Chávez created, gave a new meaning to Venezuelan social life and a new hope to the popular forces. This allowed for the creation of communes as the horizon of a concrete and achievable utopia at the local level and of a pluripolar world where cooperation and complementarity, rooted in a respect for diversity, could organise international relations and promote what Bolívar called the ‘balance of the universe’.

Chávez became a strategic target for the forces of imperialism and international finance capital. Under the Bill Clinton administration, the US government tried to co-opt him. Once they understood the strength of his convictions and his leadership, the George W. Bush administration attempted to overthrow him through a classic coup d’état that failed to materialise because the Venezuelan people came to his rescue, putting everything on the line. An Obama administration that sought to whitewash the bloody War on Terror opted for more covert destabilisation mechanisms, trusting that his physical disappearance would mark the end of his leadership.

However, part of Chávez’s legacy was to leave the Bolivarian Revolution with a collective leadership that, under Nicolás Maduro and the revolutionary and popular forces of Venezuela, has, for over a decade, resisted the strongest aggression that the country has been subjected to both economically and socially in its entire history. The maximum pressure strategy implemented by former US President Donald Trump, aimed precisely at destroying all the social welfare gains that the revolution had built, collided with the resilience and revolutionary conviction of the Venezuelan people, who remain inspired by the leadership of Hugo Chávez.

The Left faces enormous challenges on a global level. When the Berlin Wall collapsed, faith in the transformative capacity of the people also collapsed in many organisations and structures. Chávez’s strategic legacy was to have understood that crisis; to have trusted in the transformative capacity of the people; to have undertaken direct communication with them, from his program ¡Aló, Presidente! to his Twitter account; and to have woven together, through his thought, his actions, and his words, principles, empathy, solidarity, and courage in the face of the great challenge of saving humanity and the only planet we have. Hugo Chávez showed that history is made by people taking power and overcoming dogmatism, sectarianism, and pessimism.

The Origins of Hugo Chávez’s Strategic Thought

Hugo Chávez was born in Sabaneta, Barinas state, in the heart of the Venezuelan plains. The son of two primary school teachers, Chávez was a soldier who shook the continent, promoting the transformation of Venezuela from the bottom up and building a Bolivarian Revolution and ideological structure that continue to march forward a decade after his death in 2013.

Chávez’s Entry into the Army and the Emergence of the MBR-200

In order to understand Chávez’s strategic thought, we must first understand his roots and those who shaped his worldview. At the age of twenty-eight, already a soldier in the national army, Chávez and a group of his comrades formed the Bolivarian Revolutionary Army 2000, named after the new millennium that was approaching and the possibilities it held to break the cycles of poverty. A year later in 1983, the group was renamed to the Bolivarian Revolutionary Movement 200, also known by the Spanish acronym MBR-200.³ The number 200 referred to the 200th anniversary of the birth of Simón Bolívar (1783–1830), known as ‘the liberator’ for his role leading the region to independence and seeking to unify the South American continent into a single, integrated nation. Inspired by his legacy, the MBR-200 aimed to reform the army and start on the path towards building a new republic in Venezuela.

From the outset, in the words of Chávez, the movement sought to bring about ‘a revolution, a political, social, economic, and cultural transformation inspired by Bolívar’s approach’.⁴The movement grew until it had consolidated its ideological basis through the Ezequiel-Bolívar-Rodríguez (EBR) System. This system is outlined in detail in The Blue Book (2013), which brings together the main historical, ideological, and political theses of the process that was now underway:

Thus, my fellow compatriots, there is only one powerful project that is truly suitable, that truly corresponds, to the socio-historical nature of the Venezuelan being, who cries out once again for space to be sown in the national soul and lead its march towards the twenty-first century: it is the project of Simón Rodríguez, the master; Simón Bolívar, the leader; and Ezequiel Zamora, the general of the sovereign people.⁵

These three fundamental ideological axes of the Bolivarian project, he explains, are like the ‘three roots’ of a single tree.

Simón Rodríguez and the ‘Robinsonian Root’

Born in Caracas, Simón Rodríguez (1769–1854) was an educator, a philosopher, and Bolívar’s tutor. He accompanied Bolívar during the historic Oath of Monte Sacro⁶ and was fundamental in shaping Bolívar’s thought. Rodríguez, also known by his pseudonym Samuel Robinson, was more than just a teacher: departing from the rote learning and pedagogical limits that were predominant among tutors of traditional methods at the time, he instilled in his students an urgency to create original thought.

Rodríguez’s main concern was the creation of the Latin American republics. For this, the creation of the new citizen was fundamental, and education played a central role in this process. With this in mind, Rodríguez developed a method that centred work as a pedagogical tool and approach based on the notion of equality as a core principle in this new society. Each person’s experience played a formative role in this pedagogical process and in the creation of new knowledge that would lie at the foundation of the new republics.

Rodríguez developed a vision of education as a human right that must be guaranteed in the future republics. Here, education would play the role of moulding citizens who were not only ready to create new republics, but also to do so in a new way, freed from the European precepts that would only reproduce the logic of colonialism. In Rodríguez’s view, the pedagogical process had to be imminently creative and original, as his maxim makes clear: ‘either we invent, or we make mistakes’.⁷Simón Bolívar and the ‘Bolivarian Root’The hero and liberator Simón Bolívar (1783–1830) led the continent’s most extensive emancipation project from the Spanish crown. It is therefore no surprise that the Bolivarian project lies at the heart of Chávez’s thought and of Venezuela’s revolution. In particular, Bolívar’s vision for independence and continental unity to break free from the Spanish Empire shaped Chávez’s approach. Freedom and equality remained key principles, inherited from, but extending well beyond, the Haitian Revolution’s fight to abolish slavery. The main goal of the struggle led by Bolívar, which remains central to the Venezuelan project, was the transformation of the anti-colonial struggle for independence into a revolutionary process that included democratic changes that would transform the material and concrete conditions of the masses and that would allow for the construction of independent states of free women and men.

Ezequiel Zamora and the ‘Zamoran Root’

The Zamoran ideology, anathema to the Venezuelan oligarchy, shook the social structure of the nineteenth century, identifying the root of the fundamental social conflict in Venezuela and exposing the inequality and exclusion that the vast majority of the population suffered. Ezequiel Zamora, born in 1817 in Cúa, in today’s Miranda state, was a leader in numerous peasant actions, such as the insurrection of 1846, when he coined the historic slogan ‘Free Lands and Free Men’ and was appointed ‘general of the sovereign people’.⁸He fought against the oligarchy in the Federal War (1859–1863) for the right of the peasantry to an equitable distribution of land and demanded the general distribution of wealth, without which there could be no real emancipation of the people or social equality. In the words of President Nicolás Maduro, ‘Chávez brings the general of the sovereign people to the present in order to give continuity to the social struggle, the battle for equality, and the fight for a genuinely and truly equal country’.⁹

From the MBR-200 to the Movement of the Fifth Republic and the Refounding of Venezuela

On 4 February 1992, with the MBR-200 and the ‘tree with three roots’ informing how he carried out his duty to the country, Chávez planned an attempted coup that would pave the way for a new phase in Venezuela’s political history. Though the coup was unsuccessful, after being released from prison Chávez redoubled his commitment to transform Venezuela. To that end, in 1997, he led the creation of the Movement of the Fifth Republic (MVR), a coalition of left-wing parties that would act as an electoral vehicle to get him to the presidential office in Miraflores Palace.

Ever faithful to the principles of the EBR System, Chávez’s priority always remained the transformation of his homeland. Venezuela had always had a constitution that guaranteed inequality and exclusion and that had caused the crisis of representation that characterised the country in the 1980s and 90s, a crisis that peaked with the Caracazo of February 1989.¹⁰ From the outset, Chávez proposed a national constitutional assembly as a way to refound the country. As soon as he was sworn in as president in April 2002, he convened the assembly, and, once it had been approved in a consultative referendum, began a year of debates in factories, universities, neighbourhood spaces, with peasants, and in popular assemblies, among other spaces of popular democracy.

Chávez’s Strategic Thought (1992–2013)

By looking at the three roots of the EBR system, we can see that Chávez’s strategic thought reveals a dialectical, complex movement that recognises and builds on the concrete reality of the Venezuelan people. It represents neither a recipe nor a set of dry academic reflections, but rather something alive and entirely revolutionary that aims to move forward step by step and overcome practical difficulties. Chávez’s thought can be understood along three axes: political, socioeconomic, and regional strategies.

Political Strategy: A New Republic Can Only Be the Product of a New Type of Democracy

The neoliberal model in Venezuela led to a profound crisis of representation whereby the people, burdened with increasing levels of poverty and inequality, were not represented by the democratic structures in place. Chávez identified this crisis as a motor that would drive forward the process to create a new constitution. As Rodríguez had pointed out, and as Bolívar and Zamora put into practice, there was an urgent need to create something new, sovereign, independent, and popular.

The debate about the constitution and the charter that were to give birth to the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela proposed a radical transformation of the way democracy was understood. No longer would Venezuela’s democracy be merely representative: it would now be popular and participatory. In this model, it is the people – latent, living leaders – who are the true and original constituent power. Within this framework, the institutional structures and the government must always be democratic, participatory, and decentralised.

Following the Zamoran and Robinsonian visions, the constitution proposed a new type of relationship between what had until then been the dominant and the dominated sectors of society, as well as a new type of state and society no longer based on the subordination and exploitation of the majority. In this new conception of the state – which would later be proposed as a ‘communal state’ – the state’s institutions walk alongside the organised population. This principle is integral to the new democratic proposal: there are no institutions without the people, and it is the people who are the true protagonists in the process to build a new democracy.

The role of the state institutions is then to facilitate, open channels, and take the necessary steps to guarantee the development of processes that improve people’s lives. The role of the primary constituent – the people, as a collective body – is not merely to stand by and applaud or else criticise the actions of an élite, but instead to design and make collective decisions about the use of their own capacities and their own destiny, a destiny that is original, as Rodríguez called for, sovereign, as Bolívar called for, and popular as Zamora called for. Many years later, Chávez would baptise this a socialist process.

With the development of the new constitution and the creation of the Bolivarian Republic in 1999, the principles of the EBR system began to take shape in a series of concrete initiatives that emanated from the democratic processes in the popular sectors. These sectors now found themselves dealing with structures and possibilities that were inherent to their new relationship with state institutions. An example of how this system works is the ‘missions’ set up between the state and the organised sectors of society in working-class neighbourhoods to respond to the needs of residents. Some of the best-known are Mission Robinson, whose goal is to eliminate illiteracy at the national level, and Mission Barrio Adentro (‘Mission into the Neighbourhood’), with doctors from international brigade teams (many of them from Cuba) helping put in place the preventive model of medicine that is now promoted by Venezuelan health professionals.

Another step in this transformation was the Organic Law of Communal Councils (2006, amended in 2009), which proposed a state that differed starkly from the bourgeois state and would establish a series of administrative structures (communal councils, communal city councils, and councils of workers, students, peasants, and women) that could ‘directly exercise the management of public policies and projects aimed at responding to communities’ needs and aspirations’ in order to build a ‘society of equity and social justice’.¹¹

Socioeconomic Strategy: from Radical Humanism to Communal Socialism

Through both his thought and his actions, Chávez – acutely aware of the need for social change in the country since his years in military school – created a programme of social, economic, political, and cultural changes. The very formation of the MBR-200 movement brought about a vision of social justice alongside the expansion of rights that responded to the needs of the people, which the reigning neoliberal ideology had no means to address. Chávez’s contribution to economic and social development strategy can be understood in four stages: the anti-neoliberal stage, the radical nationalist stage, the stage of twenty-first century socialism, and, finally, the stage of communal socialism.

The first stage (anti-neoliberalism) coincides with Chávez’s systematic reflections during the years when he began his postgraduate studies in political science. As Chávez acknowledged in a dialogue with Ignacio Ramonet, his need for further education came from his already developed understanding of the neoliberal policies being implemented in Venezuela by Carlos Andrés Pérez, who was the president from 1979 to 1979 and then again from 1989 to 1993. The plan known as the Great Turnaround (El Gran Viraje), implemented by Pérez in 1989, expressed for Chávez ‘what world hegemonic capitalism and the International Monetary Fund had imposed through a severe structural adjustment plan that ended up provoking popular protest and the explosion of the Caracazo’.¹²

In this context, Chávez held a series of discussions about the transition from neoliberalism, the planning that would be necessary, possible development models for the country, and the strategy of civil-military unity that would allow his programme to be implemented. To a large extent, these elements were included in the Simón Bolívar National Project of 1992, which would only later be implemented. It included, among other elements, reducing the cost of living; creating productive employment through housing construction, reforestation, environmental sanitation, agriculture, and so on; achieving self-sufficiency in food production; and integrating the solidarity economy through a network of cooperatives within a scheme of new economic forms.

The subsequent development of Chávez’s strategic economic and social planning (especially during his years in Yare Prison following the attempted coup in on 4 February 1992) would continue to advance these proposals, preparing for a transition that was both necessary and possible based on the concrete conditions in Venezuela. This first stage of Chávez’s strategy regarding the economic-social programme flatly rejected neoliberalism and, in doing so, was inextricably tied to the working-class rebels of the Caracazo, embodying its thought and action, its strategy and reading of the concrete historical process.

After Chávez’s years in prison, with his growing popularity as both a figurehead and a leader, he began to develop the second stage of his strategic thought in the economic-social field: the stage of radical nationalism. Unlike under bourgeois nationalism, the development of the radical nationalist stage was part and parcel of Chávez’s goal to build alliances between the countries of the South, particularly in Latin America, to successfully transition to an anti-neoliberal model. This period of thought and strategic action was influenced by Chávez’s meeting with Fidel Castro in Havana in 1994, as well as by the development of an increasingly interwoven fabric of working-class organisation in Venezuela, where his importance as leader was growing rapidly.

From those intense days in Havana to his first days in office, Chávez expanded, in increasing detail, on an economic and social agenda of a radical nationalist nature that would become the basis for the next stage of the radicalisation of his strategic thought. On 22 July 1996, Chávez released the Bolivarian Alternative Agenda, which set out the full gamut of his strategic thought, as Serrano Mancilla pointed out, and would become the basis for his 1998 electoral platform.¹³

The Bolivarian Alternative Agenda connected the previous (anti-neoliberal) stage with the new (radical nationalist) stage. ‘How could anyone think that solving the fiscal deficit could be more urgent than ending the hunger of millions of human beings? Faced with the neoliberal offensive, a weapon for the total counteroffensive is emerging here and now’, Chávez wrote.¹⁴The agenda addresses not only the exit from the neoliberal project, but also the construction of an alternative ‘through a humanistic, comprehensive, holistic, and ecological approach’.¹⁵ Furthermore, it emphasises the need to draw on constituent power in order to rebuild national power in all its facets. The historical necessity for Chávez and the popular movement sprung from the fact that the government of Rafael Caldera (1994–1999) had advanced the general line of the Washington Consensus and its ten commandments, even going above and beyond its earlier promises to so. The most evident results of this continuation of neoliberalism were the growth of poverty and inequality as well as the foreign ownership and denationalisation of the economy. In response, the radical nationalist programme laid out in the Bolivarian Alternative Agenda aimed to build, as the sociologist Luis Wainer wrote, ‘a new common sense for the new epoch based on the strengthening of the state in communion with permanent popular mobilisation, while seeking to develop a narrative that could account for the sharpening of social conflicts under neoliberalism’.¹⁶

In more concrete terms, the development of the agenda, which differed starkly from the proposal promoted by the Global North, is based on a series of key points that would be furthered radicalised in later years:

1. A strong, democratised state that regulates market power.
2. State ownership and control of oil production.
3. Humanistic and self-managed economic development based on five sectors: strategic industries under state-owned ownership, essential consumer goods under mixed ownership, banking and finance under mixed ownership, and large-scale industries essentially under private ownership.
4. Education, culture, science, and technology as part of an autonomous and independent programme, in line with the ideas of Simón Rodríguez.
5. A renegotiation of external debt, allowing higher levels of national sovereignty to be achieved.
6. Macrosocial balances that allow for the comprehensive human development of Venezuela’s population.
7. A proposal for productive development with a shift towards greater economic democratisation.¹⁷

This programme is fundamentally opposed to neoliberalism as well as the tepid options that had been proposed a few years earlier as part of the so-called ‘Third Way’. Here, we see the pillars of a new moment that would be developed from 2005–2006 and then clearly laid out in both the national social and economic development programme Plan for the Homeland (Plan de la Patria, 2007–2013) and in communal socialism. The period following Chávez’s electoral triumph in 1998 was characterised by the formation of a ‘state of missions’ as well as other economic and social policies implemented by the Bolivarian government. Driven by his great desire to address the people’s most pressing needs, Chávez developed the proposal for social missions, taking into account the bureaucratic limitations inherited from the pre-revolutionary state. In 2004, the National System of Missions began to address problems of poverty, extreme poverty, illiteracy, health, culture, training, and housing, among others. This comprehensive, participatory, and solidary response was able to put great stress on the centralised and bureaucratic structure of the bourgeois state. In Chávez’s words, the missions are:

fundamental components of the new social state, the new social state of law and of justice, whereby all those who had been excluded are now included alongside everyone else. They are studying, training, organising, and working with a new culture and a new conscience because the missions are creating a new reality in the cultural, psychological, ideological, and philosophical order, even as they are creating a new concrete and practical social, economic, and educational reality.¹⁸

It is precisely such reflections on the missions and the strategic development plan’s ability to meet the needs of the people that, following the unsuccessful recall referendum that attempted to remove Chávez from power on 15 August 2004, led him to continue to advance the radical transformation not only of Venezuela but of Latin America as a whole.¹⁷At the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre in 2005, Chávez stated clearly that the alternative to the imperial project of neoliberalism is twenty-first century socialism, managing once again to overcome the limits of postmodern views and propose a concept that unified the strategy to build an uncharted path towards a just and egalitarian society.Among the core components of Chávez’s proposal for twenty-first century socialism, which went much further than anything else being proposed at the time, is the popular and solidarity economy. As Chávez said:

Here we have started experiments such as promoting cooperatives and associations, collective property, popular banking, and internal development nuclei, etc. This is all about leaving behind the logic of the perverse functioning of capitalism. Experiments in such matters as self-management and co-management, cooperative and collective ownership, etc., are all valid. We are launching a trial of social production companies and community production units.¹⁹

Finally, the most radical stage, the stage of communal socialism, deepens the elements of the twenty-first century socialist strategy into a long-term socialist development programme laid out in the Plan for the Homeland. Each and every one of the factors that inform comprehensive human development are included in this plan. The plan identifies five strategic objectives:

• 1. 1. ‘Defend, expand, and consolidate our most precious asset, now recaptured after 200 years: national independence’.
     2. ‘Continue building twenty-first century Bolivarian socialism in Venezuela as an alternative to the destructive and savage system of capitalism, and thereby ensure the “greatest amount of social security, the greatest amount of political stability, and the greatest amount of happiness” for our people’.
     3. ‘Transform Venezuela into a socially, economically, and politically powerful country within the great rising power of Latin America and the Caribbean, which will guarantee the formation of a zone of peace in the region’.
     4. ‘Contribute to the development of a new international geopolitics in which a multicentric and pluripolar world takes shape and allows universal equilibrium to be achieved, thereby guaranteeing planetary peace’.
     5. ‘Preserve life on the planet and save the human species’.²⁰

These five points lie at the heart of the strategic political legacy of Hugo Chávez. In particular, the communes – a proposal for a new territorial, economic, political, and military organisation – are of the utmost importance as a key milestone of the socialist radicalisation that Chávez constructed through his thought and actions. The transformation of the bourgeois state from below using that state’s own structures constituted a novel and far-reaching commitment to thinking about emancipatory projects on a national scale.

Regional Strategy: Patria Grande and the Integration of Governments and Peoples through Twenty-First Century Socialism

For us, the coming century is the century of hope. It is our century. It is the century of the resurrection of the Bolivarian dream, of the dream of Martí, of the dream of Latin America.

– Hugo Chávez, speech delivered at the University of Havana, 14 December 1994.²¹

Hugo Chávez’s foreign policy was clear from the beginning of his administration, though, in truth, this perspective had been present at least since Bolivarian project emerged on an international scale in the late twentieth century.

On 14 December 1994, at the cusp of the neoliberal decade – before the effects of the adjustment policies had begun to show signs of exhaustion on the continent – Fidel Castro welcomed Chávez at the University of Havana. In this meeting, the analyses underpinning the diagnoses and ideas that would later become state policies were already present. For this reason, over the years, it has come be known as a key moment in the region’s history.

The meeting would prove to be fundamental in cementing the relationship between the two countries. As Chávez recounted:

Last night, when I received the immense and very pleasant surprise of being met at José Martí International Airport by Fidel himself, I told him: ‘I don’t deserve this honour. I aspire to deserve it one day in the months and years to come’. I say the same to all of you, my dear Cuban-Latin American compatriots: one day we hope to come to Cuba in a position to extend our arms and in a position to work together in a Latin American revolutionary project, imbued, as we have been, for centuries, with the idea of a Hispano-American, Latin American and Caribbean continent, integrated as the single nation that we are.²²

Three days earlier, the first Summit of the Americas had just ended in Miami, with the historical objective to consolidate and extend US dominance through the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). Only one nation in the region was absent from the summit: Cuba, which had been expelled from the Organisation of American States in 1962, accused of not respecting Western liberal democracy (of course, Cuba also did not respect the US-backed military dictatorships in power in Latin America at the time). While the tour organised to recolonise the continent was beginning in Miami, Fidel and Chávez were meeting in Havana in what was almost a mirror image. Perhaps only they could imagine what lay ahead.

This political moment was marked by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of the United States as the sole superpower after its victory in the Cold War and the ideological offensive against socialism. As Fidel said:

there was no doubt that for a personality like Hugo Chávez, accepting our invitation was an act of courage, because today there aren’t many brave people in this world who dare to accept an invitation to come to Cuba. There are many who used to come to Cuba and are now doing pirouettes to make them forget that they were once friends of the Cuban Revolution, or even to forget that they were once people of the Left.

We saw the mere fact of his accepting our invitation as an act of great courage.

…

[T]he head of a Bolivarian revolutionary movement – or revolutionary Bolivarian movement, which is the same thing, here the order of the factors multiplies the product – visiting us here, in the Great Hall of the University of Havana, talking about his patriotic, national, and international projects [to build] Latin American and Caribbean unity. And at what a time! At a time when, perhaps more than ever, the ideas of Bolívar and Martí are needed. At a time when, as never before in this world of unipolar hegemonism, our peoples are threatened with being devoured, totally devoured, by the empire. At a time when they want to tear apart the principle of independence and popular sovereignty, in the name of that great democracy that is North American democracy, where barely thirty-something percent of the people vote.²³

It is worth reviewing Fidel’s analysis of the historical significance of that meeting with Chávez, especially as it relates, in strategic terms, to the first Summit of the Americas, which was almost simultaneously taking place in the US four years before Hugo Chávez came to power and in the midst of what at least appeared at the time to be one of the moments of greatest weakness on the continent. As Fidel said:

Symbolically, Chávez’s arrival in Cuba on 13 [December 1994] coincided with the famous Miami summit that had just taken place. Nobody planned it that way, but, by chance, 90 miles from Miami, a meeting was taking place between the people of Cuba and the Bolivarian revolutionary movement of Venezuela and Latin America.

It is impossible to talk about Bolívar without thinking of an entire continent, without thinking of all of Latin America and all of the Caribbean, of which we and other Spanish-, French-, and English-speaking countries are all part.

There was going to be a summit of ideas – of Bolivarian ideas and of Martí’s ideas. And it is hard not to wonder what Martí and Bolívar would have had to say, what they would have thought, if they had been able to witness the Miami summit. If they had heard the words of the president of the United States, cited by Hugo Chávez, trying to present that summit as the realisation of Bolívar’s dreams – which [the president] could just as easily have said was also the realisation of Martí’s dreams – what would Martí and Bolívar have thought of that type of ‘partnership for prosperity’ – I think that is what the thing is called now – that are they proposing? So, we see another great symbolic coincidence – that between that summit and the ideas of that summit, and the ideas of Bolívar and the ideas of Martí.²⁴

In his reply, during a period of crisis for socialism, during Cuba’s Special Period, Chávez agreed with Fidel’s optimistic outlook, stating that:

Without a doubt, we are in an era of awakenings, of resurrections of peoples, of strength and of hope. Without a doubt, President, this wave that you are announcing or that you announced and continue to announce in that interview that I referred to earlier, ‘A Grain of Corn’, can be felt throughout Latin America.²⁵

Then, Chávez laid out the central elements of his historic programme, which he would pursue with dedication over the next eighteen heady, creative years rebuilding the nation:

In the first place, we are committed to raising an ideological flag that is relevant and conducive to our Venezuelan land, to our Latin American land: the Bolivarian flag.

But in this ideological work of reviewing history and the ideas that were born in Venezuela and on this continent 200 years ago, … in immersing ourselves in history as we look for our roots, we have designed and put the idea of drawing inspiration from a tree with three roots in the sphere of national and international public opinion. [One of these roots is the root] that Simón Bolívar called for, for Latin American unity to be able to build a developed nation as a counterweight to the pretensions of the North, which was already preparing to sink its claws into our Latin American land.²⁶

These words powerfully summarise the essence of the internationalist and Americanist policies promoted by the Bolivarian Revolution. On that night in 1994, Chávez was already speaking of Latin American and Caribbean unity and integration as a condition of liberation. In Chávez’s words:

the passion that moves me tonight is a long-term strategic project in which Cubans have and would have a lot to contribute, a lot to discuss with us. It is a project, a sovereign economic model, with a 20 to 40-year horizon. We do not want to continue being a colonial economy, a complementary economic model.

Venezuela has immense energy resources, for example. No Caribbean or Latin American country should have to import fuel from Europe. Why should it? If Venezuela, with its immense energy resources, is part of Latin America…

A project in which it is not risky to think, from the political point of view, of an association of Latin American states. Why not think about that, which was the original dream of our liberators? Why remain fragmented? In the political arena, this project is neither ours nor original; it is 200 years old, at least.

…

For us, the coming century is the century of hope. It is our century. It is the century of the resurrection of the Bolivarian dream, of the dream of Martí, of the dream of Latin America.

Dear friends, you have honoured me by sitting down tonight to listen to the ideas of a soldier, of a Latin American devoted completely and forever to the cause of the revolution of this America of ours.²⁷

This early meeting between the two leaders is directly linked to political initiatives that gave shape to a decade of growing sovereignty in foreign policy for Latin America and the Caribbean. Among them is the formation of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) in December 2004. Ten years later, also in Havana, the ALBA²⁸of the people began to take shape in opposition to the FTAA, that object of North American desire that also launched ten years ago. ALBA would later be renamed the ALBA-TCP (the Peoples’ Trade Treaty) with the gradual incorporation of other countries: Bolivia (2006), Nicaragua (2007), Dominica (2008), briefly Honduras (2008, until the 2009 coup), Antigua and Barbuda (2009), Saint Vincent and the Grenadines (2009), Ecuador (2009, withdrew in 2018), Saint Lucia (2013), Saint Kitts and Nevis (2014), and Grenada (2014).

A few months later, in June 2005, PetroCaribe (an initiative that provides discounted oil to Caribbean nations) was launched, becoming the most substantial energy integration mechanism among states in the Caribbean. Almost two decades after its launch, eighteen countries in the region remain part of this agreement. This initiative is fundamental for emancipation. As Mario Sanoja and Iraida Vargas put it in their monumental work on the Bolivarian Revolution, ‘The creation of a South American-Caribbean system of energy integration is decisive to definitively defeat the imperial hegemony of the US oligarchy’.²⁹

During the fourth Summit of the Americas in Mar del Plata, Argentina in November 2005, just a few months after the launch of Petrocaribe, the ALBA bloc, in strategic coordination with the emerging progressive bloc in South America and then Presidents Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Néstor Kirchner, was able to defeat the FTAA, marking a failure of historic proportions for US diplomacy on the continent.

Chávez thought of ALBA and Petrocaribe as ‘instruments for the unification of our peoples’.³⁰ In the same vein, it is important to mention ALBA-TCP’s recounting of its historical roots:

The roots of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America-Peoples’ Trade Treaty (ALBA-TCP) lie in the Jamaica Charter of 1815, when Simón Bolívar established the doctrine of unity and sovereignty of the countries that had achieved independence from colonial power.

The alliance is based on the thought of Bolívar, Martí, San Martín, Sucre, O’Higgins, Pétion, Morazán, Sandino, Garvey, Túpac Katari, Julián Apaza, Bartolina Sisa, and many other heroes whose struggle has served as a political and ethical model for the new consciousness and emancipatory force of our homelands. The alliance vindicates the ideas of these heroes who favoured the strategic consolidation of the unity of our peoples and governments, the preservation of our historical, social, and economic interests, through joint, autonomous, democratic action, our Latin American identity, and our common interest.³¹

This eminently political space promoted practical linkages in the fields of economy, education, health, and culture, becoming the strategic platform from which it would attempt to build even higher levels of unity.

With the same desire for unity and integration, Chávez promoted, together with his strategic allies, two equally relevant institutions: the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), founded in 2008, and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), founded in 2010. This latter was the first entity in history to bring together the 33 states of Latin America and the Caribbean – in other words, all of America except the United States and Canada. For this reason, it is strategically important and the natural antagonist of the Organisation of American States, which has been led by the United States since its foundation just after the end of the Second World War.

During this journey, Chávez became aware of the importance of the ideological, cultural, and communications battle. Therefore, in 2005, he founded the multi-state channel teleSUR, a television station that set out to present the news from the point of view of the people of Latin America and the Caribbean.

The development of a policy of unity and integration of Latin America was the cornerstone of the Bolivarian State, a premise enshrined in the Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela that is approved by popular vote in 1999. This has not been to the detriment of, but rather in support of an active international policy towards the rest of the world and was also driven by, as Article 152 of the Constitution states:

the principles of independence, equality between states, self-determination and non-intervention in their internal affairs, peaceful resolution of international conflicts, cooperation, respect for human rights, and solidarity among peoples in the struggle for their emancipation and the well-being of the humanity.³²

Chávez intervened in all international arenas to promote the establishment of a fairer international order and, to this end, repeatedly called for the reorganisation of the United Nations system. As Chávez put it:

Chávez’s voice warned against the consequences of capitalism for the future of the world. ‘If the climate were one of the biggest capitalist banks, the rich governments would have already saved it’, he said at the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 15) held in Copenhagen after identifying himself with the slogans of the environmental movement, declaring: ‘Don’t change the climate, change the system! And, in doing so, we will begin to save the planet’.³⁴

Chávez was an implacable defender of peace, not ‘the peace of cemeteries, in the ironic words of Kant’, he said, ‘but peace based on the most zealous respect for international law’.³⁵ To do this, he clearly identified what he called ‘the greatest threat that hangs over our planet’ at the UN General Assembly in September 2006:

The hegemonic claims of North American imperialism put the very survival of the human species at risk. We continue to warn about this danger and call on the people of the United States and the world to put a stop to this threat, which is like the sword of Damocles itself ³⁶

Chávez’s imprint was also written into collective political programmes, which essentially aimed at ‘the diversification of political, economic, and cultural relations for the creation of new power blocs’, with the aim of achieving ‘the breakdown of the hegemony of the North American empire’, as the 2007–2013 Plan for the Homeland notes.³⁷Internationalism was also expressed in the key documents of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, including its Declaration of Principles:

The United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) must frame its internationalist praxis so as to contribute to the union of all peoples fighting to establish emancipatory and liberatory projects in Latin America, the Caribbean, and the other continents of the world in the search to provide the greatest possible degree of sovereignty, independence, self-determination, well-being, and happiness for their citizens.

The Bolivarian Revolution, given its anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist character, will create mechanisms to consolidate alliances with similar political and social movements worldwide, with the aim of achieving a new pluripolar international order.³⁸

In Chávez’s way of thinking, the global vision is not separate from the national project. That is why, as the party states, ‘the fundamental purpose of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) is the construction of Bolivarian Socialism, the anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist struggle, and the consolidation of Bolivarian, participatory, and people’s democracy through the recognition and strengthening of popular power’.³⁹This linkage of domestic to foreign policy, founded on democratic participation, runs through all of Chávez’s work and is one of his fundamental legacies, a strategic guide for revolutionaries to come.

Strategic Thought Ten Years After Chávez’s Death: A Renewed Strategy for a New Regional Moment

More than ten years have passed since Chávez’s last public speech, when he called on the people of Venezuela and the Patria Grande, his great homeland, to continue the great feat of independence: ‘In the face of new difficulties, of whatever size they may be, the response of all patriots, revolutionaries, those of us who can feel the country in their guts, as Augusto Mijares would say, is unity, struggle, battle, and victory’.⁴⁰

The death of Hugo Chávez in 2013 coincided with the increased aggression of the imperial offensive across the continent. As the United States is immersed in a global confrontation with weighty rivals such as China and, to a lesser extent, Russia and hit by a succession of failures in its strategy of intervention, its foreign policy has become oriented towards recovering the ground lost in the first decade of the twenty-first century, when Chávez’s drive, along with that of the peoples of America, made hitherto seemingly impossible dreams come true.

In that context, Venezuela became the object of an intense hybrid war within the framework of a new Condor Plan (a CIA-backed plan to install right-wing governments in Latin America), no longer with the sole aid of force.⁴¹ Without disavowing hard power, the imperial strategy began to focus on developing a combination of tactics centred on soft power. Especially in the 2015–2020 period, this siege was relatively successful and managed to land blows to the Bolivarian Revolution and paralyse its initiatives for unity and continental integration. But it has failed to defeat Chávez’s dream.

With advances and setbacks, ten years after Chávez’s death on 5 March 2013, the struggles of Latin America and the Caribbean are still very much alive. Dreams of economic independence, political sovereignty, and social justice prevail. No future is written in advance, and everything depends on the activity and creativity of the people. To this end, the peoples of this region and the world have a tradition of key tenets, which encapsulate a possible history and perspective of the future. Part of that fundamental legacy – this strategic direction – is the work of Chávez.

Notes

Bibliography

History moves often in leaps and bounds and in a zigzag line.

– Friedrich Engels, Das Volk, no. 16, 20 August 1859

In 1492, when Christopher Columbus arrived in the Caribbean, history began to cleave into two. Before this moment, no empire had a planetary reach. After 1492, the major European powers came to dominate the world and, from the late seventeenth century, this domination was organised and legitimated in the name of race, a fabrication with catastrophic consequences for humanity.

Colonial authority faced constant resistance. Colonial intellectuals imagined themselves in terms drawn from Ancient Greece, as Hercules at war with the monstrous hydra of rebellion – rebellion at sea, on the plantations, in the mountains and forests, in the portside taverns, in the commons that survived outside of the reach of colonial power, and in the insurgent new spaces created by those who escaped.¹ When capitalism, rooted in the colonial plantation, began to grip the planet in its tentacles, the factory and the city became key sites of struggle.

If there was one revolution that marked the beginning of the end of the colonial epoch and that inaugurated a new worker-led civilisation, it was the Haitian Revolution of 1804. Enslaved Africans defeated the four major European powers of the day, won their freedom, and declared an independent republic. That revolution was swiftly encircled. In 1825, the French sent twelve warships to demand that the new republic pay compensation to the former plantation owners, well more than $20 billion in today’s terms.² The assertion of freedom was met with the imposition of debt, a tactic of neo-colonial domination that would be exploited mercilessly against the liberation struggles of the century that followed.

World War II, resulting from the attempt of the fascists in Germany to return colonial practices to Europe, pulled the European powers into a terrible conflagration. At the conclusion of the war, with the European powers severely weakened, it was the United States, the most powerful of Europe’s settler colonies, that took over the neo-colonial management of the planet. Now, almost eighty years later, the primacy of the United States has entered twilight. US intellectuals, returning to Ancient Greece again, argue that the rise of China threatens the US and makes war inevitable; this theory, the Thucydides Trap, is drawn from the argument in the History of the Peloponnesian War that the rise of Athens drew Sparta into a necessary war to defend its interests.³ The United States has imposed a hostile conflict on China, and on other countries that it deems to be a threat. China does not seek to supplant the US, only to inaugurate a multipolar world order. The idea of a Thucydides Trap is part of the hybrid war that now grips the planet.

Our dossier no. 36 (January 2021) explores the emergence of a new cold war imposed by the United States on China and the forms of hybrid war that have been utilised as part of this new strategic scenario.

Part 1: The American Century

The US Department of State’s Policy Planning Staff circulated a memorandum in the late 1940s, which argued that ‘To seek less than preponderant power would be to opt for defeat. Preponderant power must be the object of US policy’.⁴ The United States emerged from the terrible violence of World War II with the most powerful economy, an undamaged infrastructure, and a formidable military force that possessed the most dangerous weapon: the nuclear bomb. It used these advantages to establish a range of institutions to extend US power across the globe; these included multilateral political institutions (such as the United Nations), multilateral economic institutions (such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank), regional security institutions (such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, the Central Treaty Organisation, and the Southeast Asian Treaty Organisation), and regional political institutions (such as the Organisation of American States).

The US moved swiftly to contain the new states that emerged from anti-colonial struggles. Patrice Lumumba, newly elected as president of the Congo, was assassinated in a US-backed plot in 1961. Radical movements were dealt with mercilessly. In Indonesia, over a million people were murdered as the military, acting with US support, sought to destroy the Communist Party of Indonesia and its support base following the 1965 coup.⁵

The Soviet Union and other communist states, as well as the radical section of the anti-colonial forces in the Third World, operated as a partial brake to the ambitions of the United States. When the USSR began to fragment in 1990, that shield vanished, and the accelerator of US primacy went to the maximum. The US Defence Planning Guidance (1990), chaired by Dick Cheney, laid out the agenda clearly:

Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere… This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavour to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power. … Our strategy must now refocus on precluding the emergence of any potential future global competitor.⁶

In 2000, the Project for a New American Century published Rebuilding America’s Defences. The report wrote that US primacy ‘must have a secure foundation on unquestioned US military pre-eminence’.⁷ Funding for the US military expanded astronomically before the al-Qaeda attack on 11 September 2001. In 2002, President George W. Bush’s National Security Strategy for the United States of America noted that ‘Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in the hopes of surpassing, or equalling, the power of the United States’.⁸ By 2019, US military spending – at $732 billion⁹ ($1 trillion if you add the largely secret but estimated intelligence budget) – spent more than the next ten countries combined. Every known inventory of weapons shows that the United States has a much greater capacity to wreak havoc than any other; but the US security community has now come to understand that while it can bomb a country to smithereens, it can no longer subordinate all countries through military might alone.

The United States used its earlier ‘hub and spokes’ alliance system to extend and consolidate its global power. A number of key pillars of that system need to be clearly understood:

1. The United States stood at the hub, while its primary allies (the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Japan, and others) were its spokes. At the outer edge of these spokes were its subsidiary allies, such as Colombia, Egypt, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, and others. These allies remain essential for the global reach of US power, since they operate against US adversaries with full backing from Washington, and they provide the US military with bases, intelligence, and logistical capacity. Any challenge to these allies is swiftly put down with the full force of US power, as evidenced in the US attack on Iraq (1991) and in Plan Colombia (1999).
2. The emergence of any ‘potential future global competitor’, as the 1990 US Defence Planning Guidance put it, had to be shut down through the use of the alliance system. Pressure was built up against China and Russia through the expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe and with the build-up of US forces in the Pacific Rim region. The election of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela (1998), the emergence of a new set of left-leaning South American leaders, and the new momentum for regional integration (such as the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas or ALBA) had to be challenged. This challenge began with a military coup attempt against the government of Chávez in 2002; two years later, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the progressive Haitian president elected with an overwhelming majority, was successfully removed in a US-backed coup. The hybrid wars followed.
3. The global commodity chain developed to advantage Western multinational corporations had to be protected at all costs. The electronic revolution ushered in a new era that has seen the doubling of computer capacity every eighteen months to two years; between 1955 and 2015, computer power increased over one trillion times. New productive forces ushered in the end of the old centralised and large industrial factory system. The US Congress extended intellectual property laws for copyright protection first to twenty-eight years in 1976 and then to one hundred years in 1998. This pernicious intellectual property system was pushed through the World Trade Organisation in 1994.
   The ability to disassemble large factories, globally distribute them, and introduce just-in-time inventory systems undermined national sovereignty and trade union power. Diplomatic and military power were deployed to ensure that no alternative to these arrangements would be possible. Mechanisms such as the War on Drugs and the War on Terror were used to attack any challenges to the global commodity chain that began in the ‘sacrifice zones’ where raw materials are extracted or grown.
4. The Dollar-Wall Street complex that has dominated economic and financial systems for decades could not be allowed to be challenged by new global currencies. Such currencies posed a threat to the Dollar-Wall Street complex in multiple ways: they could be used as reserves and for trade that would undermine the dollar; they could be used by new development banks or procedures that would weaken the IMF and the World Bank; or they could be used by new financial institutions to circumvent the Western-dominated financial networks that are rooted in the US Treasury Department, in the Wall Street-City of London-Frankfurt financial banks, and in the money transfer networks (such as the Belgium-based SWIFT system).

The illegal US war on Iraq (2003) and the credit crisis (2007) showed the wilting of US power. The US military machine could easily destroy a country’s institutions – as it showed in Iraq in 2003 and in Libya in 2011 – but it could not subordinate its populations. Battles could be won, but not long-term wars.

The credit crisis revealed the internal weakening of the US economy, where chiefly credit-induced consumerism allowed the myth of the ‘American Dream’ to remain intact even as stagnant wages and a structural jobs crisis plagued the lives of the working class and even the middle class. Between 1979 and 2018, average annual US hourly wages in constant dollars declined.¹⁰ These weaknesses led to a debate over the decline of the United States, although the reservoirs of US domination – such as military power, economic and financial power, and cultural or ‘soft’ power – remained intact. Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump were not able to reverse the slide of the US economy, once more held afloat by the global authority of the dollar, among other processes.

In his inauguration speech in 2017, Trump bemoaned the ‘carnage’ that had struck the working class and the middle class in the US, who lived near ‘rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation’.[11] Trump’s solution to this ‘carnage’ was cynically racist, blaming undocumented migrants (and Mexico) as well as blaming intellectual property theft and subsidised production overseas (and China). Biden’s agenda has nothing substantial to say beyond what Bush, Obama, and Trump have said: rebuild the US economy and use US power to defend US interests. As Biden’s campaign website notes, ‘Biden will never hesitate to protect the American people, including when necessary, by using force. We have the strongest military in the world – and as president, Biden will ensure it stays that way’.¹²

The United States is approaching a position where it will no longer be the largest economy in the world by any measurement in the foreseeable future. In purchasing power parity (the real physical flow of goods and services), China’s economy is already 16% bigger than that of the US; by 2025, the IMF projects it will be 39% bigger. As with almost all developing countries, the size of China’s economy is understated when calculated at current exchange rates, but it is already 73% of the size of the US economy at current exchange rates and, based on IMF projections, will be 90% of the size of the US economy in 2025.

By the end of the decade, China’s GDP will be bigger than that of the US no matter how it is measured. Already we sense the shift; bazaars and malls across the world have the feel of the culture of the United States, but the goods in them are made in China. In other words, the United States continues to set the terms for the form of the present, but China already provides the content. Gradually, form will come in line with content. A decade ago, China had very few globally known brands, but now Huawei, TikTok, Alibaba, and others are known throughout the world and are the subject of daily comment in the economic media.

Reaction to this evidence has taken many forms, of which the most common are the most extreme. There is a literature of catastrophism, an anticipation of the collapse of the US from its position of great power. This view is that an imploded US economy, now struggling during the pandemic despite the highs of Wall Street and the infusions of credit from the US Federal Reserve, will lead to a loss of structural power by the US-driven institutions and to the increased use of US military power to hold on to the country’s authority. In contrast to this is the literature of revival, usually on the basis of hopes and projections of a second ‘American century’ in the absence of serious data. This view suggests that the US economy is resilient; it sees the power of the dollar as sacrosanct and has undeterred faith in the ingenuity of US-based firms that are able creatively to destroy old sectors simply to rise – phoenix-like – with new inventions to power the US. US power, it is thought, derives not from yesterday’s General Motors (now becoming oriented to financial services in addition to its historic role as a car company), but from the next Microsoft.

Neither of these views – that the US will collapse or that the US will revive – are complete. Both have elements of truth, but only partially. There is a great weakness in the US hold on primacy, illuminated by the failure of the US to prevent the scientific and technological advances of China – amongst other countries – which threatens the monopoly that the US has on technological innovation. It is this high technology, and the monopoly intellectual property rent that it garners, that power the US economy. The US conflict with China stems from the recognition by a large section of the US elite that China’s rising scientific and technological advancement is an existential threat to US primacy. Obama’s ‘pivot to Asia’ in 2015 was premised on fears of this rise and on the realisation that there was not going to a Chinese Gorbachev who would internally destroy China.

China’s rise poses an existential threat to US hegemony. Like the European domination opened in 1492, the US attempts to preserve its stronghold on global power can be read in racial terms.

The historic decline of the US is taking place while it still possesses great historical reserves; there will be a long period when the US will continue to strike back against its decline. It is not an accident that Mao Zedong’s On Protracted War has once again become one of the most quoted works in China.

Part 2: The War in Eurasia

In April 2019, the US Indo-Pacific Command released a document entitled Regain the Advantage, in which it pointed to the ‘renewed threat we face from Great Power competition. … Without a valid and convincing conventional deterrent, China and Russia will be emboldened to take action in the region to supplant U.S. interests’. Admiral Philip Davidson, who leads the US Indo-Pacific Command, asked the US Congress to finance enhanced ‘forward-based, rotational joint forces’ as the ‘most credible way to demonstrate U.S. commitment and resolve to potential adversaries’.¹³ The report has a stunningly science fiction quality to it, expressing a desire to create ‘highly survivable, precision-strike networks’ that run along the Pacific Rim, with missiles – including with nuclear warheads – and radar installations from Palau to outer space. New weapons systems already in development would enhance US pressure on both China and Russia along their coastlines; these weapons include hypersonic cruise missiles, which shorten the strike time against Chinese and Russian targets to within minutes of launching.

After the collapse of the USSR and the communist state system, the US found that it could exert its power without major challenge. For instance, it could bomb Iraq and Yugoslavia, and it could push for a trade and investment system that favoured its allies. The entire decade of the 1990s seemed like a victory lap for the United States, with its presidents, George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, preening at international meetings, beaming into the cameras, and making sure that everyone saw the world through their eyes, with the ‘rogue states’ (Iran and North Korea, for example) in their gun sights, and with China and Russia seemingly committed to US leadership.

In the decades since then, much has changed. China’s economic growth has been spectacular. The per capita disposable income in real terms expanded by 96.6% in the 2011-2019 period alone.¹⁴ On 23 November 2020, China announced that it had eliminated absolute poverty nationwide. China used its very high level of investment to build infrastructure within the country and used its massive foreign exchange to aid across the world through the Belt and Road Initiative, which began in 2013. While the US was bogged down by its wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, China built up a system of trade and commerce that linked large parts of the world to its economic locomotive. During the coronavirus pandemic, China was first to break the chain of the infection and resume near-normal economic activity. As a consequence, the IMF projects that nearly 60% of the estimated global GDP in 2020-2021 will be due to China’s growth.

Key to the new period is not merely Chinese economic buoyancy, but its tightened links to Russia. China’s new linkages driven by the Belt and Road Initiative are taking place along the southern flank of Asia into Europe and Africa; its links to Russia allow for integration along the northern flank of Asia. The new ties between China and Russia culminated in a range of economic and military agreements that have been signed over the past five years.

Since the early years of the twenty-first century, countries across the Global South – including China – have sought to create regional and multilateral institutions based on international law and a genuine development agenda for the world’s people. These institutions are meant to transcend the period of full-scale US primacy that had opened up after the fall of the USSR. A range of such initiatives developed, including regional platforms – such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in Asia (2001) and ALBA in Latin America and the Caribbean (2004), as well as more global platforms – such as IBSA or India-Brazil-South Africa Dialogue (2003) and BRICS or Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa (2009). The fourteenth Non-Aligned Movement summit in Havana in 2006 was framed around the issue of regionalism and multilateralism. At the 2013 BRICS meeting, leaders released the eThekwini Declaration, which summarised the spirit of this opening, indicating their commitment to the ‘promotion of international law, multilateralism, and the central role of the UN’, as well as the need for ‘more effective regional’ efforts to end conflict and to promote development.

The BRICS project developed a set of proposals to create new multilateral institutions to substitute for the institutions dominated by the United States. For example, a Contingency Reserve Arrangement was created to supplement the IMF with short-term liquidity for countries in foreign exchange trouble and a BRICS Bank was formed as a challenge to the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. But the entire BRICS project had limits from the start: it articulated no ideological or policy alternative to neoliberalism, it lacked key independent institutions (even the Contingency Reserve Arrangement would utilise IMF data and analysis), and it had no political or military ability to counter US military domination.

Regional projects such as ALBA developed alternative forms of integration that experimented with building inter-state relations and new institutions. ALBA led to the creation of new regional formations, such as the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR, 2004) and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC, 2010), and it created a new regional bank (BancoSur), a new virtual currency (Sucre), a new communications network (anchored in TeleSur), and a new attitude of hemispheric independence from US power. This is precisely why the United States spent effort and funds to undermine many of the constituent movements of ALBA, such as through an old-fashioned coup in Honduras (2009) and a lawfare coup in Brazil (2016).¹⁵ Such attacks against social and political regional integration in South America, alongside the subordination of the hemisphere to US power, have been the defining features of the United States’ policies in Caribbean and Latin American politics for the last two centuries.

The internal limitations of the BRICS project eroded its potential when political developments in India (2013) and Brazil (2016) brought the right wing into power. Both countries immediately subordinated their foreign policy to Washington, unwilling to be party to any regionalism or multilateralism. There is no longer the possibility even of a sub-imperialism, as Ruy Mauro Marini argued in 1965, since now these fragments of the elites in places such as Brazil and India were content with being the forward posts for the US State Department rather than driving their own policy in their regions.

The exit of Brazil and India from any effective leadership in the BRICS bloc came alongside political convulsions in South Africa, where former President Jacob Zuma turned the African National Congress, once a movement for national liberation, into a repressive kleptocracy. For the past five years, the BRICS project has not been able to advance any significant agenda, although its continued existence as a grouping that includes the largest developing economies in the world has some significance. Despite differences, China, India, and Russia have also continued to cooperate in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.

It is in this context that we see the growth of the Chinese and Russian pact, spurred on by attacks by the United States and other Western powers and by the attrition of the BRICS bloc. A great gulf between China and Russia appeared during the Sino-Soviet dispute from 1956, and tensions between the two countries continued to linger through the immediate years following the fall of the USSR, with an initially pliant Moscow looking toward the West for alliances. It was only in 2008 that China and Russia finally settled a long-standing border dispute, opening the way for the close ties of the present period.

In this period, US policy makers sought to corral a weakened Russia into a project to encircle China. The West overplayed its hand and attempted to bring Russia to its knees through the expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe, breaking a promise made during the dissolution of the German Democratic Republic. Russian power seemed destined to be totally drained when the West threatened both of Russia’s only warm water ports in Sevastopol (Crimea) and in Tartus (Syria). A set of further aggressive moves by the West against Russia – including Russia’s expulsion from the G8 in 2014 and a harsh sanctions regime set up by the United States – struck at vital Russian interests, enormously offended Russian national opinion, which was deeply involved with the events in Ukraine, and pushed Russia towards greater alignment with China.

In 2019, China’s President Xi Jinping and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin spoke at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, an annual business meeting set up in 1997, the scope of which has increasingly included assessing Russia’s relations with Asia as well as with the West. Xi and Putin spoke of the intimate ties between their two countries, emphasising that the two of them had personally met at least thirty times since 2013. Amongst the many agreements to increase trade, the two leaders agreed to enhance bilateral trade by using the rouble and the yuan – rather than the dollar – to reconcile cross-border payments. This snub was not the only thing that alarmed Washington – so did the increase in arms sales between the two countries, which came alongside more frequent joint military exercises: in September 2018, a third of Russia’s soldiers participated in the China-Russia Vostok 2018 exercises.¹⁶ In October 2020, when Putin was asked if China and Russia would form a ‘military alliance’, he answered, ‘We don’t need it, but, theoretically, it’s quite possible to imagine it’.¹⁷

Weakening Russia in political and military terms has certainly been part of the overall eastward expansion of NATO, but China has been the main economic target for the United States and its allies. In particular, there is great anxiety about the developments in Chinese high-tech firms that produce telecommunications equipment and software, robotics, and artificial intelligence, among other things. It was one thing for China to be the workshop of the world, for its workers to be employed by multinational corporations while its own companies remained in the medium technology sector; it is entirely another thing for China to become a key technological producer in the world. That is the reason why the US government, nudged by Silicon Valley firms, went after Huawei and ZTE. In April 2019, the US Defence Innovation Board noted:

The leader of 5G stands to gain hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue over the next decade, with widespread job creation across the wireless technology sector. 5G has the potential to revolutionize other industries as well, as technologies like autonomous vehicles will gain huge benefits from the faster, larger data transfer. 5G will also enhance the Internet of Things (IoT) by increasing the amount and speed of data flowing between multiple devices, and may even replace the fiber-optic backbone relied upon by so many households. The country that owns 5G will own many of these innovations and set the standards for the rest of the world.¹⁸

This country is not likely to be the US; even the Defence Innovation Board admits that neither AT&T nor Verizon will be able to manufacture the kind of transmitters needed for the new systems. Nor is it likely to be Sweden (Ericsson) or Finland (Nokia), who the Chinese firms are far ahead of. This is a grave threat to the future prospects of the US economy, which is why the US government has used every instrument to constrain the growth of China.

None of the largely false accusations against the Chinese firms (of intellectual property theft or of the erosion of privacy) have deterred customers around the world. What has stopped the commercial prospects of these firms has been direct US political pressure on governments to contain or ban the entry of Huawei and ZTE. The US acknowledges that China’s rapid technological growth is a generational threat to the main advantage that the US has had for the past decades, namely its technological superiority. It is to prevent China’s technological ascent that the US has used every mechanism, from diplomatic pressure to military pressure, but none of these seem to be working.

China, for now, is resolute. It is unwilling to back down and dismantle its technological gains. No resolution is possible unless there is an acknowledgment of reality: that China is equal to if not more advanced than the West in terms of its technological production in some sectors, that this is going to be gradually spread more widely, and that is not something that needs to be or can be reversed by warfare.

In 2001, China’s then-Vice President Hu Jintao said that ‘multipolarity constitutes an important base in Chinese foreign policy’.¹⁹ China remains committed to multipolarity, eschewing any prospect of a ‘Chinese Century’ to follow the ‘American Century’. The Chinese position is mirrored in some of the US strategic documents, such as in the 2012 US National Intelligence Council’s report, which states that ‘by 2030, no country – whether the US, China, or any other large country – will be a hegemonic power’.²⁰ What there will be instead is a ‘diffusion of power’. But others in the US strategic analysis community, such as Richard N. Haass, the president of the Council of Foreign Relations, argue that if the US does not continue its ‘leadership’ of the global order, then the alternative ‘is not an era dominated by China or anyone else, but rather a chaotic time in which regional and global problems overwhelm the world’s collective will and ability to meet them’.²¹ Multipolarity, or a decline in US primacy, Haass claims, will be chaos: ‘Americans would not be safe or prosperous in such a world’, Haass wrote in Foreign Policy Begins at Home (2013). ‘Our Dark Ages was one too many; the last thing we need is another’.²² For liberals such as Haass as much as neo-fascists such as Trump, there is no substitute for US primacy. It is the failure of the US elites to understand the inevitability of a multipolar future that drives them towards new cold wars, dangerous military interventions, and hybrid wars of all kinds.

Part 3: Hybrid War

In 2015, Andrew Korybko published a fascinating book called Hybrid Wars: The Indirect Adaptive Approach to Regime Change. Through a reading of public and leaked US military documents, Korybko laid out the various strategies used to overthrow governments seen to be impediments to US power. Korybko explains the objective of a hybrid war by quoting the US Army’s Special Forces Unconventional Warfare classified training document: ‘to degrade the government’s security apparatus (the military and police elements of national power) to the point where the government is susceptible to defeat’. The point is not always to replace a government hostile to US interests with one that is favourable to it; ‘at its core’, Korybko writes, ‘hybrid war is managed chaos’.²³ A low-intensity conflict that gradually saps the country of its resilience and creates disarray in the region is perhaps the goal of the kinds of conflicts that are prosecuted through information wars and sanctions, two key elements in the hybrid war toolkit.

The US-led hybrid war is currently being deployed most fiercely against Iran and Venezuela, which have been weakened by the information warfare against them and the chaos in the petroleum markets. What prevents these countries from collapsing under the pressure is the wells of legitimacy that have been dug by their own social and political processes. In Venezuela, for instance, the regular mobilisation of the people both for demonstrations and for the practical work of social reproduction at a community scale affirms the popular legitimacy of their revolutionary process. Hybrid wars do not always succeed, but – even when they do not succeed – they threaten the basic social bonds between people.

Drawing from Korybko, and from a range of US government documents, here are four of the most important aspects of the hybrid war strategy:

1. Information War. In 1989, William Lind, an author who helped develop the theory of fourth generation warfare (a synonym for hybrid wars), wrote that ‘Television news may become a more powerful operational weapon than armoured divisions’.²⁴ To control information and to define people and events shapes the way that conflicts are understood. Control over the storyline is essential, but this control cannot be seen as naked propaganda. The narrative is so carefully defined that everything that comes from a ‘rogue state’ is interpreted as false, and what the United States and its allies say is seen as true. Even if false statements are made – such as that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction – these are taken to be errors and not falsehoods.
   Deep-seated racist ideas are mobilised to construct certain leaders as dictators – even as genocidal – while the Western leaders who send bombers to annihilate cities are depicted as humanitarian. This basic exercise in the branding of political leaders is characteristic of the power of information warfare. The United States might be responsible for over a million dead in Iraq, but it is always going to be Saddam Hussein – rather than George W. Bush – who will be seen as a war criminal and therefore deserving of his ugly fate. Muslims are always terrorists, Russians are always gangsters and spies, and the state that is deemed to be an adversary is no longer ruled by a government but by a ‘regime’. Wildly unbalanced claims about human rights violations become a central tool to delegitimate dissent, whether by states or popular movements. There is a revolving door between Human Rights Watch, an organisation set up by US actors during the Cold War, and foreign policy officials in the US government.
   
2. Diplomatic War. To remove a country’s legitimate representative from a multilateral body is a crafty way to delegitimise the country’s government. The US unseated Cuba from the Organisation of American States in 1962 as a way to punish any country that crossed swords with the United States. But Cuba had not invaded the US; it was the US that had invaded Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, and – according the OAS Charter – it should have been the US that lost its seat in the OAS. But, since the OAS is an instrument of US power, it was Cuba that was ejected. To eject the ambassador, to pressure allies to do the same, to isolate the country in the United Nations – all of this is part of the effective mechanisms of a diplomatic war.
   
3. Economic War. US sanctions and secondary sanctions are placed on an adversary who must struggle to break from the effective embargo that is established. These sanctions prevent the targeted country from using the normal channels of finance, including the SWIFT system and the international banking networks; they prevent the country from importing key goods, including paying transportation firms for the transit of goods that others are perfectly happy to sell; they prevent access to the country’s bank accounts in other states; and they prevent access to key development funds offered by the World Bank and emergency funds offered by the IMF. In January 2019, when there was an attempted coup in Venezuela, Ambassador Idriss Jazairy, the UN Special Rapporteur on the negative impact of unilateral coercive measures, said, ‘I am especially concerned to hear reports that these sanctions are aimed at changing the government in Venezuela. Coercion, whether military or economic, must never be used to seek a change in government in a sovereign state. The use of sanctions by outside powers to overthrow an elected government is in violation of all norms of international law’.²⁵
   
4. Political War. The full spectrum of information and diplomatic warfare is used to undermine the political legitimacy of a government and to cast doubt about the entire political system that is in place in the country under attack. Election processes are depicted as fraudulent, political leaders are maligned, the legal system is used against popular political leaders through a process known as lawfare, faith in the entire political system is sought to be eroded. Funds are provided to ‘opposition groups’, including some non-governmental organisations, which are often instruments of the old elites. The difficult economic situation created by the economic war creates serious internal tensions, which are then blamed on the government by this ‘opposition’ rather than on the economic war. Funds and political support are then afforded to the disaffected population, which under the weight of the political war, begins to support regime change. Social media is turned into a weapon against the government, as described in Special Forces Unconventional Warfare, a US government manual from 2010. This is a ‘colour revolution’, a revolution of Astroturf rather than the grassroots. If there is police action against the protests, even if to intervene in mobilisations that terrorise working-class neighbourhoods and physical assault the people, it is depicted as authoritarian or even genocidal. Next, clamour for ‘humanitarian intervention’ begins to lead to an open military intervention by the United States. The US Joint Chiefs of Staff Joint Vision 2020 suggests that one aim is to promote chaos in the targeted society through what are called ‘information operations’ (including ‘psychological operations’ and ‘computer network attacks’).

In a hybrid war, the aggressor targets the vulnerabilities of a society through these aspects of non-military warfare (information, diplomatic, economic, and political) and deepens the chaos through acts of sabotage and threats of invasion. The pressure builds up in the targeted society, where resources of solidarity and resistance are called upon to prevent total social and political collapse.

Among the sustained hybrid war techniques that the US is employing against China are hostile rhetoric against the Chinese government and people, distortions about events in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Xinjiang, and the depiction of the coronavirus pandemic as a ‘China virus’. Evidence is not as important here as the use of older racist and anti-communist ideas to demonise China. But these techniques have not succeeded within China, where the middle class – the target for a ‘colour revolution’ – does not have any appetite to overthrow the government. It is content with the direction of the government and sees that its government has improved living standards and has been able – unlike Western governments – to tackle the coronavirus pandemic. A Harvard University study published in July 2020 shows that the government led by the Communist Party of China has increased its approval from 2003 to 2016, largely because of the social welfare programmes and the fight against corruption pushed by both the Communist Party of China and the government. The overall approval stands at 95.5%.²⁶

The epoch of European domination of the planet that opened in 1492 will come to an end. In fact, we can see it coming to an end. But important questions arise. We do not know how long the process will take, how effective and devastating the US-led resistance will be, or what will replace it. Our task is to continue the resistance that defeated the slave powers in Haiti in 1804 into the present until there is another date to put alongside 1492, a date when the epoch of the domination of the planet by Europe and its settler colonies comes to an end.

Notes

1 Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000).

2 Dan Sperling, ‘In 1825, Haiti Paid France $21 Billion To Preserve Its Independence — Time For France To Pay It Back’, Forbes, 6 December 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2017/12/06/in-1825-haiti-gained-independence-from-france-for-21-billion-its-time-for-france-to-pay-it-back (accessed 7 December 2020).

3 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. Rex Warner, (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1968).

4 Quoted in Melvyn Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 18–19.

5 To read more about the crackdown of the Communist Party of Indonesia following the 1965 coup, see ‘The Legacy of Lekra: Organising Revolutionary Culture in Indonesia’, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, 1 December 2020, https://www.thetricontinental.org/dossier-35-lekra/

6 ‘Excerpts From Pentagon’s Plan: “Prevent the Re-Emergence of a New Rival”’, New York Times, 8 March 1992, https://www.nytimes.com/1992/03/08/world/excerpts-from-pentagon-s-plan-prevent-the-re-emergence-of-a-new-rival.html (accessed 7 December 2020).

7 Vijay Prashad, Washington bullets, (Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2020), 118. https://mayday.leftword.com/catalog/product/view/id/21820

8 ‘U.S. National Security Strategy: Transform America’s National Security Institutions To Meet the Challenges and Opportunities of the 21st Century’, U.S. Department of State Archive, 20 September 2001, https://2001-2009.state.gov/r/pa/ei/wh/15430.htm (accessed 7 December 2020).

9 Nan Tian, Alexandra Kuimova, Diego Lopes da Silva, Pieter D. Wezeman and Siemon T. Wezeman, ‘Trends in World Military Expenditure, 2019’, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, April 2020, https://www.sipri.org/sites/default/files/2020-04/fs_2020_04_milex_0_0.pdf (accessed 7 December 2020).

10 John Schmitt, Elise Gould, and Josh Bivens, ‘America’s slow-motion wage crisis’, Economic Policy Institute, 13 September 2018, https://www.epi.org/publication/americas-slow-motion-wage-crisis-four-decades-of-slow-and-unequal-growth-2/ (accessed 7 December 2020.)

11 Donald J. Trump, ‘Inaugural Address: Remarks of President Donald J. Trump – as prepared for delivery’, The White House, 20 January 2017, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/the-inaugural-address/ (accessed 7 December 2020).

12 ‘The Power of America’s Example: The Biden Plan for Leading the Democratic World to Meet the Challenges of the 21^st Century’, Joebiden.com, July 2019, https://joebiden.com/americanleadership (accessed 7 December 2020).

13 ‘National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) 2020 Section 1253 Assessment Executive Summary: Regain the Advantage’, U.S. Indo- Pacific Command, 5 April 2020, https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthelper/6864-national-defense-strategy-summ/8851517f5e10106bc3b1/optimized/full.pdf (accessed 7 December 2020).

14 ‘Factbox: How close is China to complete building a moderately prosperous society in all respects’, Xinhua, 2 August 2020, http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-08/02/c_139259082.htm (accessed 7 December 2020).

15 For more on the lawfare coup in Brazil, read ‘Lula and The Battle for Democracy’, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, 1 June 2018, https://www.thetricontinental.org/lula-and-the-battle-for-democracy/

16 ‘Russia and China hold the biggest military exercises for decades’, The Economist, 6 September 2018, https://www.economist.com/europe/2018/09/06/russia-and-china-hold-the-biggest-military-exercises-for-decades (accessed 8 December 2020).

17 Vladimir Isachenko, ‘Putin: Russia-China military alliance can’t be ruled out’, AP News, 22 October 2020, https://apnews.com/article/beijing-moscow-foreign-policy-russia-vladimir-putin-1d4b112d2fe8cb66192c5225f4d614c4 (accessed 7 December 2020).

18 Milo Medin and Gilman Louie, ‘The 5G Ecosystem: Risks & Opportunities for DoD Defense Innovation Board’, Contributors: Kurt DelBene, Michael McQuade, Richard Murray, Mark Sirangelo, Defense Innovation Board, 3 April 2019, https://media.defense.gov/2019/Apr/04/2002109654/-1/-1/0/DIB_5G_STUDY_04.04.19.PDF (accessed 7 December 2020).

19 ‘Multipolarity Plays Key Role in World Peace: Chinese Vice President’, People’s Daily, 6 November 2001, http://en.people.cn/english/200111/05/eng20011105_83945.html (accessed 7 December 2020).

20 National Intelligence Council, Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds, (Washington, DC: Office of the Director of National Intelligence, 2012), iii.

21 Richard Haass, ‘How to Build a Second American Century’, Washington Post, 26 April 2013; and Stephen Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, World Out of Balance: International Relations and the Challenge of American Primacy, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).

22 Richard Haass, Foreign Policy Begins at Home. (New York: Basic Books, 2013).

23 Andrew Korybko, Hybrid Wars: The Indirect Adaptive Approach to Regime Change, (Moscow: Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia, 2015), https://orientalreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/AK-Hybrid-Wars-updated.pdf

24 William S. Lind and Gregory A. Thiele, 4th Generation Warfare Handbook (Kouvola: Castalia House, 2015).

25 ‘Venezuela sanctions harm human rights of innocent people, UN expert warns’, United Nations Human Rights, Office of the High Commissioner, 31 January 2019,

https://www.ohchr.org/en/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=24131&LangID=E (accessed 7 December 2020).

26 Dan Harsha, ‘Taking China’s pulse’, The Harvard Gazette, 9 July 2020,https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/07/long-term-survey-reveals-chinese-government-satisfaction/ (accessed 7 December 2020).

Adapted graphic from People’s Medical Publishing House, China, 1977.

CoronaShock is a term that refers to how a virus struck the world with such gripping force; it refers to how the social order in the bourgeois state crumbled, while the social order in the socialist parts of the world appeared more resilient.

This is the third in a multiple-part series of studies on CoronaShock. It is based on research by Ana Maldonado (Frente Francisco de Miranda, Venezuela), Manolo de los Santos (researcher with Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research), Subin Dennis (researcher with Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research), and Vijay Prashad (director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research).

Friedrich Engels once said: ‘Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism’. What does ‘regression into barbarism’ mean to our lofty European civilisation? Until now, we have all probably read and repeated these words thoughtlessly, without suspecting their fearsome seriousness. A look around us at this moment shows what the regression of bourgeois society into barbarism means. This world war is a regression into barbarism. The triumph of imperialism leads to the annihilation of civilisation. At first, this happens sporadically for the duration of a modern war, but then when the period of unlimited wars begins it progresses toward its inevitable consequences. Today, we face the choice exactly as Friedrich Engels foresaw it a generation ago: either the triumph of imperialism and the collapse of all civilization as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration – a great cemetery. Or the victory of socialism, that means the conscious active struggle of the international proletariat against imperialism and its method of war. This is a dilemma of world history, an either/or; the scales are wavering before the decision of the class-conscious proletariat. The future of civilisation and humanity depends on whether or not the proletariat resolves to throw its revolutionary broadsword into the scales. In this war imperialism has won. Its bloody sword of genocide has brutally tilted the scale toward the abyss of misery. The only compensation for all the misery and all the shame would be if we learn from the war how the proletariat can seize mastery of its own destiny and escape the role of the lackey to the ruling classes.

Rosa Luxemburg, The Crisis of German Social Democracy, 1915.

Ở nhà là yêu nước! (‘To stay at home is to love your country!’), Vietnam, 2020.
Hiep Le Duc

In late December 2019, the Wuhan Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in central China’s Hubei Province detected cases of pneumonia of an unknown cause. In the first few days of January 2020, Chinese authorities were regularly informing the World Health Organisation (WHO) as well as other major countries and regions with close ties to China’s mainland, such as Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan about the outbreak. On 5 January, the WHO released its first briefing on a ‘pneumonia of unknown cause’ in Wuhan. Little was known about the virus, neither how to properly understand it nor whether transmission could occur between humans. The genome sequence for the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) was published by the Global Initiative on Sharing All Influenza Data (GISAID) on 12 January. Dr. Zhong Nanshan, a leading Chinese pulmonologist who is advising the Chinese government on this pandemic, confirmed human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus on 20 January.

As soon as it was clear that this virus could be transmitted between humans, the Chinese authorities acted. Wuhan, a city of 11 million people, was shut down, the scientific establishment in China – and its collaborators around the world – went to work to understand the virus and the disease (COVID-19), and medical personnel in China rushed to be trained and to help break the chain of the infection. Inside Wuhan, the neighbourhood committees, which include members of a range of other associations, Communist Party cadres, and volunteers of all kinds, hastened to assist with temperature checks, food and medicine distribution, and assistance in hospitals. After ten weeks in lockdown, Wuhan opened once more on 8 April. On 15 May, the authorities started to test all the residents of Wuhan once again in order to protect public health and to resume social and economic activities (China shared the results of this test to aid with studies on the feasibility of the herd immunity theory).

On 30 January, WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared that the outbreak constitutes a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC). From its Geneva headquarters, the WHO sent up a flare which effectively read: a highly contagious virus has been detected that requires stringent measures of tests, physical distance, and aggressive sanitation.

At this point, in the aftermath of 20 January, a gulf opened between the capitalist states and the socialist states. Our analysis shows four main areas of differentiation between the socialist and capitalist approach to the virus. The socialist approach is based on:

1. Science-based government action
2. Public sector production of essential materials
3. Public action mobilised to facilitate social life
4. Internationalism

In the capitalist states (such as the United States, Brazil, and India), the governments have instead operated in a hallucinatory manner, pretending that the virus is either not real or not contagious and hoping that some extraneous factor would protect their citizens from its dangers. For-profit sector firms have failed to provide the necessary equipment, while public action has been hard to galvanise in atomised societies that lack the habit of organisation and struggle. Finally, to cover up their incompetence, the ruling political class in these states has resorted to stigmatisation and jingoism, using – in this case – the lethal combination of racism and anti-communism to blame China.

In this report, we look at three countries (Cuba, Venezuela, and Vietnam) as well as one state (Kerala, India) to investigate how these socialist parts of the world have been able to handle the virus more effectively.

Cuba

On 17 January, Cuban media reported the detection of a mysterious pneumonia in China that, at that point, had killed two people and infected forty-one. When more information came in about the novel coronavirus, the government began to disseminate the WHO’s reports. The Cuban media provided comprehensive coverage of the decisions made in China to implement lockdowns and other measures to break the chain of the infection. On 28 February, Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, President of Cuba, spoke by phone with Xi Jinping, President of China. During the call, Díaz-Canel expressed the firm support and solidarity of the Cuban people, their government, and the Communist Party with China’s struggle against the virus. Cuba offered to help in any way it could to assist the Chinese people. BioCubaFarma, a public sector firm, increased its production of Interferon Alpha 2B and, as of 24 February, had provided more than 150,000 double dose vials of the drug to China.

On 28 January, Dr. José Ángel Portal Miranda, head of the Ministry of Public Health (MINSAP), convened a national-level meeting on the novel coronavirus. Medical vigilance was to be the priority, which is why the government created a National Working Group (NWG) to lead the struggle. MINSAP began to train all public health personnel – over 95,000 doctors and 84,000 nurses – to diagnose and treat cases of COVID-19. A public campaign began to call for vigilance of symptoms and heightened hygiene. Media platforms shared this information, but so did mass organizations such as the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC), the Committees for the Defence of the Revolution (CDRs), and the Federation of University Students (FEU). Dr. Francisco Durán García, the national director of epidemiology of MINSAP, made the first official statement that day. He calmly explained that the administration had designed a plan ‘similar to the plan we developed when the Ebola epidemic hit several countries’. Dr. Carmelo Trujillo Machado, national head of the MINSAP International Health Control Program, said that officials would be vigilant at ports of entry for travellers with any known symptoms of COVID-19.

The National Working Group authorised the immediate purchase of protective gear, medical equipment, and reactive agents. The production of thirty critical medical products became a priority. Agencies in Cuba began a renewed emphasis on the research and development of candidate vaccines and anti-viral treatments to be shared with China. By April, the Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (CIGB) started the first clinical trials on a vaccine that could boost the immune system. Dr. Gerardo E. Guillén Nieto, the director of Biomedical Research at the China-Cuba Centre for Biotechnological Innovation (CCBJIC) in Hunan, China said that his team was examining whether the innate immune system could be activated and, if activated, would produce a specific immunity against the virus. There are no specific vaccines for this disease, but Cuba, he says, ‘has products that already exist’.

On 10 March, four tourists who had arrived from Lombardy (Italy) showed symptoms of COVID-19. When they tested positive for COVID-19, they were shifted to the Pedro Kouri Institute of Tropical Medicine (IPK), which has a long history of combatting epidemics. The IPK, along with regional hospitals in Santa Clara and Santiago de Cuba, was designated as the primary site for testing patients suspected of having COVID-19. Each of these hospitals has the capacity to test 1,000 patients per day. The government decided to place all travellers arriving in Cuba under fourteen days of medical observation.

On 17 March, 28,000 students from Cuba’s thirteen medical universities joined a campaign to visit every home in the country. The students went to check each person for symptoms, and if they found someone with symptoms, they referred them to their community’s family doctor. This doctor would then make a decision about whether or not to test the person. Within a week, the medical students had visited six million Cubans – half of the island’s population. With this approach, close to 40,000 people were tested for COVID-19 by 26 April. In the province of Villa Clara, the students visited 250,000 people, leading to the detection of 2,687 cases with respiratory symptoms, including five potential COVID-19 cases most likely to test positive. Thousands more foreign medical students on scholarships provided by Cuba joined this campaign. Ishaira Nieto Rosas, a third year student from Puerto Rico, said that for foreign students these visits were voluntary, but ‘in these moments you realise that our work is very important and that the population is aware of that. It does not matter how many doors we have to knock on, or how many times we have to shout good morning. We do this because the country needs us, and we do it with great pride’.

On 20 March, President Díaz-Canel, along with seven members of Cuba’s Council of Ministers, went on television to report on the steps taken thus far and to outline further measures. ‘We have a responsibility to protect human lives and the entire social fabric’, he said, ‘with serenity, realism, and objectivity. There can be neither panic nor overconfidence’. A science-based attitude defined Cuba’s response. By that date, 21 people had tested positive for COVID-19 and another 716 people were under observation in hospitals. The government put forward several measures:

1. Cuban nationals who returned home from abroad would be placed under a fourteen-day quarantine.
2. Sixty thousand tourists would leave the country; the entry of travellers would be heavily regulated, which would impact tourism, one of Cuba’s key sources of revenue.
3. Physical distancing was mandated.
4. People vulnerable to the virus and those who were not working in key industries were mandated to self-quarantine at home.
5. The Ministry of Internal Commerce suspended all public activities. Food stores and farmers’ markets would be kept open under the strictest health regulations. Restaurants could remain open but only at 50% capacity.
6. Minister of Labour and Social Security Marta Elena Feitó Cabrera said that ‘No one will be left helpless’, and measures were implemented to ensure this. Tax payments for self-employed private sector workers were suspended. For the first month of the quarantine, furloughed workers received 100% of their salaries; after that, workers were promised 60% of their salaries. Workers in the private sector were told that they would receive the equivalent of the national minimum wage.
7. To stave off the possibility of hunger, the Cuban authorities expanded the existing rationing system in order to guarantee each family equitable access to food and basic sanitation supplies during the pandemic. Ration cards were used for distribution through 12,767 neighbourhood stores; these cards offer a basic food basket that includes cooking oil, sugar, rice, and beans, and was expanded to include eggs, potatoes, vegetables, an extra pound of chicken per person, and extra soap, toothpaste, and bleach. Despite its limitations, the ration cards and neighbourhood stores have served 3,809,000 families and limited price gouging.

By 6 April, the number of confirmed patients rose to 396, with 1,752 hospitalised. The government announced additional measures based on the national plan. These included suspending all non-essential economic activities, sit-down service in restaurants (only pick-ups and deliveries allowed), urban public transportation, and postponing payment for water, electricity, and gas.

The backbone of Cuba’s response to COVID-19, as in other socialist countries, has been public action. The Committees for the Defence of the Revolution (CDRs), founded in 1960 under the threat of a possible US invasion, have an estimated 8 million members (out of a population of 11.34 million). The committees are organised on a block-by-block basis; they mobilise the people to help the most vulnerable in each community, to participate in health campaigns, and to provide food and shelter during the hurricane season. In the eastern city of Santiago de Cuba, CDR members like Juana Guerra, a university professor and a member of the Federation of Cuban Women, made 16,000 masks. Members of the Federation of University Students volunteer in different cities, helping to clean and cook in isolation centres, delivering supplies to families under quarantine, and working in designated support centres preparing food for medical personnel and vulnerable families. Inspired by the battles of the past, many students proudly say that COVID-19 has become their Bay of Pigs (#EsteEsMiGiron).

Internationalism is at the core of the revolutionary Cuban ethos. In 2005, Cuba founded the Henry Reeve International Medical Brigade to provide emergency health assistance around the world; since then, it has sent twenty-five contingents abroad, aiding 3.5 million people in twenty-three countries. This brigade is now at the centre of the fight against COVID-19, responding to requests to send Cuban health workers to countries around the world. On 15 March, the first contingent of 130 epidemiologists and other medical specialists left for Venezuela. Since then, thirty-three more contingents made up of 3,337 health workers have gone to work in twenty-seven countries in Europe, Africa, and Latin America (the contingents range from two doctors in Grenada to 217 health workers in South Africa). Many of these countries have come under increased pressure from the US government to deny Cuba’s help. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has led the charge, accusing the island of profiting from the pandemic. Cuba’s foreign minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla responded to the US smear campaign, saying, ‘What right does the Secretary of State have to put pressure on sovereign governments to deprive their nation[s] of medical care?’

As the world entered into CoronaShock, the British cruise ship MS Braemar was left stranded in the Caribbean carrying 682 passengers, including five with COVID-19, desperately looking for a port in which to dock. While other countries refused to allow the ship to dock, Cuba – at significant risk – opened its doors and organised the disembarkment and return home of its passengers, stating that ‘These times call for solidarity, understanding health as a human right and strengthening international cooperation in order to address our common challenges; i.e., values that are inherent to the humanist practice of the Cuban Revolution and people’.

Cuba’s revolutionary system has given it the strength and ability to survive in the face of blockades and pandemics, integrating workers, peasants, scientists, mass organisations, and civil defence systems with a party and a government that puts human life at the centre of its attention.

We sent a doctor to Cuba; the doctor transformed into millions, 2020.
#CubaSavesLives

Vietnam

On 16 January, before it was clear that the new virus could be transmitted between humans, Vietnam’s Ministry of Health informed the other government agencies and the public about the dangerous virus and urged immediate action. Five days later, on 21 January, the Ministry of Health gave detailed instructions to hospitals and clinics about how to tackle the virus. On 24 January, Deputy Health Minister Đỗ Xuân Tuyên said that inspections would take place at all border posts; this was an important decision, since Vietnam shares a 1,400-kilometre border with China, and this border is only a ten-hour bus ride from Wuhan. On 30 January, the Vietnamese government – led by Prime Minister Nguyễn Xuân Phúc – established a national steering committee on epidemic prevention. Two days later, on 1 February, Prime Minister Nguyễn declared what was effectively a national emergency.

The Communist Party of Vietnam very early on offered a motto: ‘fighting the epidemic is like fighting against the enemy’. But this fight was to be conducted with a scientific attitude. Testing began at the border points, and epidemic control teams began to test the population and carry out contact tracing if an infected person was identified. The National Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology was able to create a test very quickly, which was used extensively in the country; over 100 laboratories across the country performed real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing, which allowed for much faster COVID-19 results at the rate of 27,000 samples per day. On 10 March, the government released the NCOVI mobile application to facilitate contact tracing. Rather than lock down the entire population, the epidemic teams studied the population and isolated and treated those with symptoms, those who tested positive for COVID-19, and anyone who they came into contact with; any region with particularly high numbers was quarantined.

Based on the scientific knowledge available, the Vietnamese authorities followed a four-tier approach to isolation:

1. Tier one: anyone with a confirmed diagnosis is isolated in a health facility (in these cases, self-quarantine is not permitted).
2. Tier two: anyone with close contact with the confirmed cases must be tested and go into a government-run quarantine centre.
3. Tier three: anyone who has been in close contact with the people in tier two must self-isolate at home.
4. Tier four: if there is a particularly bad outbreak in a village or a hospital, the entire village and hospital must go into lockdown.

This multi-tier isolation system helped the authorities break the chain of infection. But the government remained vigilant. On 30 March, soon after the Bach Mai Hospital in Hanoi – which had been essential in the fight to break the chain – experienced a flare of cases, the government announced a national pandemic.

The Ministry of Health posted a music video to explain the concept of physical distancing and hand washing; this video went viral on Tik Tok, where young people created a dance to go with it. The message was broadcast within days. Telecommunications firms – including private companies – sent three billion messages about COVID-19 to those with mobile phones. Masks were mandated in public and alcohol-based hand sanitisers were distributed and made available for sale everywhere. Schools and religious sites were all immediately closed.

The government directed public sector units to produce necessary equipment, including Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) and ventilators, as well as hand sanitizer and medicines. There was enough industrial capacity that could be directed to produce these goods without any concerns about price gouging, since these are public sector enterprises. On 8 April, the government of Vietnam sent 450,000 units of PPE to the United States in an act of solidarity. This is the same country which was bombed beyond belief by the United States government, which used such harsh chemical weapons that the people remain scarred by. Vietnam’s agriculture will not recover for generations.

The private sector followed suit, and so did philanthropists who set up ‘Rice ATMs’ to distribute food to those who had lost their incomes. The government set up food kitchens to feed any one in need.

Vietnam, with a population of 100 million, has had no fatalities from COVID-19 as of early July.

Cảm ơn Việt Nam! (‘Thank you, Vietnam!’), Vietnam, 2020.
Hiep Le Duc

Venezuela

On 26 February, Brazilian authorities reported the first case of coronavirus; this case was also the first to be reported in Latin America. Two days later, on 28 February, the Venezuelan government created the Presidential Commission for the Prevention and Control of Coronavirus (weeks before the first case was reported in the country on 13 March). Strikingly, during the same time frame, the United States government decided to deepen its hybrid war against Venezuela – despite the highly contagious nature of the coronavirus, and despite the warnings of the WHO.

Before the pandemic, Venezuela had already been under severe US sanctions, putting pressure on Venezuela’s economy as a whole and sabotaging Venezuela’s public health system. In 2018, the Venezuelan Pharmaceutical Federation reported 85% shortages of essential medicines. Another study from 2018 showed that 300,000 people are at risk of dying because they lack access to key medicines for HIV, kidney disease, cancer, and diabetes as a result of the sanctions. Venezuela turned to its international allies – China, Cuba, Iran, and Russia – to provide necessary equipment and support. Squeezed by the hostile US-driven sanctions regime and by a blockade by US warships, the Venezuelan government and its allies demonstrated nerves of steel in their decision to break the US embargo.

On 13 March, Venezuela’s Vice President Delcy Rodríguez confirmed the first positive cases of COVID-19: a forty-one-year-old woman returning from travels in the European Union and the United States and a fifty-two-year-old man returning from Spain. The previous day, the government had suspended flights – effective 15 March – from Europe, Colombia, Panama, and the Dominican Republic and began checking for symptoms at airports and seaports. Because of the cases of the travellers returning from Spain, mandatory quarantines were ordered for all passengers who arrived on Iberia flight 6673 on 5 and 8 March.

The government took the WHO advisories seriously and banned all public gatherings, suspended all schools, ordered the use of face masks on public transportation, and, on 15 March called for a total quarantine in certain states of the country (La Guaira, Miranda, Zulia, Apure, Táchira and Cojedes, as well as in the city of Caracas). Within two days, the government confirmed sixteen new cases, and so it extended the quarantine to the entire nation for one month. The use of face masks in public was declared compulsory.

It was imperative, again based on the advice of the WHO, to collect relevant medical and epidemiological information about the population. On 16 March, the government announced that the Sistema Patria (‘System of the Homeland’) – the national card system established by President Nicolás Maduro in 2016 to facilitate access to social programs and electronic payments– would be used as an instrument in the fight against the disease. In 2017, Maduro’s administration established this web-based platform as a way to reach the most vulnerable parts of the population in the fight against sanctions-induced problems. Through a voluntary registration process, over eighteen million of Venezuela’s roughly twenty-eight million residents enrolled in the system, making it the most comprehensive way both to collect information and to deliver goods and services to the people. Over the years, the Sistema Patria has become the basis for organising the food supply, allocating monetary assistance, and experimenting with digital currency. In the case of the struggle against COVID-19, the system has been used to deliver cash assistance to the people as well as to do a proper inventory of the people’s medical needs.

On 26 March, the US Department of Justice accused the Venezuelan leadership of drug trafficking and put a bounty on President Nicolás Maduro, Minister of Industry and National Production for Venezuela Tareck El Aissami, Minister of Defence Vladimir Padrino López, and President of the National Constituent Assembly Diosdado Cabello Rondón, among others. On that same day, the government announced a COVID-19 survey and screening plan using Sistema Patria as its basis. The plan, focused on house-to-house visits of those who are the most vulnerable to the disease, is an effective mechanism in the prevention and early detection of new cases. At the same time, it creates employment for healthcare workers in the midst of an economic crisis. The plan was developed by Venezuelan and Cuban medical teams who worked closely in their outreach with the various organisations of the people such as communal councils, the Local Committees for Supply and Production, health committees, and the United Socialist Party of Venezuela. Venezuela has carried out 929,599 tests to diagnose cases of COVID-19, equivalent to 30,987 tests per million inhabitants.

On 24 March, President Maduro reiterated the importance of taking preventative measures against the virus and tightened the lockdown in the Capital Region. This announcement came in light of seven new detected cases of COVID-19, bringing the country’s total at that time to ninety-one cases. This government response required at least the bolstering of three kinds of institutions: 1) Forty-six hospitals dedicated to COVID-19 patients; 2) comprehensive diagnostic centres, which were established in 2005 as local health clinics as a project of the Venezuelan and Cuban governments; 3) private health centres. Based on the latest science, the government circulated epidemiological and clinical protocols. Medications such as the Cuban anti-viral drug Interferon Alpha 2B and hydroxychloroquine were introduced to assist in the treatment of infected patients, even in private medical centres. Twelve thousand medical and nursing students were mobilised to assist in the treatment of the patients.

Venezuelans – familiar with the harsh conditions imposed on them by the sanctions – had already built relief institutions and political resilience. One such important institution is the Local Committees for Supply and Production (CLAP), which were created in 2016 as a method to deliver food to at least seven million households who were otherwise in danger of hunger. The point of the system is not only to meet the basic nutritional needs of the people, but also to strengthen local community organisations, since these are the bodies that are in touch with the people and that deliver food. Each CLAP box has similar supplies (flour, grains, rice, milk, oil, and canned meat); while the market price of the goods in the box is roughly $11, the cost to the public is less than a penny.

The CLAP programme has been under targeted attack by the United States government, which has sought to sanction overseas suppliers of food products that enter the CLAP relief boxes. This has not deterred the Venezuelan government, which – despite manifold problems – remains committed to the relief of the people. In 2016, Aristóbulo Istúriz, vice president of Venezuela, said that the programme is a ‘political instrument to defend the revolution’; this attitude remains intact. On 19 March, the government created a supplementary plan for CLAP, using the programme as a way to enhance relief at a time of the lockdown.

On 24 March, the government further extended the CLAP programme, and – despite the economic uncertainty posed by the sanctions – its distribution is guaranteed until at least August 2020. There has been a long-term plan to move from the import of food – including what goes in the CLAP boxes – to becoming more self-sufficient in food production. The government announced further investment to strengthen the Centralised Public Procurement Plan, which manages state purchases of social goods, and it encouraged the creation of ways to bring food from the countryside into cities. Since schools are closed, the School Feeding Plan, which feeds a large percentage of Venezuela’s children, has now been transformed into part of an emergency plan; drawing on a bedrock of public action, food that is cooked in community kitchens is being distributed to the students’ homes. The People to People Socialist Plan of Production, Distribution and Consumption enhances this School Feeding Plan with fruits and vegetables from productive communes and a participatory and pedagogical methodology of work. The city of Caracas has established a home delivery programme, ‘I Buy from Home’, with regulated prices of subsidised food and hired workers whose daily income had vanished as delivery persons.

A range of policies was announced on 23 March to secure the already fragile economy. Using the Sistema Patria, the government provided cash assistance to the vulnerable and to small and medium businesses directly in order for them to continue paying their workers. The government suspended lease and rent payments and prohibited evictions. It called upon real estate associations to find a way to manage the long-term crisis of insolvency. All principal and interest payments on loans were suspended for six months, and fines and interest on fines were also abolished. The government ordered banks to reclassify the measurement of credit in this period in order to protect people’s credit histories. Since communications are central – especially during the quarantine – the government prohibited the suspension of cable television services and telephone services (including the Internet) for six months. To enable the import of key goods to sustain the country, the government offered tax exemptions and invested in strategic sectors such as food production and distribution, pharmaceutical production and distribution, and the production of hygiene and sanitary equipment and goods.

In addition to such measures by the state, a key part of the Venezuelan response has been the centrality of public action. The theory of the Bolivarian Revolution is to decentralise institutional power into people power, to build institutions of the people that self-manage localities and that collectivise production. Crucial to carrying out this process are the communes, their communal councils, and the CLAP committees, as well as people’s movements. Women play a central role in the leadership of these entities as part of the Social Missions; it is women who cook every single day, who work preparing infusions and making masks, and who provide assistance to families who do not have the means to school their children at home.

The response to the pandemic is met not only by the state, but by these decentralised bodies, which are highly motivated and political. As the hybrid war against Venezuela deepens, the people’s participation not only provides vital support to counteract the impact crisis, but also strengthens their own determination to defend their Bolivarian Revolution against the attack on the currency, hyperinflation, and the armed aggression against the country intensifies popular resistance. The reaction to the pandemic – both by the state and through organised public action – has weaved relief efforts to meet people’s immediate material needs together with the political fortitude and resilience required to resist the US-led hybrid war.

Over the first six weeks of the lockdown, roughly 49,628 people returned to Venezuela, mainly from Colombia and Brazil. After being tested at the borders, they went into mandatory quarantine in government-run centres. Despite these thorough measures, many of the COVID-19 cases are imported – 77.8% of the thirty-four cases of COVID-19 identified between 9 and 27 May alone were brought in from outside of the country.

Knowing these risks, the government sent planes to Santiago (Chile), Lima (Peru), and Quito (Ecuador) to bring Venezuelans home at no cost, regardless of their political affiliations, and despite the additional obstacles to managing the crisis and accessing adequate medical supplies that are posed by US sanctions. Venezuela has faced hostility from the governments of Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, and Brazil, but this has not impacted how the government of Venezuela helped Venezuelans who migrated to those countries. Furthermore, when the Colombian Ministry of Health said that its only machine to diagnose COVID-19 had broken, President Maduro offered to send two machines, which had come from China, to Colombia – despite the fact that Colombia houses anti-Venezuelan military forces on the border and has consistently acted as a ‘doormat’ for US intervention in the country. The Venezuelan government tried to coordinate this offer through the Pan-American Health Organisation, but the offer was rejected by Colombia.

Venezuela and Cuba have been brought closer together by the US attack on both countries and by their joint commitment to socialism. The response to COVID-19 was therefore very closely coordinated by the two states. The Cuban government sent 10,000 doses of Interferon Alpha 2B; its creator – Dr. Luis Herrera – visited Venezuela on 16 March and praised the Venezuelan decision to impose quarantine as an effective way to break the chain of infection. The day before, a team of 130 Cuban doctors arrived to support the efforts to combat coronavirus in the country. This team joined the Cuban Medical Mission that has been in Venezuela since 2003 (its members rotate every two years). On 23 March, a medical team arrived from the People’s Republic of China to offer assistance, and China – along with Russia – sent medical equipment, medicines, diagnostic tests, reagents, protective lenses, biosafety suits, and air purifiers for health centres, and an air bridge was established between Venezuela and China to facilitate imports of essential goods.

In May, Iran sent five oil tankers with fuel to Venezuela with the intention of providing relief to the Venezuelan people, thereby breaking the US blockade of Venezuela’s ports. These tankers entered Venezuela with a broad message of peaceful solidarity between peoples.

A los médicos cubanos (‘To the Cuban Doctors’), Venezuela, 2020.
Miguel Guerra/Utopix

Kerala

On 18 January, KK Shailaja, Kerala’s health minister in the Left Democratic Front (LDF) government of this Indian state of 35 million, convened a meeting to discuss what was going on in Wuhan, China. Wuhan had not yet gone into lockdown, but Shailaja was aware that there were students from Kerala in Wuhan, and that when they returned, there would be a possibility of the coronavirus being imported into the state. On 22 January, the health department sent an alert to all hospitals and district authorities about the need to prepare for the virus. On 24 January, Kerala set up a state-level control room; by 28 January, control rooms had been set up in all of the districts. Isolation facilities were also set up in all of the districts, and eighteen committees were established and preventive measures were set in motion.

The first case of coronavirus in Kerala, a medical student who had been in Wuhan, was detected on 30 January; soon, two more tested positive, and by 3 February more than 2,200 people who returned to Kerala from coronavirus-hit regions had been placed under quarantine. The vigilance exercised by the state proved effective: all three patients fully recovered within a few days, and there were no cases of secondary spread. The number of people under quarantine soon decreased.

But late in February, as the coronavirus spread to more countries, the influx of people into Kerala from coronavirus-hit regions intensified. Several people – initially those coming from Italy, and later those coming from the Persian Gulf region – tested positive for COVID-19. Others who came into contact with them also contracted the disease. This was the second wave of COVID-19 infections in the state. Throughout the subsequent weeks, Kerala continued to screen passengers who came into the state not just by air, but also by road at twenty-four border checkpoints, and by train – an arduous task given the sheer number of passengers.

Kerala carried out extensive contact tracing, using route maps that contain the details of the places visited by infected persons. The people who were present at those locations during the time when the infected persons visited were asked to contact the health department. The route maps have been widely circulated through social media and through GoK Direct, the Government of Kerala’s mobile phone app. Elected representatives from Local Self Government Institutions and community health workers helped carry out contact tracing. The formula was clear: ‘trace, quarantine, test, isolate, treat’, as Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan – who is also a Polit Bureau member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) – would later state.

Those who come from abroad or from other states are placed under quarantine, either at designated quarantine centres or at home. Those who have come into primary and secondary contact with infected persons are under home quarantine. Health department officials visit or call regularly to check whether isolation protocols are being followed at home. Those who do not have enough facilities at home for effective quarantining are lodged in government-run quarantine centres, and anyone who develops symptoms associated with COVID-19 is hospitalised. Testing and treatment are free and available to everyone in the state.

When COVID-19 started being reported in the state, Health Minister KK Shailaja held daily press conferences to inform the public about the latest updates, the measures being taken to combat the virus, and the measures that must be taken by the public. From 10 March onwards, Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan started to give daily press conferences, as the efforts to contain the pandemic now involved the work of several departments. More COVID-19 test centres and COVID-19 care centres have been set up in all districts, and 276 doctors and 321 junior health inspectors have been newly appointed.

The government has taken steps to manufacture masks and sanitiser in light of the increased demand, rather than leaving the problem to be played out in the free market. The public sector has taken the lead in producing more medicines, hand sanitiser, and gloves. Kudumbashree, a massive government-backed collective of neighbourhood groups of 4.5 million women (roughly one-fourth of the population of women in the state), started making masks. Activists of the left-wing Democratic Youth Federation of India (DYFI) and the Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad (‘The Kerala Forum for Science Literature’ or KSSP, Kerala’s biggest people’s science movement) pitched in by making hand sanitiser.

The government launched the Break The Chain campaign to encourage people to adopt the practices necessary to prevent COVID-19 infection. Government employees’ organisations set up hand sanitiser kiosks in front of government offices. DYFI set up hand washing facilities in 25,000 locations across the state, and call centres for people who needed help. Preparedness, utmost vigilance, strict adherence to protocol, and transparency have been crucial in Kerala’s battle against COVID-19.

By late March, when the rest of India awoke to the reality of the pandemic, Kerala had already moved towards an in-depth plan to alleviate the economic hardship of the people. By 12 March, it had announced the closure of educational institutions and soon began to deliver food at home for children who would have otherwise been in childcare centres. Rather than impose a blanket lockdown with no thought as to how families might eat, stay in their homes, or comply with the policies being rolled out – as done by the India’s central government – Kerala’s state government gradually put restrictions into place, taking care to provide the people with the conditions to follow them. On 19 March, the Chief Minister announced a relief package of Rs. 200 billion. The package included advance payment of social welfare pensions, free food grains to everyone for a month, additional funding of Rs. 5 billion for public healthcare, and relaxation of utility bill and tax payment deadlines.

The state implemented a lockdown from 24 March onwards. India’s central government implemented a country-wide lockdown from the next day onwards. In the subsequent weeks, Kerala’s state government distributed food grains for free to all families in the state. Cooked food is being provided to the elderly who live alone, the disabled, those who cannot cook for themselves due to illness, and the extremely poor. Ward-level committees of Local Self Government Institutions (LSGIs) – panchayats in villages, municipalities in towns, and municipal corporations in larger cities – are doing this work with the help of volunteers. Community kitchens have been set up by the LSGIs, and volunteers deliver cooked food from these kitchens to the homes of those in need. Members of the left-wing unions of LSGI employees, such as the Kerala Municipal and Corporation Staff Union (KMCSU), constitute a majority of those who are volunteering their services at the community kitchens. The government has also distributed grocery kits containing seventeen essential items to all families for free.

Anticipating the possibility of supply chains being disrupted due to the lockdown, the state government took steps to ensure that paddy, the staple crop of the region, is harvested without interruption. Measures were also taken to ensure the procurement of rice, vegetables, and several other crops.

Right at the outset, the Government of Kerala recognised that the accommodation facilities for migrant workers from other Indian states were often inadequate to ensure physical distancing. Therefore, state-run relief camps were set up for the workers and medical check-ups were arranged. Food, masks, soap, and hand sanitiser were made available to the workers. As of 20 April, 19,902 camps had been opened for migrant workers in Kerala, with 353,000 workers staying in the camps – the highest number of such camps in the country.

Kerala has many welfare fund boards for workers of various sectors, which provide social security benefits by pooling contributions by workers and their employers into welfare funds. All workers in sectors with welfare fund boards are being provided financial assistance through the boards. Workers who are not part of any welfare fund board are being given Rs. 1,000 each.

The scale of voluntary work that is underway is massive. Apart from voluntary work by government employees, trade union members, youth activists, and student activists, work by the Social Volunteer Force of youth set up by the government has also been a crucial part of the relief efforts. As of 23 June, 346,306 youth had registered as volunteers who are working to identify those who need assistance, deliver food and essential items, provide emergency assistance at homes, help with the operation of call centres and control rooms, deliver materials to relief camps, communicate alerts, and provide assistance at hospitals.

Kerala’s efforts to contain the second wave of COVID-19 infections were successful – by 8 May, the number of active COVID-19 cases in the state had come down to just sixteen. But a third wave of infections began soon after. This was because, as part of the easing of the lockdown in India, the severe restrictions on inter-state travel and on the arrival of international flights which were in place began to be relaxed from the first week of May onwards. Hundreds of thousands of Keralites living abroad and in other Indian states, faced with rising COVID-19 infections and deaths, unsafe conditions, a lack of medical attention, and even job losses in many cases, scrambled to get back to their home state. The state government adopted the stand that it is committed to bring back all Keralites who wanted to return to the state. More than 315,000 people returned to Kerala from other states and abroad between 4 May and 23 June. Since most of those who return come from regions with very high numbers of COVID-19 cases, this led to an increase in the number of infections in Kerala.

As of 23 June, the number of active COVID-19 cases in Kerala stood at 1,620, and the number of deaths at 22. Out of all the cases reported in the state from 4 May to 23 June, 90.7%f were reported among those who came from abroad or other states. A total of 150,196 people were under observation at this point – 147,990 at home or at quarantine centres, and 2,206 at hospitals. Restrictions are being relaxed in a calibrated manner, but there is no room for complacency. Awareness campaigns are continuing, norms about physical distancing are in place, large gatherings are not allowed, and the use of face masks in public is compulsory. The state government continues to hold regular press conferences and provide daily updates for the public.

The efforts of the LDF government are rooted in a comprehensive approach to ensure the welfare of all citizens. This is an approach which recognises the importance of the public healthcare system, as well as other social and economic determinants of health and well-being. It recognises that hunger and homelessness would be serious impediments to health. The LDF government’s policy measures amid COVID-19 aim to address all of these issues in order to provide relief to the people.

The objective is to reach every single person in need. As of 9 June, 116,328 volunteers had been deployed to identify those who need assistance so that no one falls through the cracks. The government’s strategy has been to mobilise its entire state machinery, including the public sector and LSGIs, along with the collective energies of the state’s powerful mass and class organisations, collectives, and cooperatives, and the zeal of Kerala’s citizens for voluntary action. This is a strategy of total mobilisation that integrates the work of the state machinery with the work of the general public, with those mobilised by mass and class organisations playing a key role.

All of this has been made possible as a result of public action in the state. Right from the time when the first communist ministry was elected in 1957, Kerala has invested in public education and public healthcare. Communist-led governments have taken the lead in implementing land reforms that broke feudal landlordism, greatly improved the living standards of the peasantry and agricultural workers, and increased the bargaining power of the workers. The working-class movement has played a crucial role in Kerala’s wages being the highest in the country, and has served as the most important factor behind the state having the most wide-ranging social security measures for workers, through the welfare fund boards.

The Left has long championed democratic decentralisation. The biggest effort in that direction was the People’s Plan Campaign, initiated by the LDF government in 1996. The LSGIs were greatly strengthened by the People’s Plan Campaign, which led to much higher devolution of funds and powers to the local bodies. This has significantly expanded the capacity of the LSGIs to intervene effectively in times of need, and now they are spearheading the relief efforts in the state. Kudumbashree was also initiated by the LDF government in 1998 and strengthened in the subsequent tenures of the LDF.

Public healthcare in Kerala has received its biggest boost over the tenure of the present LDF government, which came to power in 2016. This is in large part due to the Aardram Mission, an ambitious programme launched in 2017 to upgrade the state’s public healthcare facilities. Kerala has long had the best system of primary healthcare in the country, centred on Primary Health Centres (PHCs). The present LDF government has carried forward and significantly expanded upon this legacy. Now according to official rankings, the top twelve PHCs in India are in Kerala. As part of the Aardram Mission, all PHCs are being upgraded to Family Health Centres (FHCs) with extended timings (FHCs have outpatient services from morning to evening, compared to morning to noon in PHCs) and more doctors. Facilities in all government hospitals have improved greatly. This is what has enabled the healthcare system to stand up to the challenge posed by COVID-19. At the same time, efforts by the central government led by the far-right Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to push privatisation in the healthcare sector have been resisted by the LDF government of Kerala. In February of this year, the central government proposed that the district hospitals in Indian states should be privatised, and Kerala flatly refused.

The Very Best of Human Possibilities

CoronaShock reveals a deep divide between capitalist and socialist countries. This divide can be best understood, as we have shown, along four axes:

Socialism

1. Science
2. Public sector
3. Public action
4. Internationalism

Capitalism

1. Hallucination
2. For-profit sector
3. Atomisation and paralysis of the population
4. Jingoism and racism

There are, of course, exceptions to these reactions among the capitalist states. Several states in East Asia – such as Japan and South Korea – as well as Australia and New Zealand had been prepared by the SARS outbreak of 2003, and they did not destroy their public health infrastructure in the decades that followed; based on the experience of SARS, they did not scoff at the WHO reports.

By and large, however, it is the socialist states that have confronted the virus with resolve and intelligence; this is even though they face the brunt of US imperialism and an increasingly aggressive hybrid war (especially in the case of Cuba and Venezuela). These societies and their states have acted with determination and tenacity to break the chain of the pandemic and to avoid creating individual and social trauma and an economic desert for their peoples. Capitalism is unable to confront a disaster that it has in many ways created; socialism, on the other hand, brings out the very best of human possibilities.

CoronaShock is a term that refers to how a virus struck the world with such gripping force; it refers to how the social order in the bourgeois state crumbled, while the social order in the socialist parts of the world appeared more resilient.

This is the second in a multiple-part series of studies on CoronaShock. It is based on a number of articles researched and written by Ana Maldonado (Frente Francisco de Miranda, Venezuela), Paola Estrada (Secretariat of the International Peoples Assembly and member of the Brazilian chapter of ALBA Movements), Zoe PC (Peoples Dispatch), and Vijay Prashad (director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research).

We carry on resisting. San Juan, Caracas. 2010.
Comando Creativo

But even the president of the United States
sometimes must have to stand naked.

[Bob Dylan, It’s Alright, Ma, 1965.]

The Folly of Hybrid War

Swiftly moves the Coronavirus and COVID-19, dashing across continents, skipping over oceans, terrifying populations in every country. The numbers of those infected continue to rise, as do the numbers of those who have died. Hands are being washed, tests are being done, physical distance is being observed. It is unclear how devastating this pandemic will be or how long it will last.

On 23 March, twelve days after the World Health Organisation declared a global pandemic, the UN Secretary General António Guterres said, ‘The fury of the virus illustrates the folly of war. That is why today I am calling for an immediate global ceasefire in all corners of the world. It is time to put armed conflict on lockdown and focus together on the true fight of our lives’. Secretary General Guterres talked about silencing the guns, stopping the artillery, and ending the airstrikes. He did not refer to a specific conflict, leaving his plea to hang heavily in the air. After six weeks of deliberation and delay caused by Washington, in the first week of May, the United States government blocked a vote in the UN Security Council on a resolution that called for a global ceasefire.

The United States blocked this resolution, but even this resolution did not turn its attention to the kind of war that the US is prosecuting against Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela – among others. Instead, it has imposed a hybrid war. The US military complex has advanced its hybrid war programme, which includes a range of techniques to undermine governments and political projects. These techniques include the mobilisation of US power over international institutions (such as the IMF, the World Bank, and the SWIFT wire service) in order to prevent governments from managing basic economic activity; the use of US diplomatic power to isolate governments; the use of sanctions methods to prevent private companies from doing business with certain governments; the use of information warfare to render governments and political forces to be criminals or terrorists; and so on. This powerful complex of instruments is able – in the plain light of day – to destabilise governments and to justify regime change (for more on this, see the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research dossier no. 17, Venezuela and Hybrid Wars in Latin America).

During a pandemic, one would expect that all countries would collaborate in every way to mitigate the spread of the virus and its impact on human society. One would expect that a humanitarian crisis of this magnitude would provide the opportunity to end all inhumane economic sanctions and political blockades against certain countries. On 24 March, the day after UN Secretary General Guterres’s plea, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet agreed that ‘at this crucial time, both for global public health reasons, and to support the rights and lives of millions of people in these countries, sectoral sanctions should be eased or suspended. In a context of [a] global pandemic, impeding medical efforts in one country heightens the risk for all of us’.

A few days later, Hilal Elver, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food, said that she was gratified to hear both Guterres and Bachelet call for an end to the sanctions regime. The problem, she indicated, lies with Washington: ‘The US, under the current administration, is very keen to continue the sanctions. Fortunately, some other countries are not. For instance, the European Union and many of the European countries are responding positively and easing sanctions during this time of the coronavirus. They are not completely lifting sanctions but interrupting them, and there are some communications going on, but not in the US, unfortunately’.

On 6 May, three other UN Special Rapporteurs – Olivier De Schutter (on extreme poverty and human rights), Léo Heller (on human rights to safe drinking water and sanitation), and Koumbou Boly Barry (on the right to education) – said that ‘in light of the coronavirus pandemic, the United States should immediately lift blanket sanctions, which are having a severe impact on the human rights of the Venezuelan people’. Nevertheless, the Trump administration has brushed aside all concern and continued with its agenda of hybrid war towards regime change.

Habits of Regime Change

As COVID-19 moved toward South America, the US government increased pressure on the Venezuelan government. In February 2020 at the Munich Security Conference, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that the US seeks to ‘oust Maduro’. The following month, on March 12, the US tightened sanctions against Venezuela, and then the US Treasury Department put pressure on the International Monetary Fund not to allow Venezuela access to emergency funds to tackle the global pandemic. None of this worked. Despite the lack of support from the IMF, the Venezuelan government mobilised the people to break the chain of infection, with international assistance from China, Cuba, and Russia, as well as the World Health Organisation.

At this point, the US government shifted its focus. It suggested that President Nicolás Maduro and his senior leadership are involved in narco-trafficking. No evidence was offered for this hallucinatory claim, although there is substantial evidence of the culpability of senior Colombian politicians in the drug trade. US President Donald Trump authorised a naval detachment to sit off the coast of Venezuela, threaten its government, and intimidate its population. On April 30, to increase pressure on Venezuela, the Trump administration activated parts of the Selected Reserve of the Armed Forces to assist the US armed forces in a mission named ‘Enhanced Department of Defense Counternarcotic Operation in the Western Hemisphere’. All signs point to mischief by the US and its Colombian allies against the Venezuelan people.

The United States government has been entirely candid about its goal to overthrow the Venezuelan government, currently led by President Maduro, and to reverse the Bolivarian Revolution. In August 2017, Trump spoke openly about the ‘military option’ at the same time as the United States, Canada, Colombia, and a list of other countries governed by the far-right and subordinated to Washington formed the Lima Group. The Lima Group tried to maintain a liberal patina around their objective, stating in their declaration that they wished to ‘facilitat[e] … the restoration of the rule of law and constitutional and democratic order in Venezuela’. Trump ripped aside the fig leaf of this kind of liberal language and interpreted the phrase ‘restoration of democratic order’ quite rightly as a call for a military coup or an armed intervention to overthrow the government.

In January 2019, the United States government deepened its hybrid war with a clever diplomatic manoeuvre. It declared that Juan Guaidó, an insignificant politician, was the president of Venezuela and turned over substantial Venezuelan assets outside the country to him. An attempted uprising led by Guaidó and the far-right in Venezuela to oust Maduro and claim power failed to materialise, and Guaidó found himself with more friends in Washington, DC and amongst Colombia’s oligarchy than at home in Venezuela. However, this failed attempt to overthrow the Venezuelan government did not deter the United States. In fact, the failure deepened US intervention in the region.

In May 2019, Senator Lindsey Graham took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to make the case that the ‘US must be willing to intervene in Venezuela the way we did in Grenada’. In 1983, the US marines landed in Grenada to overthrow the legitimate government and to uproot the New Jewel Movement. Should certain measures not be taken, Senator Graham wrote that the United States ‘should move military assets to the region’. The United States attempted to create a phalanx of allies in the Brazilian and Colombian militaries to prepare for an invasion of Venezuela. Fortunately, at the Lima Group meeting in February 2019, Brazil’s vice president Hamilton Mourão told the press that Brazil would not allow the US to use its territory for a military intervention into Venezuela. The plans of a full-scale invasion had to be put on hold.

‘This is our great homeland’ / Tenemos Patria Grande. La Candelaria, Caracas. 2013.
Passersby in front of a mural that references the vision of a free and united Latin America, following the vision of José Martí and the Bolivarian Revolution.
Comando Creativo

Collective Punishment

On 10 March, Venezuela’s Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza told us that the ‘illegal and unilateral coercive measures that the United States has imposed on Venezuela are a form of collective punishment’. The use of the phrase ‘collective punishment’ is significant; under the 1949 Geneva Convention, any policy that inflicts damage on an entire population is a war crime. The US policy, Arreaza told us, has ‘resulted in difficulties for the timely acquisition of medicines’.

On paper, the unilateral US sanctions say that medical supplies are exempt. But this is an illusion. On 26 March, eleven US Senators sent a letter to US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and US Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin to say: ‘We understand that the administration has stated that humanitarian and medical needs are exempt from U.S. sanctions, but our sanctions regime is so broad that medical suppliers and relief organizations simply steer clear of doing business in Iran and Venezuela in fear of accidentally getting caught up in the U.S. sanctions web’. Neither Venezuela nor Iran can easily buy medical supplies, nor can they easily transport them into their countries, nor can they use them in their largely public sector health systems. The embargo against these countries – even more so in this time of COVID-19 – is not only a war crime by the standards of the Geneva Convention (1949); it is also a crime against humanity as defined by the United Nations International Law Commission (1947).

In 2017, Trump enacted tight restrictions on Venezuela’s ability to access financial markets. Two years later, the US government blacklisted Venezuela’s Central Bank and put a general embargo on Venezuelan state institutions. If any firm trades with Venezuela’s public sector, it could face secondary sanctions. The US Congress passed the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) in 2017, which tightened sanctions against Iran, Russia, and North Korea. The next year, Trump imposed a raft of new sanctions against Iran, which suffocated the country’s economy. Once more, access to the world banking system and threats to companies that traded with Iran made it almost impossible for Iran to do business with the world. In particular, the US government made it clear that any business with the public sector of Iran and Venezuela was forbidden. The health infrastructure that provides for the mass of the populations in both Iran and Venezuela is run by the state, which means it faces disproportionate difficulty in accessing equipment and supplies, including testing kits and medicines.

Venezuela and Iran have relied on the World Health Organisation (WHO) to obtain medicines and tests. Nonetheless, the WHO faces its own challenges with sanctions, particularly when it comes to transportation. These harsh sanctions forced transportation companies to reconsider servicing both Iran and Venezuela. Some airlines stopped flying there, and many shipping companies decided not to anger Washington. When the WHO tried to get testing kits for COVID-19 from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) into Iran, it faced difficulty ‘due to flight restrictions’, as the WHO’s Christoph Hamelmann put it. The UAE sent the equipment via a military transport plane.

Likewise, Arreaza told us, Venezuela has ‘received solidarity from governments of countries such as China and Cuba’. In late February, a team from the Red Cross Society of China arrived in Tehran to exchange information with the Iranian Red Crescent and with WHO officials. China has also donated testing kits and supplies. The sanctions, Chinese officials told us, should be of no consequence during a humanitarian crisis such as this; they are not going to honour them.

Meanwhile, the Iranians developed an app to help their population during the COVID-19 outbreak. Google decided to remove it from its app store, a consequence of the US sanctions.

What kind of moral fibre holds together an international system where a handful of countries can act in a way that goes against all the highest aspirations of humanity? When the United States continues its embargoes against thirty-nine countries – but with greater intensity against Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela – when there is a global pandemic afoot, what does this say about the nature of power and authority in our world? Sensitive people should be offended by such behaviour, its mean-spiritedness evident in the unnatural deaths that it provokes.

When then-US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was asked in 1996 about the half million Iraqi children who died because of US sanctions, she said that those deaths were ‘a price worth paying’. They were certainly not a price that the Iraqis wanted to pay, nor now the Iranians or the Venezuelans, or indeed most of humankind.

The IMF Takes Orders from the US Treasury

On 16 March 2020, the chief of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Kristalina Georgieva wrote a blog post on the Fund’s website; it represents the kind of generosity necessary in the midst of a global pandemic. ‘The IMF stands ready to mobilize its $1 trillion lending capacity to help our membership’, she wrote. Countries with ‘urgent balance-of-payments needs’ could be helped by the IMF’s ‘flexible and rapid-disbursing emergency response toolkit’. Through these mechanisms, and against its own history of structural adjustment conditions, the IMF said that it could provide $50 billion to developing countries and $10 billion to low-income countries at a zero-interest rate – without the usual strings attached.

The day before Georgieva made this public statement, Venezuela’s foreign ministry sent a letter to the IMF asking for funds to finance the government’s ‘detection and response systems’ for its efforts against the coronavirus. In the letter, President Nicolás Maduro wrote that his government is ‘executing different highly comprehensive, strict and exhaustive control measures … to protect the Venezuelan people’. These measures require funding, which is why the government is ‘turning to your honorable [organisation] to request your evaluation about the possibility of granting Venezuela a financing facility of USD 5,000 million [5 billion] from the emergency fund of the Rapid Financing Instrument (RFI), resources that will contribute significantly to strengthen our detection and response systems’.

Georgieva’s policy to provide special assistance to countries should have been enough for the IMF to provide the assistance that the Venezuelan government had requested. But, very quickly, the Fund declined the request from Venezuela.

It is important to underline the fact that the IMF made this denial at a time when the coronavirus had begun to spread in Venezuela. On 15 March, the day that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s government sent the letter to the IMF, Maduro also met with senior government officials in Caracas. The state-owned Venezuelan pharmaceutical body (CIFAR) and the Venezuelan medical equipment companies said that they would be able to increase the production of machines and medicines to stem the crisis; but, they said, they would need key raw materials that have to be imported. The Venezuelan government went to the IMF in order to be able to pay for these imports. The denial of the loan directly impacted the Venezuelan health apparatus and impeded Venezuela from properly tackling the coronavirus pandemic.

‘This is the most dire situation we have ever faced’, said President Maduro as he put new measures in place. The Venezuelan government imposed an indefinite national quarantine and has implemented processes to distribute food and key supplies, building on the local self-government (communes) that developed with the Bolivarian Revolution. All of the institutions of the state are now involved in doing their part to help ‘flatten the curve’ and ‘break the chain’ of contagion. But, because of the IMF loan denial, the country has had a harder time producing testing kits, respirators, and key medicines for those infected with the virus.

Venezuela is a founding member of the IMF. It has, despite being an oil-rich state, come to the IMF several times for various forms of assistance. The cycle of IMF interventions in Venezuela in the 1980s and early 1990s led to an uprising in 1989 that delegitimised the Venezuelan elite; it was on the back of the popular protests against the IMF that Hugo Chávez built the coalition that propelled him to office in 1998 and that started the Bolivarian Revolution in 1999. By 2007, Venezuela paid off its outstanding debts to both the IMF and the World Bank; the country cut its ties to these institutions, hoping to build a Bank of the South – rooted in Latin America – as an alternative. But before this Bank could be set up, a round of crises struck Latin America, forced by a fall in commodity prices from 2014-15.

Venezuela’s economy relies upon foreign oil exports to generate the revenue necessary to import goods. With the fall in oil prices between 2014 and 2018 came a directed attack on Venezuela by the United States, who imposed a new round of unilateral sanctions. These sanctions prevented oil companies and transportation firms from doing business with Venezuela; international banks seized Venezuela’s holdings in their vaults (including $1.2 billion in gold in the Bank of England) and stopped doing business with Venezuela. This sanctions regime, tightened further by Donald Trump’s administration, deeply hurt Venezuela’s ability to sell its oil and buy products, including supplies for its state health sector.

In January 2019, after the US supported Guaidó’s attempt to usurp power, US banks hastily seized the Venezuelan state assets that they held and turned them over to the self-proclaimed president. Then, in a startling move, the IMF said that the Venezuelan government would no longer be allowed to use its $400 million in special drawing rights (SDRs), the currency of the IMF. It said that it had taken this action because of the political uncertainty in Venezuela. In other words, because of the attempted coup – which failed – the IMF said that it would not ‘take sides’ in Venezuela; by not ‘taking sides’, the IMF refused to allow the government of Venezuela to access its own funds. Strikingly, Guaidó’s adviser Ricardo Hausmann, a former IMF development committee chair and Guaidó’s representative at the Inter-American Development Bank, said at that time that he expected that when the regime change occurs, the money will be available to the new government. This is the IMF directly interfering in Venezuelan politics.

Neither at that time nor now has the IMF denied that the government of Nicolás Maduro is the legitimate government in Venezuela. The IMF continues to acknowledge on its website that the representative of Venezuela in the IMF is Simón Alejandro Zerpa Delgado, the minister of finance in Maduro’s government. One of the reasons why this is so is that Guaidó could not prove that he had the support of most of the member states of the IMF. Since Guaidó could not prove his standing, the IMF – again, extraordinarily – has instead denied the Maduro government its legitimate right to its own funds and to borrow against facilities provided by the Fund to its members.

History is watching us. Bellas Artes, Caracas, 2011.
Comando Creativo

Normally, the IMF takes time when it gets a request for funds. The request must be studied by the analysts, who look at the situation in the country and see whether the request is legitimate. In this case, the IMF responded immediately. It said no.

A spokesperson for the Fund, Raphael Anspach, would not answer specific questions about this denial; in 2019, he had been similarly cautious about saying anything about the denial of access to the $400 million in SDRs. This time, Anspach sent us a formal statement that the IMF had released to the media. The statement said that, while the IMF sympathises with the predicament of the Venezuelan people, ‘it is not in a position to consider this request’. Why is this so? Because, the IMF says, its ‘engagement with member countries is predicated on official government recognition by the international community’. ‘There is’, the statement says, ‘no clarity on recognition at this time’.

But there is clarity. The IMF listed the Venezuelan minister of finance on its website at least until mid-March. The United Nations continues to recognise the Venezuelan government, led by President Nicolás Maduro. That should be the official standard for the IMF to make its determination. But it is not. It is taking dictation from the US government. In April 2019, US Vice President Mike Pence went to the UN Security Council, where he said that the UN should accept Juan Guaidó as the legitimate president of Venezuela; he turned to the Venezuelan ambassador to the UN, Samuel Moncada Acosta, and said, ‘You shouldn’t be here’. This is a moment of great symbolism, the United States acting as if the UN is its home and that it can invite and uninvite whomsoever it wants. The IMF denial of the $5 billion request from Venezuela follows Pence’s sentiment. It is a violation of the spirit of international cooperation that is at the heart of the UN Charter.

There are signs of weakness in the US position. On 18 December 2019, the United Nations General Assembly adopted – without a vote – a resolution that accepted the credentials of the diplomats appointed by Maduro’s government. The fact that there was no vote taken reveals that the United States does not want to reveal in plain sight the minority support in the world for its position of isolating the government of Venezuela. The US would rather forego a vote in the interest of fabricating and upholding a smoke and mirrors narrative allegedly held by the ‘international community’ than allow the actual international community to vote openly and show that it accepts the Maduro government as the legitimate government of Venezuela.

The Hallucinatory Accusations of Narco-Trafficking

At a press conference on 26 March, it was almost comical how little evidence the US Department of Justice provided when it indicted Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro and several of the leaders of his government of narco-trafficking. The US offered $15 million for the arrest of Maduro and $10 million for the others. Maduro, US Attorney Geoffrey Berman said dramatically, ‘very deliberately deployed cocaine as a weapon’. Evidence for this? Not presented at all. An indictment is not a verdict of guilt, merely a note – in this case – prepared by the US government against an adversary; there is nothing in the indictment that proves the case that any of the individuals mentioned in it have anything to do with narcotics smuggling. It was apparent from the press conference at the US Department of Justice that this was political theatre, an attempt to further delegitimise Maduro’s government.

It is surreal that the United States – during the COVID-19 global pandemic – chooses to put its efforts into this ridiculous, evidence-free indictment against Maduro and other members of the government. Already, there is pressure on the United States to lift the sanctions not only against Venezuela but also against Iran (even The New York Times came out on 25 March to call for an end to sanctions on Iran). The World Health Organization has made it clear that this is just not the time to hamper the ability of countries to get precious supplies in to tackle the pandemic. Out of desperation, the US tried to change the conversation – no longer about COVID-19 and sanctions, but about narco-terrorism.

When asked about these indictments during the COVID-19 pandemic, US Attorney General William Barr tried to say that the fault lay not in Washington but in Caracas. He said, absent any evidence, that Venezuela is blocking aid from coming into the country. Nothing could be further from the truth, since Venezuela has welcomed medical supplies and medical personnel from China, Cuba, and Russia, as well as from the WHO. In fact, the WHO has pressed the US to allow it freer rein to bring goods into the country – a request that the US has not allowed. Barr can so easily say the very opposite of truth because none of the media outlets at the press conference would challenge him based on matters that are clearly in the public record.

In 1989, the US used the accusation of narco-trafficking – specifically cocaine trafficking – to taint the reputation of its former asset, then-president of Panama Manuel Noriega. Based on this accusation and an indictment in Florida, the US eventually invaded the country, seized Noriega, planted Washington’s puppet in Panama City, and threw Noriega into a Florida prison. The shadow of how the US dealt with Noriega hangs over Caracas.

The bounty on the heads of Maduro and his leadership suggests that the US government has essentially put a mafia-type hit out on these Venezuelans. This is a very dangerous move by the United States. It essentially gives gangsters a green light to attempt assassination inside Venezuela. The refusal to allow Maduro to travel outside of Venezuela is a violation of a series of international conventions that promote diplomacy over belligerence. But, given the lawless way that the US has formulated its regime change strategy against Venezuela – and throughout history – it is unlikely that anyone is going to criticise this move.

A few hours before the announcement in Washington, word began to spread that the United States was going to place Venezuela’s government on the ‘state sponsor of terrorism’ list – the very highest condemnation of a government. But they had to pause. And the pause itself came for absurd reasons. If the US government accused Maduro’s government of being a ‘state sponsor of terrorism’, then it would be tacitly acknowledging that the Maduro government is indeed the government of Venezuela. Since January 2019, one of the attempts at destabilisation had been to deny that Maduro’s government is the legitimate government of Venezuela, indeed, to deny that it is any kind of government. It would be impossible to say that the Maduro government is a ‘state sponsor of terrorism’ without acknowledging that it is the government of Venezuela. So, the United States had to stay its hand, caught out by its own logic.

The statement released by the US Department of Justice reads like a thriller, and the lack of evidence lends it to comparison with fiction. It lists names and accusations, makes constant references to ‘narco-terrorism’, and claims that the Venezuelan government wants to ‘flood’ the United States with cocaine. It would take a superhuman effort of blindness to believe this baseless ranting and raving. But the problem is that the people of Venezuela must take this seriously, since it is a deepening of the United States government’s belligerence. The people of Venezuela are aware of the dangers of a Panama-type situation. It’s hard to blame them. This is the track record of the United States government.

The comparison to a Panama-type situation cannot be written off as paranoia. On April’s Fools Day, Trump gave a press conference in which he announced a new ‘counter-narcotics effort’ by US Southern Command. ‘We’re deploying additional Navy destroyers, combat ships, aircrafts and helicopters; Coast Guard cutters; and Air Force surveillance aircraft, doubling our capabilities in the region’, he said. The point of this mission – which will be joined by other countries – is to ‘increase surveillance, disruption, and seizures of drug shipments’. ‘We must not let the drug cartels exploit the pandemic to threaten American lives’, he added.

Coming less than a week after the US indictment, it became clear that the point is not actually to disrupt the cocaine trade, but to put pressure on Venezuela. No evidence was provided during the Department of Justice press conference when the United States charged Maduro with narco-trafficking, and no evidence was presented at Trump’s press conference when he announced that a naval carrier group would enter the Caribbean. There was no evidence presented at either high-profile event, because no evidence is either available or necessary. It is not available because even the US government’s own agencies say that Venezuela is neither the originator of narcotics nor the trafficker of narcotics; it is not necessary because the United States has consistently used its position to invent increasingly hallucinatory stories about the Venezuelan government in order to delegitimise and overthrow it.

In December 2019, the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) released its ‘National Drug Threat Assessment’. This study offers the most detailed look at the movement of drugs into the United States. At several points in the study, the DEA says that Colombia is the ‘primary source for cocaine seized in the United States’. According to the DEA’s Cocaine Signature Program, in 2018 ‘approximately 90 percent of cocaine samples tested were of Colombian origin, six percent were of Peruvian origin, and four percent were of unknown origin’. As far as the US government’s own drug agency is concerned, there is no cocaine or any other narcotic that comes from Venezuela.

Both at the US Department of Justice press conference and at Trump’s press conference, maps were shown that indicated cocaine traffic from Venezuela to the United States. This is simply not true, based on the information from the US DEA: ‘The majority of the cocaine and heroin produced and exported by Colombian TCOs [Transnational Criminal Organizations] to the United States is transported through Central America and Mexico’, write the DEA officials in their 2019 report. However, there are suggestions in the report that Colombian narco-traffickers sometimes ‘store large quantities of cocaine in remote areas of Venezuela and Ecuador until maritime or aerial transportation can be secured’.

It is important to recognize that the cocaine and heroin are hidden in ‘remote areas’ of Colombia’s neighbours, with Colombia being the focus of the entire drug trade. At no point in the entire 146-page DEA document, and in documents from previous years, do the US drug officials make any statement that implicates the Venezuelan government in either the production, storage, or transportation of the cocaine and heroin. The only time Venezuela enters the picture is when Colombian narco-traffickers hide their cocaine and heroin in ‘remote areas’ of Venezuela before they traffic them into Central America and Mexico and then onwards to the United States.

There is significant evidence, however – as presented by the Colombian journalist Gonzalo Guillén in La Nueva Prensa on 3 March 2020 – that Colombia’s president Iván Duque and his patron, the former president Álvaro Uribe, had close ties with the narco-trafficker José Guillermo Hernández Aponte, alias Ñeñé. The previous day, Duque was in the Oval Office as Trump chided him for not doing enough to eradicate cocaine production in Colombia. ‘Well, you’re going to have to spray’, Trump told Duque. ‘If you don’t spray, you’re not going to get rid of them. So, you have to spray, with regard to the drugs in Colombia’.

Trump was talking about glyphosate-based fumigation, which the government of Colombia halted in 2015 because the WHO said that such sprays caused cancer. Despite this, Duque said that he will restart spraying. There was no mention of the accusations that Duque himself is linked to the narco-traffickers; since he is pliant towards Washington, his own alleged crimes do not amount to much. Duque’s patron Uribe, the former Colombian president and current Senate member, is currently implicated in more than 270 legal cases in Colombia with charges including illegal wiretapping, organised crime, selective assassinations, and forced disappearances. Uribe and members of his family have proven links with the paramilitary group Bloque Metro (‘Metro Block’) of Antioquia, which was responsible for thousands of assassinations of Colombian civilians and was deeply involved in the narco-trafficking.

Strangely, in that press conference, both Trump and Duque talked about Venezuela, but neither of them mentioned drugs or narco-trafficking. It was all about regime change.

On 31 March, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that Venezuela must have a transitional government; this itself is bizarre because Pompeo is neither Venezuelan nor a United Nations official, and yet he felt emboldened to speak for the Venezuelan people. His plan, ‘Democratic Transition Framework for Venezuela’, called upon President Maduro to resign and for Washington’s favoured replacement Juan Guaidó to continue his imaginary claim to power. Members of the four main parties, including Maduro’s Socialist Party, would form a council and be led by an ‘interim president’. If this plan is accepted, Washington would lift its unilateral coercive sanctions that it had imposed from 2014.

The previous weekend, Guaidó announced on Twitter that Venezuela needed an ‘emergency government’ that had the participation of all parties and would govern until new elections could be held. After Pompeo’s announcement, Guaidó took credit for it and thanked Pompeo publicly. Other far-right politicians, such as Leopoldo López, Carlos Vecchio, and Julio Borges, saluted Pompeo’s plan and thanked the United States for backing Guaidó’s ‘emergency government’. When she heard that gunboats are coming towards the Venezuelan coast, Maria Corina Machado of the Vente Venezuela Party tweeted, ‘That’s the way to build a credible threat’. It is credible because the gunboats have done this before.

‘This is our homeland’ / Tenemos patria. Macuro, Sucre. 2014.
Comando Creativo

The Organization of American States (OAS), which behaved as the long-arm of the US State Department during the coup against the government of Evo Morales in Bolivia last November, joined in the chorus begun by Pompeo and Guaidó. In a statement, the OAS declared that it ‘considers that the plan presented constitutes a valid proposal for a path to end the usurping dictatorship and restore democracy in the country’.

The Venezuelan government led by President Maduro rejected the plan. But it was not alone. Maduro’s main opponent in the 2018 presidential election, Henri Falcón of the Avanzada Progresista (‘Progressive Advance’) party, also rejected the Pompeo-Guaidó plan and the deployment of US warships off the Venezuelan coast. The removal of Maduro, he wrote, ‘is a process and not an imposition; it requires agreements between adversaries for it to be successful. The solution in Venezuela is between Venezuelans’. ‘The pandemic’, he wrote, ‘is wreaking havoc in the world. Venezuela is one of the most vulnerable. It would be humanitarian and very great if ships came with aid and medicine, and it would be very inhumane if they came loaded with weapons and threats’.

Most of the opposition in Venezuela, like Falcón, did not approve of Guaidó’s submission to Trump and Pompeo. Claudio Fermín of the Partido Soluciones para Venezuela (‘Solutions for Venezuela Party’) attacked the ‘irresponsible and fanciful thesis’ of Guaidó and his supporters, which is reliant upon the ‘fantasy cloud of instructions sent to them by their bosses Elliot Abrams, Pompeo, and Trump’. Henrique Capriles Radonski, who twice ran unsuccessfully to be president, said that Maduro has ‘internal control’ while Guaidó’s people have ‘international alliances’.

So much of this is déjà vu. On 7 October 1963, US President John F. Kennedy gathered his advisors in the White House to discuss how to overthrow the democratically elected government of João Goulart in Brazil. Kennedy asked frankly, ‘Do you see a situation coming where we might be – find it desirable to intervene militarily ourselves?’ His ambassador in Brazil, Lincoln Gordon, said that he had worked on a plan with US Southern Command – then based in Panama – and with his contacts in the Brazilian military. A US invasion, Gordon told Kennedy, would require a ‘massive military operation’, which ‘all depends on what the Brazilian military do’. Any coup without major military support would lead to ‘the beginnings of what would amount to a civil war’.

Rather than risk a civil war, Gordon said the military had to act, and the United States had to provide them with diplomatic and military support. By March 1964, Gordon said that the ‘most significant development is the crystallizing of a military resistance group under the leadership of General Humberto Castelo Branco’. Washington gave the green light. Operation Brother Sam was put in motion, which included egging on the Generals and sending a massive naval task force to sit off the coast of southern Brazil. An aircraft carrier, two guided missile destroyers, and other support vessels left Aruba and made their very public journey to Brazil. General Castelo Branco moved against Goulart; that coup created a military dictatorship – backed by Washington – that lasted 21 years and killed, detained, and tortured tens of thousands of people.

The US carrier group that sits off the coast of Venezuela seems to be mimicking Operation Brother Sam of 1964. Rather than focus attention on the pressing problem of controlling the coronavirus in the United States – or even amongst its military forces – Trump has begun manoeuvres that could very well lead to a serious and dangerous clash in the Caribbean Sea.

The Colombian People Reject the Hybrid War Against Venezuela

On 21 November 2019, the Colombian people took to the streets in massive numbers to reject the policies of the government led by President Iván Duque. In particular, the people voiced two main demands. First, they wanted Duque’s right-wing government to advance the 2016 Peace Accords between the government and the left-wing FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia). These Accords, negotiated in good faith, would have ended a war that has lasted for six decades (70 percent of Colombian society has been born during this war). Second, the people wanted to end the harsh austerity policies driven by Duque’s government, which includes cuts to public universities, the pension system, and broad social spending. The main trade union federation, the Central Trade Union of Workers in Colombia (CUT), called for that protest, which then broadened into a mass uprising against Duque and the system of Colombian politics.

The general secretary of the CUT and spokesperson of the People’s Congress (Congreso de los Pueblos), Edgar Mojica, was on the barricades daily helping shape the mass upsurge that suggested that Colombian society no longer wanted to be held hostage to the whims of its sclerotic oligarchy and to the United States government. This was the mood. It was clear in the slogans and graffiti that emerged in Bogotá, the capital of Colombia, and then outwards to its smaller cities and towns. The two demands – to implement the Peace Accords and to end austerity – are related. The Colombian oligarchy fears that if it contributes to building a comprehensive and genuine peace, the arrival of the FARC onto the political stage will strengthen the left, and a stronger left will have the power to annul not only the austerity agenda but also the pro-US orientation of the ruling classes of Colombia (for more on this, see the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research dossier no. 23, Peace, Neoliberalism, and Political Shifts in Colombia).

The other left organization – the National Liberation Army (ELN) – has in good faith tried to negotiate with Duque’s government, but has seen the door slammed in its face repeatedly, as Pablo Beltrán, an ELN leader, told Argentine journalist and educator Claudia Korol last year. Duque has intensified the military campaign against the ELN. If the Peace Accords with the FARC and the talks with ELN deepen, it would undermine the power of the oligarchy and of Washington. As Olimpo Cárdenas of the People’s Congress said two years ago, ‘There is a sector of the Colombian oligarchy that benefits from the war’.

There are days when it seems as if President Duque cannot make decisions without consulting the US government and his mentor, Álvaro Uribe. The advice he gets is to burrow deeper into an alliance with the United States, even at the cost of public opinion in Colombia. It would be fitting to call Duque’s policy toward the United States a ‘doormat policy’ – a policy where he offers Colombia as the doormat for the United States to wipe its feet before it marches into neighbouring Venezuela. When we spoke to Mojica recently, he said, ‘The Colombian government is a submissive government. It is inclined toward the decisions of the North American government’.

This is not a new development. At the start of the 20th century, Colombia’s foreign policy was defined by the principle of Respicium Polum (‘Look toward the North’). More recently, in the 1990s, US foreign policy shifted its gaze from Central America to Colombia; Plan Colombia, developed in 1999, drove a militarised agenda of the US and the Colombian oligarchy in the ‘War on Drugs’, which was in essence a bid to defeat any revolutionary insurgency and consolidate control over the Andean-Amazon territory. What is indeed new, Mojica says, is that Duque has done everything to facilitate both the blockade against Venezuela and the potential military intervention into Venezuela.

When the governments of Canada and the United States urged their partners in Latin America to create a platform against Venezuela, which became the Lima Group in 2017, Colombia was an eager participant. In February 2019, Duque welcomed the Lima Group to Bogotá during a high-stakes gamble by the United States to overthrow the Venezuelan government of President Maduro. At that time, Mojica and other social movement leaders criticised the way their country was being used by the Colombian oligarchy and the United States for narrow purposes, against the interest of the Colombian people. Mojica told us, ‘We have been denouncing this for the past year, beginning when President Duque lent himself to legitimise Guaidó and to legitimise the positions that the Lima Group has had with respect to Venezuela’. Heightened military tension with Venezuela suits the Duque government’s agenda. It means that it can put off any talk of full implementation of the Peace Accords and cast aside any criticism of its austerity policies. Since 2016, hundreds of social movement leaders have been assassinated across Colombia; this violence is obscured by the attention being paid by the media to the Colombian-Venezuelan border.

With the US government absurdly saying that Venezuela is the source of narco-trafficking – even though all evidence pointing to narco-trafficking is rooted in Colombia – the pressure on Colombia to deal with its drug problem is now lifted. Indeed, the intimate links between the oligarchy and the narco-traffickers are now hidden by the hallucinatory claim that Maduro is himself involved in this trade.

Mojica told us that the entire narco-policy is a ‘distraction’ because it fails to grasp the real problem. ‘We reject the policies of crop dusting and the blackmailing of the Colombian government’ by the US, he said, which uses its international power to force policy changes on the country.  Mojica explained that, because the production of coca leaves by small farmers is the ‘first step of production’, and because the farmers have no other source of revenue to support their families, the farmers serve as ‘the weakest link in the chain’ and an easy target for cocaine eradication programs.

These small farmers, whose farms and bodies will be saturated by toxic chemicals, are not the main culprits behind the drug trade, nor is their wellbeing the main concern of Duque’s government; but they do provide a convenient scapegoat to mask the actions of those who really pull the strings. The responsibility for the colossal drug trade about which the Trump administration and his cronies are allegedly so concerned instead lies mainly with the large Colombian narco-cartels, who traffic the drugs through Mexico and Central America to North America; the drug mafia in North America itself; and the immense demand – largely in the US and Europe – by consumers for South American cocaine.

But none of the main culprits face the brunt of the drug eradication policy, reserved instead for the ‘weakest link’ – coca growers. ‘The coca growers and their families’, Mojica said, ‘are not presented with any alternative in terms of financial support for the eradication of their crops’. Despite this, they have unfairly become the frontline of the war. The 2016 Havana Peace Accords did provide a mechanism to assist farmers in transitioning from the cultivation of illicit crops. However, as with much else in the peace process, the protocol has not been respected; peasant communities have repeatedly denounced incidents of forced eradication by the army. The assassination of the leaders of these communities is often carried out by paramilitary groups, cartels, and a section of the armed forces known as the Fuerza Pública (‘Public Force’).

Morale and lights. Chapellín, Caracas. 2014.
Comando Creativo

The US and the Duque administrations, Mojica says, are using the question of drugs to move an agenda for regime change in Venezuela. Matters are so grave that the Colombian government has allowed US troops to enter its territory – both on the Caribbean coast and on the Venezuelan-Colombian border, such as in the area of Catatumbo. ‘We think that from there they are preparing a land invasion’, says Mojica. These are tense times, with the imminent possibility of military manoeuvres turning into a war.

The Colombian Senate has been vocal in its opposition to the use of Colombian territory to destabilise Venezuela. In April 2020, a group of Colombian congressmen wrote a public letter to Duque saying that their country must not participate in regime change in Venezuela. If Duque wants to pursue any such agenda, he must seek permission from Congress. Mojica told us that the Colombian social movements ‘completely reject’ Trump’s agenda. ‘We are not its backyard’, he said of the United States, and therefore not its doormat either. ‘We do not condone its anti-drug policies; we do not condone its policies of looting our natural resources and our environment’.

The Bay of Piglets

In the early morning hours of Sunday, 3 May, speedboats left the Colombian coastlines and headed toward Venezuela – though they had no authorization to cross the maritime border – and landed on the Venezuelan coastline at La Guaira. This was clearly a hostile action, since the boats carried heavy weaponry, including assault rifles and ammunition. The people on the boats possessed satellite phones as well as uniforms and helmets with the flag of the United States of America. The incursion was intercepted by Venezuelan military (FANB), who fought them off; eight of the belligerents were killed, while two were intercepted, and several temporarily escaped. One of those who was arrested says that he is an agent of the US government’s Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). Early Monday May 4, Venezuelan security forces, aided by the fishermen and fisherwomen of the Bolivarian Militias in the coastal town of Chuao, arrested eight additional mercenaries on a speed boat who were attempting to enter the country. Two others were captured by Venezuelan Security Forces the same day in the town of Puerto Maya. During the arrests, more weaponry and military intelligence equipment was seized by Venezuelan security forces.

Néstor Reverol, the minister of internal affairs of Venezuela, told Venezuelan television stations hours after the thwarted incursion that the government received information about the attack from sources in Colombia and from its own regular patrols of the Venezuelan coastline. ‘We cannot take any of their threats lightly’, said senior Venezuelan politician Diosdado Cabello. ‘What happened today’, he said, ‘is an example of the desperation’ of the United States and its allies.

Such plots surround Venezuela, the plotters a cast of characters from the seediest quarters of the military and the drug world, as well as of US intelligence and Colombian paramilitaries. The plot for a small invasion in 2019 that unravelled is now documented by Joshua Goodman of the Associated Press. That plot was led by Jordan Goudreau, who served in the US Army as a medic in Iraq and Afghanistan and then became a private security contractor; he worked with Cliver Alcalá, a former Venezuelan military officer, who brought together a few hundred Venezuelan military deserters to conduct the raid. Alcalá is now in prison in the United States for his involvement in the drug trade. Goudreau and Alcalá were backed by Trump’s bodyguard Keith Schiller and Roen Kraft of Kraft Foods. The entire operation sniffs of a madcap CIA adventure, akin to the 1961 CIA failed invasion of Cuba at the Playa Girón.

One of the ugliest aspects of the 2020 military incursion was that – in the name of combatting narco-trafficking – the entire operation seems to have been financed by drug dealers. José Alberto Socorro Hernández (alias Pepero), who was captured during the invasion, admitted that the La Guajira cartel of Colombia offered them $2 million for their actions. Pepero confessed that the operation was financed by Elkin Javier López Torres (alias La Silla, ‘The Chair’, or Doble Rueda, ‘Double Wheel’), a relative of Alcalá’s wife, Marta González.

It is likely that this most recent invasion in May 2020 emerged out of the military deserter camp set up by Alcalá in Colombia. One of the men involved in the raid was Captain Robert Levid Colina, also known as Pantera (‘Panther’). Colina had been involved in the attempted coup on behalf of Juan Guaidó on 30 April 2019 and is a close associate of Alcalá’s. Antonio Sequea, former Venezuelan National Guard member, who had last been seen on April 30, 2019 during the failed coup d’état led by Leopoldo López and Juan Guaidó, was among those arrested. Sequea is believed to have led the operation. The arrest of two US military officials from Texas, Luke Denman and Airan Berry, who are members of the US mercenary company Silvercorp was also noteworthy. The US government has denied all participation in the operation, and has largely ignored it, but, according to one of the detained mercenaries, the pair has a relationship with Trump’s head of security.

Silvercorp is the company of Jordan Goudreau, to whom Guaidó promised to pay $212.9 million to ‘capture, detain, or “remove” President Nicolás Maduro and install him in his place’, as reported by journalist Alan MacLeod. In February 2019, Goudreau and his company provided security to the Venezuelan right-wing during the provocative Humanitarian Aid concert. Videos and photos have also emerged on social media showing a contract signed between Goudreau and right-wing opposition leader Guaidó. The former US special operative expressed frustration because Guaidó did not hold up his end of the bargain, however, and Silvercorp has yet to receive payment for their work.

The operation, which has been under investigation by Venezuelan authorities for the past couple of months, is believed to be organised, planned, and financed by the Venezuelan opposition and its diverse allies with the objective of assassinating constitutional president Nicolás Maduro and other high-level leaders of the Venezuelan government. It is likely that the US government’s bounty on Maduro and on other leaders played a role in this attempted invasion.

However, as Hernán Vargas, a member of the Movimiento de Pobladoras y Pobladores (‘the Settlers’ Movement’) and the Secretary of ALBA Movements explained, it is likely that the mission of this group ‘was not to take over the country, it was not to take over the government. It was simply to carry out a series of activities that would be coordinated with other forces, which all depended on a chain of events that did not occur… They really expected maybe a response from the Armed Forces, a street mobilisation, or that another armed group that was going to join, and that didn’t happen’.

The mercenaries playing freedom fighters, however, ‘did not expect the response of the people’, Vargas said, and they vastly underestimated the skill of the Venezuelan intelligence. He explained that they likely had it in their heads that they could be ‘received with applause and with cheers. They thought people were going to support this or an Armed Force was going to support this… but there are no people in Venezuela willing to do that. The majority of Venezuelans want it to be resolved in peace. There are no sectors that are willing to take that gamble or not enough for what they need at this moment’.

The threat, however, remains. Vargas calls for a close study of the Silvercorp contract with Juan Guaidó and Juan José Rendón – a right-wing political consultant and former advisor to Guaidó –where he states that there is, ‘a whole series of clauses that allow or agree to actions of human rights violations, the execution of civilians, or the use of heavy weapons, which introduce another dimension. In other words, this is an equally dangerous situation because these groups can easily carry out terrorist actions, and they also set strategic civilian and military objectives in Venezuela’.

Vladimir Padrino López, the minister of defence of Venezuela, said that the government and the people had defeated this attack and would remain vigilant against other such plots. One of the characteristic features of the Bolivarian process has been the mobilisation of the population to defend itself – from the attempted coup against Chávez in 2002 to today. ‘We declare ourselves in rebellion’, Padrino said, adding that Venezuela is now under a state of ‘permanent vigilance’. Despite the global pandemic, the old playbook of the CIA and the US government as a whole – currently led by the Trump administration – with their dirty coups and hybrid wars, remains operational. Much like the Cubans who thwarted the attempted US-backed invasion at the Playa Girón, or Bay of Pigs (1961), the Venezuelan people defeated this Bay of Piglets plot in La Guaira (2020).

The Weakness of US Power

Five Iranian tankers – each laden with gasoline – moved swiftly with their flags flying and their radar open to detection from Bandar Abbas (Iran) into the Caribbean Sea. One of them, serendipitously named ‘Fortune’, broke through the feverish US naval blockade to enter El Palito, Venezuela on 24 May. That the US was unable to force a confrontation with the Iranian vessels signals the weakness of the US position. A new sea bridge opens between two countries under immense US pressure; this demonstrates the limitations – but not the end – of US power and of the hybrid war.

Chávez lives. Puente Llaguno, Caracas. 2015.
Comando Creativo

About the pictures

The Comando Creativo (‘Creative Command’) is a collective that brings together workers from the fields of visual communication, social scientist specialists and researchers, and people who – from many other professions – see themselves as the producers of meaning, stories, and symbols. Since 2007, the Comando Creativo has been dedicated to the production of popular, counter-hegemonic communications. Currently, the collective is sharing its work on the platform utopix.cc.

International Assembly of the Peoples and Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

Introduction

The global pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus and COVID-19 disease has paralyzed large parts of the world. In this context, on March 21, we launched a Declaration in which we urged all the people of the world to put Life before Capital. We proposed the opening up of a debate on an international political platform with 16 concrete proposals of actions to confront the pandemic.

The Declaration was launched jointly by the International People’s Assembly (IPA) – an international articulation of anti-imperialist movements and organizations from 87 countries – and by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. We have since invited organizations and individuals to endorse the Declaration.

To date, we have received a total of 479 endorsements from 70 countries on all continents, including 8 international platforms, 233 organizations and 238 persons, mainly intellectuals.

The reaction of people to the Declaration is very positive. It indicates that there is a great popular will to give concrete answers to the crisis produced by this pandemic; our movements, and those not in our movements, wish to produce deep changes in the capitalist, neoliberal, and patriarchal system in which we live; this system is the root of the economic crisis; its destruction of the public systems of social and health protection generated the health crisis. All of these are elements that precede the pandemic and that aggravate the situation of the workers in the face of the contagion and lethality of this new disease.

At the same time, we have received important contributions and questions as part of the dialogue with the 16 points in the Declaration. We have systematized some of them below, because we consider that these aspects are essential for any future discussion.

1. The Gendered Impact of the CoronaShock. Without a doubt, the question of gender must be central to our assessment of the CoronaShock and of any policy framework of the left that emerges out of it.

1. 1. In the health field itself, three-quarters of the front-line workers are women, many of them working without union protection, without protective equipment, and without any leadership role in their fields. We put on the table the importance of building power for women workers.
   2. In the lockdown around the world, as a consequence of the overwhelming evidence that care works sits on the shoulders of women, patriarchal gender roles have asserted themselves. We believe fundamentally that the patriarchal understanding of ‘men’s work’ and ‘women’s work’ must be challenged and the structures must be put in place – such as universal childcare and the fight for equity inside households – that undermine these distinctions.
   3. There is already evidence of an increase in domestic violence during the quarantine, where the main victims are women, especially poor and black working women. We urge all peoples of the world to denounce and combat violence by demanding that the State provide legal, social and economic protection to all women victims of violence.

2. The Question of the Dollar-Wall Street Complex. We had called upon the United Nations to rethink the question of the dollar being essential the global fiat currency. What we want to amplify is that the institutions of finance for trade and development are utterly dominated by the United States and by the European states – whether the banking networks, the money transfer networks, the ratings agencies, the currency used to reconcile international trade. We want to make the case that this biased institutional system needs to be democratised, with the emergence of truly international financial systems for both development and trade.

3. Colonialism and Neo-Colonialism. Despite decolonization, the states that became newly independent struggle for lack of capital and investment. They had to borrow from the old colonial powers, and often went into debt. When they tried to finance their debt, they were told to ‘structurally adjust’ their governmental policy to favour international capital rather than the social needs of their population. What needs to be on the table are reparations for colonialism – the vast amount of resources stolen from the formerly colonised states – and are new proposals to deal with the toxic debt and for further financing.

Finally, we cannot fail to mention that the pandemic clarified something about the social orders in which we live: on the one side, states with a socialist orientation (China, Cuba, Venezuela) mobilised whatever resources that they had available – regardless of economic losses – to contain the pandemic; the states of the bourgeois order utterly failed to use their considerable resources and failed to prepare a rational plan for these resources (the death rates from Italy to the United States of America have been catastrophic, a political crime against humanity).

The example of the Venezuelan people, the Cuban people, and the Chinese people fill our hearts with hope that another world is possible, where relations between peoples are based on solidarity, integration, cooperation and complementarity, as dreamed of by Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, Berta Cáceres and other internationalists who preceded us.

Declaration

SARS-CoV-2 or COVID19, now declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organisation, has begun to wreak havoc in large parts of the world, with other parts waiting in anticipation. We are in a real struggle, which needs total mobilisation; a struggle that needs to put life before profit. We will only win this struggle – as China has already done – if our people are united and disciplined, if governments earn our respect by their actions, and if we act in solidarity across the globe.

Global debt is at $250 trillion, with corporate debt already enormous. On the other hand, there are trillions of dollars swirling around stock markets and in tax havens. As economic activity contracts, corporations will line up for bailouts; this is not the best use of precious human resources in this time. In the midst of this, that financial markets remain open is a failure of imagination. The drop in the value of stocks – in the markets from the Hang Seng to Wall Street – is merely a way to intensify global social anxiety, since the health of the stock market has come to be seen – erroneously – as an indicator of economic health in general.

Long-term quarantines and shutdowns have taken place in large parts of the world, certainly in Europe and North America, but increasingly in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Economic activity has already begun to shudder to a halt. Estimates of the net losses are not possible to make, and even the major international institutions are adjusting their numbers every day. An UNCTAD study on 4 March, for instance, said that the slowdown of manufacturing in China will by itself disrupt the global supply chain and decrease exports by $50 billion; this is only one part of the loss. The total losses are – as yet – beyond calculation.

The IMF has pledged to use $1 trillion to help countries stave off economic disaster. Already about twenty countries have come to the IMF to request assistance; Iran, which had stayed away from the IMF for the past three decades, has now requested IMF help. It would be an auspicious change in the IMF’s policy, unprecedented in history, if not for the shameful refusal to help the people of Venezuela under the pretext of not recognizing the Venezuelan government. The IMF must not require any adjustments or strings for the provision of these bridge loans. The rejection of a loan to Venezuela is a sign of great political failure by the IMF.

International solidarity from China and Cuba is exemplary. Chinese and Cuban doctors have been in Iran, Italy, and Venezuela, while they have offered their services and expertise around the world. They have developed salves and medical treatments that prevents the fatality rate for those afflicted with COVID19, and they want to distribute this – without any patent or profit – to the world’s people. The example of the Chinese and Cubans in this period must be taken seriously; thanks to this example, it is easier to imagine socialism in the midst of this coronavirus pandemic, than it is to live under the heartless regime of capitalism.

European countries, now the focus of the pandemic, are seeing their weakened health systems collapse after decades of under-funding and neo-liberal austerity. European governments, as well as the European Central Bank and the EU, allocate the bulk of their resources on trying to safeguard the financial and business sectors from a sure economic debacle. The adoption of timid actions aimed at strengthening the capacities of States in the face of the crisis – targeted renationalisations, temporary public control of health service providers – or of palliative measures – limited exemptions from the payment of rent and housing mortgages – do not represent a decisive commitment to provide for basic guarantees for labour and safeguarding the health of the working class that is most exposed to the devastating effects of the pandemic: healthcare workers, women that are caregivers, employees of the food industry and basic services companies, etc.

This is a partial repudiation of the neoliberal prescriptions that have dominated the world for the past fifty years. The IMF must take cognizance of this, since it has otherwise participated actively in cannibalising resources in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and creating institutional deserts in country after country. Strengthening the state and redistributing wealth in favour of the masses should be the global orientation.

Scientists tell us that this struggle against the virus could last for the next thirty or forty days. That is why it is essential that each country and each government take measures to prevent the death of multiple thousands of people.

The movements, unions, and parties that make up the International Assembly of Peoples propose that a programme of structural change be formulated and implemented to allow us to win this struggle and reshape the world. This programme must include:

1. Immediate suspension of all work, except essential medical and logistical personnel and those required to produce and distribute food and necessities, without any loss of wages. The State must assume the cost of the wages for the period of the quarantine.
2. Health, food supply, and public safety must be maintained in an organised manner. Emergency grain stocks must be immediately released for distribution amongst the poor.
3. Schools must all be suspended.
4. Immediate socialization of hospitals and medical centres so that they do not worry about the profit motive as the crisis unfolds. These medical centres must be under the control of the government’s health campaign.
5. Immediate nationalization of pharmaceutical companies, and immediate international cooperation amongst them to find a vaccine and easier testing devices. Abolishment of intellectual property in the medical field.
6. Immediate testing of all people. Immediate mobilization of tests and support for medical personnel who are at the frontlines of this pandemic.
7. Immediate speed-up of production for materials necessary to deal with the crisis (testing kits, masks, respirators).
8. Immediate closure of global financial markets.
9. Immediate gathering of the finances to prevent the bankruptcy of governments.
10. Immediate cancellation of all non-corporate debt.
11. Immediate end to all rent and mortgage payments, as well as an end to evictions; this includes the immediate provision of adequate housing as a basic human right. Decent housing must be a right for all citizens guaranteed by the state.
12. Immediate absorption of all utility payments by the State – water, electricity, and internet provided as part of a human right; where these utilities are not universally accessible, we call for them to be provided with immediate effect.
13. Immediate end to the unilateral, criminal sanctions regimes and economic blockades that impact countries such as Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela and prevent them from importing necessary medical supplies.
14. Urgent support for the peasantry to increase the production of healthy food and supply it to the government for direct distribution.
15. Suspension of the dollar as an international currency and request that the United Nations urgently call a new international conference to propose a common international currency.
16. Ensure a universal minimum income in every country. This makes possible to guarantee support from the state for millions of families who are out of work, working in extremely precarious conditions or self-employed. The current capitalist system excludes millions of people from formal jobs. The State should provide employment and a dignified life for the population. The cost of the Universal Basic Income can be covered by defence budgets, in particular the expense of arms and ammunition.

ENDORSERS:

INTERNATIONAL PLATFORMS

1. International Peoples’ Assembly
2. Tricontinental – Institute for Social Research
3. ALBA Movimientos – Articulación Continental de Movimientos Sociales y Populares hacia el ALBA
4. Central Governing Council of the Red Nation
5. Delphi Initiative for Defending Democracy
6. La Vía Campesina
7. Red de Intelectuales y Artistas en Defensa de la Humanidad
8. World March of Women

AFRICA

• Organizations

9. Ghana – SFG – Socialist Forum of Ghana
10. Kenya – Revolutionary Socialist League
11. South Africa – Abahlali BaseMjondolo
12. South Africa – Economic Research on Innovation – Tshwane University of Technology
13. South Africa – NUMSA – National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa
14. South Africa – SRWP – Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party
15. Tanzania – TASOFO – The Tanzania Socialist Forum
16. Uganda – Ruth Fund – Rural Women and Youth Fund Uganda
17. Zambia – Socialist Party of Zambia
18. Zambia – Young Cheetahs Movement
19. Zimbabwe – SPZ – Socialist Platform of Zimbabwe
20. Zimbabwe – UFAWUZ – The United Food and Allied Workers Union of Zimbabwe

• Individuals

21. Nigeria – Minna Salami, writer
22. South Africa – Antonater Tafadzwa Choto
23. South Africa – Ebrahim Ghoor
24. South Africa – Rasigan Maharajh
25. Zambia – Macleod Lunkoto
26. Zimbabwe – Ady Mutero

AMERICAS

• Organizations

27. Argentina – Colectivo Teología de la Liberación Pichi Meisegeier
28. Argentina – Federación de Inquilinos Nacional
29. Argentina – Frente Patria Grande
30. Argentina – Frente Popular Dario Santillán
31. Argentina – GEAL – Grupo de Estudios sobre América Latina y el Caribe – UBA
32. Argentina – IEALC – Instituto de Estudios de América Latina y el Caribe – UBA
33. Argentina – Movimiento Popular la Dignidad
34. Argentina – OLP – Resistir y Luchar
35. Argentina – Red de Intelectuales y Artistas en Defensa de la Humanidad – Capítulo Argentina
36. Argentina – Vamos
37. Brazil – Articulação Por uma Educação do Campo, Indígena e Quilombola no Semiárido Mineiro
38. Brazil – CEBRAPAZ – Centro Brasileiro de Solidariedade aos Povos e Luta pela Paz
39. Brazil – CMP – Central de Movimentos Populares do Brasil
40. Brazil – CNM/CUT – Confederação Nacional dos Metalúrgicos da CUT
41. Brazil – Comitê Carioca de Solidariedade a Cuba
42. Brazil – CTB – Central dos Trabalhadores e Trabalhadoras do Brasil
43. Brazil – CUT – Central Única dos Trabalhadores
44. Brazil – Frente de Evangélicos pelo Estado de Direito do Brasil
45. Brazil – FUP – Federação Única dos Petroleiros
46. Brazil – IPDMS – Instituto de Pesquisa Direito e Movimentos Sociais
47. Brazil – Levante Popular da Juventude
48. Brazil – MAB – Movimento dos Atingidos por Barragens
49. Brazil – MAM – Movimento pela Soberania Popular na MIneração
50. Brazil – Marcia Sanches Venturi
51. Brazil – MCP – Movimento Camponês Popular
52. Brazil – MPA – Movimento dos Pequenos Agricultores
53. Brazil – MST – Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra
54. Brazil – MTD – Movimento de Trabalhadoras e Trabalhadores por Direitos
55. Brazil – NESAF – Núcleo de Estudos em Agricultura Familiar da UFSM
56. Brazil – Via Campesina Brasil
57. Canada – People’s Health Movement
58. Chile – Fundación Constituyente XXI de Chile
59. Colombia – CEISAFROCOL – Centro de Estudios e Investigaciones Sociales Afrocolombianas
60. Colombia – CIPAZ – Fundacion Ciudadanía Integral para la Paz
61. Colombia – Congreso de los Pueblos
62. Colombia – Coordinadora Política y Social Marcha Patriótica
63. Cuba – Centro Martin Luther King
64. Ecuador – ABPTAI – Asociación Bolivariana de Productores Textiles y Afines
65. Ecuador – ACCUMHB – Asociación Civil de Comerciantes Unidos del Mercado Bolivariano la Hoyada
66. Ecuador – ALBA Movimientos- Capítulo Ecuador
67. Ecuador – FEDAEPS – Fundación de Estudios, Acción y Participación Social
68. Ecuador – MEAB – Movimiento Ecuatoriano Alfarista Bolivariano
69. Ecuador – MIREDES Internacional
70. Ecuador – Movimiento Jubileo 2000 Red Ecuador
71. Ecuador – Red de Intelectuales y Artistas en Defensa de la Humanidad – Capítulo Ecuador
72. Ecuador – Red de Mujeres Transformando la Economía – Ecuador
73. Guatemala – CUC – Comité de Unidad Campesina
74. Guatemala – Fundación Guillermo Toriello
75. Guatemala – FUNDEBASE – Fundación para el Desarrollo y Fortalecimiento de las Organizaciones de Base
76. Guatemala – APSM – Alianza Política Sector de Mujeres
77. Guatemala – Asamblea Social y Popular
78. Guyana – Red Thread
79. Haiti – Association Tèt Kole
80. Mexico – Comité 68 Pro Libertades Democráticas
81. Mexico – Comité de Solidaridad Mons. Romero
82. Mexico – Coordinadora de Pueblos en Defensa del Río Atoyac – Veracruz
83. Mexico – Frente Popular Francisco Villa
84. Mexico – Jóvenes ante la Emergencia Nacional
85. Mexico – MLN – Movimiento de Liberación Nacional
86. Mexico – Movimiento de Solidaridad Nuestra América
87. Mexico – Mujeres para el Diálogo
88. Mexico – Nueva Constituyente Ciudadana Popular
89. Mexico – Nuevo País
90. Mexico – SICSAL – Servicio Internacional Cristiano de Solidaridad con los Pueblos de América Latina
91. Nicaragua – UCANS – Unión de Cooperativas Agropecuarias del Norte de Las Segovias R.L.
92. Panama – Confederación Nacional de Unidad Sindical Independiente
93. Panama – Frente Amplio por la Democracia
94. Panama – Frente Estudiantil FER 29
95. Panama – Frente Nacional por la Defensa de los Derechos Económicos y Sociales
96. Panama – Movimiento Comunal Nacional Federico Britton
97. Panama – Sindicato Único Nacional de Trabajadores de la Industria de la Construcción y Similares
98. Panama – Union Campesina Panameña
99. Peru – Acción Política Socialista
100. Peru – Juventud Comunista Patria Roja
101. Peru – La Junta
102. Peru – Movimiento Comunitario Alfa y Omega
103. Peru – Mundo Verde
104. Peru – Norte Progresista
105. Peru – Todas Somos Micaelas
106. Puerto Rico – COMUNA Caribe de Puerto Rico
107. United States – (Fem)Power
108. United States – AFROAMERICAS Network
109. United States – ANSWER Coalition – Act Now to Stop War and End Racism
110. United States – Anti-Racist Action Los Angeles
111. United States – Asian Communities Together
112. United States – Border Agricultural Workers
113. United States – Code Pink
114. United States – Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS)
115. United States – Community Movement Builders
116. United States – Dream Defenders
117. United States – Earth Evolution
118. United States – Facilitating Thriving
119. United States – Four Winds American Indian Council Denver
120. United States – Global Justice Ecology Project
121. United States – Massachusetts Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism
122. United States – Mississippi Immigrants’ Rights Alliance
123. United States – PEP – Popular Education Project
124. United States – Put People First – Pennsylvania
125. United States – PWF – The Perennial Wisdom Foundation
126. United States – Southern Anti-Racism Network
127. United States – Unión de Vecinos
128. United States – University of the Poor
129. United States – Vermont Worker’s Center
130. Uruguay – Izquierda en Marcha – Frente Amplio
131. Venezuela – Colectivo Diversidad UBV
132. Venezuela – Comuna Cacique Guaracarima
133. Venezuela – Consejo comunal “Acacias IV”
134. Venezuela – Consejo Presidencial de Gobierno Popular de Comunas
135. Venezuela – Corriente Revolucionária Bolívar y Zamora
136. Venezuela – CTC – Coalición de Tendencias Clasistas
137. Venezuela – Equipo Coordinador del FPC-UNASUR VENEZUELA
138. Venezuela – Equipo de Terra TV
139. Venezuela – Escuela Popular y Latinoamericana de Cine, Televisión y Teatro
140. Venezuela – Frente Bicentenario de Mujeres 200
141. Venezuela – Frente Francisco de Miranda
142. Venezuela – Fundación O’Leary
143. Venezuela – Izquierda Unida Venezuela
144. Venezuela – Movimiento de Mujeres por la Vida
145. Venezuela – Movimiento de Pobladoras y Pobladores
146. Venezuela – Organización Social Sures
147. Venezuela – Plataforma de Lucha Campesina
148. Venezuela – Semanario por Ahora, medio alternativo venezolano
149. Venezuela – Surgentes – Colectivo de DDHH

• Individuals

150. Argentina – Alberto Rabilotta, periodista internacional
151. Argentina – Atilio Boron, Escritor
152. Argentina – Claudio Katz, Académico
153. Argentina – Cristina Mancini
154. Argentina – Damian Loreti
155. Argentina – José Javier Capera Figueroa, director de la Revista FAIA
156. Argentina – Marcos Teruggi, periodista
157. Argentina – Mario Hernandez, periodista y escritor
158. Argentina – Norberto Alayón, profesor de la UBA
159. Argentina – Patricio Germán Lo Prete
160. Argentina – Paula Klachko, socióloga
161. Argentina – Rafael Villegas
162. Argentina – Stella Calloni, periodista
163. Bolivia – Hugo Moldiz, periodista
164. Brazil – Alonso Bezerra de Carvay, UNESP
165. Brazil – Ana Raquel
166. Brazil – Andrea Foresti Lanzoni
167. Brazil – Andréa Pinto Lucas de Oliveira, teacher
168. Brazil – Aniura Milanés Barrientos, académica
169. Brazil – Bluette Fortes Santa Clara
170. Brazil – Breno Bringel, profesor de la UERJ
171. Brazil – Carlos Alberto (Beto) Almeida, periodista
172. Brazil – Carmen Lúcia Diniz dos Santos
173. Brazil – Daniel Lima Costa Muniz
174. Brazil – Daniele Melo da Costa
175. Brazil – Edmerson dos Santos Reis, professor da UNEB
176. Brazil – Jamil Murad
177. Brazil – Leonardo Nogueira, professor
178. Brazil – Luís Costa, periodista
179. Brazil – Lumie de Oliveira Zanazi
180. Brazil – Marcia Sanches Venturi
181. Brazil – Marco Alexandre de Souza Serra
182. Brazil – Maria Alice Motta
183. Brazil – Mariana Lacerda Gonçalves, cineasta
184. Brazil – Marilia Guimaraes, Escritora
185. Brazil – Nadia Bambirra, directora audiovisual
186. Brazil – Olivia Gonçalves Janequine
187. Brazil – Palloma Dreher Farias
188. Brazil – Paula Marcelino, socióloga
189. Brazil – Raissa Almeida Corbagi
190. Brazil – Sirio López Velasco, filósofo y docente universitario
191. Brazil – Tamara Siemann Lopes, economista
192. Brazil – Thiago Barison de Oliveira
193. Brazil – Vanessa Witcel Homerding
194. Brazil – Vicente Aurelio Laner
195. Brazil – Wálmaro Paz, periodista
196. Canada – Arnold August, escritor
197. Canada – Claudia Chaufan
198. Canada – Errol Sharpe
199. Canada – Peter Gose
200. Chile – Andrés Figueroa Cornejo, periodista
201. Chile – Esteban Silva
202. Chile – Florencia Lagos, promotora cultural
203. Chile – Javiera Olivares, periodista
204. Chile – Pablo Sepúlveda Allende, médico y activista social
205. Colombia – Aura Molano
206. Colombia – Jorge Eliecer Carrillo Espinosa
207. Colombia – Juan Alberto, periodista
208. Costa Rica – Carlos Madrigal Tellini
209. Costa Rica – Etienne Somogyi
210. Cuba – Ángel Guerra, escritor
211. Cuba – Ariana López, filósofa
212. Cuba – Enrique Ubieta, ensayista e investigador
213. Cuba – Fernando León Jacomino, poeta y crítico teatral
214. Cuba – Omar González, escritor
215. Ecuador – Ana María Larrea, socióloga
216. Ecuador – Andrés Arauz, economista
217. Ecuador – Argentina Chiriboga
218. Ecuador – Cachito Vera, Gestor cultural
219. Ecuador – Carlos Viteri, político
220. Ecuador – Cristian Orosco, economista
221. Ecuador – David Chávez, sociólogo
222. Ecuador – Erika Silva, socióloga
223. Ecuador – Fidel Narváez, diplomático
224. Ecuador – Gabriela Córdova Brito
225. Ecuador – Gabriela Rivadeneira, política
226. Ecuador – Galo Chiriboga, abogado
227. Ecuador – Galo Mora, escritor y político
228. Ecuador – Ilonka Vargas, artista
229. Ecuador – Irene Léon, socióloga
230. Ecuador – Jenny Londoño, escritora
231. Ecuador – Jorge Nuñez, historiador
232. Ecuador – José Agualsaca, legislador
233. Ecuador – José Regato, escritor
234. Ecuador – Juan Paz y Miño, historiador
235. Ecuador – Julio Peña y Lillo, sociólogo
236. Ecuador – Kintto Lucas, periodista
237. Ecuador – Luis Nawel, gestor cultural
238. Ecuador – Marco Antonio Pintado López
239. Ecuador – Mario Ramos, sociólogo
240. Ecuador – Melania Mora, economista
241. Ecuador – Miguel Ruiz, economista
242. Ecuador – Omar Ospina, periodista
243. Ecuador – Orlando Pérez, periodista
244. Ecuador – Oscar Bonilla, político
245. Ecuador – Osvaldo León, periodista
246. Ecuador – Pablo Guayasamin, gestor cultural
247. Ecuador – Pavel Eguez, pintor y muralista
248. Ecuador – Pedro Páez, economista
249. Ecuador – Pedro Sassone, sociólogo
250. Ecuador – Pilar Bustos, artista
251. Ecuador – Rafael Quintero, sociólogo
252. Ecuador – Ricardo Patiño, economista
253. Ecuador – Ricardo Sánchez, economista
254. Ecuador – Ricardo Ulcuango, dirigente indígena y diplomático
255. Ecuador – Sally Burch, periodista
256. Ecuador – Tania Hermida, cineasta
257. Ecuador – Xavier Lasso, periodista
258. Guatemala – Héctor Alfredo Nuila Ericastilla, médico
259. Haiti – Camille Chalmers, economista
260. Honduras – Anarella Vélez, escritora
261. Honduras – Gilberto Ríos, dirigente social
262. Honduras – José Antonio Carballo
263. Mexico – Alfonso Anaya
264. Mexico – Angeles González
265. Mexico – Bertha Vallejo
266. Mexico – Carmen Mendoza
267. Mexico – Claudia Sandoval
268. Mexico – Cristina Steffen
269. Mexico – Elizabeth Alejandre
270. Mexico – Felipe Echenique March, historiador
271. Mexico – Fernando Buen Abad, filósofo
272. Mexico – Gabriela Hernández
273. Mexico – Gilberto López y Rivas, profesor investigador
274. Mexico – Graciela Tapia
275. Mexico – Héctor Díaz Polanco, antropólogo
276. Mexico – Hildelisa Preciado
277. Mexico – Julieta Paula Mellano
278. Mexico – Leonor Aída Concha
279. Mexico – Leticia Gutiérrez
280. Mexico – Lourdes del Villar
281. Mexico – Luis Hernández Navarro, periodista
282. Mexico – Lylia Palacios
283. Mexico – María Elena López
284. Mexico – Mariana Gómez
285. Mexico – Maricarmen Montes
286. Mexico – Marisa Rodríguez
287. Mexico – Martín Hernández
288. Mexico – Nayar López, académico
289. Mexico – Norberto Pérez
290. Mexico – Roberto Benavides
291. Mexico – Rosa Barranco
292. Mexico – Teresa Olvera
293. Mexico – Walter Martínez
294. Paraguay – Ricardo Flecha, cantautor
295. Peru – Andrés Luna Vargas
296. Peru – Hildebrando Pérez Grande, poeta
297. Peru – Juan Panay
298. Peru – Leonel Falcón Guerra, vocero político
299. United States – Adán García
300. United States – Alicia Jrapko, activista social
301. United States – Catherine Liu, professor
302. United States – Dakotah Lilly, member of Students and Youth for a new America
303. United States – Don Mee Choi
304. United States – Eric Patel, artist and organizer living
305. United States – Gloria Osborne Springwater
306. United States – Marie-Josée Lavallée
307. United States – Patricia Rodney
308. United States – Paul Edwards
309. United States – Phil Nichols
310. United States – Rose M. Brewer, professor
311. United States – Steven Sugarman
312. United States – Vickiana Valdez
313. Uruguay – Antonio Elías, economista
314. Uruguay – Gabriela Cultelli, economista
315. Uruguay – Luna Zurdo Ríos
316. Venezuela – Arthur Rondón
317. Venezuela – Carmen Bohórquez, historiadora
318. Venezuela – Cecilia Todd
319. Venezuela – Geraldina Colotti, periodista y escritora
320. Venezuela – Gisela Gomez
321. Venezuela – Glenys Nahomi Palomares Mendoza
322. Venezuela – Gustavo Rafael Sanoja Flores, diputado regional
323. Venezuela – Ismael Morales, diputado de la ANC
324. Venezuela – Iván Torcat
325. Venezuela – José Alejandro Delgado Paiva
326. Venezuela – José Félix Rivas Alvarado, economista, ex-director Banco Central
327. Venezuela – José Rafael Núñez
328. Venezuela – Luis Britto García, escritor
329. Venezuela – Luisana Millé Muñoz Martínez
330. Venezuela – Molina Peñaloza
331. Venezuela – Pasqualina Curcio, economista
332. Venezuela – Pedro Calzadilla, historiador
333. Venezuela – Rafael Febles Fajardo
334. Venezuela – Sergio Arria, productor audiovisual
335. Venezuela – Thierry Deronne

ARAB MAGHREB

• Organizations

336. Algeria – National Committee to Defend the Rights of the Unemployed
337. Egypt – SPA – Socialist People’s Alliance Party
338. Iraq – General Federation of Syndicates
339. Iraq – Information Center for Reshearch and Development
340. Iraq – Iraq Social Forum
341. Iraq – Workers-Communist Party of Iraq
342. Jordan – JCP – Jordanian Communist Party
343. Jordan – Jordanian Democratic Youth League
344. Jordan – Jordanian Democratic Youth Union UJDY
345. Jordan – Jordanian People’s Party
346. Lebanon – Lebanese Communist Party
347. Mauritania – CLTM – Free Confederation of Mauritanian Workers
348. Mauritania – Movement We Can
349. Mauritania – The Future Party
350. Mauritania – The Liberation and Emancipation of the Haratin Movement
351. Morocco – All for The Right to Health
352. Morocco – DW – Democratic Way
353. Morocco – Moroccan Association for Human Rights
354. Morocco – Moroccan Association of Progressive Women
355. Morocco – National Federation of The Agricultural Sector
356. Morocco – National University of Education Democratic Orientation
357. Morocco – Progressive Left Students
358. Morocco – The Women’s Sector of the Democratic Way
359. Morocco – Youth of the Democratic Way
360. Palestine – DFLP – Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine
361. Palestine – NADA – Palestinian Democratic Women Organization
362. Palestine – Palestinian Democratic Youth Union
363. Palestine – Palestinian Working Women Committees Union
364. Palestine – PPP – Palestinian People’s Party
365. Palestine – UAWC – Union of Agricultural Work Committees
366. Palestine – UPWC – Union of Palestinian Women Committees
367. Palestine – Youth of the Palestinian People’s Party
368. Sudan – SCP – Sudanese Communist Party
369. Syria – Alliance Syrian Women to activate Security Council Resolution 1325 in Syria
370. Syria – CDF – Committees for the Defense of Democracy Freedoms and Human Rights in Syria
371. Syria – ICWOSY – Syrian Institution for Care of Widows and Orphans Rights
372. Syria – Syrian youth alliance to activate security council resolution 2250
373. Tunisia – Democratic Patriots Unified Party
374. Tunisia – Democratic Women’s Association
375. Tunisia – Musawah Organization
376. Tunisia – Nomad 08 Association
377. Tunisia – Parti des Travailleurs/Tunisie
378. Tunisia – The Democrat Patriots Youth Union
379. Tunisia – The Socialist Democratic National Party – Tunisia
380. Tunisia – Tunisian Human Rights League
381. Tunisia – Union Communist Youth of Tunisia
382. Western Sahara – CODESA – Collective of Sahrawi Human Rights Defenders

• Individuals

383. Tunisia – Khraifi Cherif

ASIA

• Organizations

384. Bangladesh – Jatio Krishak Samity (National Peasant Organisation)
385. Bangladesh – Jatio Sramik Federation (National Labour Federation)
386. Bangladesh – Krishi Farm Sramik Federation
387. Bangladesh – Nari Mukti Sangsad
388. Bangladesh – Students Unity of Bangladesh
389. Bangladesh – Workers Party of Bangladesh
390. Bangladesh – Youth Unity of Bangladesh
391. East Timor – CNRM – Conselho Nacional da Revolução Maubere
392. India – All India Kisan Mahasabha
393. India – Communist Party of India, Marxist-Leninist (Liberation)
394. India – Food Sovereignty Alliance
395. India – LeftWord Books
396. India – PSF – Progressive Students’ Forum
397. Indonesia – PRP – Partai Rakyat Pekerja (Working People’s Party)
398. Malaysia – PSM – Parti Sosialis Malaysia
399. Nepal – Nepal Communist Party
400. Pakistan – Crofter Foundation,
401. Pakistan – Labour Education Foundation
402. Pakistan – Lahore Left Front
403. Pakistan – Mazdoor Kisan Party
404. Pakistan – Pakistan Kissan Rabta Committee
405. Philippines – Bukluran ng Manggagawang Pilipino
406. Philippines – Laban ng Masa
407. Philippines – SANLAKAS 
408. Sri Lanka – Left Voice
409. Sri Lanka – MOLAR – Movement for Land and Agricultural Reform
410. Thailand – Chulalongkorn University
411. West Papua – AMP – Aliansi Mahasiswa Papua (The West Papua Student Alliance in One Comunity)

• Individuals

412. Australia – Madeleine Lawler
413. Australia – Tim Anderson, Académico
414. India – Hiren Gohain
415. India – Karen Gabriel, professor in Delhi University
416. India – Pratip Kumar Datta
417. India – Ram Chandran
418. India – Sangita Tanaji Ghodake, professor
419. India – Sankar Krishnan
420. India – Saumya Chakrabarti, professor of Economics
421. India – Sudhanva Deshpande
422. India – Tabish Khair, professor
423. Japan – Shinako Oyakawa
424. Malaysia – Jeevindran
425. Nepal – Balaram Banskota, CCM, NCP and deputy chief of central department of Consumer Rights protection
426. Nepal – Pramesh Pokharel, ICC member (youth) South Asia of La Via Campesina
427. Sri Lanka – Anuka vimukthi de Silva-Amali Wedagedara
428. Sri Lanka – Molnar
429. Thailand – Patchanee Kumnak – Labour activist – Socialist Workers Thailand

EUROPE

• Organizations

430. Austria – BOEM* Association for Art, Culture, Science and Communication
431. Basque Country – Centro de Estudios Francisco Bilbao
432. Cyprus – Union of Cypriots
433. Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine/Europe
434. France – News Net
435. Italy – Potere al Popolo
436. Norway – LAG – Latin-amerikancan Group Norge
437. Serbia – Social Democratic Union
438. Slovenia – raum AU
439. Spain – Asamblea Provincial Marchas de la Dignidad Ciudad Real
440. Spain – Asociación GOGARA
441. Spain – CUT – Colectivo Unitario de Trabajadores
442. Spain – Foro Pacifista de Ciudad Real
443. Spain – Intersindical de Aragon – CO.BAS
444. Spain – Intersindical Valenciana
445. Spain – Izquierda Unida
446. Spain – MDM – Movimiento Democrático de Mujeres
447. Spain – PCE – Partido Comunista de España
448. Spain – Plataforma de Usuarios y Pacientes em Defensa de la Sanidad Publica y del Hospital Universitario de Diego de León 62 en Madrid
449. Spain – REAS – Red de Economía Alternativa y Solidaria de Murcia
450. Spain – Red Roja
451. Switzerland – Bureau de Crise

• Individuals

452. Basque Country – Katu Arkonada, Politólogo
453. Basque Country – Roberto Muñoz Albuerno
454. Canarias – José (Pepe) Villalba Pérez
455. Estonia – Jekaterina Saveljeva
456. France – Hernando Calvo Ospina, Periodista
457. Greece – Aliki Bonia
458. Greece – Aris Tolios
459. Greece – Martina Kaika
460. Greece – Panagiotis Morakis
461. Italy – Elena Hileg Iannuzzi
462. Italy – Gianfranco Santoro
463. Italy – Guido Schiozzi
464. Italy – Laura Corradi, académica
465. Italy – Leonardo Bargigli, Assistant Professor of Economics
466. Italy – Mario Eustachio De Bellis
467. Russia – Marcus Guest
468. Spain – Ángeles Maestro
469. Spain – Arantxa Tirado, Politóloga
470. Spain – Cesar Ruiz Plaza
471. Spain – Gonzalo Vázquez Solana
472. Spain – Javier Couso, Militante político
473. Spain – Joan Manuel Cabezas, doctor in social anthropology
474. Spain – José Luis Centella, president of the PCE
475. United Kingdom – Efstathia Filippaki
476. United Kingdom – Joanna Hughes
477. United Kingdom – Miroslav Spasov
478. United Kingdom – Neil Singh, Senior Clinical Teaching
479. United Kingdom – Rajmil Fischman, Emeritus professor in Keele University

Dossier no. 17 reflects on the hybrid war unleashed against Venezuela. We document the repertoire of tactics, but also the motives behind them. We are interested not only in the recent attack on Venezuela, but in the similarities between this attack and others in Latin America over the past decades. This general onslaught in Latin America needs to be understood not in terms of the war against this country or that one, but in terms of the method of domination that shape the current neo-liberal and imperialist offensive in the region.