Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro Re-elected Despite US-backed Coup Plotters

By Jeff Mackler | Aug 10, 2024

With 80 percent of voting stations counted, the country’s election authority reported that President Maduro had received 51.2 percent of the vote. Edmundo González, the US imperialist-backed and financed “opposition” candidate received 44.2 percent. González had declared in advance of the election, based on spurious polls orchestrated by his right wing supporters, that any result other than his victory would be rejected. The “result” touted by his supporters, according to the July 28 New York Times, “could not be verified” by The Times’ analysts. Strangely, the online version of the same Times article excised this very sentence where The Times called into question the opposition’s claimed victory. 

Some 1100 international observers from around the world, including a broad spectrum of the US left and social justice organizations did verify the result. Due to a US-backed cyber attack a final result, now being tabulated by Venezuela’s Supreme Court, is still pending. Venezuelan law mandates that a final result must be certified within 30 days of the election. To date, the opposition has refused to submit its rigged tallies to the Supreme Court, not to mention to any other independent authority.  

One million Venezuelans celebrate Maduro victory

Almost immediately after the initial result was announced one million Venezuelans took to the streets in celebration and mobilized at Venezuela’s Miraflores Palace, the official residence of the president. González supporters countered with violent outbursts that trashed local schools, government buildings and Maduro election offices. While thousands of González supporters initially participated in anti-Maduro protests, these have largely dissipated, with the New York Times of August 5 largely focusing its regime change hopes on a US-backed military coup emanating from hoped-for pro-US elements inside the Maduro government’s military rather than a deeply-rooted movement of the Venezuelan people. To date no would-be US-backed military coup plotters have been evident. 

US imperialism’s regime change horrors

US imperialism has long sought the removal of the Hugo Chavez and Nicolás Maduro governments. With Venezuela in possession of the world’s largest oil reserves, the US ruling elite has spared no horror to bring down the Venezuelan government, from illegally seizing Venezuela’s financial assets in foreign banks to orchestrating a number of outright military coups, “appointing” Venezuela’s president – the corrupt and discredited Juan Gaido – assassinating Venezuelan leaders, sabotaging its infrastructure, and imposing crippling sanctions and a near total blockade. 

A UN report estimated that the US-imposed sanctions alone took the lives of 40,000 Venezuelans due to starvation! An estimated seven million Venezuelans have left the country, mostly to the US, fleeing from the terrible conditions fostered by the US ruling class. US imperialism has spared nothing in its arsenal of death and destruction to impose its will, that is, the interests of the US oil oligarchy that plays a dominant role in the US economy. 

The Times reported on July 28 “Washington has spent years trying push Mr. Maduro from office, levying brutal sanctions in 2019 that have strangled the country’s already crippled economy.” That Venezuela’s “already crippled economy” has always been a direct result of decades of US imperialist intervention, is, as always, absent from The Times’ account. 

As Maduro took office in 2014 oil prices declined by nearly 75 percent in a matter of months. This, combined with the US-imposed sanctions/blockade effectively crippled Venezuela’s largely oil-dependent economy.

Venezuela’s right to self-determination and the Cuban road to socialism

That Venezuela has survived the combined horrors of US wars of interventions is indeed remarkable. But Venezuela, a beleaguered and oppressed nation whose right to self determination must be unconditionally defended against imperialist attack by every serious current on the left, is far from faultless. The 1998 Chavista-led Bolivarian Revolution consciously decided to reject the Cuban road. It rejected the historic example of revolutionary Cuba in 1959 that embarked on a socialist course. In the words of Cuban President Fidel Castro, “We nationalized the Cuban bourgeoisie down to the nails in the boots of their shoes.”  On day one of the Cuban Revolution, the Fidelista team nationalized Cuba’s land and distributed it to the armed peasantry that were central to Cuba’s victory over the US-backed Batista dictatorship. Soon after, the Cubans established a democratically planned economy wherein capitalist profiteering was replaced by a society that prioritized human needs, not capitalist profits. To this day Cuba’s free national health care and educational systems are without rivals across the globe. Beleaguered, sanctioned, blockaded and US-invaded revolutionary Cuba, has managed to survive in the face of 65 years of a virtual and unrelenting US war. Its exemplary gains, the US perpetual war footing notwithstanding, include a diversified planned economy coupled with broad-ranging cultural, social and economic achievements admired by poor and oppressed people the world over.    

The Chavez-Maduro team no doubt implemented critical changes in Venezuela that greatly benefited the vast majority. But these changes, as we shall see, were all implemented in the framework of capitalist economy. British economist Michael Roberts recently reported, “Poverty was nearly halved between 2003 and 2011, with extreme poverty cut by 71 percent. School enrollments rose and university enrollments more than doubled, with unemployment cut in half. Child malnutrition was cut by nearly 40 percent, and Venezuela’s pension rolls quadrupled. Inequality declined steeply, with Venezuela’s gini coefficient of inequality dropping a full tenth of a point, from 0.5 to 0.4 from the early to late 2000s. By 2012 (and through 2015), Venezuela had become Latin America’s most equal country.”

But Venezuela’s economy remained tied to the then high world price of oil and it remained in the context of a state still dominated by capitalist property and private ownership. The nation’s leading party, the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), is a coalition-capitalist party, inclusive of some of the country’s richest figures as well as leading representatives of its powerful military, whose top brass are integrated into the administrative apparatus of Venezuela’s oil industry.

Today, the combination of unprecedented US sanctions and an embargo/blockade have essentially isolated Venezuela from the world marketplace, reversing most of the social gains of decades past and driving Venezuela into the depths of poverty. These factors, combined with the usual CIA-led destabilization projects and established relations with Venezuela’s capitalist elite and the still largely privatized corporate media, led the US imperialist war machine to believe, falsely, that the recent elections and accompanying US-promoted violent mobilizations at best could be used to force a negotiated “compromise” with the Maduro government, if not its outright replacement by elements in the Venezuelan military allied with the US-backed opposition.

To date, none of these projections have come to pass, a testament to the still deep understanding among the Venezuelan masses that the US imperialist monster is central to Venezuela’s plight. No doubt today’s US-backed Zionist genocide of the Palestinian masses has also convinced Venezuelan’s workers and peasants that US imperialism and its local agents are no allies of the Venezuelan people. Need we add that the upcoming US elections, expected to see the nation’s twin oligarchical parties spend a record-breaking $8+ billion in campaign expenditures and featuring two presidential candidates who espouse genocide in Palestine and endless US imperialist interventions in the Middle East and beyond, are hardly the “democratic” model that the Venezuelan masses desire to see replicated in their own country?

The solidarity expressed by broad forces in the US left has undoubtedly also been a factor, not to mention its various trade agreements with China and Russia that have provided a modicum of relief. 

Venezuela and socialist revolution

But Venezuela’s capacity to escape the ravages of the US imperialist beast and its ongoing efforts to impose its will depends more than ever on the formation inside Venezuela of a revolutionary socialist party dedicated to the abolition of capitalism and the establishment of working class rule in a socialist society. Again, the Cuban road offers Venezuelans a difficult but promising future, a society where the mass of working people, in alliance with the still oppressed and largely landless Venezuelan peasantry, build a new society free from capitalist exploitation and oppression.

US Hands Off Venezuela!  Self-determination For Venezuela and All Poor And Oppressed Nations!

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[Jeff Mackler is the National Secretary of Socialist Action; Director, The Mobilization to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal; National Steering Committee, Assangedefense.org; Administrative Committee, United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC). He can be reached at socialistaction.org  or socialistaction@lmi.net]