Juan Guaidó

After Weekend Violence, Venezuela Opposition Leader Calls for “All Options”

In a move that will surprise no one, the opposition leader in Venezuela, Juan Guaidó has called on the international community to consider “all options” in ousting the regime of Nicholas Maduro.

The tension has been ramping up for a long time and it reached the boiling point over the weekend. Workers trying to cross the border in Venezuela with relief supplies were fired upon with buckshot and tear gas, with two of the trucks catching fire and burning. Two people were killed and over 300 wounded.

With the Venezuelan people in dire need of food and medicine, with millions fleeing to Colombia, the United States had airlifted tons of relief supplies with other countries to ease the suffering of the people. The plan was to conduct a “humanitarian avalanche” that would aid the people starving and further undermine Maduro’s regime.

Maduro, who has grown increasingly authoritarian refused to allow the aid to cross the border. He claims that the allowing of U.S.aid into the country is just a preliminary move to an invasion. His Vice President went on to say that the U.S. was trying to push food with carcinogens to poison the people. But for the starving people of Venezuela, they were encouraging the military to allow the aid to pass.

On Saturday morning, eight trucks carrying food and medical supplies tried to pass thru the border between Colombia and Venezuela. Three made it across before the rest were stopped, with two of the trucks being incinerated. Some of the aid, based on the Brazilian border did make it thru to Venezuela before the military closed the border.

On the Simon Bolivar Bridge that separates Venezuela and Colombia, Venezuelan people attempted to make a human chain to keep the border open and allow the aid to move into the country. They tore down the barricades and threw them into the river. The military responded by firing tear gas into the crowds to disperse them.

About 100 members of the Venezuelan military have defected, crossing across the bridge into Colombian territory. Most were lower-ranking soldiers, the most senior was a major including three men who drove their armored vehicle across the bridge. None of the defecting soldiers, however, were battalion commanders or higher in rank.

Guaidó, who proclaimed himself interim President in January after calling out the sham election of a year ago where Maduro banned most opposition leaders from running for office has been recognized by over 50 countries as the legitimate leader.

He spoke after the violence at the bridge and called for the international coalition, the Lima Group, that has supported him to consider “all options” to resolve this ongoing crisis that has paralyzed the once-thriving country.

Speaking to the media, he addressed the people and most especially the military members of Venezuela. “How many of you national guardsmen have a sick mother? How many have kids in school without food,” he said. “You don’t owe any obedience to a sadist … who celebrates the denial of humanitarian aid the country needs.”

He was to meet Monday with members of the Lima Group including U.S. Vice President Mike Pence in Bogota. His close ally and ambassador to the Lima Group, Julio Borges who is exiled from Venezuela after being a member of Congress ramped up the rhetoric even more.

“We are going to demand an escalation of diplomatic pressure … and the use of force against Nicolas Maduro’s dictatorship,” he said.

This may be welcomed news to the more hawkish members of the Trump administration, including the President, who hinted at using force to remove Maduro as far back as 2017, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo who said on Sunday’s CNN “State of the Union” that Maduro’s “days are numbered,” calling him “a sick tyrant.”

But to the Latin American members of the Lima Group, an armed incursion into Venezuela led by the Americans is the last thing they want to see. Even the much more conservative governments of Colombia and Brazil are on record as stating that they’re against a military solution.

Democrats in the U.S. wasted little time in denouncing this latest development. Chris Murphy, a Senator from Connecticut and a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee blamed the violence on the Trump Administration.

“Cheering humanitarian convoys sounds like the right thing to do, but what if it’s not about the aid? What if the real agenda is laying a pretext for war?” Murphy tweeted.

Maduro may take this reluctance on the part of the coalition and the Democrats as a weakness and may dig in his heels, but many Latin American leaders now will see this as a time when they use all their diplomatic skills to maneuver Maduro out of power as peacefully as possible.

In a recent poll, over 50 percent of the people were in favor of Maduro stepping down, while more than 50 percent were against any form of military intervention to oust him, hardly the numbers the regime was looking for.

With increasing numbers of soldiers defecting, the rank and file of the Venezuelan army are either fed up or too scared to rise up against the regime. Maduro has courted the senior leadership with money, real estate, and titles. But they have to see the handwriting on the wall. All it will take is for one or two of the high ranking officers to turn and the floodgates will open.

Meanwhile, U.S. officials characterize this as only just the beginning calling this latest episode, “barely the first inning” of the crisis.

Photo: Juan Guaidó – Getty Images

Maduro Uses Greed to Maintain Loyalty of Top Military Leaders

Opinion: When the facade comes off, these leftist Socialist leaders who decry the evils of capitalism usually live in an opulent lifestyle that would make Bernie Madoff green with envy. Venezuela is a prime example.

Nicholas Maduro has a tenuous, illegal hold on the Presidency but he, like his predecessor, Hugo Chavez knows, that as long as the military supports him, the phony election shenanigans can be swept under the rug. Latin America has always been a hotbed of military coups and Venezuela has had plenty.

But once Chavez took over, he decided to do everything in his power to ensure that the military would never rise up against him or his personal successor. He used greed and bought the generals loyalty. Chavez began an inflated and arbitrary promotion system where the most loyal officers to the regime were rewarded with promotions to general or admiral. And those promotions came with all of the perks, highly inflated salaries, homes, etc.

Venezuela now has about 3000 flag officers, (generals or admirals) for an active military force of fewer than 300,000 troops. The United States is considered very top heavy with the most flag officers in our history. The U.S. currently has 920 flag officers with a total active force of about 1.3 million troops.

But the first cracks to appear in Maduro’s power came over the weekend. Back on January 23, opposition leader Juan Guaido declared himself interim president and called Maduro’s sham “re-election” rigged. So, this weekend four air force officers — three generals and a female major announced on social media that they were taking the side of Guaido.

One of the officers, Gen. Jorge Oropeza Pernalete said in a video that was on Twitter “In Venezuela, it is urgent and necessary to rescue democracy and restore the rule of law,” he stated. “I call on others to repudiate Nicolas Maduro and those who are with him in the regime who have taken power in an arbitrary and authoritarian way.”

Maduro wants to nip this uprising against his power in the bud. He immediately visited several military bases as a show of force and no doubt instill fear into the hearts of the rest of the generals. Because he knows, it won’t be the generals who rally to the cause of Guaido to turn the tide. It will be the junior and mid-level officers and enlisted men that may go up against him.

The ordinary people are starving and over 2 million have fled the country and streamed across the border into Colombia. It is the lower ranks of troops, like their poorer countrymen who are dealing with a scarcity of food, runaway inflation and a lack of medicine and health care. The generals have all of that. To keep the lower ranking troops in line, the Venezuelans have installed the Cuban system of the secret police in the military that keeps a watch on everything that transpires and any whiff of disloyalty is strictly dealt with.

There are also three paramilitary political militias that harass and bully the poor in the barrios and crush any kind of dissent. These militias run between 500,000 to 1,000,000 and are poorly trained but operate in large numbers to constantly keep a lid on things in the poorer, opposition neighborhoods. Maduro claims to double the number of those by April.

And behind all of this remains the specter of a U.S. armed invasion. While remote, Maduro keeps his officers in line by repeating this threat constantly. Many of his generals, fearing reprisals from the people or being extradited to the United States, as many have taken up illegal activities and drug smuggling, have remained loyal.

After the John Bolton flap over his “5000 troops to Colombia” cryptic notepad, President Trump has reiterated that “all options” remain on the table, including an incursion. But the stakes were raised by Guaido himself.

He has asked the United States for humanitarian aid for the starving masses. USAID has prepared pallets of food and medicine to help the people. Guaido has urged the military to let these humanitarian supplies thru. Maduro equates U.S. aid as a precursor to a U.S. invasion. At a rally for his supporters this weekend, Maduro said that Venezuela “was not a nation of beggars.”

While the EU (European Union) has infuriated Maduro and the Russians by announcing that they have recognized the legitimacy of the Guaido claim to the Presidency, it now is reaching a crisis phase. The Russians and Chinese are pouring cash into the country to help prop up the Maduro regime. But lately, it seems, that the Chinese are becoming convinced that perhaps Maduro must go. The Chinese government announced last week their desire to continue working with Caracas “no matter how the situation evolves”, which is hardly a ringing endorsement.

While the military leaders have so far, not cracked down on protests in the bigger cities, allowing U.S. aid to enter is a completely different animal. The time is now for Guaido to speak with some of these generals and assure some of them that their fate is safe in the next government.

And the U.S. rattling its saber with the “all options” statement may be the push that the military leaders will need in advising Maduro that it is time to exit gracefully and retire on a beach in the worker’s paradise of Cuba to avoid an all-out civil war that no one wants.

Photo: Wikipedia

5000 Troops to Colombia? It’s Probably Not What You Think

Opinion: Like everyone else, we all saw the yellow notepad that John Bolton may or may not have inadvertently showed to the press during a Monday briefing. On it was two hastily scrawled notes about supporting the Afghanistan peace talks and the other was the “5000 troops to Colombia” alleged bombshell.

Immediately alarms began going off everywhere, was this a sign of the return to gunboat diplomacy, yanqui imperialism, and gringo soldiers invading peaceful Latin American neighbors? If so, Bolton committed a huge gaffe of operational security (OPSEC) and it would go completely against what this administration claimed its stated goals were.

When running for office in 2016, President Trump stated he had an anti-interventionist policy in regards to the region. However, many of the members of his administration have quite a different take on things and several, including Bolton, are very-hawkish. Bolton himself labeled Venezuela as part of a “troika of tyranny” (Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua) speech he gave recently in Miami.

Venezuela was once one of the most prosperous nations in Latin America due to its huge oil reserves. All of that changed with the coup of Hugo Chavez. Chavez was an Army officer who founded a secret leftist organization within the military and tried to lead a coup in 1992. It failed and he was jailed for two years.

He was elected President and then abolished Congress and the judiciary and immediately created a parallel government staffed by military supporters picked by him. He embraced Russia and Cuba where bought weapons from both. He began funding left-wing movements across Latin America including a $300 million dollar investment in the FARC in Colombia.

Then he turned his sights on the life-blood of Venezuela, the oil industry. He turned over the very profitable Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A., to his leftist buffoon buds, who promptly ran the business into the ground, all while lining their own pockets in the process. He kept enormous popularity with the poor by making them dependent on the government with endless handouts and government subsidies. When he died, his successor Nicholas Maduro further ran the economy of the country into the dirt.

Inflation was off the charts, people were starving and they were flocking to the nearly 1400-mile border with Colombia to escape this latest socialist “Eden”. The latest election was a total sham, which was denounced, not only by the United States but by most of the other countries in Latin America as well.

The United States quickly supported the presidency claim by the leader of the elected assembly, Juan Guaidó. The only countries that are approving of this sham election and speaking out against the U.S. support for Guaidó are those normal bastions of democracy and human rights, Russia, China, Iran, Nicaragua, and Cuba.

However, back to the notepad of Bolton, is this a sign of impending Yanqui invasion? Hardly. An armed incursion by the United States military would be disastrous for the U.S. politically in the region. So, one has to read the tea leaves in a very fluid situation, which can change on a moment’s notice and come up with a viable scenario. Which is why the official U.S. response to events in Venezuela is to say that, “all options remain on the table.”

So, what is most likely happening? Guaidó has reportedly met with the military leadership in the country. They have remained loyal to Maduro as the senior leaders are the most likely to have benefitted from his perks.

If some, but not all of the military decides to back Guaidó, the real prospect of civil war could occur. Then there would be the resultant need for humanitarian assistance and the 5000 troops could be part of a peace-keeping, humanitarian assistance force that would be required to help the already starving people of Venezuela. The 5000 troops would most likely include them from nations in the region with American logistical support.

The contingency planning for these type of operations is always on-going and it is certain that political overtures are being made to other countries in the region that share the US view. As in our own SOF “Truths”, the time for planning is now not later.

Competent Special Operations Forces cannot be created after emergencies occur.

It is clear Maduro must go, perhaps Bolton was just sending a subliminal message to the leadership of that fact. With the illicit gold trade and the amounts supposedly leaving the country, that should pay his socialist buds enough to buy him a nice beach retirement resort in Varadero.

5000 troops? Most likely a coalition of Latin American forces. Obviously, it isn’t as earth-shaking as a Yanqui invasion… but that is most probably what will transpire. Is it out of the realm for the gringos to invade? No, but very unlikely. But whether by accident or on purpose, John Bolton just gave Maduro something else to consider.

Photo: screenshot of Bolton news video