Everybody Else's Business: Coup Fever In Venezuela - OpEd

January 27, 2019
By Binoy Kampmark

This could have been seen as audacious. Instead, it had the smell of a not so well concealed sponsorship, the backing of a meaty foreign hand. Venezuelan opposition leader and President of the National Assembly Juan Guaidó decided to take a quick step in the direction of the presidency. His own counterfeit theory is simple: he is not being a usurper, so much as a panacea for the usurpation by the current president, Nicolás Maduro. “I swear to assume all the powers of the presidency to secure and end to the usurpation.”

Such language is not that of a principled revolutionary figure so much as a hired hand intent on returning the country to conservative tedium. The power doing that hiring has had friendly press outlets for Guaidó to express his opinions. On January 15, the president of the National Assembly was permitted space in The Washington Post to claim that his country was witnessing something without precedent. (Be wary of the message claiming the exceptional.) “We have a government that has dismantled the state and kidnapped all institutions and manipulate them at will.”

But even Guaidó had to explain, despite deeming Maduro an unrecognised figure, that Venezuela was not your vanilla, crackpot dictatorship wedded to the use of police powers. “The regime may have ties to drug trafficking and guerrilla groups, but we also have a functioning, democratically elected parliament, the National Assembly.” Pity, then, that Guaidó needs so much outside help to make his call.

. . .

The official Venezuelan president cannot be said to have been a friend of state institutions. He is holding power under a form of sufferance. His interpretation of the democratic mandate can be said to be sketchy at best, a feature not uncommon in the history of the Americas. Authoritarianism breeds revolt, which breeds authoritarianism, a default revenge mechanism. But Maduro has good reasons to sneer at his opponent and the warm embrace by US officials of the movement seeking to remove the Chávista. The memory of 2002 and the failure on the part of Washington to remove Hugo Chávez remains strong and, in some ways poisonous; the failed coup resulted in attempts on the part of Chávez to neutralise the power of his opponents, be they in the Supreme Court or the corporate media. Mass round-ups and executions were resisted, but authoritarian counter measures were used. Maduro has merely been one of Chávez’s keener students in that regard.

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http://www.eurasiareview.com/27012019-everybody-elses-business-coup-fever-in-venezuela-oped/