Canada’s Role in the Venezuela Coup

Canada’s Role in the Venezuela Coup

By Prof. John McMurtry
Global Research

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A letter was sent today to the Science for Peace list-serve in response to the Science for Peace Statement on the Government of Canada’s ongoing campaign to overturn the elected government of Venezuela. 

Science for Peace is based in the Dept of Physics of the University of Toronto.

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What is most welcome in this statement is its expeditious issue and wide-lensed comprehension of the hypocritically self-serving role of Canada’s state, major mining corporations and banks in the plundering of Latin American societies and interference in their internal affairs to ensure that it can continue on and grow against elected governments seeking self-determination.  (now for the first time our foreign minister mendaciously publicly leading the alliance of the externally orchestrated oppression, exploitation and coup in Venezuela).

This exact passage deserves verbatim support:

“Canada has, in recent years, supported the replacement of elected governments in Honduras, Guatemala, Haiti and now in Venezuela, and its relations with Latin America are problematical in broader terms.

Canada provides a financial and legal haven for businesses that exploit labour and decimate the forests, agriculture, and watersheds in these countries. Canadian banks mire these countries in debt and buy up public utilities.

Protests against Canadian mining companies in Mexico, Peru, Bolivia and Guatemala are met with police and military brutality. In addition, Canada needs to maintain a distance from the far-right government of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. Bolsonaro, among other policies, threatens our common future by opening up the Amazon, the lungs of the planet, to deforestation for profit.”

I would like to add, however, that it is not only or primarily “the Trudeau government” that is “shaping its interventionist stance toward Venezuela”. It is, more specifically, Foreign Minister Freeland who also leads Canada and NATO towards massive militaristic operations on Russia’s borders, as well as warlike policies of the violent-coup established government of Ukraine with, as the right-wing states of Latin America, a chilling fondness for fascist military rule of the past.

But to be fair, this is just as much the policy of the now Conservative opposition whose leader stands full-square for this illegal interference in Venezuela, and whose admired Harper predecessor was the most militaristic regime in Canada’s history with its bombers leading NATO’s near eco-genocide of Libya. The Conservatives not the Liberals signed the still fulfilled contract “to sell military hardware to Saudi Arabia” that helps to starve and destroy Yemen society today. Only the NDP has advised against Canada’s US-like interference in Venezuela’s government, but the media have bayed against its leader for saying so.

The excellent Sandbrook/Science for Peace statement also points out the hypocrisy of Canada still selling armoured vehicles to Saudi Arabia (as it murders its critic and bombs poverty-stricken neighbour Yemen into mass starvation), while at the same time “condemning the Maduro regime for lesser crimes”.

But the question arises even here, what are “Maduro’s crimes“ under law?  Everywhere in the mass media and government statements Maduro is accused of them – from ‘massive corruption’ to ‘fraudulent elections’. But internet search cannot find any evidence of abuse of public power for private gain – the definition of corruption.

Moreover, the pervasive claim of ‘fraudulent elections’ is plainly refuted by the international evidence of nearly 100 professional journalists and others from around the world whose June 26 report on the 2018 May election was unanimous in declaring the Venezuela’s electoral system as “fraud proof”, and by President Jimmy Carter’s earlier report on Venezuela’s electoral system as “the most excellent I have known”.

There is no testimony from any direct observer to the contrary. But then none of Minster Freeland’s foreign allies now ganging up on Venezuela had any known observers at the election which some of then-fractured opposition boycotted (the sole irregularity).

What is most shocking about Canada’s fomenting of a right-wing led uprising against Venezuela’s elected government is the long line of official lies of its government and the corporate media at collective and individual levels.

They completely suppress the cause of Venezuela’s economic and civil collapse by ever more US-led financial embargoes on all its lifeline of support – from its international credit to food and medical imports to recent seizure of banked assets in the US to externally orchestrated mobs in the street over 20 years.

Led by Canada’s Foreign Minister (right) embracing all fellow conspirators to Bolsonaro’s man most warmly, she claims and all echo in variations that this externally-wrought coup in violation of international law is “the rule of law” and “according to the Constitution” for “free and fair elections” to end the “illegitimate Maduro dictatorship”.

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John McMurtry is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada whose work is translated from Latin America to Japan. He is the author of the three-volume Philosophy and World Problems published by UNESCO’s Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS), and his most recent book is The Cancer Stage of Capitalism: From Crisis to Cure. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.