Canada Must Lift Sanctions against Venezuela amid COVID-19 Pandemic: Courage Toronto
Photo Credit: (Al Jazeeera/Google Images)
Written by: Courage Toronto
Ever since the United States proclaimed the Monroe Doctrine in 1823 establishing South America as its exclusive backyard, any upstart country on that continent that defied it sooner or later had to pay a price. However, that price has never been higher than what the people of Venezuela are being asked to pay today.
Donald Trump’s total sanctions block the medical supplies and equipment that Venezuela needs to save thousands of lives in its campaign against the COVID-19 pandemic. Canadians must rise to end their country’s complicity, break from its endorsement of U.S. imperialism’s agenda to control a country that has the world’s largest oil reserves, call for the end of sanctions and extend solidarity through humanitarian aid to millions of Venezuelans. The recent discovery of a Columbia-based plot to launch an armed attack on Venezuela under discredited Venezuelan ex-general Cliver Alcala’s aegis with apparent U.S. facilitation has shocked the world. Along with placing a $15-million bounty on President Nicolas Maduro’s head based on contrived drug-trafficking charges, these charges have brought the crisis to a boil.
As it turned out. the pot boiled over in April, as thousands of U.S. military personnel and a massive deployment of military assets came calling. Navy destroyers and AWAC planes worth $250 million each or their equivalent had never come visiting the shores and skies of Venezuela before. It was clearly a terrifying act of intimidation with weaponry culled from U.S. bases around the world. The State Department alleged that the reason behind mobilization was to counter narcotics trafficking, which is not prevalent in this area. However, it also admitted it hoped to cause financial harm to Maduro, whom they indicted of drug trafficking with no evidence or proof. These unprecedented threats and manoeuvres show how imminent the danger is and the need to rally to Venezuela's defence.
U.S. Targets Bolivarian Revolution
The history of U.S. recent machinations against Venezuela is well-known. The U.S. has had Venezuela in its crosshairs since 1999 when Hugo Chavez tapped into the country’s aspirations for national independence and was elected to power in the spirit of Simon Bolivar’s anti-imperialist heritage. Deep-rooted support in the slums and among the rural poor kept him in power until he died from cancer in 2013.
The U.S. tried everything to overthrow him: a failed US-backed military coup in 2002; encouraging violent demonstrations which damaged public property and cost human lives; a campaign of unremitting vilification on the international stage—these were all on the menu. Yet, Chavez’s humble roots, his commitment to redistribute to the poor the wealth of proven oil deposits that rank it first in the world, his personal incorruptibility and his refusal to bow to the U.S. policy of Pax Americana enabled him to win election after election until his untimely death.
Maduro, who replaced Chavez as the leader of the Bolivarian Revolution in 2014, has been given the same treatment, only multiplied a thousandfold. Venezuelan assets overseas were frozen. Venezuela was excluded from the world banking system. Hyperinflation destroyed its currency. Shortages of foodstuffs and basic necessities caused hunger and 40,000 deaths since sanctions were imposed. The import ban was extended from initially targeting government leaders to the imposition of sanctions against entire sectors of the economy.
The Lima Group, consisting of oligarchies or vassal states of the U.S., was formed in 2017 to isolate Venezuela and counts among its members brutal repressive regimes such as Peru and Guatemala. It supports efforts of an unpopular oppositionist, Juan Guaido, to declare himself the legitimate head of Venezuela. Now, more than 50 countries accept Guaido’s credentials. Guaido, a puppet of the U.S., has promised to open Venezuela’s nationalized oil industry, PDVSA, through joint enterprises to majority control by foreign capital while steering the state on the global scale against Cuba and Palestinians.
Venezuela is also hurt by bureaucratic deformities that multiplied during Maduro's rule as well as by Venezuela's over-dependency on the oil industry. This created economic instability because of the fluctuating price of oil on the world market. Though far from being a petrostate, Venezuela has many features associated with a rentier state model. The pro-Bolivarian nouveau riche who first emerged as a social force late in Chavez's rule and has multiplied rapidly under Maduro has extended its influence into state administrative recesses and is emboldened by the economic turmoil.
Many on the left agreed that there were deficiencies in the administration of the 2015 re-election of Maduro. They also criticized the assumption of much of the legislative authority of the National Assembly by a constituent assembly called by Maduro in 2017, which was boycotted by anti-Chavista forces as well as elements of the Venezuelan left. Yet none of this gives the U.S. a legal or moral right to decide who should govern the country. The Venezuelans will find ways to resolve their political differences as they have in the past since the proclamation of the Republic in 1830 without foreign intervention.
Trump seeks otherwise. He announced in January that the State Department would pursue a "maximum pressure" policy toward both Venezuela and Iran (which also faces an already devastating COVID crisis because of similar sanctions). This then is the face of a heartless, encroaching and predatory capitalism whose thirst for oil "trumps" its pretended hunger for democracy.
Sanctions Threaten Effort to Stop Pandemic
The European Union earlier and the International Monetary Fund, in March, refused a loan for emergency humanitarian assistance for funds to Venezuela. They needed this loan to maintain its efforts to overcome the spread of COVID -19, which may potentially exceed tens of thousands of deaths. This is made worse by the boycott of medical equipment and medicine as well as food as a result of U.S. sanctions.
The refusal to lend relief funds by the IMF blocked the purchase of raw materials needed to produce equipment and medicine to stem the crisis. Falling in line with the American State Department’s imperialist agenda, right wing governments in Brazil and Columbia have locked their borders with Venezuela. In the midst of this, Guaido attempted to engineer a U.S.-backed coup last year, an adventure which failed spectacularly.
So far, Venezuela has attempted to limit the spread of the pandemic shutting down non-essential businesses and using physical distancing while attempting to manage the near collapse of its hospitals, the severe shortage of doctors, and sore need for medicine and medical supplies. Without the humanitarian aid and emergency funds denied to it by the IMF—something it routinely grants to all other countries in need—Venezuela’s efforts to stall COVID-19 from spreading will falter. Add to that the previously seldom, if ever, practiced inclusion of medical supplies and equipment to the items barred by the U.S. sanctions, and a tragedy of unimaginable proportion is in the making. Diagnostic kits from China and the influx of doctors from Cuba have provided limited help but without an intact medical infrastructure, the tide of the pandemic’s spread will be difficult to stop.
Canada Runs Interference for U.S. State Department
Appeals to exclude humanitarian aid and medical supplies from the all-encompassing list of sanctions imposed by Donald Trump last August have multiplied recently. The U.N. Commission on Human Rights, leading economists like Jeffry Sachs and Mark Weisbrot, even CNN(!), have recoiled at the inhuman suffering caused by the sanctions. CNN questioned in its daily email on March 30th what the moral calculus is of a policy pursuing regime change when “civilian lives are on the line.” The Rideau Institute has condemned Canada for illegally meddling in Venezuela’s internal affairs.
Canada has run interference for the U.S. military-industrial complex on the “Venezuela file” on matters big and small:
Canada co-founded and fully participates in the Lima Group formed in 2017 when the Organization of American States refused to do Trump’s dirty work for him.
The UN’s Special Rapporteur’s August 2018 report directly links Canada to aggravating life-saving medical supplies including insulin and anti-viral drugs.
Canada illegally supports the obstruction of medical and food imports, thereby violating international humanitarian and human rights laws which constitutes an “international wrongful act”.
Canada’s conduct clearly violates the sovereignty of Venezuela and its support for coercive actions including sanctions and military steps without UN Security Council approval is unlawful.
Canada’s hosting earlier this year of the Venezuelan pretender Guaido in Ottawa and a meeting of the Lima Group, its senior role in promoting this group whose members include the quasi-fascist Brazilian President Bolsonaro, and its co-signing last year of an agreement with the U.S. to expand the sanctions constitute an abject surrender of an independent role for Canada on the world stage.
Canada’s Hypocrisy Cannot Be Hidden
It is apparent that the government of Canada’s made-in-the-U.S. policies on Venezuela are an integral part of and reflect its subordinate role as a handmaiden to U.S. imperialism and as a junior partner in Trump’s adventures. How can Canada pretend to stand for democracy and human rights while supporting the threats to use armed force, recognizing an illegitimate rival as state head and carrying out economic warfare through sanctions that deny a nation support needed to counter the scourge of the pandemic? Trudeau justifies Canada’s role as needed to restore democracy.
Is that why he is rubbing shoulders in the Lima Group with brutal militarists and corrupt tin pot dictators who shoot their citizens in the streets when they protest? Why is he voiceless when Saudi Arabia facilitates the bombing of villages and hospitals in Yemen, and why is he also selling militarized vehicles to it while its leaders permitted their underlings to use a saw to slice and dispose of the body of a critical journalist lured into its embassy in Turkey? Where was his moral outrage against Saudi Arabia then?
Let’s not forget that Canada has a dog in this race—Canada’s government has supported Canadian gold-mining companies seeking compensation for the expropriation of their holdings by the Bolivarian state of Hugo Chavez. In fact, Canadian mining companies have an international reputation for brutalizing and even murdering Indigenous people resisting their destructive enterprises in various countries with impunity and silence from our supposedly moralistic government. Trained in theatrics, Trudeau is skilled in feigning false pretenses of moral rectitude. Yet it is clear that Canada’s role in this litany of brutal realpolitik has been to act as a powder monkey for the U.S.
NDP Should Initiate Anti-Sanction Campaign
It is important to note that prominent New Democrats, such as Nikki Ashton and Svend Robinson, have openly criticized the Government of Canada’s servile obedience to U.S. plans to overthrow Maduro’s government. They have advocated that Canada respect Venezuela’s sovereignty and right to determine its own political future without foreign interference and to promote the resolution of differences within Venezuela peacefully by accepting the offer to mediate the conflicts within that country by Mexico. NDP leader Jagmeet Singh declared last year that Canada should break from the U.S.’s “self-interested interference in the region” and that “who is to lead Venezuela should be in the hands of Venezuelans…free of foreign interference.”
These pronouncements were made last year before Trump and his surrogates put the lives and health of innocent Venezuelans at the mercy of COVID-19. Now is the time for the NDP to actuate its pronouncements of solidarity and human compassion by immediately initiating an urgent coalition to campaign for Canada to abandon participation in and oppose the sanctions, disengage itself from U.S. connivance to bring Maduro to his feet, break from the thugs and bullies in the Lima Group, restore diplomatic recognition of the Maduro government whatever its short-comings might be, support the mediation efforts of Mexico and cooperate fully in sharing our medical supplies and resources with Venezuela to make up for the unmitigated hypocrisy and abuse that the Trudeau government has been party to over the years. This campaign should seek the widest support from the Greens, the BQ, the QS and from labour councils and unions across Canada and groups such as the Council of Canadians to unite together for humanitarian reasons to prevent the impending disaster that Canada has slavishly helped to engineer.
The Courage Coalition calls on all Canadians to send Justin Trudeau a message to speak up loudly and clearly in defence of human life as the U.S. tightens the noose around a proud and courageous people with a history of standing up against imperial powers since the rule of Simon Bolivar in the early 1800s.
End the sanctions against Venezuela now! Provide emergency medical relief!
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