“Venezuela is a brutal sanctions regime.” - Geo Maher

Political scientist Geo Maher sits down for an in-depth conversation about the history of Venezuela, US interests in the region, and what the media gets wrong about Trump's fast unfolding disaster.

“This is a brutal sanctions regime.” Writer, political scientist and educator Geo Maher emphatically reminds us about Venezuela. A bipartisan strategy that began with Barack Obama and got much worse under Donald Trump, sanctions have been a deliberate effort to keep Venezuela in a long term chokehold. The seeds to destabilize Venezuela were thus sowed decades ago, even as last week’s US strikes in Caracas left dozens of Venezuelans dead and the unlawful kidnapping of Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro by the United States shocked the world.

Maher is disturbed by the speed with which the situation is moving, but has been well aware that “something was coming,” he tells me. He has written two books on Venezuela, a country that captured his imagination many years ago partially because he instinctively knew that when it came to Venezuela, he was being lied to. He decided to go see for himself and was bowled over by the mass mobilization movements that brought the charismatic Hugo Chavez to power and longstanding grassroots efforts of the Venezuelan people to take back their country from a greedy and corrupt capitalist system.

In this conversation, Maher offers a long view on a maligned and misunderstood country. The US obsession with Venezuela goes way back. While this current conflagration is certainly about oil, it is also due to the fact that US settler ambitions have been consistently thwarted by Latin American independence movements going as far back as the type of resistance mounted by Venezuela’s Simon Bolivar in the 19th century.

21. Venezuela and the Long View: Featuring Geo Maher

In recent years, it is not just the desire for oil, but the competition for this very oil (currently available to Russia and China) that has driven the US’ aggressive political project in the country. Meanwhile, Venezuelan resistance to this imperial violence is the subject of lore. Despite sustained efforts to vilify Hugo Chavez and to mount and fund various coups against him while painting him as a crazy dictator, the grassroots movements remain strong. Maduro may not be as popular or as powerful a politician as Chavez, but Maher says that it is precisely the fetishization of individual figures like Maduro - the eccentric, the rabid narcoterrorist - that obscures insights. “It was this obsession with this single individual, as if a single individual could ever make a revolution, which was not the case - or that a single individual would be ultimately in control of something so sprawling as the Venezuelan state.”

Today, people are suffering due to “the major contradiction of the oil economy, which still plagues the Venezuelan state today,” says Maher. “Because of oil, nothing is produced. It’s very difficult in the context of an oil economy to produce the things that people actually need. As long as you’re reliant on that oil money and those imports, you are politically vulnerable to imperialism and to the global capitalist system.”

Despite different chronologies, regional specificities and frameworks, comparisons with Iraq ring loudly and true. Unhinged American colonialism, an obsession with oil, brutal swathes of sanctions and several wars in Iraq make it a striking analogy to understand Venezuela. In Iraq, there were fake arguments about WMD, and in the case of Venezuela, Maduro is being charged with narco-terrorism and a drummed-up fentanyl crisis (Venezuela does not produce fentanyl). There is no basis for the drug charges being brought against Maduro, Maher says. In fact, “they’re already backing off the claim that the Cartel de los Soles even exists.” Maher adds that one of the charges - “possessing machine guns” - is particularly laughable.

“You’re charging a head of state with the possession of machine guns. This is one of the most bizarre things that I’ve seen.”

What’s clear is that it will be a long road ahead for Venezuelans and the region as a whole. It is also becoming clearer that none of this will necessarily prove easy for Trump, Marco Rubio and the rest of Trump’s cronies, who have almost certainly bitten off more than they can chew. Maher retains faith in the people of Venezuela. Today, when the definition of democracy appears diseased and flaccid, he sees the Venezuelan people’s movements as a blueprint for ushering in what could be a radical democratic structure. There is no way to predict how this situation will unfold, but when it comes to Venezuela, Maher’s convinced of one thing: “Any kind of occupying force will be doomed.”

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Bhakti Shringarpure