Fight Back News Service is circulating the following article by Julian Sobogal, that appeared in Semanario Voz, the newspaper of the Colombian Communist Party. It was translated by Fight Back! staff.

The United States, as an imperialist country, has a script that it applies, with few variations, to overthrow the governments of rich countries that are adverse to it. The script contains the following steps: first, provoke a shortage of basic necessities; second, finance massive protests of the population and the displacement of the population to neighboring countries; third, offer “humanitarian” aid, which leaves the government of the country with the dilemma of accepting it, which can turn it into a Trojan horse, or reject it running the risk of being presented as an enemy of the needy population; if these actions are not enough, there comes the fourth step, military intervention.

If they manage to win over the national army, or a part of it, they delegate it the task of assassinating the leader of the government and all those who can defend it, as they did in Chile with the socialist government of Salvador Allende and in Granada with that of Maurice Bishop; in the first case they did not need to move the Marines to the country, in the second case the assassination was not enough for them and later came the invasion.

Of course, they are not always victorious. In Vietnam they were defeated and in Syria they will end up leaving while President Bashar al-Assad remains. A very important role in the application of the script is played by the so-called international media – which are really private monopolies that create opinion. The role of these companies is very efficient. A significant case is the so-called Arab Spring, about which they managed to convince even people with ideological backgrounds and left-wing positions; in spite of the fact that they could not discover that such a spring only took place in countries with governments not friendly to the United States and with oil wealth. It was really a plan of Barack Obama's government.

The application of the script is the one that is underway in Venezuela; with the aggravating circumstance that we are at a moment in which the world, particularly Latin America, has moved to the right, that is, it is a favorable moment for the United States and its extreme right-wing allies such as Duque and Bolsonaro.

As Halimi said, speaking of the “yellow vests,” “in moments of social crystallization, of class struggle without detours, one must choose one's side. The center disappears, the swamp dries up. And then, even the most liberal, the most educated, the most distinguished forget the nonsense of “living together” (Le Monde diplomatique, edition 185, “Class Struggle in France, year 2019”, p. 12). To outline the problem we can say: Trump or Maduro.

The U.S. Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, threatened the president of Venezuela with jail in Guantanamo Bay. Surely he is thinking of Manuel Antonio Noriega – president of Panama who was detained in his country by a U.S. military command and taken to a U.S. prison. The president of Colombia, in his visit with Donald Trump, also repeated that there will be no amnesty for Maduro and he has to be jailed. The National Security Advisor, John Bolton, told the high commanders of the Venezuelan army that those who go over to the side of the enemies of the Venezuelan government will not be punished. Note that he did not say that the Venezuelan justice system could possibly amnesty them. Bolton is already legislating from a neighboring country. All these statements resemble Aesop's The Milkmaid's Story.

The U.S. army is not going to enter and exit Venezuela to arrest the president. If they take the next step, after “humanitarian” aid, a war will begin that, that like all wars, one knows when and how it begins but not how or when it ends. Everything indicates that they will not be able to buy the Bolivarian army, in addition to the fact that the country has nearly one million militiamen under arms.

In addition, the United “States, once again, will wage a war far from home and, in this case, will make use of the military bases it already has in Colombian territory. Some of the bombs dropped on the border will fall on non-American Colombians. The emigration of the population to neighboring countries, which today is counted in hundreds of thousands, will be counted in millions.

The true Latin American and world left will have to show solidarity with the Venezuelan government and people, as it has always done with the peoples who are victims of fascism and imperialism. The only favorable scenario in the near future is that the sovereignty of the Bolivarian country be respected and that Venezuelans autonomously solve their problems. This is something that imperialism and the extreme right will not be able to understand. The possibility of seizing a country that has the largest oil reserves, is too tempting for the United States.

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