The Washington Post (9/10/18) describes US officials meeting with Venezuelan coup-plotters to discuss the overthrow of President Nicolás Maduro as “more fuel for his paranoia.” And it cites the White House dismissing “speculation that it wants to intervene” in Venezuela—ignoring the fact that the US has for years been heavily intervening to wreck the country’s economy.
A Washington Post article by Ishaan Tharoor (9/10/18) states that it “can be plausibly argued” that Venezuela is “a threat to the world.” The justification for the remark is unclear, but seems to be based on his claim that a “hemispheric humanitarian calamity is now straining Venezuela’s neighbors, who are struggling to cope with the vast influx of refugees fleeing hunger and depredation.”
The phrase “a threat to the world” has a hyperlink to an earlier Tharoor piece (3/1/18), which includes the claim, “As many as 4 million Venezuelans—more than 10 percent of the population—have already left the country, according to the Brookings Institution,” and goes on to assert, “That displacement threatens to create problems beyond Venezuela’s borders.”
If you follow the link to Brookings, you see that the think tank (2/12/18) only says, “Some estimates suggest that there are already 4 million Venezuelans who have left the country in search of better living conditions: over 10 percent of the country’s population.” No source is offered beyond “some estimates.”
I’ve written recently on the scale of Venezuela’s migration (FAIR.org, 8/31/18), given the comparisons to Syria that Tharoor and others have tossed around. According to the UN’s International Organization for Migration figures, by July 2018, about 1.6 million Venezuelans had fled its economic crisis, far from the 5 million that have fled Syria’s civil war to live abroad, and whom no decent person would call a “threat to the world.”
The UNHCR has appealed for $46 million to offset the costs of the exodus from Venezuela’s economic depression to its neighbors. That’s 0.006 percent of the recently approved Pentagon budget. Threat to the world? Unless you accept Trump’s racist logic that Mexico poses a “threat” to the United States because of the millions who have fled poverty there, then Tharoor’s remark is not only preposterous but offensive.
Trump’s policy has been to deliberately make Venezuela’s economic crisis worse, which makes its migration crisis worse. In August 2017, as US economist Mark Weisbrot (The Hill, 8/28/17) explained, Trump imposed sanctions—illegal under various treaties the US has signed—that
do their damage primarily by prohibiting Venezuela from borrowing or selling assets in the US financial system. They also prohibit Citgo, the US-based fuel industry company that is owned by the Venezuelan government, from sending dividends or profits back to Venezuela.
According to Reuters (9/14/17), Citgo had been sending about $1 billion per year back to Venezuela before Trump’s sanctions cut off that flow of revenue —about 20 times more than what the UNHCR has asked for to help Venezuelan migrants. That’s the easiest cost of the sanctions to estimate. The other costs come from gravely impeding Venezuela’s capacity to restructure its debt, which is crucial to any recovery. US clout stems from the fact that all Venezuela’s foreign currency bonds are governed under New York state law.
Amazingly, the closest Tharoor’s article came to saying anything about Trump’s draconian sanctions—which could be made even more devastating through the imposition of an oil embargo, a move that is made more likely by a deluge of articles like his—is when Tharoor mentioned a travel ban:
President Trump, meanwhile, has played the part of the hectoring American hegemon rather well. His administration included Venezuela among the mostly Muslim-majority countries targeted by Trump’s travel ban, shutting the door to a nation in desperate need.
I asked the Washington Post to correct Tharoor’s article so his readers are not left completely ignorant of Trump’s economic sanctions on Venezuela, and worked up into a panic about a democracy that poses them no threat. Notwithstanding Dean Baker’s struggles to get basic facts reported accurately in the Post when elite agendas are served by “mistakes,” I hope others also ask the paper to show a semblance of honesty.
ACTION:
Please ask the Washington Post to retract its baseless and dangerous claim that Venezuela poses a “threat to the world.”
Email: letters@washpost.com
Twitter: @washingtonpost
Venezuela is a regional threat to stability. It just depends on whether you consider South America (Colombia, Peru, Brasil) part of the world. If you are an armchair agitator sitting fat and happy in a comfortable part of the Empire — say Canada, the UK, or the USA — it’s an easy (and sadly historical) trope to discount the South’s membership in the world. I
t doesn’t matter if it is 5 million or several hundred thousand. A mass (tens to hundreds of thousands) of unemployed people moving into a developing country creates problems. I have first hand experienced the change in Peru. I can only imagine that it is much worse in Colombia.
“But “creates problems” and “a threat to the world” are entirely different tropes hence the irresponsibility of WaPo to jump on the hysteria-generating bandwagon that the traditional (European) ruling elite (who own all the major media outlets in Venezuela) have been engaged in from Day 1 of Chavez right on through to Medurro without skipping a beat. These are the same guys who tried to install Carmona. You don’t really think they’re above playing “dirty tricks” with the media do ya?
Would have been useful to also include a link or an email to direct us !
Try
corrections AT washpost.com
and/or
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/letter-to-the-editor/?utm_term=.a4a78e554f20
Just a few years ago Venezuela had over 5 million Colombian immigrants living within their borders, part of the largest internally displaced population of any country anywhere on the planet after Sudan.
Yet this massive migration was not considered a threat to anyone, in fact Colombia was rewarded for this accomplishment with preferential trade status and sweeping military assistance. After all most of the displaced were ejected from foreign owned lands and potentially interfering with mineral extraction or agitating for a living wage in the agricultural sector.
Colombia continues to be a human rights disgrace with the number of extrajudical killings and disappearances rivaling any point in the civil war, Venezuela would stabilize if the US stopped funding and hosting opposition groups, and encouraging outright Constitutional crisis.
Not just Colombian. My uncle lived in Venezuela for years, but had to return to Peru. His wife and daughter are Venezuelan, and he left to work ito send them money. He moved to Venezuela in the early 80s when the government was at least as corrupt as Maduro’ government is today, but there was opportunity. He was able to support much of my family in Peru based on his humble earnings. Now that the tide has shifted. The root cause is pretty much the same. Corruption and a lack of technocrats running the country. It’s sad to see the corrupt leadership of Venezuela preaching equality and robbing the nation simultaneously. There was so much promise early on that was wasted. Now it is just idiots clinging to power.
But how much of that corruption is actual and how much of it is merely a perception created by the false narrative deliberately spread by Venezuelan media outlets owned by the same extremely wealthy, European-descended elites who have been having fits and spasms ever since their traditional perch atop the government was disrupted by that cheeky half-breed military officer, Hugo Chavez. His election and subsequent rerouting of government revenue into programs for the middle and lower classes eg. education, healthcare and a social safety net that the wealthy never needed (of course) and so declined to ever create one for the less well-off majority population despite their desperate need for one. They portraying Chavez as a dictator despite his repeated re-election with landslide majorities in numerous UN-monitored election. And they never skipped a beat with Medurro, painting him as a tyrant and crook before he could even get the seat at his presidential desk warm. Remember, these are the same people who backed ‘Dictator-for-a-Day’ Carmona who seized power from the democratically elected, rightful leader Chavez. But as the masses assembled, the rank and file military and police officers refused orders to massacre the majority voters who were having none of it. So he tucked his tail and fled leaving the media owners to do what they’ve been doing ever since….lying, whining, bitching and moaning, about every perceived transgression committed by those “damned Chavistas!”.
The corruption is 100% actual. My uncle is nowhere near being elite nor is he European. The same is true of the more than 400,000 Venezuelans registered and living in Peru today. They are the proletariat with nothing to lose but their lives. Moving to Peru is a gutsy move since its situation can hardly be described as safe.
The elites you speak of were/are also corrupt. I will give them no free pass. It’s not an either/or situation. One group being corrupt doesn’t make it okay for the current group to be corrupt. Chavez had a good chance to fix the corruption. The revolution had promise. But instead of taking on corruption he became part of it. Now his family are at least millionaires. And, his revolution is going bust.
where is the link to the action?
Whatever one can say of their politics, what is so obvious is the elite news media in the US always has to have a foreign villain rather than reporting the truth about what is going on in the US itself. The danger is that the US media plays its imperialist role so well that Americans think they should go to war with the media chosen enemy. Recall William Randolph Hears said if you can supply the photos he could supply the war.
Venezuela suffers from the intervention of European-U.S. countries since colonial times to the present. It is time to end our capitalist adventures, mostly resource extraction and the labor exploitation that goes with it. We need a new model — for the health of the earth and ourselves.