In the midst of the campaign by the major international news media, you are not likely to see that Venezuela has become the second country in the world, following Cuba, in attaining a total coverage of medical attention for all of its citizens.  The achievement is a consequence of a neighborhood health program, established fourteen years ago by Hugo Chávez.  As a result of the medical mission, Venezuela’s 31 million citizens today have access to nearly 600 “areas of health;” more than 500 Centers of Integral Diagnosis; 580 “rehabilitation halls;” thirty centers of high technology; 22,000 integral community doctors; and 63,000 health professionals.  The mission has included the education of 830 indigenous doctors, who are not divorced from the ancestral customs of their communities.  

     The medical system has been developed with the support of Cuba, which has sent health and other professionals to work in the South American nation.  I personally know doctors, nurses and professors who have worked for as much as three years in Venezuela.

      In a ceremony recognizing the achievement, doctors presented Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro with the gift of a white medical coat and a stethoscope, and they declared the nation’s first worker president to be “Doctor Love.”  Maduro noted that the achievement is of no importance to the international news media.  But the indifference of the media cannot erase the achievement nor the fact that “the human miracle, of treating all human beings as what they are, is in march for millions.”  

      The achievement was reported by the Cuban journalist Alina Perera Robbio, who sent a special report to Granma, the Official Organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba and the principal daily newspaper in Cuba.  On the same page, another article on Venezuela appears.  It describes the work of armed bands contracted by the Venezuelan opposition, who engaged in vandalism against various public installations, including an attack on an infant-maternal hospital.

      The opposition in Venezuela is driven by its particular interests.  Its leading forces are the large estate landholders and business elite, both of which are tied to international corporate capital, through their participation in the import-export commerce that is integral to the core-peripheral relation.  These economic sectors have a particular interest in opposition to an autonomous national project of economic and social development, the ultimate goal of which is to break the core-peripheral economic relation.  The opposition has, but does not openly propose, an anti-national and anti-popular project that wants to restore neoliberal polices, opening the national market to international penetration and weakening the role of the state.

       In seeking to influence the popular sectors, the Venezuelan elite exploits three possibilities.  (1) The highly educated sector of the workforce is for the most part able to find material security in a national economy shaped by the international core-peripheral relation, even though an autonomous national project offers more to the middle class in terms of a meaningful and more dignified national project.  (2)  The great majority of people tend to think in terms of their concrete daily needs, rather than thinking theoretically and historically.  The elite has exploited this human tendency by disrupting the economy through the denial of goods and services and by creating conflict through street violence.  Some of the people, thinking concretely, have a tendency to blame the government for such economic and political disruptions, supporting the opposition with a naïve hope for improving the situation. (3) Many people also have a tendency to not fully appreciate the significant societal effort that is involved in the providing of health care, education, and social services to an entire population, such that dissatisfaction with the government emerges, leading to a naïve hope for improvement through the opposition.

     In this strategy of exploitation, the elite is seeking to confuse and manipulate the people, exploiting their limitations.  The elite has the advantage of its ties to important economic and political actors on a global scale.  The national and international elites form a partnership in opposition to a government seeking to develop an autonomous project in defense of the people.  The elites control the international and national media of information, so that what the media sees and does not see is shaped by the particular interests of the elites.  In addition, the elites have a stranglehold on the national economy, enabling them to cause economic disruptions. For a national elite whose particular interests are more important than patriotism, the strategy is not to persuade the majority, but to cause sufficient disruption to justify a foreign intervention.

       Such is the battle unfolding in Venezuela, and it is merely one particular expression of a war on a global scale.  On the one side are those powerful forces that are committed to defend their particular interests in the neocolonial world-system.  Their policies are the weakening of states, the imposition of neoliberal economic policies, and military aggression.  They are presently divided between the more aggressive militarism and narrow nationalism of the Right (represented in the United States by Trump) and a less aggressive combination of hard and soft power in seeking to preserve neocolonial domination (represented by Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama).  On the other side are the movements and governments of the world that are proclaiming the unsustainability of the neocolonial world-system and the need to construct a more just, democratic and sustainable world-system (represented by the Non-Aligned Movement and ALBA).

       The Left in the nations of the North ought to more fully understand the alternative project being developed by the movements and nations of the Third World, in order that we can effectively explain to our peoples the necessity of casting our lot with the forces of change that are emerging from below.  If the peoples of the North were to form popular movements with knowledgeable appreciation of what ALBA, the Non-Aligned Movement and the governments of Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Vietnam, Iran and China are attempting to do, the prospects for the cooperative development of a just, democratic and sustainable world-system would be significantly enhanced.

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     On April 10, 2017, the Political Council of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) emitted a declaration in support of Venezuela, which has been confronting interventionist maneuvers by the Organization of American States (OAS).  

      The Declaration stated, “We reject the concerted aggressions and manipulations against the sister Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, as well as the deceptions and lies that threaten its sovereignty, independence and stability as well as that of the entire region.  We condemn the interfering, illegal and pro-imperialist conduct of the Secretary General of OAS. . . .  We back the Bolivarian Republic, which has restored the rights and dignity of millions of human beings within and outside its borders.”  See the full text: “Declaration of the XV Political Council of ALBA.”

      ALBA was established as an alternative to the Free-Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), which was a proposed project of economic integration directed by and in the interests of the United States.  FTAA could not be implemented, because of opposition by key Latin American governments.  

     Founded in 2004 by Venezuela and Cuba, ALBA was conceived as an alternative form of cooperation based on mutual respect and solidarity, and envisioning an integral form of integration, social and cultural as well as economic.  Today the member countries of ALBA are Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and the Caribbean States of Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia and Granada (see “The rise of ALBA” 3/11/2014).  

     Whereas ALBA is a project of integration forged from below by the neocolonized, the Organization of American States was imposed from above by the neocolonial hegemonic power.  OAS was established in 1948, with the intention of institutionalizing US-control of Inter-American economic and political structures.  It was the culmination of a fifty-year U.S. quest to establish a Pan-American system, initially proposed by Secretary of State James Blaine of the Harrison administration.  Twelve Inter-American conferences were held from 1889 to 1942; but Latin American governments refused to cooperate. Nevertheless, with World War II militarization driving a U.S. ascent to hegemonic dominance, the United States was able in the post-war years to impose its interests on the region, and the Organization of American States was born.  

       U.S. economic, political and ideological domination of Latin America was systemic during the second half of the twentieth century. However, it was not unchallenged.  Popular revolutions triumphed in Cuba in 1959, in Chile in 1970, and in Nicaragua in 1979.  A revolutionary sector was a significant component of popular movements in every nation, with short-lived takings of political power in Guatemala in 1951, Bolivia in 1952, Brazil in 1960, and Grenada in 1979, and with sustained revolutionary guerrilla movements in El Salvador and Colombia.

      The neocolonial hegemonic power attacked all of these challenges.  Cuba was expelled from the OAS, and a still-existing commercial and financial blockade was imposed.  Nicaragua was subjected to a decade of “low-intensity warfare” directed by the United States.  The government of Grenada was overthrown by U.S. invasion, and that of Guatemala was ended by a U.S.-financed invasion.  Bolivia, unable to benefit economically from the nationalization of its tin mines, was pressured into cooperation.  The governments of Chile and Brazil were overthrown by U.S.-supported military coups d’état, leading to long dictatorships.  And the governments of El Salvador and Columbia were provided with extensive U.S. military aid.

     However, in the twenty-first century the challenges to U.S. neocolonial domination have arrived to a more advanced stage, developed on a foundation of popular rejection of the U.S.-imposed neoliberal project.  Cuba has persisted, and self-proclaimed socialist movements have taken political power in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, while the Sandinistas have returned to power in Nicaragua. Progressive governments arrived to power in Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay.  The progressive and socialist governments developed alternative regional associations, with ALBA being the first, later followed by South American Union of Nations (UNASUR) and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC).  The more unified Latin American governments have been pursuing cooperation with other nations of the Third World as well as China and Russia.  

     The arrival of the Latin American popular anti-imperialist movement to a more advanced stage is a reflection of an erosion of U.S. economic and political control of the region.  This erosion is a consequence of the economic and financial decline of the United States, relative to other core nations; and of its considerable loss of “soft power” in the form of international prestige, caused by such factors as the Vietnam War, the imposition of the neoliberal project, and the post-2001 wars of aggression in the Middle East.

       The current attack on Venezuela by the Organization of American States is, in part, a reflection of an insurgent Right in Latin America. Beginning in 2014, seeking to take advantage of a decline in Latin American raw materials exports prices and the death of Hugo Chávez, the Right escalated its efforts to bring down the progressive and socialist governments of the region.  Using a strategy of economic war and vague political promises, the opposition won the parliamentary elections in Venezuela in December 2015.  Since then, the right-wing parliament has been seeking to destabilize the country, possibly seeking to provoke a U.S. intervention.  In Argentina, a right-wing candidate narrowly won the presidential elections, using a strategy of vaguely progressive campaign rhetoric.  In Brazil, a parliamentary coup d’état ended the democratically elected government.  The resurgent Right, now as always, has been supported by the United States, standing against all governments, progressive or socialist, that are seeking to forge autonomous projects of economic and social development, not directed by U.S. interests.  

      The OAS attack on Venezuela is directed by Luis Almagro, Secretary General of the OAS, with the support of the U.S. military. The Argentinian journalist Telma Luzzani has reported on a Pentagon document dated February 25, 2015, in which the chief of the Southern Command outlines a plan to besiege and suffocate the Venezuelan government, provoking a fall of the government, and describing the measures to be taken by a government of transition after the fall of the government of Maduro.  And the plan specifically refers to the Secretary General, whose assigned role is to insist on the application of the Inter-American Democratic Charter.  Emitted by OAS on September 11, 2001, in the aftermath of the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers, the Charter obligates members of OAS to adopt structures of representative democracy.

     In accordance with the plan of the Southern Command, Amargo convoked a session of OAS on March 28, 2017.  However, Amargo failed to obtain the approval of OAS members for the application of the Democratic Charter, the expulsion of Venezuela from OAS, or any sanction or action against Venezuela.  

      The interventionist initiative continues, however, seeking to take advantage of conflicts between the Venezuelan parliament, controlled by the opposition, and the executive and judicial branches, controlled by the socialist chavistas.  Accordingly, the governments of ALBA considered necessary the April 10 declaration against the interventionist maneuvers of the OAS and the U.S. Southern Command and in support of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.

     At the April 10 meeting of the Political Council of ALBA, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro provided an historic overview of the anti-imperialist struggles of the people of Latin America for autonomy and true independence, and he exhorted the peoples to continue the struggle.

     Worthy of note are Maduro’s comments with respect to the Trump administration.  “In the United States in this moment, there is a new situation, very risky and dangerous, more threatening to the peace of the peoples of the world, a situation of a reconfiguration of power.  The principal decision-making organs of the political-industrial-military apparatus of the United States are in this moment in the hands of extremists.”  

     Maduro tied such control of the U.S. political structures by extremists to the recent renewal of the attack against Venezuela.

​       In a moment of renewed counterattack by the Right on a global scale, the recent electoral victories of the Left in Nicaragua and Ecuador, keeping socialist governments in power, are of great importance and significance.  A retaking of political power by the Left with respect to the executive branches of Brazil and Argentina and the parliament of Venezuela could be of decisive importance.   These are attainable goals, inasmuch as the administrations in Brazil and Argentina and the parliament in Venezuela are increasingly lacking in legitimacy, because of their anti-popular and anti-national conduct. Moreover, the greater aggressiveness of the United States toward Latin American autonomous national projects should favor greater popular support for the parties of the Left.

 See “Discourse pronounced by Nicolás Maduro, President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, at the political-cultural Act of Solidarity,” Havana, Cuba, April 10, 2017.