FROM EIR DAILY ALERT

British Empire Coup Attempt in Venezuela Runs into Resistance

Feb. 9, 2019—The following evaluation was written for EIR’s Feb. 11 issue of European Strategic Alert:

It has been three weeks since London and allied neo-conservative hawks in Washington announced that their synthetic creation Juan Guaidó would immediately take over as the interim president of Venezuela, that all democratic nations would quickly recognize him, and that the Venezuelan military would in short order rise up and send sitting President Nicolas Maduro into exile and hand power over to Guaidó.

But that has not occurred, at least not yet. What has happened in these three weeks is that U.S. Vice President Mike Pence and National Security Advisor John Bolton have threatened to use foreign military force to overthrow Guaidó, or at least to escort foreign aid caravans into Venezuela; Britain’s Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt on Feb. 4 has led a number of European countries (including France, Spain, Germany, but emphatically not Italy) in formally recognizing Guaidó; and the so-called Lima Group of nations has met in Ottawa to also recognize Guaidó and fulminate against any efforts to hold dialogue with Maduro or reach a peaceful settlement—as those proposed by Pope Francis and Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

But Britain’s regime-change script for Venezuela has run into significant snags, both internationally and inside Venezuela. López Obrador has stuck to his guns on Mexico’s policy of strict non-interference in the internal affairs of other sovereign nations, and has refused to recognize Guaidó. He is supported by a number of Ibero-American countries in this policy. The newly-created International Contact Group on Venezuela, consisting of several EU countries and four Ibero-American ones, met in Montevideo, Uruguay and issued a final declaration calling for finding a peaceful path towards holding new presidential elections in Venezuela, shying away from the idea of immediate confrontation. The Brazilian military has made it clear it will not be used to escort humanitarian aid into Venezuela, since Brazil doesn’t want to trigger a conflict, as Vice President Gen. Antõnio Hamilton Mourão (ret.) stated. And inside Venezuela, the military has not sided with Guaidó, nor even significantly split on factional lines, despite every effort from Washington to activate all their assets. Only one high-level Air Force officer came out against President Maduro—and he issued his statement standing alone, with none of his comrades at his side.

The danger of chaos and civil war being unleashed in Venezuela, however, is by no means over, because the British Empire’s strategic objectives of the operation are still intact: 1) establish a precedent for “Responsibility to Protect” and similar regime-change operations throughout the region, to put an end to the entire Peace of Westphalia system of sovereign nation-states; 2) ensure that the region does not continue to move towards working with China on the Belt and Road Initiative; and 3) spring a deadly trap on President Donald Trump, swallowing him up in new warfare at exactly the point he is advancing on his stated policy of withdrawing American troops from Syria and other endless foreign wars.