U.S. State Dept. Goes for Venezuelan Coup, with the BRICS Being the Ultimate Target

It is a fool’s errand to pretend that the international uproar over Venezuela’s July 28 presidential elections has to do with the allegations of “election fraud” loudly proclaimed by the U.S.-NATO bloc. It has become more blatant by the day that this is an all-out drive for bloody regime-change in Venezuela, one of the many nations of the Global South which, after suffering years of murderous economic sanctions, has applied for membership in the BRICS, joined China’s Belt and Road Initiative, and turned to Russia for assistance in economic development. Standing in the way of the U.S./NATO plans for Venezuela and the entire region are three major Ibero-American countries — Brazil, Mexico and Colombia – which smell that the U.S. is prepared to intervene “to restore calm,” should chaos and conflict be unleashed in Venezuela, and spill over into the entire region.

When the polls closed on July 28, before the vote had even been counted, the U.S. election polling firm Edison Research — whose “polls” are currently being used to foment regime-change against the government of Georgia — announced that “opposition candidate Edmundo González will defeat Nicolás Maduro in a landslide win to become the next President of Venezuela.” Its projection was based on its exit poll of a grand total of 6,846 people, out of nearly 10 million who cast their vote.

When Venezuela’s National Electoral Council (CNE) announced the next morning that, with some 80% of the vote counted, President Maduro had been re-elected by a 51.2% to 44.2% margin, the opposition forces led by Wall Street’s neoliberal ideologue Maria Corina Machado, proclaimed that González had won a landslide 70% of the vote, and called for international recognition.

Organization of American States (OAS) Secretary General Luis Almagro, a flagrant State Department asset who played a key role in the violent 2019 Bolivian upheaval, issued a 23-page report declaring the elections to be fraudulent. A meeting of the OAS Permanent Council was then called for July 31 to pass a resolution declaring the official Venezuelan elections “fraudulent.” That failed when Brazil, Colombia and Mexico voted against it. Nonetheless, on the next day, U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken declared González the winner by “an insurmountable margin”, and offered Washington’s help in organizing the transition to a new government.

Brazilian President Lula da Silva has taken the lead in organizing for resolving Venezuela’s crisis through dialogue and negotiations, in coordination with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Colombia’s Gustavo Petro. The three leaders issued a joint statement calling on the country’s election authorities to expeditiously publicly release the official vote tallies, and urging all “political and social actors to exercise the utmost caution and restraint in their demonstrations and public events” in order to avoid an escalation of violence. They emphasized that the only way to deal with the “controversy” around the election is through “institutional means”.