James Petras tiene una gran experiencia y un gran poder de objetividad analítica en sus hermenéuticas y, como se dice en términos coloquiales, sabe muy bien lo que dice.
Hemos encontrado en su artículo, "US and Venezuela: Decades of Defeats and Destabilization",
http://www.globalresearch.ca/us-and-venezuela-decades-of-defeats-and-destabilization/5434884, ésta parte --que lleva el título de éste página-- muy interesante en cuánto a su sagaz y constructiva crítica que creemos debe ser oída y estudiada, no solamente por el gobierno de Nicolás Maduro, sino por cualquier digno gobierno del globo que se quiera safar del yugo de los canallas de la Forbes World's Billionaires List.
Facing the US Offensive: The Strengths and Weaknesses of the Maduro Government
The basic strength of the Chavista government of President Maduro is the legacy of nearly 15 years of progressive legislation, including rising incomes, grass roots community based democracy, the affirmation of racial, class and national dignity and independence.
Despite the real hardships of the past 3 years, forty percent of the electorate, mostly the urban and rural poor, remains as a solid core of support of the democratic process, the President and his efforts to reverse the decline and return the country to prosperity.
Up to now the Maduro government has successfully rebuffed and defeated the offensive by US proxies.
President Maduro won electorally, and more recently has pacified the coupsters by adopting firmer security measures and more technically efficient intelligence.
Equally important he has demanded that the US reduce its embassy operatives from 100 to 17, equal to Venezuela’s staff in Washington.
Many embassy personnel were engaged in meetings with Venezuelan organizers of violent activity and in efforts to subvert military officials.
Yet these security measures and administrative improvements, as important and necessary as they are, reflect short-range solutions.
The deeper and more fundamental issues relate to the structural weakness of the Venezuelan economy and state.
First and foremost, Venezuela cannot continue running on a petrol based ‘rentier economy’ especially one that still depends on the US market.
Venezuela’s ‘consumer socialism’ totally depends on oil revenues and high oil prices to finance the importation of foodstuffs and other essential commodities.
A strategy of ‘national defense’ against the imperial offensive requires a far higher level of ‘self-sufficiency’, a greater degree of local production and decentralized control.
(En la parte del decentralized control no estamos muy de acuerdo con Petras porque hay que tener en cuenta que Venezuela es un país dónde gran parte de la producción está en manos capitalistas, decentralizarla sería como entregarsela a esas mismas manos de las cuales, precisamente, hay que seguir arrancándola)
Secondly, next to US intervention and destabilization, the greatest threat to the democratic regime is the government’s executive, managerial and elected officials who have misallocated billions in investment funds, failed to effectively carry out programs and who largely improvise according to day to day considerations, It is essential that Maduro advances the strategic priorities ensuring basic popular interests.
The Chavez and the Maduro governments outlined general guidelines that were passed off as a strategic plan. But neither financial resources, nor state personnel were systematically ordered to implement them. Instead the government responded or better still reacted, defensively, to the immediate threats of the opposition induced shortages and oil revenue shortfalls.
They chose the easy route of securing loans from China by mortgaging future oil exports. They also took out commercial loans – borrowed at the highest rates in the world (18%)!
The post commodity boom requires a decisive break with the petrol economy . . . continuing costly debt financing staves off the day of reckoning, which is fast approaching.
US military coups and political warfare are with us and will not fade away even as Washington loses battles.
The jailing of individual plotters is not enough. They are expendable …Washington can buy others.
The Maduro government faces a national emergency which requires a society-wide mobilization to launch a war-economy capable of producing and delivering class specific commodities to meet popular needs.
The February 12, 2015, coup dubbed, Plan Jericho, was funded by the US NGO, the National Endowment for Democracy and its subsidiaries, the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute and Freedom House. The coup organizers led by former Venezuelan Congresswomen Corina Machado, (a White House invitee) was designated to head up the post-coup dictatorship.
As a matter of survival the Maduro government must clamp down and prosecute all self-styled ‘NGO’ which are recipients of overseas funding and serve as conduits for US backed coups and destabilization activity.
No doubt the Obama regime will seek to protect its proxy financing and howl about ‘growing authoritarianism’. That is predictable.
But the Venezuelan governments’ duty is to protect the constitutional order, and defend the security of its citizens. It must move decisively to prosecute not only the recipients of US funds but the entire US political network, organizations and collaborators as terrorists.
Venezuela can take a page out of the US legal code which provides for 5 year prison sentences for “nationals” who receive overseas funds and fail to register as foreign agents.
(Esto es sumamente importante. Para nosotros es una de las mas grande debilidades --por "buenos que son"-- del gobierno. No comprendemos el por qué al respecto no se actua con mas contundencia y precision para erradicar a estos agentes extranjeros conocidos por todos. ¿A qué esperan?)
More to the point, the Obama regime has prosecuted organized groups suspected of conspiring to commit violent acts to lifetime prison sentences. He has justified extra judicial assassinations (via drones) of US “terrorist suspects”.
President Maduro need not go to the extremes of the Obama regime. But he should recognize that the policy of “denunciation, arrest and release” is totally out of line with international norms regarding the fight against terrorism in Venezuela.
What the US has in mind is not merely a ‘palace coup’ in which the democratic incumbents are ousted and replaced by US clients. Washington wants to go far beyond a change in personnel, beyond a friendly regime amenable to providing unconditional backing to the US foreign policy agenda…
A coup and post-coup regime is only the first step toward a systematic and comprehensive reversal of the socio-economic and political transformations of the past 16 years!
Heading the list will be the crushing of the mass popular community organizations which will oppose the coup. This will be accompanied by a mass purge, of all representative institutions, the constitutionalist armed forces, police and nationalist officials in charge of the oil industry and other public enterprises.
All the major public welfare programs in education, health, housing and low cost retail food outlets, will be dismantled or suffer major budget cuts.
The oil industry and dozens of other publically owned enterprises and banks will be privatized and denationalized.
US MNC will be the main beneficiaries. The agrarian land reform will be reversed: recipients will be evicted and the land returned to the landed oligarchs.
Given how many of the Venezuelan working class and rural poor will be adversely affected and given the combatative spirit which permeates popular culture, the implementation of the US backed neo-liberal agenda will require prolonged ,large-scale repression.
This means, tens of thousands of killings, arrests and incarceration.
The US coup- masters and their Venezuelan proxies will unleash all their pent-up hostility against what they will deem the blood purge necessary to punish, in Henry Kissinger’s infamous phrase, “an irresponsible people” who dared to affirm their dignity and independence.
The US backing of violence in the run-up to the February 2015 coup will be escalated in the run-up to the inevitable next coup.
Contemporary US imperial wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Libya and past US backed bloody military coups installing neo-liberal regimes in Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Bolivia and Uruguay a few decades past, demonstrate that Washington places no limits on how many tens of thousands of lives are destroyed, how many millions are uprooted, if it is ‘necessary’ to secure imperial dominance.
There is no doubt that the Venezuelan economy is on shaky foundations; that officials have yet to devise and implement a coherent strategy to exit the crises. But it is of decisive importance to remember that even in these times of intensifying imperial warfare, basic freedoms and social justice inform the framework of government and popular representation.
Now is the time, and time is running short, for the Maduro government to mobilize all the mass organizations, popular militias and loyal military officials to administer a decisive political defeat to the US proxies and then to proceed forward to socializing the economy.
It must take the opportunity of turning the US orchestrated offensives into a historic defeat.
It must convert the drive to restore neo-liberal privilege into the graveyard of rentier capitalism.
.....................................
Totalmente de acuerdo.
time is running short.
El gobierno bolivariano tiene sobre sus hombros una gran responsibilidad, no solamente nacional, sino histórica en todo el sentido global de la palabra, porque la revolución socialista anti-imperialista venezolana se ha hecho universal como bandera de todos los pueblos del mundo en el tornillo sin fin de la lucha de clases en cuanto que Venezuela está convertida en la representación par excellence del epicentro que presentó Rosa de Luxemburgo:
Socialismo o Barbarie
It must take the opportunity of turning the US orchestrated offensives into a historic defeat.
It must convert the drive to restore neo-liberal privilege into the graveyard of rentier capitalism.
