Maduro — coup against the Pink Tide

If democracy is the will of people, will they vote to decide who they want or a superpower sitting next door will?

It’s not just about Maduro — the story could end at him but it certainly doesn’t start with him. The story starts with Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the Americas, in 1492, opening the ‘age of slavery’ for the western hemisphere. And South America reacted to the barbaric enslavement of its people, with revolts and insurrections, earlier than the North.

Simón Bolívar (1830), one of the heroes of South America’s struggle for freedom, led Venezuela, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Panama to their independence and aided other South American states in their struggles against the Spanish and the Portuguese invaders. Bolivar’s dream was not just of making all states of South America independent — but to unite the whole of Hispanic America into one united entity. This was the only way, in his vision, that South America would be able to repel foreign intervention and slavery. Sadly, his dreams were left short of fulfilment — but the invaders were forced to flee from the southern continent.



Just as these states were gaining independence, the US issued the Monroe Doctrine (1823) which stated that any further efforts by European nations to take control of any independent state in North or South America would be viewed as ‘the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States’. This was the United States of America’s self-declaration of being the sole imperialist in the two Americas. And then came the era of instating pro-US dictators all over South America, making SA a US backyard — only until the Bolivarian spirit was revived in Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, Lula da Silva of Brazil and Evo Morales of Bolivia, in the 1990s — when they rejected the “Washington Consensus” and threw out US interests from their countries — this was the ‘Pink Tide’.

The ‘Pink Tide’ coincided with surging oil prices and these countries used their oil money in the welfare and growth of their economies. In 2009, Mark Weisbrot wrote in The Guardian that “Argentina’s economy grew more than 60% in six years and Venezuela’s by 95%. These are enormous growth rates even taking into account these countries’ prior recessions, and allowed for large reductions in poverty”. Hugo and Lula were socialists, but not ardent economists, they did what they saw as welfare of their people after centuries of depravations and subjugation — but did not foresee a possible plunge in the oil market.

More than the social programmes, what was more painful for the US were the programmes that built South American countries into a unity, perhaps emulating the EU example. The Bank of the South America, made by Rafael Correa, Evo Morales, Néstor Kirchner, Cristina Fernández, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Nicanor Duarte, and Hugo Chávez; and the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America, based on the idea of the social, political and economic integration of the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean were practical step to such a goal.

For the political realists in the US, who deemed the US being unchallenged in its immediate region, an underlying reason for its superpower status, the Pink Tide was a clear signal for US decline and the Tide had to be receded at any cost. And the efforts were doubled up right with Chavez’s death. In Argentina, where the Kirchners brought a 6% and 8% economic growth and poverty reduced from 65% in 2002 to less than 10% in early 2015, there was a quiet soft coup in favour of the neoliberal, right-winged, multibillionaire Mauricio Marci. Subsequently, Lula of Brazil was set in a trial and sentenced to solitary confinement as his successor Dilma Rousseff faced an impeachment last year. Renowned intellectual and activist Noam Chomsky said of Dilma, “We have the one leading politician who hasn’t stolen to enrich herself, who’s being impeached by a gang of thieves, who have done so. That does count as a kind of soft coup”. Emboldened by so many victories, now the US is after Maduro — and with Trump, they can go to any extent.

As early as 2017, Trump threatened a US military intervention in Venezuela. He said, “We’re all over the world and we have troops all over the world… Venezuela is not very far away.” In September this year, The New York Times published a report saying that the whole year had been spent holding “secret meetings with rebellious military officers from Venezuela… to discuss their plans to overthrow President Nicolás Maduro”. And out of the blue, came Juan Guaido — a politician most Venezuelans had not heard of before January 22. Guaido was elected president of the opposition-led National Assembly that had virtually been scraped of all powers by the parallel pro-Maduro Constituent Assembly — on the 5^th of January and proclaimed himself president of Venezuela on the 15^th — after a phone-call from Mike Pence.

Trump officially recognised Guaido as the President of the Venezuelan National Assembly on the 23^rd, followed by several states of the region, including Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Paraguay and Peru.

The question is how so many democratic states can recognise an unelected person as president of a country over another who has come after winning a ballot? What is democracy then, are we redefining it? If democracy is the will of a people, will the people’s vote decide who they want or a superpower sitting next door will? Regardless of corruption or claims of rigging or boycott of some parties, the ballot will be taken as the final verdict of the people, and that is what we have seen in US elections!



There is a long list of controversies that came up in Bush’s 2000 elections as well as in his 2004 elections, but the loosing candidates stepped down in respect of the ballot. And Russian interference in the 2016 Trump elections is still fresh in memory, yet no other nation can ask him to step down. The only way he will go is by an impeachment by the country’s own legislative body or the next ballot. If the ballot is not representing the will of the people, perhaps a revision of the loopholes in the democratic process is what’s needed — not a foreign-led coup.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 14^th, 2019.

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