April 30, 2019

April 30 — Anti-imperialists in the United States must unite once more, just as we did in February, March and April, to stop the coup that U.S. imperialism is attempting to carry out against the Bolivarian government of Venezuela and against all the workers, farmers, Indigenous and poor people of that country.

At dawn, from a highway near a military base in the rich, right-wing section of Caracas, the nominal coup leaders — convicted plotter Leopoldo López and self-nominated leader Juan Guaidó — announced a military coup. López and Guaidó have already disgraced themselves as traitors to Venezuelan sovereignty. They stand still unless someone in Washington pulls their strings.

U.S. officials Elliott Abrams, Mike Pompeo and John Bolton, impatient with the lack of success of their “interim” puppet, push every move aimed at “regime change” in Venezuela. The three are ruthless. They stop at nothing — starving the masses, bombing their opponents, mass murder — in their effort to expand the power of the imperialist banks and corporations.

Their weakness, and that of Donald Trump and Mike Pence, is that they consistently underestimate the determination and will of the masses of people to defend their own interests. Up to now the right wing have demonstrated this weakness in Venezuela in every battle.

In January, when Guaidó first appointed himself “interim president,” only imperialist and rightist foreign governments subservient to the U.S. recognized this arrogant act. In Venezuela the masses rejected him.

In February, when Guaidó tried to bring an invasion force into Venezuela on the backs of so-called “humanitarian aid,” the mobilized people and their militia, along with the Bolivarian Armed Forces (FANB), stopped the invasion at the border.

In March, when U.S.-directed sabotage disrupted electric power for days, cutting off food and water supplies, the people mobilized to deliver emergency supplies while power was being restored.

Realizing Guaidó’s lack of support, even the most right-wing regimes in the region — in Colombia and Brazil — refused to offer their troops as cannon fodder for a U.S.-led intervention.

At the present time — noon EDT on April 30 — the coup attempt appears to have very little support inside the country. The Venezuelan defense secretary and the president of the Constituent National Assembly have said the FANB and the population are with the Maduro government. Tens of thousands of people have answered the call to defend the presidential residence at Miraflores in Caracas.

There remains the possibility of a U.S. military intervention. Despite the dangers to U.S. troops invading against an intact military with massive popular support — and 2 million people with access to arms in the militia — there is no guarantee that the Abrams-Pompeo-Bolton gang will concede.

In the U.S., the forces that have demonstrated support for the Bolivarian Revolution since January are again in action. In New York, community and religious leaders held a news conference today calling on the U.S. population to protest the new threat. Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., anti-imperialists occupying the otherwise empty Venezuelan Embassy are continuing to defend the right of Maduro government representatives to the office.

Everyone who defends the sovereignty of nations against imperialism should defend the government of Nicolás Maduro against this latest coup attempt and defend the workers and poor of Venezuela against U.S. imperialism and its local agents. And we should continue that defense, whatever measures the Bolivarian government, the real government of Venezuela, decides are necessary to suppress the imperialist-inspired coup and its leaders.