The Clement Payne Movement denounces U S President Barack Obama’s recent decision to declare Venezuela a threat to the national security of the United States of America, and to impose sanctions on seven of the top leaders of the Venezuelan Government!

As we have said time and time again, the neo-imperialist Establishment of the USA is intent on destabilizing Venezuela and subverting its socialist Government,  and this recent move by President Obama is merely further proof of the USA’s evil intentions.

In light of this most disturbing recent development, we would like to renew our CALL for Barbados and the other CARICOM countries to take a greater interest in events in our sister nation of Venezuela.  

Last year,on the 19th of April , I publicly challenged Ms Vivian Ann Gittens, Chief Executive Officer of the Nation Newspaper of Barbados, to “send a senior and respected newspaper reporter and a camera man to Venezuela to observe for themselves the reality on the ground and to come back to Barbados and give an honest and objective report to the Barbadian people”.

Almost a full year has passed since the issuance of that challenge, and neither Ms Gittens nor the Nation Newspaper itself has seen it fit to respond positively and to put themselves in a position to provide the Barbadian people with authentic, first hand information about the state of affairs in Venezuela. Instead, they continue to content themselves with publishing  news and information that emanate from Western oriented news agencies that are extremely hostile to President Nicolas Maduro, and that are currently in the process of waging a formidable campaign of “psychological warfare” against the Bolivarian Government of Venezuela.

I therefore wish to take this opportunity to transform my challenge to the Nation Newspaper into a plea to all of the media houses of Barbados and the rest of the Caribbean region, to invest some of their human and financial resources in garnering a correct understanding of the Venezuelan reality by sending a few of their own journalists to that sister Latin American and Caribbean country to see for themselves.

And it is important that we Caribbean people make such an effort because the fate of Venezuela has fundamental implications for our own fate!  If we – the people of the Caribbean – have an interest in living in sovereign, independent nations that belong to us and that foster and sustain our well-being  and that of our children- then we had better pay close attention to events in Venezuela  and do all that we possibly can to give principled solidarity and support to the popularly elected, nationalist and democratic – socialist Government of Venezuela!

But in order for us to fully understand this point, we must engage in a little reflection on our history. We need to delve into a little history if we are to get a proper understanding of the importance of Venezuela to the centuries long struggle of the broad masses of the people of Latin America and the Caribbbean to resist colonial and imperialistic exploitation, and to assert for themselves a dignified human existence.

No doubt, all of us are aware that it was Venezuela’s Simon Bolivar who, as far back as the second decade of the 19th century, picked up the baton of revolutionary anti-colonialist struggle from the “Black Jacobins” of Haiti ; led a formidable armed struggle against Spanish  colonialism in the  Americas; and  initiated a process of nationalist development founded on the establishment of independent nation states.

But as important as that early Venezuelan contribution was to the development of our hemisphere, that  is not the history that is foremost in my mind!  Rather , I would like to reflect on a much more recent period of history: I would like to reflect on the critical role that the late great Hugo Chavez and his revolutionary compatriots played in the first decade of the 21st century, in coming to the rescue of a Latin America and Caribbean region that was on the verge of drowning in a veritable swamp of North American concocted and controlled “ Neo-Liberalism”!

Neo- Liberalism (or New-Liberalism) is the name that has been given to the modern version of a European/ United States of America orchestrated system of neo-colonialism, in which the targeted countries (or new-colonies) are stripped of their sovereignty and of their structures of economic nationalism.

By the decade of the 1990’s, the USA – acting in collusion with wealthy elites in the Latin American nations- had enmeshed most of Latin America and the Caribbean in a system of Neo-Liberalism that was characterized by such features as:- wide scale privatization of state owned enterprises and public services; the removal of import tariffs and the opening up of the economy to American capitalists;  deregulation of capital flows; removal of subsidies to the poor; the slashing of social spending ; intense cultural penetration from the USA; exploitation of cheap and defenseless labour by American multi-national corporations; collapse of indigenous industry ; intensification of unemployment and human suffering ; exacerbation   of social and economic inequality; and the maintenance of weak neo-colonial governments that did the bidding of the US establishment.

It was into this morass that Hugo Chavez stepped in the late 1990’s, and– at the elevated level of head of state– almost single handedly took on and turned back the tide of Neo-Liberalism with a philosophy and a programme that wedded  Latin American and Caribbean nationalism to a 21st century model of Democratic Socialism.

Chavez led the campaign to defeat the USA’s neo-imperialist Free Trade  Area of the Americas, and established in its stead the “prosper-thy-neighbour” Bolivarian Alternative For Latin America and the Caribbean , and its companion Petro Caribe Energy Cooperation Agreement.

Under the banner of Bolivarianism, Chavez and his Venezuelan compatriots showed the way forward and upward with the establishment of such revolutionary institutions as Banco del Sur (the indigenous multi-national bank of the developing world ) , Telesur (a television network of the South) ; the Africa -South American Summit (a multi-lateral institution for synergising the resources of two continents ) , CELAC (the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States), and the list goes on and on.

But this Venezuela based revolutionary challenge to Neo Liberalism has not gone uncontested, and both the late Hugo Chavez and his successor, President Nicolas Maduro , found themselves the targets of unrelenting hostility, attack , subversion and “dirty tricks” emanating from the Government of the USA and their Venezuela based agents and fellow travelers.

In the year 2002, the enemies of Latin American and Caribbean independence and nationalism went so far as to stage a military coup d’etat against President Chavez : and these same enemies of the people are currently in the process of attempting to orchestrate a similar unlawful seizure of power against the newly elected President Nicolas Maduro!

Almost immediately after Maduro’s election victory in April 2013 , the coup plotters – in the form of right wing Opposition politicians such as Leopoldo Lopez and Corina Machado , and their US backers in USAID, the State Department, and the CIA- went into action with their so-called La Salida  (The Exit) strategy of violent street protests that– though few in number—  were blown out of all proportion by a compliant  right wing media committed to waging psychological warfare against the Bolivarian Government.

And several weeks ago, it was discovered that 2014’s La Salida had morphed into 2015’s Jerico Operation – a new violent coup attempt that was to be led by traitorous active and retired members of the National Armed Forces and members of the right wing Opposition.

You see, the elitist Establishment of the USA is well aware that if it can knock out President Maduro and the Bolivarian Government of Venezuela, that it would – simultaneously— knock away the foundation of ALBA, Petro Caribe , CELAC, Banco Sur and all the other critical institutions and processes upon which contemporary Latin American and Caribbean opposition to Neo Liberalism is built !!!
It is in our Barbadian and Caribbean interest to ensure that we do not allow this to happen.

And that is why we must defend Venezuela!

David A. Comissiong
President
Clement Payne Movement