Corporate Coup: Venezuela and the End of US Empire
By Anya Parampil
London: OR books, 2024
If you ever wondered what happened during the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela, what happened after President Hugo Chávez died in 2013, or what has happened since, under President Nicolás Maduro, Anya Parampil’s book Corporate Coup: Venezuela and the End of US Empire, published in 2024, covers the key events in easily digestible form.
Parampil studies how successive United States political leaders, Democrat and Republican, used criminal acts, illegality and outright lies, backed by a compliant mainstream media, to try to carry out regime change in Venezuela.
The US government has employed a variety of insane tactics against Venezuela: organising an invasion by rogue militia fresh from Iraq; backing an unknown opposition leader, Juan Guaidó, as the fraudulent president of Venezuela; applying more than 1000 sanctions, crippling the oil industry; blocking all possibility of foreign credit; and, finally, stealing CITGO, a huge business owned by the Venezuelan people, comprising over 100 petrol stations and three refineries, based in the US.
Parampil first visited Venezuela in February 2019, the first of three extended visits to the country, up until November 2021. For those unfamiliar with the events leading to radical army officer Hugo Chávez winning the 1998 national election and the rise of Chavismo, the history is covered in the introduction.
Many of these key events in Venezuela that portrayed the country as a pariah in the Western media were not widely reported in Australia.
The book begins with the story of Alex Saab, who was kidnapped from his plane on the orders of Washington, as it touched down for a fuel stop on the tiny island of Cape Verde, off the West Coast of Africa.
Chaos and crisis
Born in Colombia, Saab had been given diplomatic status by Venezuela, as he was organising to buy food and fuel items from the Iranian and Turkish governments, in the midst of Venezuela’s economic crisis — largely provoked by the US sanctions. Saab was on a humanitarian mission to procure essential food items for CLAP, the food program set up by Maduro to supply 10 million boxes to be distributed to all Venezuelan households, monthly.
Saab was charged on seven “money laundering” counts by Interpol, on behalf of the US government, before Interpol had even issued such an order. Washington was keen to find out how Venezuela was paying for these purchases.
Meanwhile, British banks had stolen US$2.3 billion in gold reserves from Venezuela. Saab spent from June 2020 to November 2023 in jails in Cape Verde and Miami, Florida. He was physically tortured, and denied essential medical treatment, as he was a recovering cancer patient. He only returned to Venezuela in a prisoner swap with the US government.
Within a year of Maduro’s inauguration, in 2014, an abrupt international oil market crash, engineered by the Barack Obama administration in the US, saw the price of oil fall by 40% in six months. Saudi Arabia was persuaded to boost production of crude oil, designed to weaken Iran, but also Iraq, Russia and Venezuela.
Oil revenue accounted for 95% of Venezuelan exports, so it was hit the hardest by the fall in the oil price. President Donald Trump signed an executive order in 2017 banning any new debt offered to Venezuela’s government in US markets, restricting all foreign credit lines. This meant everything going to Venezuela was hit with three to four times the insurance premium compared with other nations.
In 2019, Trump signed a blanket ban on the sale of Venezuelan crude oil into US markets. “By 2020, Venezuela was in the midst of the largest economic contraction in modern Latin American history, reporting a 75% drop in gross domestic product,” writes Parampil.
The price of a litre of milk rose to almost one third of the local monthly wage. The economic crisis in Venezuela was, of course, blamed on gross government inefficiency and corruption in the Western press — not the result of US economic sanctions and lower oil prices.
This crisis, severely affecting living conditions, resulted in a 31% increase in the Venezuelan death rate between 2017 and 2018 alone.
Chávez introduced a constitutional referendum in 2007 to bring about his vision of 21st century socialism, based on communal democracy. The proposals included the reduction in working hours from 44 to 36, and an official declaration that Venezuela was to be a “socialist nation”.
A group of opposition student activists, known as Generation 2007, began organising against these “outrageous aims”. Guaidó was just finishing his university studies in that year, and threw himself into the opposition student tumult.
Throughout November of that year, the students created an atmosphere of chaos in the universities. Masked gunmen fired shots at a student rally. Fortunately, no one was killed.
Opposition rioters killed a Chavista in Valencia the same week. Four days later, Chávez’ referendum was lost by a 2% margin. While Generation 2007 appeared as a spontaneous revolt, it had been moulded by the US government into an anti-Chavista movement for years.
This was only later revealed by Julian Assange in Wikileaks, which published the Global Intelligence Files in 2012. By 2019, the student group had grown to form the Voluntad Popular party under veteran, reactionary politician Leopoldo López. They were at the forefront of the violent guarimbas [riots] that swept Venezuela over following years, beginning in 2013.
Trump
The year 2019 was the last year of Trump’s first presidency, and so began an onslaught of attacks to bring about regime change. A massive blackout took place in March 2019 over the whole country, affecting schools, hospitals and airports, even traffic lights.
The blackout was traced to a cybernetic attack on the Guri Dam in Bolivar state. It took a month before Venezuela could recuperate its full electrical activity. The blackout had been orchestrated from Washington, again through a shadowy NGO called CANVAS, linked to members of Voluntad Popular.
Virgin Airlines CEO Richard Branson got into the game in February 2019. He paid for a colossal concert stage across the border at Cúcuta, Colombia, for a Venezuela Aid Live concert in front of a crowd of several thousand people. Guaidó attended (but was too scared to appear on stage), along with Luis Almagro, secretary general of the pro-US Organisation of American States.
The aim was to highlight the lie that Maduro was letting his people starve, while dozens of trucks with humanitarian aid were bringing tonnes of food and medicine, provided by USAID. Then US senator Marco Rubio, now secretary of state, led the propaganda charge.
Every US aid truck was set alight, providing the film clip the Western media was waiting for. Investigations by Max Blumenthal later revealed that hooligans on the Colombian side of the border had lit the fire on the convoy.
In the months leading up to the September 2019 UN General Assembly, a diplomatic war was unfolding in the New York headquarters. Then Vice President Mike Pence appeared before the UN Security Council to lead the charge, intended to replace Venezuela’s UN ambassador Samuel Moncada with Guaidó’s representative.
Some 55 of the 193 UN member states had recognised Guaidó, after intense lobbying and threats from the US. If the US were to succeed in removing the legitimate Venezuelan representative, “the absurd precedent for regime change would apply to any sovereign government”, writes Parampil.
The long running CITGO conspiracy, in which US courts are in the process of stealing US$21 billion of Venezuela’s property, is also recorded in Parampil’s book, with more detail of the personalities involved.
Operation Gideon
Other attacks on Venezuela’s legitimacy are also described in the book, including a drone attack on Maduro at an outdoor address to the National Guard in August 2018.
There was the right-wing takeover of the Venezuelan embassy in Washington DC. A group of US peace activists, organised by CODEPINK, defended the embassy in March 2019 for two months. The takeover of all Venezuela’s government buildings held in the US was organised by Carlos Vecchio, another shadowy ambassador representing Guaidó.
Michelle Bachelet, as the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, wrote a report in July 2019 condemning Maduro, defending US sanctions on Venezuela, without mentioning the violence emanating from the opposition.
In May 2020, local fishermen in Chuao, a northern Venezuelan city on the Caribbean coast, noticed a suspicious boat. On board, they found military equipment, rifles, satellite phones and eight mercenaries. Two US citizens and 60 other men were involved in a plot, known as Operation Gideon, to capture or kill Maduro.
Washington denied any involvement, but then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had announced two days before the Gideon operation, “I am pleased to report that the multilateral effort to restore democracy [in Venezuela] is continuing to build momentum. I’ve asked my team to update our plans to reopen the US embassy in Caracas, so we are ready to go.”
The book contains a huge bibliography, as well as a final chapter on the international political future in the light of recent international upheavals. Overall, a very informative read.