Franco Vielma
At the beginning of February 2019, the U.S. Senate vetoed the possibility that the government of that country, at least momentarily, would intervene through its regular forces in Venezuela, despite the fact that the Republicans dominate the Upper House. In the Democrat-dominated House of Representatives of the U.S. Congress, the positions are much more adverse to those intended actions of the White House.
However, these conditions of U.S. domestic politics do not constitute a relief for peace in Venezuela, since the warmongering rhetoric remains intact in the spokespersons of John Bolton, Mike Pence, Marco Rubio and Donald Trump himself, not only advancing “the military option” over the Caribbean nation, but also encouraging the Bolivarian National Armed Force (FANB) to depose President Nicolas Maduro to initiate an internal confrontation.
During the second week of February, the narrative of the “humanitarian crisis” in Venezuela has increased and the White House, through USAID and the Colombian government, has instrumentalized the placement of supposed “humanitarian aid” on the Colombian-Venezuelan border, heightening a trigger of conflict and stirring up commotion through the purported “entry by force” of alleged aid packages.
At the same time, Venezuelan authorities arrested former Venezuelan colonel and then fugitive from justice Oswaldo García Palomo, who has been one of the operators on the ground to instigate the Venezuelan armed force and has been instrumental in coordinating mercenary operations, including the attempted assassination of President Maduro in August 2018. García Palomo revealed to the Venezuelan authorities elements of the conspiracy between Colombia and the United States to detonate in Venezuela a civil conflict and an armed intervention of external origin simultaneously.
It is also no coincidence that the self-proclaimed Juan Guaidó also introduced the narrative of unleashing “a civil war” in Venezuela, and further argued that through his efforts, he could “request foreign intervention” in order, in theory, to save the Venezuelan population.
Considering these elements in the internal politics of the United States and the other details about the coup d’état under development in Venezuela, it is indispensable to unite the points: the likelihood that the military variant of the siege of Venezuela has the denomination of mercenarized war presented as a civil conflict acquires ever more consistency. An outsourced war scheme in which the United States, through paramilitary elements in Colombia, would trigger an Irregular type of conflict and consequently could break into factions that could be co-opted within the FANB to give rise to a threshold of chaos.
But there are other factors in regional politics and in U.S. policy itself that have indicated that they disagree strongly with the possibility of intervention in Venezuela, or the possibility that the current situation escalates into a civil conflict. Governments of the same Lima Group, such as those of Peru, Chile and Ecuador, among others, have established that position and simultaneously the governments of Mexico, Uruguay, Bolivia and the Dominican Republic have highlighted the “risks” that would result from an armed conflict in the Caribbean basin.
Factors to consider
The political derivations: several right-wing governments, beneficiaries of a new boom of their political forces in the region, understand that today the Venezuelan issue is dividing international relations. Internally, several governments have effectively managed the Venezuelan issue by demonizing Chavismo and stigmatizing the country. For this reason, some governments have officially recognized Juan Guaidó as a parastatal and fabricated figure.
However, the outbreak of a war would seriously change the position of those governments facing their internal political front, because they would become the governments that legitimized and shaped the outbreak of a war in Venezuela, even though now they separate themselves from the war discourse trying to protect their political capital. But the truth is that, if a war were to occur in Venezuela, there would be a schism in regional politics, the critical matrix of right-wing forces would increase, which could be taken advantage of by other left-wing and social-democratic forces to stagger parties in governments.
The spiral that would result from a war in Venezuela would traverse politics among the right-wing allies or adversaries of the intervention, presenting a broad argument that would be very useful to accelerate the delegitimization of the current right-wing governments in power in several countries, some of them with rather flimsy political foundations.
The real humanitarian crisis: since the war in Afghanistan it has been demonstrated that the conflicts of this time tend to be prolonged. An asymmetric war in Venezuela would qualify as such, since there are elements that make up Venezuela’s military defensive structure that suggest that a “lightning war” would be impossible. It is also true that in such wars, the internal and external displacement of the population would be at least 40% of the total population due to the worsening of a full spectrum crisis: lack of services, hunger and inadequate sanitation.
According to a report by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), this has been the case in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria. According to VoxEU, according to UNHCR data, 54% of Syrians have been displaced. The possibility of a war in Venezuela would displace inside and outside the country at least 12 million people. A number of astronomical dimensions for this part of the world.
A conflict in Venezuela would open refugee camps in the country, but also outside it. Neighbouring governments would be under an obligation to attempt to contain the enormous human displacement, probably of at least 7 million people who would join the economic migrants who have already left the country. They would have to manage such a crisis with the same methods that European countries know how to apply; opening refugee camps would then be an unwieldy, logistically and politically costly affair. The Caribbean Sea could become another Mediterranean Sea, and even the scale of the tragedy of deaths by immersion could be greater, on the understanding that Europe deploys an organization and logistics of maritime supervision and control, and that such capabilities do not exist in the Caribbean Sea.
An epicentre of security instability: it is essential to analyze the consequences of a violent onslaught against Venezuela, if successful. A multivariate asymmetric war would mean the massive insertion of weapons into the country, but also the at least partial fragmentation of the regular Venezuelan forces and their arsenal. An enormous quantity of armament of at least 500,000 weapons in the hands of the army, the Navy, the Bolivarian National Guard (GNB) and the Bolivarian militias, that could fall into the hands of members of diffuse sides of the conflict. Weapons susceptible to passing to the black market to be distributed in the hands of terrorists, members of organized crime and insurgents in the region and other continents.
On this issue it is worth refining on one example. It lies in one of the components of the three-level Venezuelan anti-aircraft system, which has with it the Russian-made IGLA-S low altitude anti-aircraft defense missile launcher, up to about two kilometers high. It is a device available by the thousands in the Venezuelan army. In fact, the Compañía Anónima Venezolana de Industria Militar (CAVIM) designed for FANB a Venezuelan version, the IGLA-VE, with a readiness very much at the level of its Russian predecessor. This portable device also follows the heat traces of any airborne device, but also has the ability to guide directly to the target by circumventing flares through software in the rocket launcher.
This artifact is of great importance. The United States has not, in fact, provided instruments that are similar to mercenary forces that it has unleashed in Syria, precisely because of the risks of this weapon falling into irregular hands. Regional aviation security would be at enormous risk and any civil aircraft could be an extremely vulnerable target in the face of these devices in the wrong hands.
Long-term risks to regional strategic security
These risks are fully known to the U.S. military forces that are currently fighting a war in Venezuela. However, intervention remains an option on the table. It infers that what is under discussion is not only the possibility of a war in Venezuela, but also the possibility of developing a focus of conflict that, as an expansive wave, could compromise the strategic security of the region, in order to expand the U.S. presence and the full deployment of its institutional infrastructure.
Does the United States want a new Middle East in its “backyard”? That raises a very serious question.
The presumed withdrawal of the United States from Syria and the possibility of signing an armistice with the Taliban in Afghanistan -evidently without their having been defeated- would momentarily de-escalate the U.S. presence in that area of the world that has been the target area for decades. But the U.S. military industrial complex, the causal and central factor in its military expansion and wars, remains intact as a modulating factor in U.S. policy and may be considering opening another large-scale war front in Latin America.
At the end of the day, subjugating the nation-states, which is the beginning and end of U.S. strategic policy, has had a multipurpose dimension in warfare. War has been a component of perpetual confrontation between the United States and the world, and that is why it has been consecrated as the hegemonic and dominant force in international relations for a century.
