Radiography of Trump’s Speech Against Venezuela in Florida
At an event hosted by the “Venezuelan Diaspora” in an auditorium at Florida International University, President Donald Trump delivered a speech that had been announced with high expectations.
A few days before February 23, when anti-Chávez and Washington seek to retake the offensive using the umbrella of “humanitarian aid” from Cúcuta and possibly other border points, Trump’s pronouncement was expected to consolidate the bellicose rhetoric of the last few days and oxygenate the spirits of the opposition base.
The U.S. president’s intervention lasted about 30 minutes, the event took place under the guise of an electoral campaign with the intention of keeping the increasingly influential Venezuelan electoral mass in the state of Florida happy.
The 2020 presidential election is just around the corner and Florida could once again be the turning point.
Trump began his address by greeting Senators Marco Rubio and Rick Scott, Representative Mario Diaz-Balart, OAS Ambassador Carlos Trujillo and his National Security Advisor John Bolton, in whom he has entrusted the course of U.S. foreign policy toward Venezuela under a hard-line approach.
Domestic politics, absurdities and forced comparisons
In the course of his speech, he devoted considerable time to criminalizing socialism by presenting it as a polarizing factor against the Democratic Party.
Although he catalogued the Latin American region as an area where socialism was in its “twilight”, the real interest was in sending a message for internal American politics: to use the figure of Maduro, and the supposed failure of the socialist model in Venezuela, to terrorize the electorate before an eventual victory of the Democratic Party in 2020.
In Trump’s absurd logic, the Democratic Party is Nicolás Maduro’s similitude on U.S. soil, so the Venezuelan president’s forced departure would be an extension of his internal political clashes. A direct message to the electorate of the Cuban-Venezuelan “diaspora,” who, according to his calculation, will vote en masse for him so that what happens in Venezuela is not repeated in Florida. This is an argument that can only be understood that way.
In the same line of demonization of President Maduro’s leadership, he elevated to the level of slogan that “the United States will never be a socialist country”. Thus, placing in a binary framework the pre-electoral confrontation in which he is immersed, he also maximized his own contradictions, since to assume the defense of the free market against the opposing side’s “socialist ideas” is radically opposed to its protectionist and commercial war policies.
With a discourse that bordered on the religious, highly decontextualized, Trump predicted that “for the first time in history there will be a hemisphere free of socialism,” referring directly to Latin America. The supposed resurgence of the continent after the application of the method of soft coup in recent years against the progressive bloc, contrasts with the return to a semi-slavery economy in Brazil, the growth of poverty in Argentina, the caravans of Central American migrants and the State terrorism that crushes daily in Colombia.
All these situations are not the result of socialist policies, but the consequences of coups d’état, judicial and military interventions and the extreme plundering of a capitalist system in crisis that exports its contradictions to the Latin American periphery.
A tailor-made discourse and exaltation of terrorism (Bolton’s hand)
Trump also used idioms and commonplace phrases designed specifically for the audience facing him. Expressions such as “Maduro is a Cuban puppet” were used to raise the spirits of the fans in the auditorium, earn some more applause (and votes), and get the ovation he so desperately needed to distract attention from his most recent failure to secure congressional funding to expand the wall with Mexico.
An audience whose organizational leaders are extremist spokespersons such as Luis Almagro or María Corina Machado welcomed these demagogic clichés. Oscar Perez, who was discharged last year after forming a paramilitary cell that attacked institutional buildings in Caracas with gunshots and grenades, putting at risk the lives of workers and preschool children in the capital city of the Supreme Court of Justice.
His short career as “Rambo criollo,” camouflaged in an evangelical posture mixed with self-help speech, had its last action with a terrorist attack on a military barracks in Los Teques, Miranda, where he subdued members of the Bolivarian National Guard and appropriated several weapons.
The mention of Perez in the middle of Trump’s speech, who also granted a very brief word to his mother, appears to have John Bolton’s trademark. A message that, while legitimizing terrorism and irregular war as valid resources to confront the Venezuelan government, also enhances Florida’s role as a logistical base for the failed assassination of August 4, the preparation of the coup of former colonel Oswaldo García Palomo and the financing of terrorist agendas.
For this reason, the mention of Oscar Perez in the auditorium was not only intended for a specific audience, receptive to this type of message, but also to emphasize that the card of professional and mercenary violence is active for use.
The metamessage is as follows: to encourage the emergence of another figure like Oscar Perez will have the support and legitimacy of the United States.
Let’s remember that a couple of months ago, President Nicolás Maduro denounced that John Bolton would be behind a plan to assassinate him and in creating a false positive with mercenaries hired to make an intervention possible after the simulation of a coup d’état.
Calls for a military coup, “humanitarian aid” and other paradoxes
As usual, Trump stated that all “options are on the table,” indirectly referring to the use of military intervention to force a change of government in Venezuela. He called on the military to withdraw its support for Maduro, to allow the entry of “humanitarian aid,” at the risk of “losing everything they have” if they do not accept the amnesty proposed by the artificial government of Juan Guaidó.
His call for the military insurrection was accompanied by a threatening message to the FANB, indicating that ” there would be no escape” if they continue to support Maduro, as if it were a personal decision and not a mandate from the Venezuelan Constitution after the May 20 elections, where Nicolás Maduro was re-elected as President and Commander of the FANB.
Paradoxically, after attempting to intimidate the Venezuelan military high command, he acknowledged its importance in “restoring democracy” and also as a strategic factor for regime change to advance.
In short, Trump has assumed that the FANB maintains its current chain of command and that without its breakdown, promoted by his war on Venezuela, Juan Guaidó has little chance of exercising practical power to make the extra-constitutional exit of Nicolás Maduro from power viable.
Thus, he recognized that the effectiveness of U.S. support to Guaidó’s “parallel government,” the crude economic and financial sanctions against the country, and the strategy of provoking a military confrontation using the cover of “humanitarian aid,” ultimately depend on a variable beyond his control: the FANB.
National Security Strategy and the Breakdown of the Alba Axis
Trump’s speech was an adaptation of Florida’s Consumer National Security Strategy. This document that governs U.S. foreign policy emphasizes that, in a hypercompetitive world, where its hegemony is challenged by China and Russia, the United States is able to use its political, economic, financial and military resources to maintain geopolitical supremacy and defend the U.S. way of life.
In this strategy, presented in 2018, which was a break with Bush and Obama’s previous strategies for returning to Cold War language with protectionist ideology, it depicts a world in which the United States has as a strategic objective the reduction of the presence of China and Russia in areas of geostrategic interests in order to extend the lifespan of their hegemony. One of these zones is, logically, Venezuela, which in recent years has expanded its relations with the two Eurasian powers in areas ranging from financial to military.
For that same reason, and using the narrative of John Bolton’s “troika of tyranny”, Trump affirmed that the overthrow of the constitutional government of Venezuela is also a blow against Cuba and Nicaragua, as these three countries comprise the centre of gravity of the ALBA axis as a counterweight to U.S. hegemony in the region. It is a three-pronged attack.
In Trump’s National Security Strategy, Latin America is a zone that is projected as exclusive, where the United States tries to promote State, judicial and economic reforms that block the presence of China and Russia and orient the flow of raw materials to promote the “America First” program.
The strategy of soft coups against the Latin American political class, which has been justified under the cover of the “fight against corruption” in recent years, shapes the practical application of this by achieving a realignment of the countries previously governed by progressivism and a political centre with favouring the United States. The result has been an undermining of the power of the continent’s nation-states, under which they try to hinder the rise of China and Russia as strategic partners.
However, the National Security Strategy as a paradigm feeds on the doctrine of full spectrum dominance and the Pentagon’s unconventional war training guidelines. It configures a concept of aggressive, military-style foreign policy, where economic sanctions, the expansion of military bases, selective judicial persecution, the undermining of the economic power of states and the use of mercenaries to “fight organized crime” are mechanisms for geopolitically controlling the region.
Although Trump omitted to make direct references to China and Russia, the speech was an exposition of the guidelines of the National Security Strategy that justifies the exceptional and unipolar actions of the United States in areas where there are strategic resources for its reconstitution.
A deflated discourse for February 23
While Marco Rubio and other congressmen are in Cúcuta to manage the influx of “humanitarian aid” on February 23, Trump’s speech appears not to have met the expectations that were announced from the outset.
In his final words, beyond the explosion of emotion, a certain disenchantment was noted with respect to the United States’ own capacities to crystallize a change of government in Venezuela in the short term. Trump referred to the fact that “someday” freedom will return to Venezuela, which undermines opposition to Maduro’s imminent departure.
A few days before February 23, Washington has not succeeded in manufacturing the two pre-conditions necessary to execute the regime change: a military fracture or a civil war scenario that would trigger “humanitarian intervention”. For that reason, Trump’s platitudes were a compensation mechanism to try to disguise the difficulties in removing Chavismo from power with the least possible political effort. The figure of Guaidó, on the other hand, as time goes by, reveals his incapacity to exercise any real influence in the Venezuelan territory and State.
Trump keeps the “military option” on the table without a clear and effective route to make it viable.
In this sense, the 23rd of February is intended as a turning point, where Trump’s speech, Marco Rubio’s electoral campaign in Cúcuta and the coordinated work between USAID and the Southern Command will create a provocation manoeuvre to encourage a military confrontation against Venezuela.
However, Trump’s speech, stuffed with clichés and idiosyncratic phrases, highlights the urgency of regaining the offensive, the inability to convince Maduro to surrender, the lack of consensus regarding military intervention and the reorganisation of Chavismo as both a political bloc and a force for order and peace within Venezuelan society.
Translation by Internationalist 360°
