The Potential U.S. Nightmare

Maddogg Guest Opinion Writer, OMIG Investigator, Arturo Hernandez-Byrd

VENEZUELA COULD REALLY TURN INTO A BLOOD BATH AND JUNGLE HELL HOLE FOR U.S. MILITARY BEHIND OUR OWN BRAND OF RACISM.

Instigating this fight, which Trump and his neo-con war mongering war hawks, like John Bolton, continue ramping up, could cause more racial strife and problems internally in the US. All of the background to Venezuela’s economic decline is not in yet but much of its underpinnings appear to have racial undertones, starting as far back as 2012 with sly politicos in the U.S. attempting do undermine the second election of US President, Barack Obama.

The racist opposition in the US appeared to want to poison the minds of the American electorate in order to defeat Obama by energizing the same bigoted base that would put Trump into office in 2016 based on a lackluster performance by Hiliary Clinton. They began by creating chaos and displaying Barack Obama together with Maduro’s predecessor who the white plutocrats in the US hated, Hugo Chavez, Venezuela’s then President. Chavez would die within a few years due to terminal cancer. However, before he died his and Obama’s detractors appeared to perpetrate violence, political upheaval in both Venezuela and a US Territory.

Handout picture released by the Venezuelan Presidency press office showing the President of the US, Barack Obama (L), and his Venezuelan counterpart Hugo Chavez (R) chatting before the opening of the 5th Summit of the Americas in Port of Spain, on April 17, 2009. Despite efforts by Obama and summit organizers to keep the three-day gathering on the topics of energy, the environment and public safety, Cuba has emerged as the headline issue for being the only nation excluded.

The uncertainty they created involved their attempts to destabilize the regional black run government and society in the US Virgin Islands. The second largest oil refinery in the US and Western Hemisphere, Hovensa, was a joint venture between the Hess Oil family and the Venezuelan government and was located in the Virgin Islands. Hovensa was also the largest employer on the island of St. Croix providing high paying, high quality jobs to the island inhabitants as well as providing reduced gasoline and oil supplies to the other two main territories of the US Virgin Islands, St. Thomas and St. John. The Hovensa refinery also provided a large amount of the cash revenue received by the government of Venezuela because of the 500,000 barrels of oil per day imported into the U.S. mainland.

However, the Hovensa oil refinery’s existence provided a soft underbelly for provocateurs in the US to attack while attempting to embarrass and destroy President Obama, the attack simultaneously did the same by causing havoc to Chavez in Venezuela. The US government via its EPA levied a $750 million dollar fine on the Hovensa refinery back in 2012, coincidentally the second Presidential election year for Barack Obama. That mega fine for pollution problems caused the refinery to close down which was generally the only refinery of its size with the ability to refine large volumes of the heavy sludge, sour crude petroleum, noted to come from Venezuela’s oil fields.

Maduro’s problem stems from the fact that he was not, and possibly is still not, as charismatic as his former boss Hugo Chavez. Chavez, without reservation, thumbed his nose at American arrogance which has historically influenced the internal matters in Venezuela and Latin American countries as a whole for the last century. However, the backlash of U.S. recklessness in its Latin American foreign policy is now being felt at its front door on the border between Mexico and the US with the massive marches of Central American immigrants fleeing violence and poverty who continue arriving at the US border. They are seeking asylum in the U.S.; however, the only solution offered to them from this Presidential administration seems to be one dripping with racism itself and that is building a financially in-definitive transcontinental border wall to presumably keep people of color south of the border out of the United States.

The late President Chavez on the other hand dismissed U.S. concerns and went as far as to cut a deal with Fidel Castro to provide Cuba with needed oil products in exchange for medical doctors to take care of the largely forgotten poor that make up a large portion of Venezuela’s interior population. Much of that population consists of people of color, Native indigenous Venezuelans, and Afro-Venezuelan descendants.

The Mestizo mixture of these two groups, African and Native Venezuelan, largely appear to be seen as members of Maduro’s Venezuelan militias. They also appear to be well represented in that nation’s regular army and during the Maduro held rallies they seem to be stoked to fight to the death for Maduro, or at least against the arrogant imperial Trump-ian rhetoric emanating from Trump’s minions in Washington D.C.

What doesn’t help the image of the political opposition to Maduro is that they suspiciously appear largely to be Europeans. It is that racial stock in the nation who have historically been the privileged few that have inequitably controlled the wealth of the nation at the expense of people of color in Venezuela. In this case, and with the Trump’s administration’s interaction, the Maduro opposition looks to many observers in the U.S. watching this situation unfold like the same racist sounding MAGA hat wearing supporters of Donald Trump. Since Trump’s mantra “Make America Great Again” comes across to many in the U.S. as Make America White Again.

Any hint of a Trump perception in Venezuela becomes a volatile cocktail for both Venezuelan bloodshed and for people of color in the U.S. military asked to enter this potential theater of war. The threat in the U.S. has even become more stark as a racial concern when the unified morale of the nation and its own military is potentially splintered by Trump’s continuously engaging in racially divisive nationalistic rhetoric.

Certainly this flaw in the U.S. is not lost within the military intelligence divisions of the U.S.’s potential major adversaries. Many of who are now displaying their own presence in Venezuela in support of the Maduro government. Hopefully, the multiple Venezuelan sides including the indigenous natives, the African descendants, as well as the Euro-descendants can find some common ground to rebuild the nation and avoid the impending destruction of super power fueled Armageddon in their own back yard. No one has explained to anyone’s satisfaction how one of the most mineral rich countries could fall into this hyper-inflated depression and despair. The lack of a cogent explanation generally signals intrigue from the outside as we have seen repeatedly with the African mineral rich nations, like Liberia and the Congo.

Thus, this becomes a witches brew for deadly conflict whose racial undertones could potentially be felt in a disruptive manner right here in the US.

The Hovensa refinery’s closing in the U.S. Virgin Islands is likely to have been one of the major unspoken problems at the root of Venezuela’s economic hyper-inflation dilemma now causing major socio-economic and political instability in that nation where it requires a wheel barrel full of Venezuelan currency to purchase a pound of meat.

However, Trump’s advisers are not helping themselves in this adventure but appear with their bluster to be playing to Trump’s blood thirsty base in the U.S. Secretary Bolton and Pompeo are too predictably deliberate with their plantation-overseer rhetoric and veiled threats directed towards Maduro. The perception of their rhetoric seems to come straight out of the old nostalgic paperback books of the 1960s, i.e. MASTER OF FALCONHURST novels.

Arturo Hernandez-Byrd, is a member of the investigative organization Ocean Medical Investigative Group, (OMIG), which has continued to examine hidden evidence concealed from the public by corrupt sworn court officers in the OJ Simpson case and trial 24 years ago.