Maddogg Guest Writer, Arturo Montenegro, is an OMIG Investigator.

If the U.S. wanted to provide food and other aid to the starving Venezuelan people why could they not have offered it via the U.N.? It is even equally pathetic that the U.N. has not intervened to say publicly to both sides to hold down the heated rhetoric and focus on helping the starving citizens. By doing so in this manner it would appear to be less provocative and less suspicious as it looks presently.

The U.S. knows that the Venezuelan regime of President Nicholas Maduro which assumed the continuing power over the Venezuelan government is skeptical of anything coming from what they perceive to be the unclean hands of the American government. That suspicion has existed since the late President Hugo Chavez accused the US of attempting to assassinate him in an attempt to undermine his authority as President of Venezuela. Thus, that suspicion still exists given the perceived attack on the jointly owned oil refinery in St. Croix of the US Virgin Islands jointly owned by an American oil family, the Hess family, and the Venezuelan government. That refinery, named Hovensa, was the second largest oil refiner in the Western Hemisphere whose major client almost exclusively was Venezuelan crude oil. Hovensa was one of the few refineries set up to handle the sludge like consistent crude oil from that nation.

The U.S. government’s EPA levied such a heavy fine, estimated at approximately $750 million, for pollution on the refinery in 2012 that within 90 days of the announcement it had to ultimately serve notice on the Virgin Island government that it was shutting down altogether. That act is certainly looked at as a provocation coming from the American government and factor analysis suggests severely damaged the Venezuelan economy to where hyperinflation has set in. Now it requires a wheel barrow full of currency to purchase a pound of meat.

What “new day” is coming that Vice President Pence is standing on the Colombian/Venezuelan border alleging? Again, his rhetoric is simply pumping up the volume and potentially causing enormous blood shed that will undoubtedly include the sacrifice of a lot of American lives sent there behind this administration’s heated rhetoric. If Pence or the Trump administration wanted to help Venezuela out of the goodness of the US Government’s heart they are intelligent enough people to know that it could be done, under the prevailing circumstances that would not be so provocative, by making it a U.N. sanctioned effort under the U.N. flag. However, how smart is it for people at the U.N. to sit around the table and fail to intervene while watching two entities ready to square off with one another in a major blood letting exercise? What sense does that make for the already suffering Venezuelan people.? If the US intent is to shift a sense of loyalty towards the U.S. government via people like Juan Guaido, who will be turned in all probability into a U.S. puppet, that is a shallow placebo action in order to control. Hungry people may pledge allegiance to you now, but how is that considered to be loyalty when people simply come over to your side because they want to eat?

For the time being the people can see through that masquerade whether the American public can or not. They know that these war mongering politicos, generally gringos or Blancos (whites) within the Trump administration have long eyed an opportunity to presumably exert their influence in or covertly over Venezuelan affairs. Unfortunately, Venezuelan political affairs has in the past long been dominated by people who appear to look a lot like the Blancos of the U.S. (white Europeans). The under represented class who have experienced great hardship and enormous poverty appear once again to be brown and dark brown people. They are native South American Indians of Venezuela and Afro-Venezuelans who are ancestors of the kidnapped Africans of the 17th and 18th century slave trade.

Our hands have to often engaged in dirt in Latin America. Whatever destabilizing problems have been in the past you can often attach U.S. policy and covert intervention to it. El Salvador, we’ve had dirty hands, Guatemala, dirty hands, Nicaragua, dirty hands, Panama, dirty hands, Colombia, dirty hands, Chile, dirty hands, and now Venezuela, we certainly do have unclean hands there. Hopefully, people in the US who fail to review history will do so and remind the war mongerers that beating the war drums is not the way to go. This could prove to be a bloody racial war, in which as Machiavelli pointed out in his book THE PRINCE the sovereign who is supported by a people who are loyal to a cause, in this case throwing off the yoke of U.S. imperialism, to where they are the ones most committed to fighting to the death, they may make Maduro the strongest Prince of this principality of the Western Hemisphere in South America. It doesn’t seem like Trump understands that concept, and Vice President, Mike Pence, appears to simply be parroting the mandate of this government.
Whatever the outcome will be, it certainly bears watching, due to the political consequences that could boomerang back in the United States.