March bulletin 2018

Bulletin Bolivarian Government of Venezuela

Ministry of People’s Power for Foreign Affairs

Embassy of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela Volume 6, Issue 3- 2018

1) Neoliberalism is destroying our democracy 2) Cambridge Analytica: The data firm's global influence 3) Venezuela’s Presidential Elections 4) China's advance in Africa exaggerated by a retreating U.S 5) Exonerating the Empire 6) Africa’s most ambitious joint venture kicks off

Democracy

Content

Editorial 2018 has been marked as the time of the sinking of the dollar, the bond crisis, the definitive bursting of the huge American debt, in short, the return of another global financial crisis much more devastating than the previous one.

1) Editorial 2) Noam Chomsky: Neoliberalism is destroying our democracy 3) “Brexit wouldn’t have happened without Cambridge Analytica”

Faced with this panorama, the industrialized countries are prepared to resist these dark omens, for this reason they have increased their bellicosity, unleashing aggressions all over the globe, accentuating the attempts to impose a univocal vision of the societies, the economies and the cultures. Particularly, the countries of the Third World have been the victims, especially those who have drawn an independent line and have tried to free themselves from economic and cultural subjection. Africa, Asia and Latin America, in recent years, have suffered a disproportionate attack, marked by the direct military threat, indiscriminate bombing, invasions, selective killings, and in general all the stratagems of the brute Western force that heed It ignores the international laws that these same powers claim to defend.

4) Cambridge Analytica: The data firm's global influence 5) Democracy under threat: The US can’t revive the Monroe Doctrine or expel China from Latin America, but it can inflict Pain on Venezuela & the region 6) U.S intervention in Kenya? NO THANKS! 7) Understanding the National Constituent Assembly of Venezuela: 8) Venezuelan Presidential Election Date Set for May 9) US Interferes in Elections in Venezuela & Latin America

So, when American senators and top political leaders invoke the overthrow of governments under the Monroe Doctrine ("America for Americans ... from the North") in the style of then US President Theodore Roosevelt known for his Big Stick policy, which we thought had disappeared, we see the case of the absolute denial of any authentically democratic attempt. But the people have increased their consciousness and they face all these attacks with courage.

10) US Imposes fresh sanctions against Venezuela's Petro 11) Exonerating the Empire 12) Danny Glover & 150 Other activists slam US-Canadian sanctions on Venezuela 13)Fallacies and Inaccuracies About Venezuelan Migration

At the forefront of this current and necessary struggle is the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, militarily threatened, financially enclosed through an economic blockade, accused of being a "dictatorship", despite being a country where 24 elections have been held under an electoral system that, in the words of former President Jimmy Carter, is "the most reliable in the world."

14) “WE ARE ALL VENEZUELA” People of the world ratify support and solidarity with Venezuela 15) World Urban Forum in Malaysia 16) China's advance in Africa exaggerated by a retreating U.S

And while all this has been going on, there’s also been a heated debate in the political world about just what in the world Cambridge Analytica even does and whether it’s hatrmful.

17) Africa’s most ambitious joint venture kicks off with $3.4tr trade deal

Are they an ingenious, sinister operation that harnessed big data to power Donald Trump to victory and other governments around the world? Or are they as many who’ve worked with them claim sort of a joke?

Or something in between?

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Neoliberalism is destroying our democracy

How elites on both sides of the political spectrum have undermined our social, political, and environmental commons. power, on moral grounds first, ahead of practical considerations. He remains a rock star on college campuses, here and abroad, and he’s become a sort of North Star for the post-Occupy generation that today refuses to feel the Bern-out.

For 50 years, Noam Chomsky, has been America’s Socrates, our public pest with questions that sting.

He speaks not to the city square of Athens but to a vast global village in pain and now, it seems, in danger.

The world in trouble today still beats a path to Noam Chomsky’s door, if only because he’s been forthright for so long about a whirlwind coming. Not that the world quite knows what do with Noam Chomsky’s warnings of disaster in the making.

Remember the famous faltering of the patrician TV host William F. Buckley Jr., meeting Chomsky’s icy anger about the war in Vietnam, in 1969.

He remains, unfortunately, a figure alien in the places where policy gets made. But on his home ground at MIT, he is a notably accessible old professor who answers his e-mail and receives visitors like us with a twinkle.

We visited Chomsky with an open-ended mission in mind: We were looking for a nonstandard account of our recent history from a man known for telling the truth.

We’d written him that we wanted to hear not what he thinks but how. He’d written back that hard work and an open mind have a lot to do with it, also, in his words, a “Socratic-style willingness to ask whether conventional doctrines are justified.”

Christopher Lydon: All we want you to do is to explain where in the world we are at a time— Noam Chomsky: That’s easy.

CL: [Laughs]—When so many people were on the edge of something, something historic. Is there a Chomsky summary?

It’s a strange thing about Noam Chomsky: The New York Times calls him “arguably” the most important public thinker alive, though the paper seldom quotes him, or argues with him, and giant pop-media stars on network television almost never do. And yet the man is universally famous and revered in his 89th year: He’s the scientist who taught us to think of human language as something embedded in our biology, not a social acquisition; he’s the humanist who railed against the Vietnam War and other projections of American 3

NC: Brief summary?

CL: Yeah.

NC: Well, a brief summary I think is if you take a look at recent history since the Second World War, something really remarkable has happened. First, human intelligence created two huge sledgehammers capable of terminating our existence—or at least organized existence—both from the Second World War. One of them is familiar. In fact, both are by now familiar. The Second World War ended with the use of nuclear weapons. It was immediately obvious on August 6, 1945, a day that I remember very well. It was obvious that soon technology would develop to the point where it would lead to terminal disaster. Scientists certainly understood this.

power. That’s what it means. The institutions of governance—or other kinds of association that could allow people to participate in decision making—those are systematically weakened. Margaret Thatcher said it rather nicely in her aphorism about “there is no society, only individuals.”

Since the Second World War, we have created two means of destruction. Since the neoliberal era, we have dismantled the way of handling them.

She was actually, unconsciously no doubt, paraphrasing Marx, who in his condemnation of the repression in France said, “The repression is turning society into a sack of potatoes, just individuals, an amorphous mass can’t act together.” That was a condemnation. For Thatcher, it’s an ideal—and that’s neoliberalism. We destroy or at least undermine the governing mechanisms by which people at least in principle can participate to the extent that society’s democratic. So weaken them, undermine unions, other forms of association, leave a sack of potatoes and meanwhile transfer decisions to unaccountable private power all in the rhetoric of freedom.

In 1947 the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists inaugurated its famous Doomsday Clock. You know, how close the minute hand was to midnight? And it started seven minutes to midnight. By 1953 it had moved to two minutes to midnight. That was the year when the United States and Soviet Union exploded hydrogen bombs. But it turns out we now understand that at the end of the Second World War the world also entered into a new geological epoch. It’s called the Anthropocene, the epoch in which humans have a severe, in fact maybe disastrous impact on the environment. It moved again in 2015, again in 2016. Immediately after the Trump election late January this year, the clock was moved again to two and a half minutes to midnight, the closest it’s been since ’53.

Well, what does that do? The one barrier to the threat of destruction is an engaged public, an informed, engaged public acting together to develop means to confront the threat and respond to it. That’s been systematically weakened, consciously. I mean, back to the 1970s we’ve probably talked about this.

There was a lot of elite discussion across the spectrum about the danger of too much democracy and the need to have what was called more “moderation” in democracy, for people to become more passive and apathetic and not to disturb things too much, and that’s what the neoliberal programs do. So put it all together and what do you have? A perfect storm.

So there’s the two existential threats that we’ve created—which might in the case of nuclear war maybe wipe us out; in the case of environmental catastrophe, create a severe impact—and then some.

A third thing happened. Beginning around the ’70s, human intelligence dedicated itself to eliminating, or at least weakening, the main barrier against these threats. It’s called neoliberalism. There was a transition at that time from the period of what some people call “regimented capitalism,” the ’50s and ’60s, the great growth period, egalitarian growth, a lot of advances in social justice and so on—

CL: What everybody notices is all the headline things, including Brexit and Donald Trump and Hindu nationalism and nationalism everywhere and Le Pen all kicking in more or less together and suggesting some real world phenomenon.

NC: it’s very clear, and it was predictable. You didn’t know exactly when, but when you impose socioeconomic policies that lead to stagnation or decline for the majority of the population, undermine democracy, remove decision-making out of popular hands, you’re going to get anger, discontent, fear take all kinds of forms. And that’s the phenomenon that’s misleadingly called “populism.”

CL: Social democracy…

NC: Social democracy, yeah. That’s sometimes called “the golden age of modern capitalism.” That changed in the ’70s with the onset of the neoliberal era that we’ve been living in since. And if you ask yourself what this era is, its crucial principle is undermining mechanisms of social solidarity and mutual support and popular engagement in determining policy.

CL: I don’t know what you think of Pankaj Mishra, but I enjoy his book Age of Anger, and he begins with an anonymous letter to a newspaper from somebody who says, “We should admit that we are not only horrified but baffled. Nothing since the

It’s not called that. What it’s called is “freedom,” but “freedom” means a subordination to the decisions of concentrated, unaccountable, private 4

triumph of Vandals in Rome and North Africa has seemed so suddenly incomprehensible and difficult to reverse.”

NC: Well, that’s the fault of the information system, because it’s very comprehensible and very obvious and very simple. Take, say the United States, which actually suffered less from these policies than many other countries. Take the year 2007, a crucial year right before the crash.

What was the wondrous economy that was then being praised? It was one in which the wages, the real wages of American workers, were actually lower than they were in 1979 when the neoliberal period began.

That’s historically unprecedented except for trauma or war or something like that. Here is a long period in which real wages had literally declined, while there was some wealth created but in very few pockets. It was also a period in which new institutions developed, financial institutions. You go back to the ’50s and ’60s, a so-called Golden Age, banks were connected to the real economy.

That was their function. There were also no crashes because there were New Deal regulations.

Starting in the early ’70s there was a sharp change. First of all, financial institutions exploded in scale.

By 2007 they actually had 40 percent of corporate profits.

Furthermore, they weren’t connected to the real economy anymore.

In Europe the way democracy is undermined is very direct. Decisions are placed in the hands of an 5

ent—tried to enter the political arena in one or another way to press their interests and concerns. They’re called “special interests.” That means minorities, young people, old people, farmers, workers, women.

In other words, the population. The population are special interests, and their task is to just watch quietly.

And that was explicit.

unelected troika: the European Commission, which is unelected; the IMF, of course unelected; and the European Central Bank. They make the decisions. So people are very angry, they’re losing control of their lives. The economic policies are mostly harming them, and the result is anger, disillusion, and so on.

We just saw it two weeks ago in the last French election. The two candidates were both outside the establishment. Centrist political parties have collapsed. We saw it in the American election last November. There were two candidates who mobilized the base: one of them a billionaire hated by the establishment, the Republican candidate who won the nomination—but notice that once he’s in power it’s the old establishment that’s running things. You can rail against Goldman Sachs on the campaign trail, but you make sure that they run the economy once you’re in.

Two documents came out right in the mid-’70s, which are quite important. They came from opposite ends of the political spectrum, both influential, and both reached the same conclusions. One of them, at the left end, was by the Trilateral Commission—liberal internationalists, three major industrial countries, basically the Carter administration, that’s where they come from. That is the more interesting one [The Crisis of Democracy, a Trilateral Commission report]. The American rapporteur Samuel Huntington of Harvard, he looked back with nostalgia to the days when, as he put it, Truman was able to run the country with the cooperation of a few Wall Street lawyers and executives. Then everything was fine.

Democracy was perfect.

CL: So, the question is, at a moment when people are almost ready… when they’re ready to act and almost ready to recognize that this game is not working, this social system, do we have the endowment as a species to act on it, to move into that zone of puzzlement and then action?

But in the ’60s they all agreed it became problematic because the special interests started trying to get into the act, and that causes too much pressure and the state can’t handle that.

NC: I think the fate of the species depends on it because, remember, it’s not just inequality, stagnation. It’s terminal disaster. We have constructed a perfect storm. That should be the screaming headlines every day. Since the Second World War, we have created two means of destruction. Since the neoliberal era, we have dismantled the way of handling them. That’s our pincers. That’s what we face, and if that problem isn’t solved, we’re done with.

CL: I remember that book well.

NC: We have to have more moderation in democracy.

CL: Not only that, he turned Al Smith’s line around. Al Smith said, “The cure for democracy is more democracy.” He said, “No, the cure for this democracy is less democracy.”

CL: I want to go back Pankaj Mishra and the Age of Anger for a moment— NC: It’s not the Age of Anger. It’s the Age of Resentment against socioeconomic policies which have harmed the majority of the population for a generation and have consciously and in principle undermined democratic participation. Why shouldn’t there be anger?

NC: It wasn’t him. It was the liberal establishment. He was speaking for them. This is a consensus view of the liberal internationalists and the three industrial democracies. They—in their consensus—they concluded that a major problem is what they called, their words, “the institutions responsible for the indoctrination of the young.” The schools, the universities, churches, they’re not doing their job. They’re not indoctrinating the young properly. The young have to be returned to passivity and obedience, and then democracy will be fine. That’s the left end.

CL: Pankaj Mishra calls it—it’s a Nietzschean word—“ressentiment,” meaning this kind of explosive rage. But he says, “It’s the defining feature of a world where the modern promise of equality collides with massive disparities of power, education, status and— NC: Which was designed that way, which was designed that way. Go back to the 1970s. Across the spectrum, elite spectrum, there was deep concern about the activism of the ’60s. It’s called the “time of troubles.” It civilized the country, which is dangerous.

What happened is that large parts of the population—which had been passive, apathetic, obedi-

Now what do you have at the right end? A very influential document, the Powell Memorandum, came out at the same time. Lewis Powell, a corporate lawyer, later Supreme Court justice, he produced a confidential memorandum for the US Chamber of Commerce, which has been extremely influential. It more or less set off the modern so-called “conservative movement.” The rhetoric is kind of crazy. We don’t go through it, but the basic picture is that this rampaging 6

New Left which is undermining freedom and democracy.

Connected with this was something else. As a result of the activism of the ’60s and the militancy of labor, there was a falling rate of profit. That’s not acceptable. So we have to reverse the falling rate of profit, we have to undermine democratic participation, what comes? Neoliberalism, which has exactly those effects.

Noam Chomsky interview By Christopher Lydon www.thenation.com The views and opinions expressed in these articles are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Embassy

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“Brexit wouldn’t have happened without Cambridge Analytica” Christopher Wylie is the brains behind Cambridge Analytica (CA), the data analytics company that is being investigated for its role in the Donald Trump election campaign and the Brexit vote. The 28-year-old puts the most effective data mining machinery at the service of politics, but was shocked by how it was abused. Wylie has since exposed CA and Facebook for secretly mining the personal information of millions of Facebook accounts. After serving as a source for The Guardian and The New York Times, Wylie sat down with a small group of European journalists to talk about privacy, the failure of Facebook, and political interference.

part in elections: why would we allow military contractors to, or for them to act as advisors for some of the most important politicians in the world? When a company with military clients creates an enormous civilian database, some of it collected illegally, there is a serious risk that the line between domestic surveillance and conventional market research will be blurred. People and lawmakers need to get up to date with technology and understand what these companies, Facebook and others which make money from personal data, really mean. It is important for people not to see it as something abstract but rather as something with a tangible impact.

Question: What was your motivation for speaking out?

Answer: My original goal was to expose the work of Cambridge Analytica, in part because I helped build it and I have a responsibility. If not to correct what has already been done, because there are things that can’t be undone, at least to inform authorities and the people.

Q. When did you realize it was time to stop?

Q: What is the most serious thing you have revealed?

A. First, the fact that there is a company that is a military contractor and also an advisor to the president of the United States. In modern democracies, the military is not allowed to take

A. It built up. The problem was I got lost in my own curiosity. It’s no excuse but I had million-dollar budgets, I could do any research I wanted. That was really attractive. I joined in June 2013 as research director of the SCL group [the parent company of CA] and I began to understand with the passing months what they were really doing. But you get used the corporate culture. It’s not an People should be to excuse, but it was like that. You do more able to trust their and more, each step isn’t much bigger than the last, until – bang, you have democratic created a privatized NSA [National institutions.

Security Agency].

“

Cheating is cheating” 8

think data itself is a problem. There’s a lot of potential and amazing things we can do with data. But what CA has exposed is the failings, not just of our legislators but us as a society to think about what the boundaries are.

Q. Then you left.

A. I left at the end of 2014. It was becoming more and more toxic, especially because Alexander Nix [Cambridge Analytica CEO] and Steve Bannon [former company vice president and ex-chief strategist to Donald Trump]. When Bannon arrived, this freedom to research which had attracted me at the beginning, turned into researching for what we now call the alt-right. Bannon came to London all the time, at least once a month, and we had a conference call with him every Monday morning.

Q. Is it really that influential? How well can data help make predictions?

A. There’s no doubt that you can profile people and exploit this information. What people should think about is whether it’s appropriate for this to happen in a democratic process.

Q. What was your role in Brexit? The latest revelations suggest a data company associated with CA played a key role in the result and helped bend the rules on electoral spending.

Q. There’s nothing new about political campaigns targeting undecided voting groups…

“It’s different to knocking on a door and identifying yourself as part of a campaign” A. I didn’t work on the Brexit campaign but I was a phantom presence. I knew everything that happened.

Q. Do you believe Brexit wouldn’t have happened without CA? A. Absolutely. It’s important because the referendum was won by less than 2% of the vote and a lot of money was spent on tailored ads based on personal data. This amount of money would buy you millions of impressions. If you targeted a small group, it could be the deciding factor. If you add up all the collectives that campaigned for Brexit, it was a third of everything that was spent.There has to be an investigation into the indications that they spent more than what was legally allowed. People should be able to trust their democratic institutions. Cheating is cheating. We are talking about the integrity of all democratic processes, it’s about the future of this country and of Europe more generally.

There’s no doubt that you can profile people and exploit this information

Q. Has CA worked in other European countries?

A. I know that there was a project in Italy when I was there, but I don’t have the details. I don’t know about others.

A. The difference is when you cheat, when you create a mediated reality for someone, when you target someone because you know they are more susceptible to believe conspiracy theories because you have profiled them, and you send them a spiral of fake news. It’s different to knocking on a door and identifying yourself as part of a campaign.

Q. Is data science dangerous for our society?

A. Data is our new electricity. Data is a tool.

You can have a knife sitting on the table that can make a Michelin-star meal or be a weapon of murder. But it’s the same object. It’s the same thing with data. I don’t 9

Q. Your specialty was predicting fashion trends. How did you end up to your neck in politics?

Q. What has been the failure of Facebook in all of this?

A. At the beginning, they said that there was no breach because the users had consented to give their data: in some part of the terms and conditions it says that your information could be used by applications, even if you don’t use them. One of the biggest failures of Facebook is to excessively legalize its terms and conditions and forget something so important as the reasonable expectation of the user.

A. It’s exactly the same. They are an expression of identity and of your role in society. You can think of Trump in terms of fashion. I see him like Crocs sandals. Before they were popular, they were ugly and then they became ugly again. But when they were popular everyone wore them. Donald Trump is the same as pair of Crocs sandals. It is an aesthetic that is objectively horrendous but people follow fashion.

People adopt an aesthetic and later, when they see the photos, they will deeply regret it.

Interview with Christoper Wylie Former research director at Cambridge Analytica. www.elpais.com The views and opinions expressed in these articles are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Embassy

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Cambridge Analytica: The data firm's global influence

worked in more than 200 elections across the world, including in the Czech Republic. "We've just used a different organisation to run a very, very successful project in an Eastern European country where... no-one even knew they were there," company executive Mark Turnbull said.

The company accused of using the personal data of millions of Facebook users to influence how people vote is not shy about its international portfolio.

Political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica is facing questions over whether it used personal data to sway the outcome of the US 2016 presidential election and the UK Brexit referendum. But its reach extends well beyond the UK and US, with its website boasting of supporting more than 100 campaigns across five continents.

Cambridge Analytica's website also says it was involved in political campaigning in Italy in 2012, on behalf of a "resurgent political party last successful in the 1980s".

"CA's suggested reforms allowed the party to perform beyond its initial expectations at a time of turbulence in Italian politics," it says.

The company has suspended its CEO, Alexander Nix, who was filmed as part of a Channel 4 investigation giving examples of how the firm could swing elections around the world with underhand tactics such as smear campaigns and honey traps.

But the role of SCL goes back much further. It claims to have helped the Orange Revolution in 2004 in Ukraine which helped bring the pro-Western President Viktor Yushchenko to power.

The UK-based company, which denies any wrongdoing, has an extensive record of work abroad Here's what we know about it.

More recently, SCL says it was hired by the Ukrainian government to provide "localised communications campaigns" to help them win back control of Donetsk during the conflict in eastern Ukraine.

Europe As part of the Channel 4 investigation, executives said Cambridge Analytica and its parent company Strategic Communications Laboratories (SCL) had

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"The final project report was delivered to the President of Ukraine...this report was pivotal in later national decisions," the company says.

clients in Brazil's presidential race" that is due to take place later this year.

CA Ponte, a partnership between Cambridge Analytica and Brazilian consultancy firm Ponte Estrategia, "had been in touch with representatives of three potential candidates", according to Bloomberg. The partnership's director André Torretta told the El Pais newspaper [in Portuguese] that he had been approached by two presidential campaigns but had not reached a deal with either.

Mexico In July 2017, Cambridge Analytica revealed that it had teamed up with a phone app in Mexico and Colombia called Pig.gi, which gives users free service in exchange for watching adverts and taking surveys. The firm was hoping to use data mined from Pig.gi to help a candidate in Mexico's July 2018 presidential election, according to Bloomberg.

Malaysia

"There's a huge opportunity in this country to find the issues that are important for people and actually turn people out to vote," Cambridge Analytica's vice-president of business development, Brittany Kaiser, said.

In the Channel 4 investigation, Malaysia was named as one of the countries in which Cambridge Analytica had operated, sparking a huge national debate ahead of a general election.

The company's website reportedly stated that it supported Prime Minister Najib Razak's Barisan Nasional (BN) coalition during generation election campaigning in Kedah state in 2013 "with a targeted messaging campaign highlighting their school improvements".

Mr Najib and the BN strongly denied having used the company. They said its advice was "provided personally" to Mukhriz Mahathir - he was at that time part of BN and went on to be Kedah's chief minister.

Mr Mukhriz, in turn, denied this, but his former media manager has contradicted his denial.

Mr Mukhriz, now with the opposition, will be running against Mr Najib for prime minister in the coming elections.

Separately, it was reported in October that the head of operations for Cambridge Analytica in Mexico, Arielle Dale Karro, had posted an advertisement on a Facebook page for foreigners living in the country. The post sought people "with significant political experience" who were interested in becoming a campaign manager in one of eight Mexican states, Buzzfeed reported.

Cambridge Analytica later denied that Ms Karro was carrying out any political work for the firm.

Mr Nix also stated that "Cambridge Analytica is not working for any political party in Mexico".

Brazil Cambridge Analytica was reportedly "prospecting for 12

Describing its work in a Nigerian election, SCL Global said it had advised that "rather than trying to motivate swing voters to vote for our clients, a more effective strategy might be to persuade opposition voters not to vote at all".

Documents shared by Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie spell out how parent company SCL Group tried to influence elections worldwide.

One letter also refers to its support of 15 psychological operations involving the UK's Ministry of Defence as of January 2012.

'Ethnic tensions'

It said this had been achieved by "organising anti-election rallies on the day of polling in opposition strongholds" and using "local religious figures to maximise their appeal especially among the spiritual, rural communities".

The Foreign Office is quoted as saying another part of SCL was "a joy to work with" on a counter-terror operation.

The files also refer to work done for Ambassador Bolton on US votes. This appears to be a reference to John Bolton, the former US ambassador to the UN. He was recently appointed as President Trump's National Security Adviser.

The Guardian had previously reported on his involvement in a Cambridge Analytica experiment to target YouTube videos at profiled US voters. The political consultancy is in the spotlight after reports that it amassed the data of millions of Facebook users without their consent and used this in political campaigns.

It boasted of devising a political graffiti campaign to create a youth "movement" in Trinidad and Tobago and of disseminating "camThe firm has paign messages that, said that it whilst ostensibly "destroyed" the coming from the information when youth, were Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix has been suspended amid the controversy Facebook demandunattributable to ed, although Channel 4 News has reported that copies any specific party". It said as a result "a united youth of at least part of the trove are still in circulation. "We movement was created". take allegations of unethical practices in the past by our In Latvia, it said it had recognised that "unspoformer global (non-US) political consultancy very ken ethnic tensions" were "at the heart of the seriously, and they are currently the subject of a full and election". "The locals secretly blamed the Russians for independent investigation which we have instigated to stealing their jobs... armed with this knowledge, SCL establish the facts," said Cambridge Analytica in a was able to reflect these real issues in its client's statement it published. "Its findings will be made messaging," the document said. available in due course."

The files spell out how SCL helped the UK's Foreign and Commonwealth Office "in strategic planning to counter violent jihadism" in Pakistan.

'International experience'

The files were released by the UK's Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee. They detail some of the work undertaken by Cambridge Analytica and companies it has been linked with, including SCL Group, Global Science Research and Aggregate IQ. Mr Wylie had referred to several of the documents in his appearance before the committee.

In one document, SCL said that encouraging people "not to vote" might be more effective than trying to motivate swing voters.

"I wouldn't only recommend them, I'd work with them again in an instant," wrote an official, whose name has been redacted.

www.bbc.com The views and opinions expressed in these articles are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Embassy

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Democracy under threat:

The US can’t revive the Monroe Doctrine or expel China from Latin America, but it can inflict Pain on Venezuela & the region

Is the United States getting its groove back in Latin America?

It’s certainly talking like it is. In February, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson toured the region in a bid to drum up support for Washington’s regime-change agenda in Venezuela. He began the tour in a bizarre fashion, celebrating the relevance of the long-expired 1823 “Monroe Doctrine.” In effect, Tillerson was asserting — with typical Trump administration hubris — Washington’s sovereignty over the entire Western Hemisphere, a response to China’s regional presence.

Speaking to MintPress News, sociology professor at the University of Oregon and Monthly Review editor John Bellamy Foster said: U.S. economic hegemony is in decline and Washington is using every means at its disposal to develop its geopolitical and geoeconomic power — that is, its imperial power — as a way of countering this decline.

The biggest current thrust in U.S. military and imperial strategy circles is directed at the articulation of what is called geoeconomic warfare as a definite strategy and as a means to geopolitical power. This involves the development of a whole new arsenal of weapons.”

Washington’s bellicose tone comes amid a regional resurgence of the neoliberal right wing that has seen the once-dominant left – gathered under the banner of “Socialism of the 21st Century” – face multiple setbacks across Central and South America.

21st century socialism: from red dawn to star-spangled dusk?

“What is taking place today across Latin America comes in the wake of an unusually long period of progressive advancements across the region,” author and University of California San Diego lecturer Harry L. Simón Salazar told MintPress News.

Continuing, Simón explained:

Despite its growing structural weakness and international isolation, the U.S. is still willing to do what it can to retain primacy in its historical “backyard,” the Western Hemisphere. Its current wounded-beast insecurity is only forcing it to desperately rethink its strategic approach.

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Even sections of the capitalist class in these countries were forced to begrudgingly accept these positive results and, in many cases, conservative and pro-U.S. electoral parties were delegitimized and pushed to the margins.

What was labeled by the bourgeoisie as the ‘pink tide’ can be tracked as beginning in the mid-to-late 1990s as a leftist trend that influenced regional politics for approximately 20 years, with the right wing increasingly isolated and limited to operating with impunity within Colombia, Florida, and Mexico. The leftist trend that spread across Latin America was primarily institutional and electoral, developing within the framework of diminished neoliberal states across Latin America and often influenced by Bolivarian oil wealth.”

Multilateral institutions like the Washington-based Organization of American States and the World Trade Organization were likewise marginalized, as intergovernmental groups like Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) were forged. Meanwhile, the China Development Bank and Beijing-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank increasingly took over the role of the Inter-American Development Bank, World Bank, and IMF.

In 1998, Hugo Chavez was elected president of Venezuela, signaling what he called at the time a “social revolution.” He soon became the ideological lodestar of the new 21st-century socialist trend. By 2009, eight out of 10 South American governments were ruled by leftist parties backed by social movements, indigenous communities, and the traditional socialist and communist left. For a time, these social-democratic administrations proved massively popular and won more votes and elections than any prior government.

The past several years have taken a grim toll on the Latin American left. As the popularity of incumbent left-of-center governments sagged, neoliberal presidents came to power in Argentina, Chile, and Peru through electoral means. In other countries, right-wing forces managed to devise new strategies beyond simply getting out the vote: in Paraguay and Brazil, leftist administrations were impeached in parliamentary coups that made way for pro-U.S. governments. In Ecuador, President Lenín Moreno – fresh from narrowly being elected with outgoing leftist leader Rafael Correa’s support – quickly used the “anti-corruption” rhetoric of the right-wing opposition to purge the ruling party of Correista “Citizen’s Revolution” stalwarts through unconstitutional means.

People hold up images showing Fidel Castro, Venezuela’s late President Hugo Chavez, and Cuba’s revolutionary hero Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara during a May Day march in Revolution Square in Havana, Cuba, May 1, 2013. The image of Chavez carries the words in Spanish “Chavez : Our best friend.” (AP/Ramon Espinosa) To differing degrees, these governments broke with the Washington consensus of unquestioned market rule and focused more on the social, economic, and cultural rights of regional populations.

In the spirit of what was called buen vivir (good living), the state strengthened its role — as social investment, labor market regulations, and other progressive reforms redistributed income and lifted tens of millions of people out of poverty and into a new middle class.

MIKE POMPEO

Colombia’s FARC insurgents have disarmed in a peace deal widely criticized by the right, but killings and disappearances targeting rural activists and social movement organizers have continued unabated. Most recently in Honduras, the U.S. threw its weight behind the illegitimate and widely-resisted reelection of Juan Orlando Hernández.

Simón explained:

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The current imperial/neoliberal offensive taking place across Latin America shares what might be labeled as an insurgent quality — the willingness among derechistas [rightists] and their U.S. sponsors to dismantle what is left of the neoliberal state, particularly any leftist manifestation of it, however innocuous it may be.”

In some cases, notable right-wing elites, landlords and local oligarchs like former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe are hardly distinguishable from mafiosi, and retain their seats in power despite their close ties to fascistic paramilitaries and death squads tied to the drug trade.

In a speech kicking off his Latin America tour last month, Tillerson hailed the Monroe Doctrine for being “as relevant today as it was the day it was written.” The announcement was a direct reversal of former President Barack Obama’s policy signaling that the era of U.S. military intervention in the region was over – a declaration “worth applauding,” as Tillerson’s predecessor John Kerry told the Organization of American States in 2013.

In Venezuela, the government of President Nicolas Maduro has struggled with plummeting oil prices and sabotage that has paralyzed sections the economy and empowered the U.S.-backed opposition.

The U.S. is now openly discussing a “military option” while urging officers in the Venezuelan military to act as “the agent of change” in a manner similar to Augusto Pinochet’s violent overthrow of Chilean President Salvador Allende in 1973.

Liberal beltway analysts saw Tillerson’s speech as a gaffe and possible result of a shortage of regional experts in his State Department, yet the assertion brought a sense of foreboding to critics of U.S. imperialism. “U.S. imperialism in Latin America is of course nothing new, now going back at least two centuries, with the [bicentennial] anniversary of the Monroe Doctrine only five years away,” Foster explained, continuing:

“In some Latin American countries this insurgent right wing [is] striking out against populations using methods not seen since the days of Operation Condor and the counterinsurgent wars of the 1980s,” Simón noted, continuing:

The Monroe doctrine, which has frequently been glorified in the United States almost as an

Latin American reactionary elites [are] demonstrating a class-based consensus that there is no need to mask their current power grabs with bourgeois legality, and instead they demonstrate a willingness to disrupt the constitutional order and tear apart ‘el tejido social’ [the social fabric].”

Meanwhile, China has continued to consolidate its presence in the region while forging close economic relationships with Latin American and Caribbean governments, irrespective of whether they lean left or right. Beijing’s repeated assertions that “Latin America is the natural extension of the 21st-century Maritime Silk Road” were without a doubt seen in Washington as an implied strategic threat to the U.S. and a signal of its receding power in Latin America. “The object of the continued incorporation of Latin America within the U.S. Empire has remained consistent, though the methods in which this has been approached have naturally varied depending on historical circumstances,” Foster explained.

ancillary to the Constitution, is primarily a declaration of U.S. hegemony over Latin America, and against any interference in the region by powers outside the Americas. It has been used to justify U.S. imperialism, including military interventions, in the region over a period of two centuries.”

When the Monroe Doctrine was authored by then-Secretary of State John Quincy Adams in 1823, Washington claimed that it was necessary to prevent a European imperial presence in the Americas. The doctrine was eventually extended to Hawaii and the Philippines. Throughout the 20th century, the doctrine was used to justify U.S. imperialism’s fight against socialist and communist governments and national liberation movements seen as friendly toward the Soviet Union.

“America First” meets the Monroe Doctrine Colombia’s President Juan Manuel Santos, front, and U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson arrive to hold a press conference after a meeting at the presidential palace in Bogota, Colombia, Feb. 6, 2018.

(AP/Fernando Vergara)

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In his landmark 1944 analysis, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, German political scientist Franz Neumann laid out how Nazi Germany saw the American exceptionalist assertions in the Monroe Doctrine as a model for geopolitical hegemony — unlike traditional international law, which was seen as a “creation of the Jews and as a cloak for British imperialism.” For the ideologists of Nazi-era geopolitics, the Monroe Doctrine became a justification for Germany’s own grossdeutsche Reich.

Neumann explained:

coherent policies to deal with these Chinese geoeconomic actions — many of which are aimed squarely at America’s allies and friends. … [A]s economic techniques of statecraft have become a lost art in the United States, the rest of the world has moved in the opposite direction. Russia, China, and others now routinely look to geoeconomic means, often as a first resort, and often to undermine American power and influence. In ignoring the ever-greater role of geoeconomics in the international system, the United States squanders opportunities and dilutes its own foreign policy outcomes … It gives China free rein in vulnerable African and Latin American nations.”

The Monroe Doctrine [became] ‘the most successful example of a large-scale principle in international law’ … Ever since the first Hague Peace Conference of 1909, the United States has insisted that the Monroe Doctrine occupies an exceptional position …

In German hands, the exception now becomes the rule.

There is no longer one international law but as many as there are empires, that is, large spaces. The grossdeutsche Reich is the creator of its own international law for its own space. Interventionists must keep their hands off.”

“So the Monroe Doctrine is now being revived and reinterpreted to extend to geoeconomic statecraft and warfare,” Foster said. “The United States is essentially insisting on its total economic as well as military domination of its Latin American ‘backyard.’” Foster added: “I believe that Venezuela in particular has become a test case for this new strategy of geoeconomic warfare. But it is not just Venezuela that is the target, and in different places different weapons are used.”

The policy is now being reimagined as an “America First” imperialist strategy to reduce Chinese investment in the region – in Tillerson’s words, to prevent China from using its “economic statecraft to pull the region into its orbit.”

With the U.S. embroiled in various “regime change” efforts and low-intensity conflicts across the globe, aimed at securing its dominance – a state of perpetual warfare known to Washington policymakers as the New Thirty Years War – the U.S. capability for a direct military intervention against the formidably-armed National Bolivarian Armed Forces of Venezuela has been significantly eroded. Even Trump, surrounded as he is by former top-brass generals like Defense Secretary James “Mad Dog” Mattis, can understand this.

The geoeconomic battle with China for the Americas Bolivia’s President Evo Morales, right, gives a handcrafted bust of Bolivia’s indigenous leader Tupac Katari to Houlin Zhao, left, from China, Secretary General of the International Telecommunication Union, ITU, during a meeting at the presidential residence, in La Paz., Oct. 13, 2017. (AP/Juan Karita)

An asymmetric approach is thus a preferred option to effect “regime change,” Foster explained, continuing: The U.S. strategy in Latin America has been to focus on altering various parameters in its favor, weakening and dividing Latin American states, and diminishing China’s role … Isolation of Venezuela and the other ALBA states is key, with the U.S. exerting pressure for coups or even military intervention by a combination of states. [For example], the Venezuela opposition has been promoted under the mantle of a ‘civil society’ revolt.”

Tillerson’s remarks were a result of ongoing discussions in Washington about how best to reassert the U.S.’s flagging economic and military power, Foster noted, pointing to the “the hottest book in U.S. imperial circles” – the Council on Foreign Relations’ War by Other Means: Geoeconomics and Statecraft.

In the 2016 book, authors Robert D. Blackwell and Jennifer M. Harris highlight China’s threat to U.S. hegemony in the region, unfavorably comparing Washington’s coercive power to Beijing’s ability to offer development assistance and condition-free aid to increase its geopolitical leverage: More and more states are waging geopolitics with capital, attempting with sovereign checkbooks and other economic tools to achieve strategic objectives that in the past were often the stuff of military coercion or conquest … The United States has no 17

Mediated terror

primarily for the right wing (with a few cases for the left), with organized parties and organizational forms assigned a secondary position.”

Venezuelan opposition leader Henrique Capriles speaks to the media following his meeting with Organization of American States (OAS) Secretary General Luis Almagro, at the OAS building in Washington, March 31, 2017. (AP/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

His perspective was underscored by former Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa in a recent opinion piece for Cuba’s Granma daily, where the once overwhelmingly popular and now widely-defamed leader stressed:

For Harry L. Simón Salazar, the current U.S. neoliberal offensive in Latin America is increasingly becoming a role assigned to the mass media. Even In countries like Ecuador and Venezuela, media outlets remain in the hands of either U.S.-based transnational corporations or Washington- and Miami-loyal elites.

Our democracies should be called mediated democracies. The media are a more important component in the political process than the parties and electoral systems; they have become the main opposition parties of the progressive governments, and they are the true representatives of business and conservative political power.

In his recently-published book, Television, Democracy, and the Mediatization of Chilean Politics, Simón analyzed Chile’s 1990 transition from Pinochet-era dictatorship to civilian rule. In Simón’s view, the 1988 Franja de Propaganda Electoral campaign was a case study of how the media plays a key role in proliferating neoliberal cultural values and the “politics of the possible” in the minds of the populations.

It does not matter what best suits the majorities, what has been proposed in the election campaign, and what the people — the main actor in every democracy — has decided at the polls. The important thing is what the media approve or disapprove of in their headlines. They have replaced the Rule of Law with the State of Opinion.”

The campaign was a collaborative effort between the outgoing dictatorship and the democratic opposition. In the 2012 Chilean film, No, it was memorably portrayed as the crass product of an advertising agency.

Simón, like Correa, sees this new reality as an important moment for self-criticism and the need to examine the actual feasibility of breaking from imperialism’s grip through peaceful democratic means: We must reconsider the relative importance of electoral struggle within the context of the neoliberal bourgeois state, and as part of the Latin American left we must put into balance this history and reconsider our priorities.

Simón explained: Since the late 1980s, Latin American mass media was not just instrumentalized by the right to frame political struggle, but it became a mass media that often became the central field of political struggle 18

In a 21st century marked by repeated defeats for U.S. imperialism and the rise of “multipolarity” across the globe, the United States remains a “giant with feet of clay,” as Immanuel Wallerstein has argued.

The empire still has a strong ability to overwhelm its adversaries in conventional combat, but it’s also restrained by its economic fragility, diplomatic fecklessness, and unease over the costs of a bloody, prolonged intervention in Venezuela.

If neoliberalism in Latin America proved to be so resilient as to survive the so-called ‘pink tide’ – and be capable of rising up and pushing back the progressive gains of the past 20 years – then it is essential that we understand that its power and influence weren’t just a function of presidential and constitutional power alone.”

Venezuela versus the “giant with feet of clay:” a new David versus Goliath?

“Venezuela is now the target of clearly-articulated geoeconomic warfare at every level, designed to soften it up for a coup or military intervention,” Foster said. “This message has to be conveyed to the world on a daily basis.”

Government supporters perform a parody involving a Venezuelan militia up against Uncle Sam, a personification of the U.S government, during an anti-imperialist march to denounce Trump’s talk of a “military option” for resolving the country’s political crisis, in Caracas, Venezuela, Aug. 14, 2017. (AP/Ariana Cubillos)

Despite its aggression, any attempt by Washington to launch a unilateral war against a Latin American government would doubtlessly result in a tsunami of anti-imperialist fervor from the region’s numerous social movements. The reinvigoration of the popular left is a likely prospect in this scenario, not to mention sustained resistance on the military front.

In South America, only two real leftist governments remain standing: Bolivia and the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. For now, Washington’s regime-change obsession has focused on the latter. In response, Caracas has met a stream of U.S. sanctions and threats with a deepening of radical measures aimed at consolidating the Bolivarian state, ranging from civilian-military exercises to the introduction of the Petro digital currency and formation of a National Constituent Assembly.

The danger remains that in the present crisis-racked geopolitical arena, the United States government’s propensity to wreak havoc could lead to a disaster in the region or another “long night” of right-wing dictatorships — keen on steering their countries back toward repressing the poor, enriching corrupt elites, and exporting raw materials to the imperialist core countries of North America, Asia, and Europe.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration continues to isolate itself with its incoherent policies and all-sided hostility to friend and foe alike.

“Venezuela has been declared to be an official enemy, but the list of official and unofficial enemies of the United States is now very extensive,” Foster said.

“Venezuela is not alone and the whole world can see the economic sanctions and other coercive measures being imposed to bring Venezuela to its knees.”

Continuing, Foster explained:

It would be a mistake, however, to exaggerate Washington’s potential to prevail in the “great game” of 21st-century imperialist statecraft and geoeconomic warfare — let alone its ability to revive lost hegemony by bringing the long-dead Monroe Doctrine back from the grave.

I think a lesson here can be taken from Cuba.

There is not a day where Cuba has not stressed to its population and the whole world the deleterious effects of the U.S. embargo on Cuba. It is a simple and powerful message.”

By Elliott Gabriel: A former staff writer for teleSUR English and a MintPress News contributor based in Quito, Ecuador. www.venezuelanalysis.com The views and opinions expressed in these articles are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Embassy

The United States remains far from its goal of fully reasserting itself in its historic stomping ground, in Simón’s view, but it remains capable of corralling its local proxies: What I believe is happening now in Latin America is more along the lines of a terroristic rightwing insurgency, aligned with organized crime and transnational economic elites, that has monetized chaos and is willing to make a country ungovernable if that is what’s required for reconquering political power and purging what’s left of the so-called ‘pink tide.’”

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U.S intervention in Kenya?

NO THANKS! That Amb. Mark Bellamy and Amb. Johnnie Carson are accomplished US diplomats is not in doubt. It may also be assumed that their relationship with Kenya as former Ambassadors in Nairobi gives them a more than average understanding of Kenya’s politics, economy and even social aspects. But the article by the two gentlemen published online on February 22, 2018, in which they call for US intervention in Kenya is a clear demonstration of how preconceived notions and stereotypes about Africa

by Western technocrats, override any practical experience and knowledge they may have acquired in the continent. Their knack for getting it wrong on African and Kenyan issues is not only dumbfounding but also a demonstration of why desk research on Africa, with the only source of information being a biased western media, should be treated with disdain.

The authors seem to revel in misinforming their readers not only on the existing situation but also on the events that unfolded during Kenya’s election cycle in 2017. They talk of political chaos and possible intercommunal violence and a palpable desire to change this trajectory.

They even mourn that attempts by western governments to appeal for calm are not being heeded. The reader will note how the authors are keen to weave the now familiar narrative of a crumbling African State and the ever-benevolent western states, ready to intervene and sort “another fine mess in Africa”. Inevitably, attempts to weave this narrative in this article fall flat on the face due to the blatant use of lies, half-truths and innuendos.

It’s a fact that Kenya’s vibrant electioneering period ended with the swearing in of President Uhuru Kenyatta on November 28, 2017, after he was duly elected in October 26, 2017, repeat presidential elections. The claims that there is a deliberate attempt by the executive to subvert the rule of law cannot be further from the truth. Throughout the campaign period, the government demonstrated fidelity to the law with the then incumbent president accepting the Supreme Court ruling nullifying the August 8, 2017, presidential election even as he, and other legal analysts, disagreed with it. The main opposition coalition, clearly aware that their political strategy had failed, dithered and withered, eventually boycotting the repeat presidential elections.

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the Jubilee Party and NASA Coalition in Kenya during and after the electioneering period as political turmoil.

Competitive politics in a democracy, both in America and in Africa, can never be described as turmoil.

Indeed, political competition is a key tenet of democracy and Kenya has demonstrated that with strong institutions, credible and peaceful elections are possible.

Their attempt to perpetrate violence in the wake of their electoral loss have been outrightly rejected by Kenyans with the government taking the necessary steps to fulfil its cardinal responsibility of protecting the lives and property of Kenyans in line with the Kenyan constitution. In the long and arduous walk to entrench democratic principles in Kenya, no individual or institution is exempt from the dictates of the constitution. Just like in any other democracy, the media, various arms of government, political parties, the civil society groups and all citizens are bound by the constitution and the violation of the same has consequences in line with the rule of law.

On a positive note, the authors have acknowledged the cordial relations between Kenya and the US which they had an opportunity to strengthen during their respective tenures as US ambassadors to Kenya.

They use this as a basis for advocating for US intervention to prevent what they term as Kenya descending into violence and threat to rule of law. With memories of US interventions in countries such as Libya and Iraq ostensibly to return democracy, still fresh in our minds, the jitters about this proposal by senior US leaders is understandable. Any form of interference by the US in a country that has time and again demonstrated her commitment to entrenching democratic principles, rule of law and good governance can only portend danger.

The fact that Kenya went through the prolonged campaign and electioneering period and emerged peaceful, should be a reason to celebrate the resilience of her democracy. Kenya’s constitution which was enacted in 2010 is barely 8 years old. The 2017 elections presented an opportunity to test the institutions created by the constitution including the Judiciary and the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission.

It is no wonder that the current US ambassador in Nairobi and indeed the entire US government has risen above Kenya’s political challenges. Just as Amb. Carson was proven wrong on his assertion in the period preceding the 2013 general elections in Kenya that election of President Uhuru Kenyatta would have negative consequences, the two countries have once again continued in the path of strengthening their bilateral relations and partnerships with a clear understanding of the need for mutual respect. The threats issued and the grandstanding advocated for by the two US leaders in this article is not only unfortunate but also an affront to Kenya’s sovereignty.

The question of whether the institutions withstood the test can be attested by the peace and tranquility that is existing in Kenya barely three months after the repeat elections. Kenyans are back to work and the economy, which had slightly slumped during the electioneering period, is now on an upward trend with the World Bank projecting a 5 percent economic growth for the year 2018. Even international investors have given the Kenyan economy a vote of confidence by a sevenfold oversubscription of a Eurobond issued by the Kenyan government in the London Stock Exchange on 21st February 2018. The tourists are trooping back to enjoy the unrivalled Kenyan flora and fauna and bask in the white beaches of Malindi and the entire Kenyan coastal region.

On her part, Kenya will maintain momentum in strengthening governance institutions, entrenching the rule of law, building a cohesive society and buttressing peace within its borders and in the region.

While we welcome positive and constructive criticism from our partners and friends, we remain averse to any suggestions of interference with our internal affairs from any quotas. Our response to the authors’ absurd demand for US intervention in Kenya is a loud NO THANKS!

The authors’ assertion that Kenya is unravelling due to what they refer to as the widening rift between the ruling Jubilee and the opposition NASA coalition betrays their double standards when it comes to democratic tenets in Africa as compared to the same in America. It is not lost on Kenyans that the differences in ideologies between the Democrats and Republicans, especially during the 2016 presidential elections and the toxic political drama that culminated in the election of President Donald Trump left some social and political fissures in America.

Despite their divisive nature, the Trump Vs Clinton political campaigns can rightly be described as a demonstration of the vibrancy and maturity of the American democracy. In a clear display of bias and cognitive dissonance, the authors describe similar ideological differences and political rhetoric between

By Amb. Macharia Kamau: Principal Secretary Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Kenya www.mfa.go.ke The views and opinions expressed in these articles are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Embassy

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VENEZUELA - Elections - Threats - International Interference - World Solidarity - We are all Venezuela summit

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UNDERSTANDING THE NATIONAL CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY OF VENEZUELA: TRUTHS AND MYTHS

The idea was to consult the sovereign people if they wished to draft a new Magna Carta to replace the anachronistic and "moribund" Constitution of 1961, as Commander Chavez himself affirmed, that it no longer adapted to the new challenges of a nation with aspirations to development, and that it was far from the new century that was to come. With an overwhelming majority of 87.8% of voters, Hugo Chávez and his constituent proposal emerged victorious in 1999, making possible one of the most advanced and democratic Magna Carta in the world, through the intervention of 131 delegates chosen by the people.

That first step refounded the Republic with profound changes that could not be made through reforms or amendments.

A precedent: the first constituent in Venezuela led by Hugo Chávez In 1999, after the overwhelming electoral victory in 1998 that gave him the presidency, Commander Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías dedicated himself to the titanic task that had never been experienced before, of calling a Constituent Referendum upon the Venezuelan people in order to modify the Magna Carta of his country. In the constitutional text of Venezuela that was submitted to the change known as the Constitution of 1961, the figure of the Constituent Assembly did not exist, so it was necessary to use the legal tool of the Constitutional Referendum for the popular consultation of that time.

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The Constitution of 1999 was basically transformed into sovereign and participatory power, moving away from the caudillo representation that historically distributed power only among a few; gave the name and character of Bolivarian to Venezuela to honor not only in speeches the Father of the Homeland, Simon Bolivar; added the figure of the Recall Referendum in order to give the people the opportunity to revoke any mandate that did not fully comply with its initial postulates;and also included the possibility of its own renewal, and making a previous consultative referendum unnecessary, with the inclusion of the convocation of a National Constituent Assembly contained in articles 347, 348, 349: that is, always left open, turning on itself , the possibility to new airs of update. In short: a Magna Carta example of what would be called Participative and Protagonist Democracy.

Since the arrival of Commander Chávez, Venezuela has applied a system of exchange control to prevent the flight of foreign exchange, so that the State could distribute its income in social programs for the majority of the population, a sovereign act that facilitated Venezuela to reduce their levels of poverty in less than 5 years and receive recognition by FAO, UN and ECLAC. Since Maduro became President , the national oligarchy allied to the mainly North American transnationals, owner of the means of production-distribution of the country, unleashed a violent Economic war artificially creating a huge induced inflation that persists in generating a situation of instability that directly affects the most vulnerable population.

But the fundamental purpose of this war is directed towards the recovery of the free exchange of the dollar and thus to restore exchange conditions only for the exclusive benefit of large importing companies and the usual transnational corporations. Among these are the North American oil companies which, prior to the arrival of Commander Chávez, did not pay the income tax nor the royalties corresponding to the exploitation and Venezuelan crude was sold at ridiculous prices.

Articles of the Venezuelan Constitution of 1999 approved in the referendum by 87.75% of the people according to CNE.

Article 347:

The people of Venezuela are the depository of the original constituent power. In the exercise of this power, they may convene a National Constituent Assembly with the purpose of transforming the State, creating a new legal system and drafting a new Constitution.

This led to the creation of a phantom exchange office with an arbitrary dollar measurement system in relation to the Bolivar (the official Venezuelan currency), based in Miami, which has resulted in a monetary imbalance that causes the bolivar to decrease its purchasing power, and overpriced price rises to the ordinary Venezuelan, making him the main victim, despite efforts to subsidize food, medicine, education, housing which the Bolivarian Revolution has popularized among the poorest.

Article 348:

The initiative to convene the National Constituent Assembly may be taken by the President of the Republic in the Council of Ministers; the National Assembly, by agreement of the two thirds of its members; the Municipal Councils in town hall, by the vote of two thirds of them; or fifteen percent of registered voters and voters enrolled in the Civil and Electoral Registry.

Article 349:

Although the Venezuelan Government provides preferential dollars to entrepreneurs to import basic items, these entrepreneurs, along with opposition political forces, have articulated a plan to hoard and smuggle illegal food and medicines and have diverted them to border countries like Colombia or Brazil, where these basic services are not cheap because they are not subsidized by the state, as it happens in Venezuela.

The President of the Republic cannot object to the new Constitution. The constituted powers may in no way impede the decisions of the National Constituent Assembly. Once promulgated the new Constitution, this will be published in the Official Gazette of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela or in the Gazette of the National Constituent Assembly.

Thus, the Venezuelan population daily suffers a perverse shortage as part of the destabilization whose aim is none other than to bend its will, its heroic resistance and its adhesion to the Bolivarian Revolution.

A soft and continuous blow against the stability of Venezuela After the physical disappearance of Commander Hugo Chavez, President Nicolás Maduro has experienced several coup attempts, and especially one that Chavez also knew and that is part of the continuous Gentle Coup or Fourth Generation War. 24

Opposition coup violence in the street: the guarimba

1: Murdered when he protested against the attack an urbanism built by the Government.

These groups, financiers of the continuous coup attempt, seek to violently displace the constitutional and legitimate government of President Nicolas Maduro, as they tried against Commander Chavez in the embarrassing coup of 2002, whose illegitimate government was immediately recognized by the United States, Spain and the OAS. Since April 2017, these same groups, through opposition parties of extreme right and in complicity of the media mostly, made continuous calls for violence, invited their followers to take to the streets, armed and trained small terrorist groups that from April to July of this year took some streets of the most important cities of Venezuela, causing the majority of the population to alter its rhythm of life, jeopardize its stability so that a few violated the right to peace of the majority.

With barricades, homemade explosive weapons and in some cases with the most professional and advanced armament equipment, the coup folly left 131 dead, of which only 13 people were killed in the hands of the Venezuelan security forces. 40 personnel (police and / or military) are being tried, detained or sought, because there were express orders not to use firearms at demonstrations. Nevertheless, many of the cases remain unpunished, and the opposition lies before the world, saying that all of the victims were caused by the government forces, when according to the numbers, most of the mortal victims succumbed to irresponsibility of the violent foci they fomented.

Some victims in numbers: 19: Killed due to barricades and blockades of streets or avenues caused by protests of violent deposits. Deaths caused by traffic accidents, or when victims tried to dodge opposition barricades.

17: Related to looting. People who participated in vandal acts and died electrocuted inside the place they looted.

13: Killed by firing squads: 40 troops are being held accountable.

9: Officials of the Venezuelan Security Forces, police or military who tried to control street violence. Killed by violent protesters using bullets or homemade weapons.

8: killed while participating in violence and handling explosives.

9: People who were burned alive or lynched just to appear "chavistas", that is, black or mulatto men.

Expression of the most terrible racism and fascism.

5: Victims of criminal gangs.

1: Woman passed near a manifestation of Chavismo, and received the impact on her head of a frozen bottle thrown from a building.

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Need for a Constituent Assembly for Peace

• Strengthen Venezuela's sovereignty over its natural resources, and invigorate it in various productive areas to abandon its oil rentier model.

• Include in the Constitution the defense of the homeland, through repudiation and condemnation of foreign interventionism, and to punish Venezuelan political and economic forces or groups that call for violence and promote the intervention of foreign forces.

• New cultural spirituality and being Venezuelan, the multicultural character and cultural identity.

• To include in the Constitution social, educational and cultural rights and duties to shield the Venezuelan youth.

• To include in the Constitution projects that combat climate change, global warming and help the survival of the species on the planet

In the midst of an environment of destabilization, and after making invitations and calls for peace ignored by the opposition, on May 1st, during the commemoration of Labor Day, President Nicolás Maduro convoked the constituent.

The process of the National Constituent Assembly is the call to the various sectors of the country without partisan or ideological distinction: peasants and fishermen, people with disabilities, youth and students, workers in the Oil and Mining sector; social sector, banking and trade sector, transport sector, construction sector, public administration sector, services sector, sector of the popular economy, business sector, pensioners, indigenous people, housewives, social movements, communes, artists, popular cultivators, etc. . to elect, through the popular vote, 545 constituent members who are already active may shield the interests of the majority, guaranteeing labor rights, making no elite impose on the economically disadvantaged sectors.

The National Constituent Assembly and the National Assembly (National Congress) are two distinct and independent bodies One of the fallacies posed by the communist hegemony was that the government of President Nicolás Maduro and the National Constituent Assembly had unconstitutionally abolished the opposition-majority National Assembly, elected on December 6th, 2015.

According to article 348 of the Constitution of 1999, the President of the Republic may convene a National Constituent Assembly, which does not mean that the other elected officials must arbitrarily give in to the Executive, so Venezuela is a country with a presidential regime.

These 545 constituents (414 members more than those elected in 1999) elected by 8 million, 300,000 Venezuelans, will draft, improve, update and make the necessary modifications to fine-tune the rights acquired during the Bolivarian Revolution, always taking as a starting point the 1999 Constitution, which is already a perfect base to improve any state of well-being and law. They are still in session to give a constitutional solution to the most urgent problems and needs facing the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela today and to avoid that acts of violence and economic destabilization get repeated in the future.

In reality, they are two totally different entities, whose objectives do not coincide, and whose members were democratically elected for two different functions. The National Assembly forensic law and its assembly members exercise their functions for a longer period of time (from 2016 to 2021). The ANC instead meets specifically for the drafting of the new constitutional text that will update, according to the people's election, the political, economic and social system through the transformation of the State. Its period of activity is reduced to two years, while the debates and sessions take place, the Constitution is drafted and the final text of the new constitution is approved by the people. Which means that both can work in parallel.

Points to be highlighted in the National Constituent Assembly of 2017: • To fight the economic war that only aims to reduce the Venezuelan's ability to acquire goods and services, and is a war that seeks to increase hunger and misery for political ends.

• Ending the hegemonic blackmail of the dollar and induced inflation.

• Include in the Constitution the missions and great missions created by Commander Hugo Chávez, as well as social projects initiated by the Revolution, so that they cannot be absorbed by private sectors that seek to profit, and have an irreversible character.

• Reaffirm the values of justice, to get peace, isolate the violent in a constituent for peace. Justice, the judicial and penitentiary system, the war against impunity, terrorism, drug trafficking. Increase penalties for severe justice. To avoid terrorist violence and to condemn it, to avoid the impunity enjoyed by sectors, that, because there were no severe laws, plunged Venezuela into three months of war and death.

The historical veracity of the Venezuelan electoral system Venezuela, after the inauguration of President Hugo Chavez, in just 18 years has experienced more than 20 electoral processes, many more than in the previous 50 years to the Revolution, its republican 26

The Opposition and its friends from abroad have only pointed to the supposed bias of the Venezuelan electoral body, known as the CNE (National Electoral Council). And the truth is that the leaders of the Venezuelan opposition did not want to participate in the call made to register their candidates so that he could participate in the National Constituent Assembly, even when President Maduro himself invited them. As the constitutional channels have not worked for them, they dedicated themselves to increasing in some streets of Venezuela terror, vandalism, violence, whose terrorist actions were one of the causes that motivated President Maduro to call for sanity, using as tool the call to the ANC.

history had lived. The Venezuelan opposition has never recognized any triumph of the Bolivarian Revolution, although international bodies have always certified the transparency of the processes.

Even President Chávez had no trouble measuring his overwhelming electoral power in 2004, when the Venezuelan opposition carried out the historic Recall Referendum that sought to oust Chavez as president. What they never acknowledged from that 1999 Constitution they wanted to repeal was that the Referendum tool was not included in the 1961 Constitution before Chavez.

“

JIMMY CARTER said this about the Venezuelan electoral system:

Although they continue to argue about the fraudulence of the Venezuelan electoral system, last August the opposition inscribed its candidates for regional elections before the Venezuelan electoral body, and whose contest will be measured in the system that they call fraudulent, elections that must taken place on October the 15th .

"Of the 92 elections we have monitored, I would say that the electoral process in Venezuela is the best in the world."

According to the former US president, the biggest advantage of the Venezuelan system is the fact that it is fully automatic, which facilitates verification of election results. For his part, he said that his country's electoral system, the US, was "one of the worst electoral processes in the world due to excessive influx of private money," Carter said.

In addition, once the electoral results of the votes for the election of the 545 constituents were given, opposition violence ceased in the streets, as a sign of the strength of the call they could not conceal.

The National Constituent Assembly is not only a democratic and legitimate tool that is validated in the Venezuelan Constitution of 1999, but is seen as an option to make peace reign, to strengthen Venezuela economically and to make clear to the world the irrevocable decision of a people to ensure respect for their economic, political and cultural sovereignty, despite the intrusive violations that other nations and powers want to exercise ignoring the decision of the majority of Venezuelans.

Thus, many media have confined themselves to accusing the constitutional process of being illegal, omitting the massive election that took place last July 30, 2017, when 8,300,000 voters went to the polls to choose their 545 constituents after a call from the president validated in the 1999 Constitution.

”

The National Constituent Assembly (ANC) works intensely in the approval of fundamental laws for the development of the country.

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• Other laws are in the process of approval: Law of the Exchange Houses, which will regulate the operation of the followinmg; the Law of Promotion and Protection of International Investment; the environmental project of the Law of the Mining Arc; Law that creates the Agrifood Corporation; Law of Tributes to the Great Fortunes and Derivatives of the Economic War; and the law that creates a tax regime for economic crimes.

After the elections of July 30th of last year, then after on August 4, 2017 the National Constituent Assembly was officially installed. Since it began its operations despite the interventionist actions of the great Western powers against Venezuela , the National Constituent Assembly (ANC) has held discussions with various popular sectors of the country in order to channel political actions towards overcoming the economic wars, the economic blockades from large international corporations, in order to insist on peace and democracy as solutions to conflicts and political differences, to consolidate processes that strengthen and extend the social benefits that the Revolution has built, and in general for the strengthening of democracy and the sovereignty of the country. Among the concrete achievements of the ANC are the following:

Elections of governors The Constituent Assembly of Venezuela approved the holding of governor elections, which had been suspended on two occasions. The Constituent Assembly approved the electoral process in "the exercise of its constitutional functions" to "respond with votes to the threats" against the country, and reported on its decision to the president of the National Electoral Council, Tibisay Lucena.

Legislative matters On the bills that according to the political situation, the economic destabilization of which he is a victim and the calls for violence by the opposition sectors, which have made these laws urgent mechanisms to preserve peace and sovereignty in the country.

"Given the threats we are going to respond with votes (...), by continuing with the electoral process in Venezuela," said the president of the Constituent Assembly, Delcy Rodríguez.

Municipal elections

• Approval of the Law against Hate and Political Intolerance in Venezuela. A Law against Hate, Intolerance, Fascism and in Favor of Peaceful Coexistence which was deeply debated in all sectors of Venezuelan society, and which will put Venezuela at the forefront in terms of regulation and control of this matter .

• Also the proposal presented by the Minister of Internal Affairs, Justice and Peace, Néstor Reverol, for the constitutionalization of the Peace Quadrants, a project aimed at consolidating citizen security from a humanistic dimension and an attachment to human rights.

• The Law on Supply and Agreed Prices has also been approved together with the Law on Local Committees for Supply and Production (CLAP) and whose function is to ensure food security and protection of the purchasing power of Venezuelans.

The National Constituent Assembly (ANC) approved, in its role of Plenipotentiary Power of the nation, to hold the municipal elections on December 10, this being the third electoral contest that took place in 2017 and the 23rd since the beginning of the Bolivarian Revolution (1999). On that electoral day 19,740,846 voters came to elect their mayors and to continue along the democratic and participatory path that the Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela guarantees.

Presidential elections The National Constituent Assembly (ANC) of Venezuela approved a decree to call presidential elections. "Approved by acclamation," said ANC President Delcy Rodríguez, after the unanimous vote of the constituents through the proposal of Diosdado Cabello, a leader of the Bolivarian Revolution.

By: Mr. Alfredo Lugo - First Secretary, Embassy of Venezuela in Nairobi Film director and Journalist The views and opinions expressed in these articles are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Embassy

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Venezuela Elections:

Venezuela’s Presidential Elections moved to May 2018.

President Maduro & Opposition candidate Falcon agree to Electoral Guarantees

The government and electoral opposition have agreed to push presidential elections back until May 20.

The new agreement includes a number of electoral guarantees that had been outlined in a previous deal negotiated between the national government and the coalition of opposition parties known as the MUD (Democratic Unity Roundtable) during talks in the Dominican Republic. A much-anticipated deal between the two sides was expected to be signed off at the beginning of February following months of internationally mediated dialogue. However, the MUD walked away at the last minute, while an early election date of April 22 was announced by the CNE shortly afterwards.

Venezuela’s National Electoral Council (CNE) made the shock announcement this Thursday that it would postpone much anticipated presidential elections scheduled for April 22 until May. According to declarations made by CNE President Tibisay Lucena at a press conference, the vote will be pushed back to May 20 while elections for municipal and regional legislative councils will also now be held on the same day.

The surprise postponement is the result of an agreement reached this Thursday between the parties backing Maduro and political leaders of opposition parties, Progressive Advance, COPEI and MAS, which are supporting presidential candidate and former Lara State Governor Henri Falcon in the upcoming elections.

“The electoral power celebrates the signing of this agreement through which these organisations commit to the country so that this electoral process may contribute to the peace between Venezuelans,” stated Lucena.

“With this agreement, we ratify that in Venezuela we choose our leaders with the broadest and fullest electoral guarantees,” she continued.

Since then, the MUD has vowed to boycott the upcoming elections and went as far as to expel Falcon from its ranks after he registered with national electoral authorities as a presidential candidate this past Monday.

Following the CNE’s announcement to push back elections this Thursday, the MUD reaffirmed its decision to boycott, declaring that “the MUD has no presidential candidate”. They also complained that Falcon could not speak in the name of the “opposition” in Venezuela, as he had not been recognised as a spokesperson by the MUD leadership.

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The fact that the MUD has failed to register a presidential candidate means that they will not be able to participate in a meeting called by the CNE for this Friday, when all six nominees who registered before this Thursday’s cut-off date will further discuss the agreed electoral guarantees.

Party political logistical kiosks will also be pushed back to a distance of 200 metres from voting centres on election day to avoid voter intimidation or activists attempting to influence voters. Meanwhile, the president has also agreed during the campaign period to “avoid” making nationally broadcast speeches, which are mandatorily carried on all public and private media.

Electoral guarantees

The electoral guarantees agreed upon in Thursday’s agreement include safeguarding equal access to both private and public, national and international media, as well as social media coverage.

Lucena concluded that the deal “ratified the dialogue” in the Dominican Republic, even though it had not resulted in an official deal with the national government and the MUD. While Lucena clarified that May 20 will see elections for president as well as state and local legislatures, she made no mention, however, of National Assembly elections.

The agreement also commits the CNE to creating a delegation to observe “ all phases of the electoral process” with participants from United Nations and “other mutually agreed upon international bodies and organisations”. The vehemently anti-Maduro secretary-general of the Organization of American States, Luis Almagro, will also be invited to the country as an electoral observer.

Last week a request by President Maduro to call “mega elections” of all municipal and regional legislative councils, the National Assembly, and the presidency on the same day was rejected by the CNE on technical grounds, with Lucena declaring, "On April 22 we will elect only our president."

In addition, Lucena went on to announce that the electoral registry will be re-opened for further voter registration, both within Venezuela and in embassies and consulates abroad so that Venezuelans with a local visa outside the country can vote. Similarly, voting centres which had been relocated following violent outbreaks in July 2017’s Constituent Assembly elections are to be returned to their initial location.

On Tuesday, CNE Rector Tania D'Amelio told Panorama that she could not confirm that National Assembly elections would be held this year, as the proposal is still under evaluation by the body's technical committee.

www.venezuelanalysis.com The views and opinions expressed in these articles are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Embassy

The agreement also guarantees that “audits” of the electoral process will be carried out in a “not inferior” way to those to carried out during the previous regional and municipal elections, which saw over twenty audits supervised by representatives of all participating political parties as a standard operating practice.

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US Interferes in Elections in Venezuela & Latin America

Venezuela

In reality, the U.S. has continued its longtime practice of working to destabilize democratically elected, leftist governments throughout Latin America right up to the present day.

We don’t know whether the CIA supported a coup d’état that temporarily removed former president Hugo Chávez from power in 2002. But we do know that an integrated and consistent effort existed across U.S. agencies to depose the leftist Venezuelan government throughout Chávez’s time in office, from 1999 until his death in 2013.

While CIA covert operations undoubtedly play a role in this interference, the spy agency is far from the only one working to destabilize foreign governments.

Most notably, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the International Republican Institute (IRI) play an immense role in influencing political outcomes throughout the world. And they do it openly — under the guise of “democracy promotion.”

After Chávez returned to power after the coup, the opposition attempted to remove him through a recall referendum. In the run-up to the vote, U.S. Ambassador Charles Shapiro hosted prominent opposition leaders, including Julio Borges and Henry Ramos, for a strategy dinner.

Three contemporary cases of U.S. “democracy promotion” expose that this practice is little more than outright interference in other countries’ elections, aimed not at ensuring functional democracies, but rather at installing governments friendly to U.S. interests. Rather than seeking to perpetuate democracy across the globe like a global superpower, the U.S. behaves like an imperial power that attempts to cultivate governments supporting U.S. economic and security interests, regardless of their democratic credentials.

During this dinner, Shapiro and Peter DeShazo, another high-ranking U.S. diplomat, advised the opposition on how to better contest Chávez and his allies, including counseling that for “the opposition to be effective, it needed to reach out to public opinion with a coordinated, coherent, and positive public message, put forward a program or plan of action, and reach out not only to oppositionists but also to independents and chavistas.”

Chávez won the recall referendum, but faced a presidential election in 2006. In preparation for that election, the IRI organized basic training seminars for opposition political parties and their leaders throughout Venezuela, which included political advice from U.S. politicians. One former IRI contractor, who helped

Should the U.S. continue this practice, it shouldn’t be surprised that other global powers will push back against the U.S., often through their own covert actions.

Venezuela 31

to run some of these seminars, told me that their ultimate purpose was to help the opposition “get [their] s— together, so they could defeat Chávez.”

Another high-ranking U.S. diplomat repeatedly tried in meetings to prod the opposition to unify because “there were 50 opposition parties registered!”

began to investigate USAID funding in the country, prompting some contractors to destroy their files and flee Venezuela. In the end, these efforts to unseat Chávez ultimately failed, and he reigned until his death.

So desperate were the Americans to topple Chávez that when former governor Manuel Rosales became the opposition front-runner during the campaign, the IRI specifically “brought in five technical specialists” to assist his campaign.

USAID operated in a similarly aggressive manner in Bolivia after the election of President Evo Morales in 2005, a fierce anti-imperial critic of U.S. foreign policy.

Shortly after Morales’s victory, he met with U.S. Ambassador David Greenlee. Greenlee threatened the new Bolivian president and sought to demonstrate “the crucial importance of U.S. contributions to key international financial [institutions] on which Bolivia depended for assistance, such as the International Development Bank (IDB), the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. “When you think of the IDB, you should think of the U.S.,” the ambassador said. “This is not blackmail, it is simple reality.”

Bolivia

Beyond this training, USAID explicitly worked to diminish domestic support for Chávez throughout civil society. The U.S. Embassy reported that USAID’s Office for Transition Initiatives, for example, held more than 3,000 events aimed at “delivering alternative values” and giving opposition activists an opportunity to pull “hardcore Chavistas” away from Chávez.

Some of these events in poor Caracas neighborhoods were disguised to appear organic and authentic — even as they disseminated propaganda critical of the Chávez government in an attempt to push residents toward the opposition. While these events were designed to look “very neutral in the eyes of the government,” as one USAID contractor described them to me, with no affiliation with a political party and hosted by “people from the

In case Morales defied these threats, USAID also went to work. The agency moved from funding economic development projects and assisting the government to supporting local opposition strongholds and aiming to block Morales’s political agenda. In one case, USAID even bankrolled an array of groups opposed to Morales’s efforts to construct a new Constitution that would have further fostered a participatory democracy. As in Venezuela, however, these efforts ultimately failed, and Morales continues as president.

Nicaragua In Central America, the same U.S. agencies desperately tried to prevent the election of former revolutionary leader Daniel Ortega in 2006. Shortly before the election, recently retired longtime U.S. diplomat Tom Shannon brought together U.S. ambassadors from throughout Central America. During this meeting, U.S. Ambassador to Nicaragua Paul Trivelli toldShannon that an Ortega victory “would give Chavez a foothold in the region.” Shannon agreed and underscored the importance that neither Ortega nor another candidate who he influenced win.

neighborhood,” they were funded by the U.S. government with logistical assistance from opposition political parties.

Despite these efforts, Chávez again succeeded at the ballot box, easily defeating Rosales. But the U.S. did not give up; on the contrary, the contractors got bolder, furnishing a burgeoning, anti-Chávez student movement with grants, organizational resources and training. Eventually, the Venezuelan government

In a separate meeting, USAID personnel asserted to U.S. Embassy staff that “timing is crucial for the receipt of election and other financial assistance to bolster chances for a reform-minded, democratic candidate to win the elections” over Ortega. The IRI also moved to counteract Ortega’s electoral prospects, 32

working with a private Nicaraguan university to provide training for members from four political parties, all of whom opposed Ortega. However, as in Venezuela and Nicaragua, the U.S.-preferred candidates were defeated by those they sought to punish.

The failed efforts in these three countries against different popularly elected candidates show that the United States hasn’t stopped trying to undermine leftist Latin American leaders. But even failed efforts undoubtedly generate conditions more conducive to a pendulum shift to the right. And indeed, we have recently witnessed leftist governments displaced in Argentina, Brazil and Honduras.

These U.S. efforts to undermine Latin American leaders make it hard for the United States to cry foul as Russia moves to ensure that countries have governments favorable to its interests. Until the United States renounces electoral meddling, it cannot expect other countries to respect U.S. elections.

As evidenced by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s recent praise of the Monroe Doctrine, many U.S. leaders still view Latin America through a paternalistic and imperial lens. Many U.S. diplomats do not believe that Latin Americans are capable of properly selecting their own leaders. Therefore, the U.S. implements “democracy promotion” programs to show Latin American citizens whom they ought to select.

By Tim Gill- Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina www.venezuelanalysis.com The views and opinions expressed in these articles are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Embassy

But these efforts are nakedly self-interested.

The U.S. pushes leaders that embrace, or at least do not seriously challenge, U.S. economic and security interests — namely neoliberal economic policies like free trade, privatization of industry and deregulation; liberal democratic rather than participatory democratic efforts; and counterterrorism and counternarcotics programs.

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US Imposes fresh sanctions against Venezuela's Petro

The latest sanctions are believed to be part of a larger set which will once again target Venezuelan officials and other government associates. U.S. President Donald Trump has announced fresh sanctions against Venezuela's fledgling Petro cryptocurrency, which was launched specifically to help stabilize the Latin American nation's economy.

Venezuelan Constitutional Assembly member, Diosdado Cabello, however, rejected the sanctions, explaining that "the enormous difference is that the Petro has a tangible backup, oil. No one can negate Venezuela's oil reserves".

Opposition leader Antonio Ledezma called for such sanctions recently in an open letter to Argentinian President Macri, Peruvian President Kuczynski, and Chilean President Piñera. In the letter, Ledezma, who is fleeing the Venezuelan justice system, "respectfully requests that the Latin-American governments implement sanctions" against his own country.

The blockade, due to be signed and implemented today, restricts the use of Petros in U.S. financial transactions, McClatchy reports. Trump and other critics have claimed the Petro, backed by Venezuela's oil reserves – the largest in the world – is unreliable. Yet in presales alone, Venezuela has already made over US$5 billion dollars.

www.venezuelanalysis.com The views and opinions expressed in these articles are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Embassy

The Petro, which was made available for presale on Feb. 20, is being used specifically to counter U.S.-imposed sanctions and the economic war waged

by Washington.

Last month, President Nicolas Maduro said the new digital currency exists to strengthen Venezuela's "monetary sovereignty, to make financial transactions and overcome the financial blockade." Other countries subject to U.S. sanctions are now considering launching their own crypto-currencies.

Venezuela has yet to officially respond to news of the latest round of penalties imposed upon it by the United States, believed to be part of a larger set which will once again target Venezuelan officials and other government associates.

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Opinion & Analysis

Sanctions against Venezuela: Exonerating the Empire

The intent of the sanctions is clear: to inflict maximum pain on Venezuela so as to encourage the people of the country to overthrow the democratically elected government.

That same month, the US government added further sanctions that prevent Venezuela from doing what governments routinely do with much of their debt, which is “roll it over” by borrowing again when a bond matures. The sanctions also made it difficult if not impossible for Venezuela to undertake debt restructuring, a process wherein interest and principal payments are postponed and creditors receive new bonds, which the sanctions explicitly prohibit.

The United States has for years undermined the Venezuelan economy with economic sanctions, but US media coverage of Venezuela’s financial crisis has gone out of its way to obscure this.

The intent of the sanctions is clear: to inflict maximum pain on Venezuela so as to encourage the people of the country to overthrow the democratically elected government. SUNY professor Gabriel Hetland (The Nation, 8/17/16) pointed out in 2016 that the Obama government “prevented Venezuela from obtaining much-needed foreign financing and investment.” Such policies, Hetland notes, have had a considerable and highly detrimental impact at a time when Venezuela is in desperate need of dollars but is prevented from gaining access to them by Washington.

According to economist Mark Weisbrot (AlterNet, 11/3/17), the sanctions implemented that month appear designed “to prevent an economic recovery and worsen the shortages (which include essential medicines and food).” New York Times (12/17/17) The word “sanctions” does not appear in this New York Times feature (12/17/17) on how Venezuela’s economic crisis is leading to child malnutrition.

All of this is rarely mentioned when US media report the hardships facing Venezuelans or describe the causes of Venezuela’s economic and political crisis.

A New York Times(12/17/17) story told readers that Venezuelan children are facing hunger, with hundreds dying from malnutrition, because “years of economic mismanagement set the stage for the current disaster”—according to “many economists.”

In August 2017, two weeks before the Trump administration intensified the sanctions against Venezuela, UN Special Rapporteur Idriss Jazairy noted that they “would worsen the situation of the people of Venezuela” and that sanctions are disruptive for any state, and can have a particularly devastating impact on the citizens of developing countries [such as Venezuela] when they impair the economy.

However, less than two weeks earlier, following a trip to Venezuela, UN Rapporteur Alfred de Zayas (ThinkProgress,12/8/17) offered his analysis of what “set the stage for the current disaster.” He reportedly said that the conditions in the country did not constitute a full-blown humanitarian crisis, but that there are “shortages, scarcity and distribution delays, etc.,” and listed sanctions among the causes of these problems: What is important is to get to know the causes and take measures against contraband, monopolies, hoarding,

When Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in November 2017 proposed a meeting with creditors to discuss a restructuring of the country’s public debt, the Trump administration warned US bondholders that attending this meeting could put them in violation of US economic sanctions against Venezuela, which can be punished with 30 years in jail and as much as $10 million dollars in fines for businesses.

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It’s sanctions, not “years of economic mismanagement,” Rodríguez noted, that prevent Venezuela from turning rising oil prices into food for hungry children: Major financial institutions have delayed the processing of all financial transfers from Venezuelan entities, significantly hampering the ability of Venezuelan companies to do business in the United States.

Even Citgo, a Venezuelan-owned subsidiary that owns 4 percent of the United States’ refining capacity, hasn’t been able to get US financial institutions to issue routine trade credit since sanctions were imposed.

corruption, manipulation of the currency and the distortions in the economy caused by an economic and financial war which includes [the effects of international] sanctions.

The Washington Post’s editorial board (2/23/18), in writing about what it misdescribed as “Latin America’s Worst-Ever Refugee Crisis” (see FAIR.org, 2/18/18), overlooked these dimensions of what has happened in Venezuela, writing: Though it controls the world’s largest oil reserves, the regime founded by Hugo Chávez has wrecked not just oil production but the economy as a whole. At no point did the paper mention the US role in wrecking the Venezuelan “economy as a whole.” It’s a striking example of what Venezuelan economist Francisco Rodríguez described in Foreign Policy (1/12/18): problematic idea driving current US policy is the belief that financial sanctions can hurt the Venezuelan government without causing serious harm to

Another Post article, by Rachelle Krygier, reporting on the serious challenges facing Venezuela’s health system, likewise ignored US sanctions as part of the explanation. Instead, she wrote: Lower oil prices and populist policies championed by the late Hugo Chávez and continued by his successor, President Nicolás Maduro, have plunged Venezuela into a spiraling economic emergency.

The Post’s Anthony Faiola (3/2/18), writing about the “humanitarian crisis” driving Venezuelans to flee their country, similarly acquitted the empire of any wrongdoing: Venezuela has reached a breaking point, with lower oil prices and economic mismanagement leading to the world’s highest inflation rate and spiraling indexes of poverty and malnutrition.

CNN (3/2/18) also exclusively blamed the Venezuelan government for the country’s difficulties: “Corruption, mismanagement and price freezes have caused Venezuela’s economy to collapse.”

In an article on NBC’s website (3/12/18) on how “Life Is a Daily Struggle in Venezuela,” Mariana Zuñiga claimed that “Venezuela’s crisis can be traced back to Chávez,” who “relied heavily on oil revenues to fund his ‘21st Century Socialism’ agenda,” leaving Venezuelans with

ordinary Venezuelans. That’s impossible when 95 percent of Venezuela’s export revenue comes from oil sold by the state-owned oil company. Cutting off the government’s access to dollars will leave the economy without the hard currency needed to pay for imports of food and medicine. Starving the Venezuelan economy of its foreign currency earnings risks turning the country’s current humanitarian crisis into a full-blown humanitarian catastrophe.

Even as Venezuela’s export revenues rose last year, as world oil prices increased, Venezuela’s imports fell by 31 percent, Rodríguez pointed out: The reason is that the country lost access to international financial markets. Unable to roll over its debt, it was forced to build up huge external surpluses to continue servicing that debt in a desperate attempt to avoid a default.

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“little savings to fall back on” when oil prices collapsed. The other key reasons she listed for Venezuela’s problems were government currency controls and “years of excessive regulations [that] have discouraged local production.”

These elisions exonerate the empire’s economic warfare against Venezuela and the harm the U.S has intentionally inflicted on the Venezuelan people. As de Zayas (Real News Network, 3/14/18) notes simply, the sanctions “have caused death.” That these articles opt against informing their readers that American sanctions are contributing to the issues facing Venezuela is all the more egregious considering that the sanctions violate international law, contravening both UN Resolution 2625, which forbids “the use of economic, political or any other type of measures to coerce another state” and the charter of the Organization of American States, which bars the “use of coercive measures of an economic or political character.” As usual (e.g., FAIR.org, 9/19/13, 12/8/17), US media do not deem American violations of international law newsworthy.

She neglected to point out what 150 scholars, writers, artists, activists and workers did in a letter published three days earlier (Alliance for Justice, 3/9/18): that the impact of US sanctions “falls most heavily on the poorest and most marginal sectors of society, to coerce political and economic change in a sister democracy.” They described sanctions as “a cynical use of coercive economic power to attack a nation that is already dealing with hyperinflation and shortages of basic commodities.” The letter also points to polls showing that a large majority of Venezuelans oppose sanctions, and notes: It is no secret that Venezuela, unlike Mexico, Honduras, Colombia, Egypt or Saudi Arabia, is targeted for regime change by the US precisely because of Venezuela’s leadership in resisting US hegemony and the imposition of the neoliberal model in Latin America.

And of course, Venezuela holds the largest oil reserves in the world, attracting more unwanted attention from Washington.

www.venezuelanalysis.com The views and opinions expressed in these articles are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Embassy

As the situation worsens in Venezuela, the US government has decided to aggravate matters further by repeatedly ramping up sanctions, most recently earlier this month, but media have failed to note the connection between such measures and the multitude of stories about Venezuelans’ struggles that they keep publishing.

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International Interference:

Noam Chomsky, Danny Glover & 150 Other Activists Slam USCanadian Sanctions on Venezuela

Over 150 prominent US and Canadian citizens oppose their government's imposition of unilateral sanctions against Caracas, which they consider an illegal, coercive economic measure punishing Venezuela's poorest and most vulnerable.

At this important moment, we call on the US and Canadian governments to support this process, allowing the Venezuelan people to vote democratically, free of foreign threats, for their next president.

Sanctions added by the Trump and Trudeau administrations to Obama-era sanctions against Venezuela impose new burdens on ordinary Venezuelans who are just trying to live their lives. Unilateral sanctions are illegal under international law. Over 150 prominent US and Canadian individuals and organizations have signed the letter below which is being delivered to US Senators and Congress Members as well as Canadian Parliamentarians.

The Alliance for Global Justice along with other defenders of Venezuelan sovereignty call on Congresspeople, the President, members of Parliament and the Prime Minister of Canada to support the recent progress in dialogue made in Venezuela, rather than impose more sanctions, and remove those now in place. Previously there were longstanding mediation talks between the Venezuelan government and the Opposition in the Dominican Republic, presided over by the former Prime Minister of Spain Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, Dominican President Danielo Medina, and the foreign ministers of Chile, Mexico, Bolivia, Nicaragua and others. These talks have been supported by Pope Francis.

Open Letter in Support of Mediation not Sanctions on Venezuela We urge the United States and Canadian governments to immediately remove their illegal* sanctions against Venezuela and to support eorts at mediation between the government of Venezuela and the nonviolent segments of the political opposition.

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, who is up for re-election, has just recently reached an agreement with four other presidential candidates to hold presidential elections on May 20.

We, the undersigned organizations and individuals in the US and Canada, support hemispheric 38

advancing democracy and freedom, the sanctions violate the Venezuelan peoples’ basic human right to sovereignty, as outlined in the UN and OAS Charters.

We call on the political leaders of the United States and Canada to reject overheated rhetoric and to contribute to the search for real solutions to Venezuela’s political and economic problems. We urge the US and Canadian governments to rescind their sanctions and support the mediation efforts pursued by the Chancellor of the Dominican Republic Miguel Vargas, the President of Dominican Republic Danilo Medina, former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the Vatican, and supported by a growing number of Latin American nations.

relations based on respect for the sovereignty of all peoples of the Americas. We are deeply concerned by the use of illegal sanctions, whose effect falls most heavily on the poorest and most marginal sectors of society, to coerce political and economic change in a sister democracy.

Polls in Venezuela show that the large majority of Venezuelans oppose sanctions, regardless of their opinion of the Maduro government. Sanctions merely complicate efforts by the Vatican, Dominican Republic, and other international actors to mediate a resolution to the deep polarization in Venezuela. Moreover, sanctions undermine efforts of the democratically elected government and Constituent Assembly to address critical economic issues and determine their own political destiny.

* Chapter 4 Article 19 of the OAS Charter states: No State or group of States has the right to intervene, directly or indirectly, for any reason whatever, in the internal or external affairs of any other State. The foregoing principle prohibits not only armed force but also any other form of interference or attempted threat against the personality of the State or against its political, economic, and cultural elements.

Despite the high-minded rhetoric of officials in Washington and Ottawa, it is not a genuine concern for democracy, human rights, and social justice that drives the belligerent interventionist posture towards Caracas. From President Obama’s admittedly untrue presidential decree that Venezuela represents a national security threat to the United States, to UN Ambassador Nikki Haley’s declaration that Venezuela is “an increasingly violent narco-state” that threatens the world, the use of hyperbole in diplomatic situations seldom contributes to peaceful solutions on the world stage.

Signers:

It is no secret that Venezuela, unlike Mexico, Honduras, Colombia, Egypt, or Saudi Arabia, is targeted for regime change by the US precisely because of Venezuela’s leadership in resisting US hegemony and the imposition of the neoliberal model in Latin America. And of course, Venezuela holds the largest oil reserves in the world, attracting more unwanted attention from Washington.

The US and Canada tried and failed to use the Organization of American States (OAS) to build a bloc to hypocritically evoke the Democratic Charter against Venezuela. Recently, Luis Almagro, the rogue Secretary General of the OAS, went so far as to publicly support the swearing in of a parallel Supreme Court unconstitutionally appointed by opposition legislators and allowed them to use the OAS headquarters in Washington DC for their ceremony – without the approval of any OAS member state. Almagro has thereby delegitimized the OAS, emboldened the most extreme and violent elements of the Venezuelan opposition, and side-lined efforts at mediation.

The US-Canadian sanctions represent a cynical use of coercive economic power to attack a nation that is already dealing with hyperinflation and shortages of basic commodities. While said to be in the name of 39

UNITED STATES Noam Chomsky Danny Glover, Citizen-Artist Estela Vazquez, Executive Vice President, 1199 SEIU Bishop Thomas J. Gumbleton, Archdiocese of Detroit Jill Stein, Green Party Peter Knowlton, General President, United Electrical Workers Dr. Alfred de Zayas, former Chief, Petitions Dept, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Medea Benjamin, co-founder, Code Pink Dan Kovalik, Counsel, United Steelworkers Union Clarence Thomas, ILWU Local10 (retired) Natasha Lycia Ora Bannan, President, National Lawyers Guild Chuck Kaufman, National Co-Coordinator, Alliance for Global Justice James Early, Articulation of Afro Descendants in Latin America and the Caribbean Gloria La Riva, coordinator, Cuba and Venezuela Solidarity Committee Karen Bernal, Chair, Progressive Caucus, California Democratic Party Kevin Zeese, Margaret Flowers, co-directors, Popular Resistance Chris Bender, Administrator, SEIU 1000, retired Mary Hanson Harrison, President Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, US Section Alfred L. Marder, President, US Peace Council Tamie Dramer, Executive Boardmember, California Democratic Party Greg Wilpert, journalist School of Americas Watch (SOAW) Coordinating Collective Gerry Condon, President, Board of Directors, Veterans for Peace Tiana Ocasio, President, Connecticut Labor Council for Latin American Advancement Leah Bolger, Coordinator, World Beyond War Alexander Main, Senior Assoc for Intl Policy, Center for Economic and Policy Research Kevin Martin, President, Peace Action and Peace Action Education Fund Dr. Robert W. McChesney, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Berthony Dupont, Director, Haiti Liberté Newspaper Dr. Frederick B. Mills, Department of Philosophy, Bowie State University Marsha Rummel, Adlerperson, City of Madison Common Council, District 6 Monica Moorehead, Workers World Party Kim Ives, Journalist, Haiti Liberté Cindy Sheehan, Cindy’s Soapbox Claudia Lucero, Executive Director, Chicago Religious Leadership Network on Latin America William Camacaro, Venezuela activist Baltimore Phil Berrigan Memorial Chapter Veterans For Peace David W. Campbell, Secretary-Treasurer, USW Local 675 (Carson, CA) Alice Bush, retired Northwest Indiana Division Director SEIU Local 73

Teresa Gutierrez, Co-Director International Action Center Claire Deroche, NY Interfaith Campaign Against Torture Eva Golinger, journalist and writer The Cross Border Network (Kansas City) Antonia Domingo, Pittsburgh Labor Council for Latin American Advancement David Swanson, Director of World Beyond War Matt Meyer, National Co-chair, Fellowship of Reconciliation Rev. Daniel Dale, Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), CLRN Board of Directors Daniel Chavez, Transnational Institute Kathleen Desautels, SP (8th Day Center for Justice*) Michael Eisenscher, National Coord. Emeritus, U.S. Labor Against the War (USLAW) Dr. Paul Dordal, Director, Christian Network for Liberation and Equality Dr. Douglas Friedman, Director International Studies, College of Charleston Fr. Charles Dahm, Archdiocesan Director of Domestic Violence Outreach Blase Bonpane, Director, Office of the Americas Larry Birns, Director, Council on Hemispheric Affairs Task Force on the Americas Dr. Sharat G. Lin, former president, San Jose Peace and Justice Center Stansfield Smith, Chicago ALBA Solidarity Alicia Jrapko, U.S. coordinator, International Committee for Peace, Justice and Dignity National Network on Cuba Diana Bohn, Co-coordinator, Nicaragua Center for Community Action Joe Jamison, Queens NY Peace Council Jerry Harris, National Secretary, Global Studies Association of North America MLK Coalition of Greater Los Angeles Charlie Hardy, author, Cowboy in Caracas Dan Shea, National Board, Veterans For Peace Houston Peace and Justice Center Dr. Christy Thornton, Fellow, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University Code Pink Houston Workers Solidarity Action Network.org Rochester Committee on Latin America Patricio Zamorano, Academic and International Affairs Analyst Cliff Smith, business manager, Union of Roofers, Waterproofers and Allied Workers, Local 36 Michael Bass, Convener, School of the Americas Watch-Oakland/East Bay Joe Lombardo, Marilyn Levin, Co-Coordinators of United National Antiwar Committee Dr. Jeb Sprague-Silgado, University of California Santa Barbara Portland Central America Solidarity Committee (PCASC) Dr. Pamela Palmater, Mi’kmaq lawyer Chair in Indigenous Governance Ryerson University Lee Gloster, Steward IBT 364, Trustee, N. Central IN Labor Chapter, Northern Indiana Area Labor Federation Celeste Howard, Secretary, WILPF, Portland Branch (Oregon) Mario Galván, Sacramento Action for Latin America Hector Gerardo, Executive Director, 1 Freedom for All Jorge Marin, Venezuela Solidarity Committee Ricardo Vaz, writer and editor of Investig’Action Dr. T.M. Scruggs, University of Iowa, Professor Emeritus Dr. Mike Davis, Dept. of Creative Writing, Univ. of CA, Riverside; editor of the New Left Review Dr. Lee Artz, Dept of Media Studies; Director, Center for Global Studies, Purdue University Northwest Dr. Arturo Escobar, Dept. of Anthropology University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Cheri Honkala, Director, Poor Peoples Economic Human Rights Campaign Suren Moodliar, Coordinator, Encuentro5 (Boston) Dr. Jack Rasmus, Economics Dept., St. Mary’s College, Moraga, California Alice Slater, Nuclear Age Peace Foundation Rich Whitney, Co-chair, Green Party Peace Action Committee David Bacon, independent photojournalist Dr. Kim Scipes, Department of Sociology, Purdue University Northwest Jeff Mackler, National Secretary, Socialist Action Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES) Henry Lowendorf, Co-chair, Greater New Haven Peace Council Judith Bello, Ed Kinane (founders), Upstate Drone Action Dr. Daniel Whitesell, Lecturer in the Dept. of Spanish & Portuguese, UCLA Dr. William I. Robinson, Sociology and Global and International Studies, UC-Santa Barbara Emmanuel Rozental, Vilma Almendra, Pueblos en Camino, Abya Yala

Ben Manski, President, Liberty Tree Foundation for the Democratic Revolution Frank Pratka, Baltimore-Matanzas Association/Maryland-Cuba Friendship Coalition Dr. Hilbourne Watson, Emeritus, Department of International Relations, Bucknell University Dr. Minqi Li, Economics Department, University of Utah Christina Schiavoni, PhD researcher, Boston Dr. Robert E. Birt, Department of Philosophy, Bowie State University Topanga Peace Alliance Judy Somberg, Susan Scott, Esq., Co-chairs, National Lawyers Guild Task Force on the Americas Audrey Bomse, Esq., Co-chair, National Lawyers Guild Palestine Subcommittee Daniel Chavez, Transnational Institute Barby Ulmer, Board President, Our Developing World Barbara Larcom, Coordinator, Casa Baltimore/Limay; President, Nicaraguan Cultural Alliance Nick Egnatz, Veterans for Peace Dr. Marc Becker, Latin American Studies, Truman State University Dr. John H. Sinnigen, Professor Emeritus, University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) Dr. Dale Johnson, Professor Emeritus, Sociology, Rutgers University Sulutasen Amador, Co-coordinator, Chukson Water Protectors Mara Cohen, Communications Hub, Trade Justice Alliance Dorotea Manuela, Co-Chair Rosa Parks Human Right Committee Efia Nwangaza, Malcom X Center – WMXP Community Radio Dr. Chris Chase-Dunn, Sociology, University of California-Riverside Dr. Nick Nesbitt, Comparative Literature, Princeton Timeka Drew, coordinator, Global Climate Convergence Jack Gilroy, Friends of Franz & Ben www.bensalmon.org Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists, Social Justice Committee Victor Wallis, Professor, Liberal Arts, Berkeley College of Music CANADA Jerry Dias, President, UNIFOR Mike Palecek, National President, Canadian Union of Postal Workers Harvey Bischof, President, Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation Mark Hancock National President of the Canadian Union of Public Employees Stephanie Smith, President of the British Columbia Government and Service Employees’ Union Linda McQuaig, journalist and author, Toronto Raul Burbano, Program Director, Common Frontiers Miguel Figueroa, President, Canadian Peace Congress Heide Trampus, Coordinator, Worker to Worker, Canada-Cuba Labour Solidarity Network Rights Action (U.S. and Canada) Joe Emersberger, writer, UNIFOR member Nino Pagliccia, Jorge Arancibia, Marta Palominos, Frente para la Defensa de los Pueblos Hugo Chavez Fire This Time Movement for Social Justice Venezuela Solidarity Campaign – Vancouver The Hamilton Coalition To Stop The War Vancouver Communities in Solidarity with Cuba (VCSC) Maude Barlow, Chairperson, Council of Canadians Canadian Network on Cuba Mobilization Against War and Occupation (MAWO) – Vancouver Dr. William Carroll, University of Victoria, Canada Andrew Dekany, LL.M, Lawyer Dr. Leo Panitch, Professor Emeritus, York University, Toronto Canada-Philippines Solidarity for Human Rights (CPSHR) Alma Weinstein, Bolivarian Circle Louis Riel Toronto Maria Elena Mesa, Coord, Sunday Poetry and Festival Internacional de Poesia Patria Grande, Toronto Dr. Radhika Desai, University of Manitoba OTHER Dr. Grazia Ietto-Gillies, Emeritus professor of Applied Economics, London South Bank University; expert for UNCTAD [United Nations Transnational Corporations and Management Division]; co-founder of the World Economics Association Sergio Romero Cuevas, former Mexican Ambassador to Haiti Observatorio de Derechos Humanos de los Pueblos, Oaxaca, Mexico

Source: Alliance for Global Justice www.venezuelanalysis.com The views and opinions expressed in these articles are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Embassy

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Fallacies and Inaccuracies About Venezuelan Migration With so many politically charged figures knocking around about Venezuelan emigration and a so-called “exodus”, who should we believe?

They claim that almost a third (29%) of Venezuelan families has at least one relative living outside national borders and, on average, nearly two people (1.97) have migrated from the nucleus of the family (father, mother, partner, child or sibling).

A narrative has been increasingly positioned in the press for the past two or three years concerning the "exodus" of Venezuelans as a result of the "humanitarian crisis" that stems from the economic war and the financial siege against Venezuela.

The UN Agency states that immigration stock of foreign-born citizens living in Venezuela between 1990 and 2000 was more than 1 million, and by 2017 surpassed 1.4 million.

The mainstream media and global propaganda outlets are saying that more than 2 million people have left Venezuela. The fact that this incomplete information is allowed to circulate is only further evidence of our "post-truth" world, where there is no objective truth that can be clarified other than that which is validated by merely being news.

The following table dismantles the thesis cooked up in the Miami media which claims that "90% of the more than 1.5 million Venezuelans now living abroad left the country in the past 16 years".

For its part, the World Factbook of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), in classifying the world's countries according to their net migration rates, places Venezuela in 143rd place (- 1.2 migrants for each 1,000 inhabitants).

This highly propagandized "data" comes from a report that was prepared by an NGO called the Voice of the Venezuelan Diaspora Observatory with alleged figures from host countries' institutes for statistics.

Likewise, the staunchly anti-Chávez newspaper Tal Cual states that more than 4 million people (4.091.717) have emigrated from Venezuela based on a survey of 2,000 people between November 17 and December 4, 2017, from which the company Consultores 21 made projections.

Net migration rates compares the difference between the number of people per thousand inhabitants who enter and leave a country for the year (according to mid-year population), and although UN data shows that immigration is and has been consistently higher than emigration, the CIA shows that the net rate for Venezuela is negative.

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VENEZUELANS FLEEING TO COLOMBIA 41

Between data and projections, it is reported that (of Venezuelans emigrating to Colombia) 153,443 migrants have exceeded their legally-permitted stay, and in staying without a visa they are employed without any backing by the social security system, which makes them subject to labour exploitation.

Equally, there are 47,305 migrants who have legalized their immigration. Combined, this totals an estimated 200,000 people who would form only 0.4% of the Colombian population which is around 50 million inhabitants.

From the same CIA data we can see that nine of the twelve countries of the Lima Group countries have negative migration rates (more people leaving than entering), three of them have more negative rates than Venezuela: they are Mexico (- 1.80) Guatemala (-1.90) and Peru (- 2.20). In 2012, Venezuela’s rate, as the CIA calculated it, was zero (0).

As Giuseppe de Corso said on the program "La Hojilla" on Venezolana de Television: neither data on Venezuelan emigration nor the fact that the number of Venezuelans – children of Venezuelans or of foreigners – living abroad has increased, match the mainstream media claims of an 'exodus'.

However, according to the table presented above, Venezuela's emigration stock [Venezuelan-born citizens living outside of Venezuela] registered by the UN in 2017 was little more than 650,000 people, of which, according to the report, approximately 250,000 were in Europe, another 250,000 in North America (Canada and USA) and 75,000 in South America. The destination most sought by Venezuelans in this continent is Colombia with about 50,000 people living there, while Colombian immigration to Venezuela is about one million people.

Many have left fleeing from difficulties caused by the financial siege on Venezuela which was intensified by the blockade that the Trump administration implemented, encouraged by the efforts of [former National Assembly President] Julio Borges in coordination with Presidents Santos, Temer, Macri, Kuczinsky and others.

Migration data has been used to stoke conflicts and hide the failures of governments that openly confront Venezuela. According to the very same CIA, neighboring Guyana is among the countries with the highest rate of emigration.

According to the UN refugee agency, Colombia itself has the largest displaced population due to conflict and violence, with 7.3 million internally and externally displaced people registered at the end of 2016. In global terms, Colombia is followed by Syria (6.3 million), Sudan (3.3 million), Iraq (3 million), and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (2.2 million). Many of these displaced persons come to Venezuela from Colombia. The same UNHRC declared at the end of 2016 that the official number of Colombia refugees in Venezuela was 172,000.

Admiral Kurt Kidd, head of the U.S. Southern Command, said before the US Senate’s Armed Services Committee that the Venezuelan emigration to countries of the South American region such as Colombia has reached 500,000, with 40,000 going to Brazil, and 93,000 to Ecuador, despite UN figures being much lower.

A report released by the Colombian Foreign Ministry and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) showed that 69% of those who cross the border with Colombia belong to the floating population that lives, works and studies in the border area, while 23% of those crossing the frontier claim that they will remain in the country for a few months, and only 5% leave Venezuela with the intention of staying permanently.

wwwvenezuelanalysis.com The views and opinions expressed in these articles are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Embassy

Venezuelan migration stock data registered by the UN Population Division website showing the amount of Venezuelan born citizens living abroad (cumulative emigration stock), and the amount of foreign-born citizens living in Venezuela (cumulative immigration stock).

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‘We Are All Venezuela’ People of the world ratify support and solidarity with Venezuela

WE ARE ALL

Under the slogan "We are all Venezuela", the people of the world ratified their support and solidarity with the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, in a global tweet that went viral.

The day, was replicated in different parts of the world, positioning the hash tag #TodosSomosVenezuela label in the first and second place of the national and world ranking. In the case of Venezuela, it was followed by the Hashtag #VenezuelaPazSiInjerenciaNo. Through these tweets, organizations, social movements, students, artists, intellectuals and diplomats of the world, rejected the constant interference of the US Government, the European Union (EU) and the so-called Group of Lima, in the internal affairs of Venezuela.

Specifically, the extension of the Decree issued in March 2015 by the then US president, Barack Obama, which declares the Bolivarian Republic as an "unusual and extraordinary threat" to the internal security of his nation; the alleged sanctions that they insist on imposing on Venezuela from the US and the EU, and the intentions of the Government of Peru to exclude Venezuela from the VIII Summit of the Americas, that will be held in Lima this April.

In this context, the Minister for People’s Power for Foreign Affairs of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Jorge Arreaza, thanked the expressions of solidarity and support of the people of the world to the South American country, in the global tweet "We Are All Venezuela". "Thanks to the friends of the world for so much solidarity. Imperialism will not succeed with the sons and daughters of Bolívar and Chávez. # JuntosTodoEsPosible. With @NicolasMaduro, Veneceremos! #TodosSomosVenezuela #VenezuelaPazSiInjerenciaNo, "the diplomat posted through his Twitter account @jaarreaza.

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www.mppre.gob.ve www.telesurtv.net

Asia:

World Urban ForumMalaysia

We believe that global, regional, national and local implementation frameworks of the New Urban Agenda being formulated since its adoption should be supported by key enablers capable of unlocking positive transformation, such as:

We, the participants of the Ninth session of the World Urban Forum — representing national, subnational and local governments, parliamentarians, civil society, older persons, women, youth, children, persons with disabilities, grassroots groups, indigenous peoples and local communities, private sector, foundations and philanthropies, international and regional organizations, academia, professionals and other relevant stakeholders — gathered in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to localize and scale up the implementation of the New Urban Agenda as an accelerator to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.

Strengthening the role of subnational and local governments, urban governance systems that ensure continuous dialogue among different levels of government and participation of all actors, and increasing multilevel and cross-sectoral coordination, transparency and accountability.

Encouraging sharing of creative solutions and innovative practices which enable a shift in mindset necessary to drive change.

Led by a strong spirit of collaboration, creativity and innovation, we share our aspirations for the future of Cities 2030 as the Cities for all where no-one and no place is left behind.

Building inclusive partnerships and strengthening age and gender responsive environments to ensure meaningful participation and engagement at all levels.

To this end, we call for the deployment of all efforts, means and resources available towards the operationalization of the concept of cities for all, ensuring that all inhabitants, of present and future generations, without discrimination of any kind, are able to inhabit and produce just, safe, healthy, accessible, affordable, resilient and sustainable cities and human settlements to foster prosperity and quality of life for all.

Adopting integrated territorial development, including through appropriate urban planning and design instruments, to ensure sustainable management and use of natural resources and land, appropriate compactness and density, diversity of uses, and revitalization of cultural heritage.

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Actionable recommendations

Deploying monitoring and reporting mechanisms, including assessment of impacts, that encourage best practices for effective policy making.

We, the participants of the WUF9, leveraging the advantage of the Forum, which convenes thousands of decision makers, key actors, stakeholders and communities, generated a wealth of ideas.

We draw attention to the persistent challenges faced by our cities and human settlements, such as:

We encourage the acceleration of the implementation of the New Urban Agenda through:

Limited opportunities and mechanisms for youth, women and grassroots organizations, as well as other civil society organizations, local, subnational and national governments, international and regional bodies to work together in planning, implementation and monitoring;

Frameworks 1) Encourage the formulation of implementation frameworks for the New Urban Agenda at all levels, including monitoring mechanisms, providing a coordinated space for an effective contribution from all stakeholders, aligning to the efforts and actions of the 2030 Agenda and other international, regional, national, subnational and local development frameworks.

Inequitable access to the city, including to decent jobs, public space, affordable and adequate housing and security of land tenure, safe, efficient and accessible public transport and mobility systems, infrastructure and other basic services and goods that cities offer;

2) Support the creation and consolidation of inclusive platforms and agendas for dialogue among all levels of government, decision makers and stakeholders such as regional, national and local Urban Forums and committees that can strengthen policy review and assessment of impacts. These can also foster exchange of experiences and cooperation, as well as scaling up voluntary commitments and actions from all partners.

Insufficient protection from human rights violations, including forced evictions, and inadequate inclusion of people living in poverty, persons with disabilities and other disadvantaged groups in urban planning, design, and legislation processes; Gender inequalities in urban economic and leaderships spheres.

3) Further develop and advocate for integrated territorial development, which includes integration of sectoral policies, institutions and investment; integration among the different spheres of government; spatial integration across the urban-rural continuum; improved coordination across actors; and enhanced alignment of national, subnational and local policies with international agendas.

We recognize that today we face emerging challenges that require urgent actions, including: Recognizing that crises are increasingly urban, which calls for inclusive urbanization tools adapted to local contexts and to the nature of natural and human made disasters and conflicts, as well as to guide humanitarian assistance, fast track recovery, and contribute to building and sustaining peace.

4) Adapt innovative and robust mechanisms for the diversification and expansion of the means of implementation, to cater for complex and integrated approaches promoted by the New Urban Agenda.

Technological innovations and improvements, research, capacity building, technical assistance and partnership development, among others, may require enhanced resourcing.

Managing the complexities of increased migration into cities, at all levels, leveraging positive contributions of all and using more inclusive planning approaches that facilitate social cohesion and create economic opportunities; Understanding the impact of new technologies and potential of open and accessible data, which require governance and design models that help to ensure no one is left behind;

Governance and partnerships 5) Adopt multiple collaborative governance mechanisms that actively engage national, subnational and local governments, all groups of society, including youth, women and grassroots organizations and particularly the excluded, vulnerable and disadvantaged groups. This work in solidarity is critical to promote more buy-in and co-responsibility in the activities towards sustainable urban development, and to ensure the sustainability of the results.

Addressing growing social and cultural inequalities, lack of access to economic opportunities, that are increasingly manifested in cities.

Responding to environmental degradation and climate change concerns.

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6) Promote multi-stakeholder constituency-based coalitions to use the implementation of the New Urban Agenda to better prevent, prepare, and respond to urban crises.

We, the participants of the Ninth Session of the World Urban Forum, recognize the value of the Forum convened by UN-Habitat as an inclusive platform to collect inputs from a broad range of stakeholders and to feed these into annual and quadrennial reporting on progress in the implementation of the New Urban Agenda.

Innovative solutions 7) Foster a culture of creativity and innovation to be embedded in the way cities and human settlements operate.

We call to further develop the role of UN-Habitat as a focal point in the United Nations system to support all countries and mobilization of stakeholders in the implementation, follow up and review of the New Urban Agenda, including through scaled up normative support.

8) Develop monitoring and data collection mechanisms, including community generated data, to enhance availability of information and disaggregated and comparable data at city, functional urban areas and community levels. This would promote informed and evidence-based decision making and policy formulation, assessing progress and impact at all levels.

We thank the Government of Malaysia, the City of Kuala Lumpur, and UN-Habitat for organizing the Forum, and commit to provide continuous cooperation to the next hosts, the Government of the United Arab Emirates and the city of Abu Dhabi.

9) Create an enabling environment and develop capacities for scaling up of good practices including municipal ďŹ nance, sustainable private and public investments in urban development and job creation, and generating value while advancing the public good.

www.wuf9.org The views and opinions expressed in these articles are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Embassy

10) Adopt accessibility and universal design as core principles into national, subnational and local action plans for implementing the New Urban Agenda through inclusive, accessible and participatory processes and consultations.

UN-Habitat Ms. Maimunah Mohd Sharif (Malaysia) is the Executive Director of the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat), appointed at the level of Under-Secretary- General by the Secretary-General, following an election by the General Assembly on 22 December 2017.

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China's advance in Africa exaggerated by a retreating U.S

In a speech the day of his departure for Africa, Mr Tillerson warned that China's Africa policy “encourages dependency using opaque contracts, predatory loan practices, and corrupt deals that mire nations in debt and undercut their sovereignty, denying them their long-term, self-sustaining growth.” "Its approach has led to mounting debt and few, if any, jobs in most countries,” Mr Tillerson charged. “When coupled with the political and fiscal pressure, this endangers Africa's natural resources and its long-term economic political stability."

China's growing influence in Africa is triggering something close to panic on the part of Trump administration officials, members of Congress and sections of the US media.

They depict China as a “predatory lender” that is “weaponising capital” in order to practice “a new form of colonialism” in Africa. But such accusations have little factual basis, according to US-based independent policy analysts.

TRUMP They suggest that the rhetoric being employed against China may be partly intended to divert attention from President Donald Trump's dismissive attitude toward a continent he has reportedly described as a collection of “sh**hole countries.”

CHINA FACTOR China's growing financial stake in Africa may come to threaten US interests, Mr Tillerson implied. And he argued that Beijing's refusal to condition its loans on adherence to human-rights and anti-corruption standards is imperilling Africa's democratic development.

Mr Trump's Africa diplomacy team remains riddled with vacancies. And the president appeared to underscore his disregard for African sensibilities by recalling Rex Tillerson from a long-awaited visit to Africa and then sacking him as secretary of state days after Mr Tillerson had sought to assure his hosts that the Trump administration does respect Africa.

But prior to and during his abbreviated safari, Mr Tillerson had framed the US approach toward Africa as consisting mainly of concerns about China and insurgencies. He offered no new programme initiatives while seeking to downplay the potential impact of Africa-related spending cuts proposed by Mr Trump.

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US-based policy analysts critical of the Trump administration's record on Africa do affirm the contention that China is uninterested in promoting respect for human rights in Africa. “Of course, Chinese government and firms have low if not zero interest in democratisation in Africa,” says Youyi Zhang, a research fellow at Boston University's Global Development Policy Centre. He adds, however, that “there are many domestic factors that contribute to lack of democracy and rule of law in Africa, more fundamental than the China factor.”

standard gauge railway linking Mombasa and Nairobi.

The US has meanwhile experienced delays in implementing President Obama's Power Africa initiative that aims to leverage a comparatively small sum of $7 billion in private investments for electricity generation.

Deborah Brautigam, director of the China Africa Research Initiative at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, adds, "It is worth pointing out, as we can see with oil investments from companies like Exxon and Shell, respect for human rights has not been a cornerstone of American or Western corporate investment in the continent.

Mr Tillerson noted prior to his sacking that the US typically does not build infrastructure in Africa. It focuses instead on development aid, health programmes and humanitarian relief, along with counter-terrorism efforts.

OBAMA YEARS While the Trump administration may be exaggerating and misportraying aspects of China's role in Africa, there is no doubt that Chinese involvement has deepened considerably in recent years. And China's rise in Africa has been accentuated by a decline in US involvement that began during the Obama years. China surpassed the US as Africa's largest trading partner in 2009.

"The US and China have traditionally funded complementary sectors in Africa," Prof Brautigam observes. And US officials do occasionally acknowledge that China's role in Africa has positive elements that are facilitating the development of poor countries.

DEBT BURDEN China's investments take the form of loans, not grants — leading to accusations that it is reversing progress made during the past two decades in easing Africa's debt burden. But most Chinese lending in Africa comes on favourable terms for borrowers, Prof Brautigam notes.

US foreign direct investment in the continent dropped 5.2 percent in 2016, while China's investments in projects in Africa grew by more than 100 percent that same year, according to a report by the Ernst and Young global consulting firm.

In what could be construed as an admission signalling the passing of an old order, US Africa Command chief Thomas Waldhauser recently told Congress that the US will “never outspend the Chinese.” Gen Waldhauser was referring explicitly to Djibouti but his concession might accurately be applied to other African countries as well.

KENYA'S SGR China's expanding financial role in Africa includes $35 billion spent on power generation and transmission projects, along with $30 billion for transportation infrastructure, including the underwriting of Kenya's

Predatory lenders, by contrast, “use deception and fraud to entice borrowers to take out expensive loans they don’t really need and can’t afford,” she recently wrote in a commentary she co-authored with Kevin Gallagher, head of Boston University’s Global Development Policy Centre.

The writers pointed out that China's investments in power plants and transportation are both needed and welcomed.

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Prof Brautigam has also characterised as a “sticky myth” the contention that China's heavy spending in Africa produces few jobs for Africans.

PEACEKEEPING MISSIONS About 2500 Chinese soldiers and police officers are currently deployed in Africa under the aegis of United Nations peacekeeping missions.

In 2016, Ernst and Young reported, Chinese investments produced “more than three times the number of jobs created by the next biggest investor, i.e. the United States.”

In comparison to the overall US involvement in Africa, “China is catching up, but its role should not be exaggerated,” Mr Zhang suggests.

The US does not contribute any troops to UN operations in Africa, but it does have some 6500 soldiers stationed in various African countries, some of which host US drone bases and other military installations. “So far China is not a fundamental threat, as its footprint is still not as deep as assumed,” Mr Zhang commented. “Plus, China and the US are not direct competitors on this continent: China is more interested in economic cooperation, while US focuses more on security and military issues. The more serious challenge is that US government has not had an effective Africa policy.”

MILITARY “For military and political involvement,” he adds, “China is not as deeply engaged as Western countries and former colonial powers. But the gap between Chinese and American influence in Africa is much smaller than a decade ago due to lack of effective Africa policy from the US side.”

In their March 15 commentary in The Hill, a publication focused on the US Congress, Prof Brautigam and Prof Gallagher called on Mr Trump “to put his money where his mouth is and offer a better alternative” than what China is providing in Africa. The US president could, for example, scale up the Power Africa programme while welcoming, rather than denigrating, China's investment activities in Africa, the scholars wrote.

China clearly does have military ambitions in Africa. They are demonstrated most visibly by its construction of a naval base in Djibouti—close by the only permanent US military base in Africa. “There will be more” such Chinese installations in Africa, Gen Waldhauser predicted in remarks to Congress on March 6.

China is also increasing its military exports to African countries, which rose 55 percent between the period 2008-2012 and 2013-2017, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. ““A total of 22 sub-Saharan African countries procured major arms from China in 2013–17, and China accounted for 27 percent of sub-Saharan African arms imports in that period,” Sipri reported.

www.nation.co.ke www.newsdog.today The views and opinions expressed in these articles are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Embassy

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Chinese-built Ring Road, Addis Ethiopia

Africa’s most ambitious joint venture kicks off with $3.4tr trade deal Traders farmers and workers will be the main gainers, with free movement of goods, services and labour across borders.

The failure by Africa’s largest economies, Nigeria and South Africa, to sign the $3.4 trillion free-trade zone agreements in Kigali on Wednesday has cast a cloud over the integration given the strategic role the two countries play in continental trade.

More than 40 countries signed the protocol to the treaty establishing the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) in Kigali with AU chairman, Rwanda President Paul Kagame saying trade and free movement heralded prosperity.

But Africa’s economic giants, backed by Southern African Development community (SADC) member states, including Tanzania, Botswana, Namibia, Lesotho and Zambia, failed to ink the deal. Others were Burundi, Benin, Sierra Leone, Eritrea and Guinea Bissau.

“It would have been great if the two biggest economies on the continent had signed, but the most important is that the rest of the continent is sending a right message to these two biggest economies that we are moving ahead without you,” Michael Kottoh, an analyst at Confidential Strategies in Ghana, told Reuters.

The project needed at least 22 countries to sign up to get off the ground. “At stake is the dignity and well-being of Africa’s farmers, workers and entrepreneurs,” President Kagame said.

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National issues

Sudden changes in rules and impromptu checks on goods also held up supply chains. “Some countries suddenly decide they are going to do a quality check on goods but don’t really know what they want to check. That slows the trade,” said Thomas Schafer, CEO of Volkswagen Africa. “For instance, we are not able to bring a vehicle from South Africa into Zimbabwe in a cost-efficient and fast way and that needs to change.”

Economists cite the low level of intra-regional trade as one of the reasons for the continent’s enduring poverty and lack of a strong manufacturing base. It is blamed on a host of factors, from colonialism, to high internal tariffs to poor road and rail links to excessive border bureaucracy and petty corruption at frontier checkpoints.

The relatively small size of many African markets — only Nigeria and Ethiopia have populations estimated at 100 million people or more — also inhibit private sector investment. Africa already has an alphabet soup of competing and overlapping trade zones — Ecowas in the west, the EAC in the east, SADC in the south and the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa — although only the EAC, driven mainly by Kenya, has made significant progress towards a common market in goods and services. Analysts said governments needed to do more to ensure goods and people flowed freely across borders.

The African Union started talks in Ghana in 2010 to establish a 55-nation bloc that would be the biggest across the world in a bid to increase intra-regional trade, which currently stands at a paltry 15 per cent of the continent’s total commerce. The EastAfrican has learnt that Nigeria, which chaired one of the technical working groups, pulled a surprise and quietly left Kigali on Sunday, as it emerged that President Buhari would skip the event, bowing to pressure from his country’s private sector which has concerns over the deal’s impact on the Nigerian economy.

“They have been very supportive of the meeting and have been with us in Kigali since February 22 at the working group meetings that built up to the summit. So we were taken aback when they quietly left the country at the weekend,” said one insider.

“If they just sign the agreement without throwing open the borders, without getting rid of non-tariff barriers and if they do not work on free movement of people, it is not going to work,” Mr Kottoh said.

Even the six-nation EAC has its sticking points: Tanzania has been known to kick out Kenyan executives and impound Kenyan goods at the border in violation of EAC rules.

Some of the countries that did not sign the deal cited political decisions while others said certain national issues had to be addressed first. Tanzania, for instance, said that it would first have to seek approval from its parliament and the wider population.

Businessmen said the current setup forced them to look outside the continent, particularly Asia for manufactured goods. “It is easier and cheaper to buy from Asia than from the sub-region because of less flexible rules of origin and unclear non-tariff barriers,” said Meriem Bensalah-Chaqroun, head of the Moroccan Confederation of Businesses.

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The EastAfrican understands that South Africa asked the Summit to allow it to submit the document to its national assembly for scrutiny before signing it.

President, Cyril Ramaphosa said they would sign it once domestic legal requirements were met and approved.

“South Africa has to go through its national assembly first and get its backing before signature,” Prudence Sebahizi, chief technical advisor and head of the AfCFTA unit at the AU Commissions’ Department of Trade told The EastAfrican.

The document signed by the heads of state has nine annexes, eight of them touching on trade.

They include rules of origin, trade facilitation, non-tariff barriers, sanitary measures, trade remedies, transit and barriers to trade. These annexes are crucial because, without them, the agreement wouldn’t stand.

“That is what its Constitution requires, so there is nothing sinister. We expect that before the next summit, they shall have finished this process and signed it awaiting ratification.” The next summit is slated for July in Mauritania.

“Negotiations on these annexes have been concluded, but due to time limitations, we couldn’t start the legal scrapping. We will therefore strive to achieve this before the next Heads of State summit slated for July in Mauritania,” Mr Sebahizi said.

Stephen Karingi, director for capacity development division at the UN’s Economic Commission for Africa, that is one of the members of the AfCFTA technical committee, said that Pretoria’s hesitance was expected, but that Nigeria’s came as a surprise. “For countries like South Africa, national processes didn’t allow them to sign, but we are happy that they endorsed this process by signing the Kigali Declaration, which demonstrated the political commitment.

Nigeria’s was a surprise, but I doubt we would have reached where we have without their support, especially given that they chaired very crucial committees,” Mr Karingi said.

The signed agreement also encompasses three protocols supported by these annexes: Trade in goods, trade in services and disputes and procedures.

The priority areas for the committee as it enters the second phase is to complete the outstanding issues from phase one before the July summit. The committee will also engage the various stakeholders and states that have signed so as to ratify the agreements, within 18 months.

Phase two of the negotiations will focus on the three protocols that touch on investments, intellectual property rights and competition agencies. Some 17 countries have said they will ratify the AfCFTA, partially allowing for free trade but not movement and residency of people from other countries.

AU trade commissioner Albert Muchanga is confident that the two nations will be on the same page with the rest of the continent before the next summit. “We understand that they need national consultations and once they finish they will come on board,” Mr Muchanga said.

www.theeastafrican.co.ke The views and opinions expressed in these articles are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Embassy

The AfCFTA hopes to create the world’s largest single market of 1.2 billion people and a GDP of $3.4 trillion. For businesses, it commits governments to removing tariffs on 90 per cent of goods produced within the continent and phase out the rest over time.

Countries now have to ratify the agreement at national level within six months, that is, by September this year.

That includes those that did not sign.

Annexed protocols

The technical experts will be looking to the next working group meetings between April 30 to May 10 in Addis Ababa to start the second phase of the process. In this meeting, it is expected that the technical committee will start scrapping some annexes in the signed document.

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DEMOCRACY is impossible in a capitalist system.

Capitalim is the realm of injustice and a tyranny of the richest against the poorest.

PRESIDENT HUGO CHÁVEZ

EDITORIAL TEAM: Jose Avila, Alfredo Lugo, Keyla Castillo, Daniel Mwangi, Lucy Ojwang’, Milka Aweyo, Antony Onyango, Laura Silva, CONTACT: UN Crescent, Opposite Diplomatic Police Gigiri, Nairobi Kenya, P. O. Box 2437- 00621, Tel: (+254 - 20) 712 06 . 48 / 712 06 . 49