Maduro accuses Washington of “economic war” against Venezuela

Yesterday (August 29), President Nicolás Maduro accused the United States of planning, since the end of July this year, an economic war against Venezuela “in order to generate chaos in the country.”

Here is a translation of Maduro’s words:

“In the White House, President Barack Obama -and I want to give him the benefit of the doubt because perhaps he is not aware of this information-  in the White House, there was a meeting at the end of July of the chief of the Bureau on Venezuela of the Department of State, two representatives from the Pentagon that deal with issues on Venezuela and Latin America, three representatives of the Department of State, two representatives of the National Security Agency, one representative of the CIA, and a person from the White House close to him [Obama]”

“They updated the economic war against Venezuela during that three hours meeting. Two persons from the Department of the Treasury reported on the economic war against Venezuela. We have knowledge of this.They were making calculations of a date for the economic collapse of Venezuela, then for a date for a social explosion and then, according to these macabre minds, a chaos in Venezuela as we have seen in Egypt.”

“They said that they are preparing a transition government for Venezuela to be installed following the chaos.”

“I received this information from people that love Venezuela, people that want peace. Those people are not socialists or anything like that. They come from the United States, from Washington DC, they come from there. It was a person that used to provide Comandante Chávez with key information, and this persons saved Chávez´s life several times, from attempts to kill him, and evil things that. This person alerted him of the possibility that he could be inoculated with a disease many years ago. And the same persons sent us this information, with a lot of precautionary measures, because the paper with the information has travelled around the globe until it finally made it to our hands last night.”

Economic rationale behind sabotage claims

A note published by El Universal on Monday 27 argues that Petróleos de Venezuela could increase the amount it claims from insurance companies if it can show that direct sabotage was the cause fof the fire in the Amuay refinery last year.

The article cites sources from the insurance sector that explain that “the insurance policies contracted by Petróleos de Venezuela should include sabotage, because that has always been the case.”

But on the contrary, if the cause of the event was shown to be lack of maintenance in the refinery, as the opposition argues, the sources quoted by El Universal said that “not only could payments be limited, but [insurance companies] could reject the claims altogether.”

However they added that sabotage is very hard to demonstrate, and that PDVSA would be force to allow access to insurance companies to conduct their own investigations.

It is an interesting argument, but I tend to think that claims made by the government that the opposition is full of “wreckers and saboteurs” financed by the Empire have a broader political aim than negotiating insurance deductibles. In any case, both aims are not incompatible.

Maduro: Magnicidio was meant to coincide with attack against Siria

Today President Nicolas Maduro revealed details of the timing of the recently uncovered plot to assassinate him. According to Maduro: “The plan was to eliminate me simultaneously with the attack on Siria, in order to eliminate this moral and political portent that is Venezuela”

Maduro compared his situation with that faced by his predecessor in 2002: “the international plan was to make things coincide, the same way they tried in 2002, with the preventive coup d’état against Chávez and the Iraq invasion.”

He also announced that he had given authorization to PDVSA President Rafael Ramírez to present, in a national cadena, the evidences of the sabotage that allegedly caused a fire a year ago at the Amuay refinery. No date has been given for that cadena.

Herique Capriles has been counting conspiracy claims made by the government

I’m not the only one monitoring conspiracy theories in Venezuela. Opposition leader Henrique Capriles claimed yesterday  that this year the government “has denounced 11 conspiracies, including 4 suspected magnicidios.” 

According to Capriles, Maduro wants to break a record held by Castro: “One [conspiracy] per month. He wants to break Fidel Castro’s record of 640 denunciations of magnicidio in 48 years, that’s 14 per year, which means 1.5 per month, less than Maduro.” 

Capriles also ventured his own theory about the magnicidio claims made this week: “What I really think, and we need to pay attention to this, is that they [government officials] may try to eliminate each other. (…) Also, in the face of the elections of December 8, they could try to simulate anything, because they know what the current electoral reality is.”

Maduro: Is Obama weak?

President Maduro reacted strongly to revelations by Rodríguez Torres that two sicarios were apprehended yesterday near Caracas, allegedly with orders to carry out the assassination of Maduro or Cabello. The President repeated claims made earlier that the conspiracy had been plotted from the United States: “The conspiracy comes directly from the United States and we have enough proofs of that.”

He also directly questioned Obama: “President Obama, is it that you don’t know that in the United States there is a conspiracy, by the group of Posada Carriles, monitored and tutored by Otto Reich and Roger Noriega, to carry out terrorist acts and a magnicidio in Venezuela? Is it really that President Obama doesn’t know about this? Or is it possible that President Obama is so weak that decisions to kill a head of state in Latin America are being taken in the United States, and he knows nothing about it? Or maybe he does know, but there are power groups in the United States that have decided to assassinate me and he cannot stop them? Or could it be that he has decided to eliminate me physically.”

Maduro went on to complain that the local opposition was trying to ridicule the conspiracy  allegations: “They show a strange nervousness, they think it’s a joking matter.” On the contrary, Maduro claimed it is very a serious issue because, he said: “after the physical loss of Comandante Chávez, the international right began a conspiracy process against Venezuela in order to destroy this prodigy [portento] we have become. (…) I have no doubt that the main leaders of the fascist right agree with these types of magnicidio plans. They don’t accept the fact that the Venezuelan people are now the government, they don’t accept that this man here [Maduro], this man of the streets, is the President of the Republic and that he is consolidating the Bolivarian Revolution.”

After explaining that the leaders of the opposition wanted a scenario similar to that of Syria, Egypt, and Libya, “war of all against all, chaos and the intervention of the United States Army disguised with blue helmets,” Maduro warned the opposition that “the wrath of the gods, of the people, will fall on you, leaders of the right, and our fatherland will then enter the most feverous of general insurrections.”