Trinidad & Tobago, the collateral damage of US aggression against Venezuela
From The Barrel
Topping the list without equivocation is the colourful President Hugo Chávez Rías, as he then was. He irritated the Empire with his revolutionary firebrand to the point of embarrassment. So much so that they staged a military coup against him on April 11, 2002.
Image: IOL
IT would seem as if Venezuelans, all of them that is, whether known as Chavistas or going by the lesser quixotic attribution of Juan Guaidoitas, are all tortured in equal measure by the prophetic words of the most iconic Latin American figure of the 19th century, General Porfirio Diaz of Mexico.
In the cryptic words of the son of Oaxaca de Juarez, translated into his northern neighbour’s lingua franca, he bemoaned fatalistically, “poor Mexico, so far from God and so near to the United States”.
That may have been so for Mexico, but so it is with all of the US’s Latin American neighbours. And Marco Rubio, the US Secretary of State of Cuban immigrant parents, has trained his ire on Venezuela. Or specifically, on Nicolas Maduro, the democratically elected titular head of the Bolivarian Republic.
America has long been planning to overthrow any Venezuelan administration that espouses ownership of their natural resources, oil and gold specifically, for the benefit of the Venezuelan masses. Exactly 100 years since the Porfirio lament, the most celebrated Venezuelan Petroleum Minister, Juan Pablo Perez Alfonzo, uttered the most diabolical prophecy in 1976. “Ten years from now, 20 years from now, you’ll see. Oil will bring us ruin. It is the devil’s excrement,” he decried.
It must be said that Nicolas Maduro inherited a poisoned chalice, even though it could reasonably be postulated that he had no hand in its imprecation, neither in the odiousness of the chalice nor in the toxicity of its poison.
If it could be agreed that the chalice is the rumbunctious Bolivarian Republic and its amazing but varied demographics, then the poison is the bountiful oil and gas on which it is rested.
President Maduro, therefore, happens to follow a long line of his predecessors since the end of the notorious reign of Vincente Gomez, el Bagre, “the Catfish”.
He may also not be the highlight of the CIA’s desperation to topple the Venezuelan government. Topping the list without equivocation is the colourful President Hugo Chávez Rías, as he then was. He irritated the Empire with his revolutionary firebrand to the point of embarrassment. So much so that they staged a military coup against him on April 11, 2002.
According to Eva Golinger, writing in Venezuela Analysis on November 22, 2004, the CIA choreographed all the parts that resulted in the ill-fated 47-hour putsch.
In her opinion piece titled The CIA Was Involved in the Coup Against Venezuela’s Chavez, in the documents released under a notice of discovery, she put paid to the notion that the uprising was a spontaneous reflex by different organs of Venezuelan civil society and organised labour, including the Holy See.
The government of Trinidad and Tobago had long determined that its future economic sustainability and its reliable energy supply were dependent on accessing natural gas from Venezuela. In 2017, on reaching an agreement with PDVSA, the administration of Dr Keith Rowley announced that “today is a significant and happy day”.
The traction of the buildup was so infectious that even the US administration approved the waiver against working with Venezuela through the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).
What was at stake for Trinidad and Tobago was 4.2 TCF (Trillion Cubic Feet) of gas to be explored and extracted for their exclusive benefit. The gas would be extracted from the Venezuelan Dragon offshore wells to the Trinidad and Tobago Hibiscus terminal platform.
As a consequence, and in their own words, from a significant and happy day, they started paying $1 million to Venezuela in taxes per year.
As President Donald Trump launched a second offensive against Venezuela in his second term as he did in his first term, Port of Spain found itself in the middle of a crossfire of a raging war rhetoric and militarised attempts at regime change.
The Americans, for their part, have always needed this hydrocarbon resource to feed their insatiable energy juggernaut. Since the discovery of oil in South and Central America, the citizens of the sub-continent were put on notice that the capitalist beast of the Yankees has been unbridled.
Hydrocarbon-rich neighbourhoods in what the US considers its near abroad will have to adjust to the reality that all sermons from a bully pulpit smell like the sulphur of purgatory and seldom move except to change regimes.
So soon after the swearing in of the Trump administration, less than a year to be exact, the OFAC waiver on the Dragon Gas Field was withdrawn, including that of the Coquina Mannequin licence.
This has made the second-time Premier of Trinidad, Kamala Persad-Bissessar, very happy. After all, it has provided her the opportunity to align her administration with Guyana and finally become the first country to host US military bases in the Caribbean.
The nation’s ambitions have been frustrated, and the big lessons have been learnt. War is on its way to take residency in the Caribbean. And, that the devil’s excrement has come to ruin not only the Venezuelans.
* Ambassador Bheki Gila is a Barrister-at-Law.
** The views expressed here do not reflect those of the Sunday Independent, Independent Media, or IOL.