Venezuela’s opposition have never accepted defeat at the ballot box. The riots in\u00a0Tachira are a sign that they can’t wait until 2015 for another legitimate tilt at power.<\/i><\/p>\n
In 2002, I covered the April coup against the late President Hugo Chavez. The collusion between the economic elite, the political right, the commercial media and the US failed to overthrow Chavez’s democratically elected government. Twelve years later, President Nicol\u00e1s Maduro is facing the same menace.<\/p>\n
The coup of 2002 came straight from the US low intensity warfare playbook<\/a> \u2014 support for a militarised right wing, financial sanctions, destabilisation \u2014 specifically mentioned by the democratically elected socialist president of Chile,\u00a0Salvador Allende<\/a>, before he was deposed in 1973.<\/p>\n These days the same playbook has been dusted off and used by the most reactionary sectors of Venezuela\u2019s opposition. The unfolding events began on 6 February when a group of 80 students from T\u00e1chira \u2014 a state bordering Colombia \u2014 protested against insecurity and inflation.<\/p>\n The rally ended badly when the students tried to burn the local government house. From then on, the students\u2019 actions have become a seditious call to overthrow Maduro, who replaced Chavez after his death almost a year ago.<\/p>\n The government responded by sending a battalion of paratroopers to T\u00e1chira \u2014\u00a0“to enable the city to function, so food can get in, so people can go about their normal lives,” according to Venezuela’s interior minister<\/a>. The opposition say the paratroopers are part of a political crackdown by the state. Either way, 13\u00a0have been killed<\/a>.<\/p>\n That Venezuela has economic problems is undeniable. Neither Chavez nor Maduro have been unable to reduce the country’s crime rate. Maduro was also wrong to revoke the accreditations of CNN reporters covering the country’s crisis.<\/p>\n However, it is also true that the extreme right \u2014 the \u201cblonde ones\u201d as Chavez used to call the wealthy, white social elite \u2014 has never accepted political defeat at the ballot box. In the last 15 years, the Bolivarian socialist government has won 18 out of the 19 elections held in the country, from presidential to municipal polls.<\/p>\n The opposition \u2014 assembled around the Mesa de la Unidad Democr\u00e1tica (Democratic Unity Roundtable, or MUD) \u2014 tried to delegitimise Maduro\u2019s win in the 2013 April election. Their \u201celectoral fraud\u201d campaign,\u00a0instigated by the defeated Henrique Capriles Radonsky, provoked massive street unrest, resulting in 11 deaths and dozens of wounded.<\/p>\n It was only after the US recognised that the election of April was clean and transparent \u2014 it was monitored by the the Carter Center \u2014 that Capriles and the MUD backed off.<\/p>\n The most recent time Venezuelans went to the polls was on 8 December last year for the municipal elections. The opposition cast the election as a plebiscite on Maduro. They lost again, by a margin of one million votes. It was their fourth opposition defeat at the ballot box in recent months. The legislative elections at the end of 2015 would be their next legitimate try at power<\/p>\n MUD’s defeat last December provoked a bloody civil war between the moderate and the extreme right of the party. The extreme right won. Capriles, seen as too soft, was ostracised and replaced by Leopoldo L\u00f3pez, instigator of the latest street violence in Caracas.<\/p>\n Lopez, a telegenic Harvard-educated economist perennially dressed from head to toe in gleaming white, was one of the ringleaders of the botched 2002 coup against Chavez.<\/p>\n The political defeat of the opposition last December gave Maduro further legitimacy and strengthened his determination to introduce further reform. His most daring is the \u201cFair Price Law”, introduced on 11 January, that puts a 30 per cent profit ceiling on goods and services. The financial elite went into paroxysms when they saw their speculative 400 to 2000 per cent margins melts into air.<\/p>\n This has happened before \u2014\u00a0to Allende in Chile. \u201cMake the economy scream,” US President Richard Nixon\u2019s told the CIA, “to prevent Allende from coming to power or to unseat him.” It was a pre-coup strategy. El acaparamiento<\/i> (hoarding) was one of the most effective tactics used by the financial elite to prepare for the Chilean coup of 1973. This is what has been happening in Venezuela since the Bolivarian government came to power.<\/p>\n Hoarding basic goods<\/a> in Venezuela \u2014 such as toilet paper, coffee, rice and milk among others \u2014 creates both a false shortage, increasing hardship, and the appearance of chaos. Almost daily the authorities find new storehouses packed to the rafters with basic goods. Last February more than 900 tones of rice, sugar, oil, milk and coffee were discovered in a warehouse in the state of T\u00e1chira.<\/p>\n Nixon’s interference in Chile is a reminder that Washington is never too far from attempts to destabilise radical democracies in the region.<\/p>\n When is it considered legitimate to try and overthrow a democratically elected government? Mark Weisbrot ponders in The Guardian<\/a>. \u201cIn Washington, the answer has always been simple: when the US government says it is.\u201d<\/p>\n In a speech before the US Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives in April last year the American Secretary of State, John Kerry, reminded the world that Latin America is the “backyard\u201d of the US. The US has historically funded opposition groups<\/a> in Venezuela, through the National Endowment for Democracy and USAID programs.<\/p>\n The current destabilisation attempts have been widely condemned by most Latin American governments. Bolivia\u2019s president Evo Morales described the latest events as a coup against the legacy of late Hugo Chavez and Argentine Minister of Foreign Relations, the highly respected human rights advocate H\u00e9ctor Marcos Timerman, said his government fully supported Venezuela\u2019s democracy.<\/p>\n The uncritical and myopic international news media neglect to quote Maduro’s supporters \u2014\u00a0as they neglect to mention that he was elected by the majority of Venezuelans.<\/p>\n ________________________<\/p>\n Antonio Castillo<\/i> is a journalist. He is the Program Director of undergraduate journalism at RMIT university.<\/i><\/p>\n