Hunger and Sanctions

As Henry Kissinger, one of the greatest terrorist minds of the 20th century once said: “Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people.”.

Exactly, no matter how many human rights and international laws must be violated in order to achieve that control of nations and people, it is indeed possible to control both, if one really follows Kissinger's recipe for plunder and suffering.

If the US interferes in Venezuela to control the amount of food available (as the US has been doing for years), sure the US can make Venezuelans starve and, by doing so, somehow control at the least some of them. 

Western manipulative MSM tirelessly criticize the Venezuelan government for all the hunger in the country, but they never search for the real causes of hunger and starvation, fearing tumble upon Kissinger's Machiavellian truth: we the US control food, so we the US control the Venezuelan people.

So let's talk about hunger and starvation of Venezuelans, starting with a sarcastic video Max Blumenthal filmed in a wealthy neighborhood of Caracas, in which he brilliantly exposes the contradictions of pathetic Venezuelan opposition and liar Western MSM, both incoherent critics of Venezuelan socialism constantly blaming Maduro's administration for the imaginary lack of capitalism: 

Another precious video to expose the incoherences spread on Western Lying Media about the lack of food in Venezuela is Caracas streets and stores, filmed 2 months ago by Eva Bartlett. As we can clearly see, shopping malls are full of all kinds of goods! As we can clearly see, Eva Bartlett was not in starving Yemen but rather in bullied Venezuela that, in spite of the genocidal embargoes and sanctions that would wipe out the entire population of many Western capitalist states, manages to survive with dignity, proving socialism to be by far more effective than capitalism in providing access to goods and services, even under total economic siege.

Even under total siege, as Eva Bartlett shows us with footage taken in the streets of Venezuela, the poor Venezuelans can still access and afford to buy food in a country suffering hyperinflation imposed from abroad and also by the anti-Bolivarian local private companies:

I know this is inviting Miami trolls & HRW groupies to jump on me & say poorest Venezuelans can't afford these prices (8000 around US $2 & a bit, depending if 3200 to $1 or 3500, etc).
However, got these yesterday & they'll last me a few days, avacadoes longer. pic.twitter.com/2kFk9IkJhh

— Eva Bartlett (@EvaKBartlett) March 28, 2019

To completely understand why Western MSM lie and exaggerate the reports on lack of food and goods in Venezuela, and to understand the real reasons behind the lack of certain specific goods such as toilet paper or cooking oil, one definitely should follow the extensive work Abby Martin has been producing for Empire Files, in particular, the episode Inside Venezuela's Markets: Propaganda vs. Reality.

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In a more comic tone, I would invite the reader to think about the ultimate contradiction in Venezuela. From the unparalleled documentary War on Democracy produced by John Pilger in 2007, to the most recent (and abundant) videos showing poor Venezuelans happy with the political system and rich Venezuelans crying out about hunger and starvation, every evidence leads us to conclude that, at the least, the over-privileged Venezuelan elite does not starve (although their decisions of self-inflicted industrial sabotage, and the shut down of their own factories,  does make some poor Venezuelans starve) and, ironically, while complaining about the supposed lack of food, we can  see them surrounded by princely luxury, mansions, fancy clothes, super expensive cars and so on.

This can be seen not only in the streets of Venezuela but also abroad, namely in Miami, USA. Or in the streets of London, as you will see. I propose you to analyze a photographed evidence of wealthy well-feed Venezuelans wearing expensive clothes and carrying super-expensive bags (Jet Set Travel Medium Tote, by Michael Kors, $377), in front of their Embassy in London, while shouting "We are dying of hunger!".

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But let's get more serious and rewind some of the main events of economic warfare implemented by the West to artificially create hunger in Venezuela. Let's go back in time, to 2013, when the most visionary humanist of modern times, Hugo Chávez, died or was killed, and when the West had recently started its longest and toughest aggression ever on Venezuela.

At that moment, with Chávez dead (but not gone), the main short-term objective was to distance Nicolás Maduro from Hugo Chávez, in order to buy the minds and souls of Chavéz's supporters and make them believe Maduro had nothing to do with Chávez (wrong, painfully wrong). To do so, Western and Venezuelan anti-socialism propaganda forced itself to be more incoherent than ever, praising Hugo Chávez for having been a true socialist and democrat, while bashing Nicólas Maduro for being a moron bus driver and a dictator. The problem is Western and Venezuelan media used to say the very same nonsenses and lies about Hugo Chávez. 

With Chávez dead and Maduro democratically elected the new president of Venezuela, terrorist "opposition" started to implement fear, destruction and death in the street of its own nation. Local elites started to attack the economy by closing factories, sabotaging distribution, exchanging all its savings to dollars and sending it to Miami, etc. The US and Europe increased their support (including financial) to the opposition, while imposing economic and mediatic war on this brave nation. Colombia, paid to be an executioner of Western terror, had an important role in the smuggling of Venezuelan goods to sabotage its economy. And so on.

To learn in detail how the economic war was waged against Venezuela, and because there's no room to explain it here, I advise reading the book The Visible Hand of the Market: Economic Warfare in Venezuela, written by Pasqualina Curcio Curcio. The author explains with precision many aspects of the economic war, such as induced inflation or planned shortages. And the reader can, for instance, understand why in a country where the total amount of money allocated to import medicines increased many folds, the medicines are not available (one way to achieve so is to have murderous Venezuelans companies increasing many folds the price of imported medicines, so the country spends far more dollars in medicines, but gets far less of it in its harbors. Read the book!

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Since the arrival of Hugo Chávez, the nominal GDP of Venezuela grew from $97,239 million in 1999 to $334,069 million in 2011 (UN figures), proving real socialism to be highly effective in creating wealth. In 12 years, Chávez's Venezuela saw its economy growing 3,4 times!

In the same period, my neoliberal country (Portugal), a client state of the US, went from $127,633 million to $245,120 million, not even doubling. Portugal suffered no embargoes. Portugal didn't suffer a coup d'état imposed by the US.

Portugal didn't had its main source of income completely blocked as Venezuela had during the wrongly labeled general strike of 2002–03, a true sabotage of oil production that started with companies "striking" (And not workers, amazing, no?), resulting in production of crude oil decreasing by 68%, or even more, due also to storage restrictions, the stoppage of 29 compression units in Lake Maracaibo, the stoppage of the activities of the Terminal Lacustre de La Salina abandoned by its staff and the electronic warfare delivered at distance by a US company (SAIC) disrupting and trying to destroy the very complex infrastructures involved in oil production. 

The North American SAIC inflicted electronic warfare to destroy oil infrastructure to try to prove tanned people from the South (especially if socialists) can't handle modern technology. They couldn't be further away from the truth. Even under Western electronic sabotage, Southern engineers, brave Venezuelans, managed to manually stop the electronic aggression.

All this happened thanks to the former US-puppet government of Venezuela, as Venezuela explained:

On January 17, 1997, a company known as Informatics, Business, and Technology (Intesa) was formed and tasked with optimizing the structures of information technologies used by Pdvsa. This company was born with Pdvsa investing, and owning, a 40% share, while another firm – Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) – owned the rest (60%).

From that moment on, the US had a high-tech company (SAIC), "that provides government services and information technology support", infiltrated in the main Venezuelan oil company, Pdvsa. Their acts of electronic sabotaged are well documented in many books published by Minci, including this one: Del terrorism petrolero al golpe económico (in Spanish).

a visual explanation of the cyber attack 

Having the Venezuelan oil industry sabotaged is not a rare event, and 2002-03 attacks were not the only ones. For instance, do you remember what happened with Amuay Refinery in 2012, when explosions killed 48 people and injured over 100 more?

But let's go back to economic statistics. With the rise of economic warfare in 2012, and full economic war from 2013 until today, the tendency was reverted and Venezuelan GDP sharply sunk, proving that, yes, socialism + claustrophobic economic war doesn't work! Socialism left alone does work!

In 2012, the Venezuelan nominal GDP was $331,457 million, slightly lower than in 2011. The estimated nominal GDP for 2019 is $76,458 million. All the gains obtained by Bolivarian socialism were neutralized by Western aggression.

In the meantime, the Portuguese nominal GDP went from $216,488 million in 2012 to a whopping $239,473 million in 2019, a mere 10% increase that proves neoliberalism, even if left alone, does not work! And it will get even worse, there in Portugal, once they have finished with the full privatization of what the Portuguese Constitution declares to be Portuguese basic rights (education, health, etc).

Look at these numbers:

Click on the diagram for full-zoom

As you can see, the Venezuelan economy dropped to around $75,000 million now in 2019, at the same time Venezuelan government complains about the more than $30,000 million lost this year due to sanctions, embargoes and Venezuelan assets being frozen by the US and its client states. As Maduro said:

I will not get tired of denouncing the theft of more than $30 billion belonging to Venezuela by the United States Government."

Then tell me hunger is not the fault of the economic war inflicted on Venezuela, as Kenneth Rapoza shamelessly wrote for Forbes:

The ruling Socialists United of Venezuela is, point blank, the only reason why Venezuela is a mess."

Kenneth says this preposterous nonsense in a world tired of past examples of entire socialist economies destroyed by US economic warfare to make them fail and turn their citizens against their innocent (and also victim) governments. Kenneth says this preposterous nonsense in a time of infinite access to information (thanks to the Internet), where everybody can easily access US declassified documents explaining point by point how they did in Allende's Chile or in Cuba all the time. How they purposely destroyed socialist economies and starved people, purposely expecting to turn the people against their socialist governments! 

The Battle of Chile - 1st part 

The Battle of Chile - 2nd part 

The Battle of Chile - 3rd part 

More: look how socialist and democratic Iran governed by Mossadeq was starved the same way, and for the same reasons:

Iranian Prime Minister Dr Mossadegh was overthrown by USA UK in 1953

And the list is painfully endless.

Still, Western sheep-like humans buy this lunatic rhetoric, as they want to believe! They want to believe "socialism is bad" and "Maduro is a dictator". 

Yes, Venezuela's economy is in very bad shape, but there are no miracles! Venezuelan economy could now be many times bigger than the Portuguese if it was not a victim of endless economic war and other kinds of war.  Sure the Portuguese economy could be bigger too, if they had a truly socialist government but, in that case, they would be the next victim. And Portugal under total economic siege would last a week, I bet! Portuguese would all starve to death, literally, knowing how exposed is economy their to World Economic Dictatorship's greediness and how dependent are they from imported goods. 

Back to Venezuela, in the era prior to the full-scale economic war, it was not only the nominal GDP that was thriving. Standards of living and basic human rights too. There's plenty of data available online proving so, For instance, read The Chávez Administration at 10 Years, The Economy and Social Indicators (by the North American Center for Economic and Policy Research, based in Washington DC) and amaze yourself.

For instance:

1. Thanks to the implementation of universal access to education (Misión Robinson I) in 1999, about 1.5 million Venezuelans have learned to read and write.
2. In December 2005, UNESCO declared illiteracy in Venezuela had been eradicated.
3. The number of children accessing school increased from 6 million in 1998 to 13 million in 2011, and school attendance reached 93.2%.
4. The Misión Robinson II (Mission Robinson II in English) was launched to increase secondary education. Thus, the school enrolment rate in secondary education rose from 53.6% in 2000 to 73.3% in 2011.
5. Ribas and Sucre missions allowed tens of thousands of young adults to reach college. Thus, the number of students in colleges rose from 895,000 in 2000 to 2.3 million in 2011, with the creation of new universities.
6. The National Public Healthcare System was created to guarantee free access to medical care for all Venezuelans. Between 2005 and 2012, 7,873 medical centers were established in Venezuela.
   
7. The number of doctors rose from 20 per 100,000 inhabitants in 1999 to 80 in 2010, an increase of 400%.
   
8. Misión Bairro Adentro I provided 534 million medical consultations. About 17 million people could finally get medical care, while in 1998 less than 3 million people had regular access to healthcare. 1.7 million lives were saved between 2003 and 2011.
   
9. The infant mortality rate decreased from 19.1 per thousand in 1999 to 10 per thousand in 2012, a reduction of 49%.
10. Life expectancy rose from 72.2 years in 1999 to 74.3 years in 2011. Thanks to Operación Milagro, launched in 2004, 1.5 million Venezuelans victims of cataract and other eye diseases have regained sight.
11. From 1999 to 2011, the poverty rate went from 42.8% to 26.5%, and the extreme poverty rate went from 16.6% in 1999 to 7% in 2011.
12. In the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Human Development Index (HDI) classification, Venezuela rose from 83rd place in 2000 (0.656) to 73rd place in 2011 (0.735), reaching the level of nations with high HDI.
13. The Gini coefficient decreased from 0.46 in 1999 to 0.39 in 2011.
14. The rate of child malnutrition decreased by 40% from 1999 to 2011.
15. In 1999, 82% of the population had access to drinking water. In 2011, they were 95%.
16. In 1999, only 387,000 elderly people received pensions. In 2011, they were 2.1 million.
17. In 1999, Venezuela produced 51% of the food consumed. In 2012, production Venezuela was producing 71%, while food consumption had increased by 81% since 1999. If food consumption in 2012 were similar to that of 1999, in 2012 Venezuela would be producing 140% of the food required.
18. From 1999 to 2012, the number of calories consumed by Venezuelans increased by 50%, thanks Misión Mercal, which created a chain of 22,000 food markets where products were subsidized on a 30% average. Meat consumption increased by 75%.
    
19. The rate of malnutrition dropped from 21% in 1998 to less than 3% in 2012.
20. The unemployment rate dropped from 15.2% in 1998 to 6.4% in 2012, with the creation of more than 4 million new jobs.

As you just read, went left alone (or not so much), revolutionary socialism can bring a sharp increase in standards of living (1999-2012). And even under harsh economic warfare, it still does. From 1999 to 2019, 2.6 million homes have been built in Venezuela for the poor classes, and the governments of Chávez and Maduro distributed millions of hectares of land to its native population willing to farm.

But these are embarrassing truths to be totally and systematically censored by Western Lying and Manipulative Media.

These and many others. Western MSM refuse to report the private sabotage of food distribution but, when the Venezuelan threats to take control over the distribution of food, the Western MSM go will and start crying out about hellish "forced nationalization".

Who in the Western MSM prostituted industry of propaganda cares if people are starving due to private sabotage, right? Actually, "starving Venezuelans" is always good news for them, a new reason to falsely accuse the Venezuelan government of others' crimes, right? 

Who in the Western MSM prostituted industry of propaganda dares to mention CLAP (Local Committees for Supply and Production? Who in the Western MSM dares to reuse all the data shared by CLAP on Twitter, Facebook or Youtube? CLAP is a network of committees (within the communities) charged with supplying and distributing food and it was created by in 2016 in response to the economic sabotage.

Who in the Western MSM mention food destroyed or burned by the opposition? Who in the Western MSM mentions food and oil being stolen and smuggled into Colombia?

And, because we are talking about the Venezuelan economy and its interactions with the outside world, why does the West totally ignores ALBA, UNASUR, PetroCaribe, PETROSUR and many other Venezuelans initiatives promoting transnational cooperation among the Southern nations and fighting for their true independence from US doctrines of imperial "backyards"?

These initiatives that envisioned the end of economic colonialism of the South by the North, making it as self-sufficient from bullying North as possible, encouraging Southern economies to develop value-added products and internal consumption for those products, to stop being an enslaved source of half-stolen raw material to be sent to richer North. These initiatives Hugo Chávez came with, were meant to prevent what happened over and over in South America, so the great Fernando E. Solanas would no longer have reasons to produced appalling documentaries such as Social Genocide or Argentina latente.

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2019 Sanctions

If, as already explained, economic war always managed to inflict minor or major damages to the Venezuelan economy, a total blockade in 2019 cannot be seen as a bright US idea to solve all the economic problems of bullied Venezuela. Yet, most Western sheep-like humans, when invited to swallow this appalling contradiction... they actually do it, and even ask for more! 

Total blockade has its consequences, of course it does. But, somehow, Western sheep-like humans manage to ignore it and see Maduro's fault in every single empty stomach and empty shelve (real or imaginary, it doesn't matter).

No matter how blatantly the Western world prevents Venezuelans from accessing food and other basic goods, the mantra says is "Maduro's fault" or "socialism fault". But facts are facts:

Western barbarism:https://t.co/XWNvOXUZ25

— Luís Garcia 🇸🇾 🇰🇵 🇻🇪 🇨🇺 🇨🇳 🇷🇺 (@lgnomada) January 28, 2019

The US adopted sanctions against Venezuelan state banks (like Venezuelan Economic and Social Development Bank), preventing the government from buying necessary goods. Even The New York Times does not hide it in the title of one of its articles: "New U.S. Sanctions on Venezuela Aim to Choke Off Government’s Finances". Yet, when Western MSM (The New York Times included) blame Maduro for the economic problems his country suffers, Western sheep-like humans completely swallow it and say "baa". 

Today, Venezuela's Ambassador to Russia gave a press conference in Moscow in which he explained in detail all the economic attacks on Venezuela and the negative consequences of having their money, gold and other assets stolen by Portuguese or British banks, but who cares, right?

Which banks have stolen the assets of #Venezuela and how much? Thank you #PSUV pic.twitter.com/HUqqQYYmfT

— tim anderson (@timand2037) May 21, 2019

In the West, no MSM reports about press conferences delivered by Venezuelan officials. In the West, no sheep-like human even considers the possibility of watching and listening such hellish press conferences. Their arrogant ignorance tells them they already know everything, they already know  "Maduro is bad", "humanitarian" bombs are the solution and "socialism only spreads poverty". Their arrogant ignorance tells them to go watch fictional and crappy Western violence on Game of Thrones and to pretend real Western violence against Venezuelans is not happening. How convenient and relaxing.

The US and Europe know how dependent is Venezuela from its oil revenue. And so did Chávez. As Venezuelanalysis reported:

            “Hugo Chávez knew that Venezuela was very vulnerable. Its oil revenues account for 98 percent of its export earnings. “

The US and Europe know about this Venezuelan dependence, similar to any other country exporting goods and absolutely natural. Dependence on the need to for money to obtain ulterior needs: food, water, shelter, energy, etc. Western sheep-like humans ignore this fundamental truth surely have lost all their reasoning capacities. Western sheep-like humans are no longer able to extract logical conclusion from words and facts like:

The country relied on oil revenues to import food and medicines. The theft of the $7 billion in PDVSA assets, the seizure of the $1.2 billion in Venezuelan gold in the Bank of England, the transfer of ownership of the PDVSA subsidiary CITGO in the United States to the opposition and the pressure on oil exports squeezed Venezuela very hard. U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton estimated that the United States (and Canadian) sanctions had cost Venezuela about $11 billion.”

And so, Western sheep-like humans are sure and certain that "it's all Maduro's fault"...

TO BE CONTINUED

(read the other parts here)

Luís Garcia, Bang Sarai, Thailand