cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/43616072
Excerpt:
When the US negotiates with Acting President Delcy Rodríguez, it is because the US was unable to replace Chavismo with some clown like María Corina Machado and Juan Guaidó. “Washington’s kidnapping of Maduro was intended to demonstrate the empire’s dominance. But it also exposed its limits: the durability of the Bolivarian Revolution and the reality that even great powers must sometimes negotiate with governments they detest.”
Delcy Rodríguez, now acting president while Maduro is held hostage by the empire, met with US Department of Energy officials, and immediately narratives emerged that she had betrayed the Bolivarian Revolution by privatizing oil. This is false. The reform of the Organic Law of Hydrocarbons dictates that the state remains the owner of the natural resources and that public entities maintain majority ownership of all joint ventures with private corporations in the oil sector. Furthermore, the law stipulates that the final authority for all disputes will be the Venezuelan courts, rather than some court in Washington or New York. Misión Verdad wrote that “the Venezuelan State externalizes and transfers to others the risks of commercial activity, while directly benefiting from the activities of the operators, fully preserving public ownership of the deposits and resources.” Changes in the royalty structure and external marketing and sales does not reflect privatization; instead it is a reaction to the technical and financial barriers that the United States has imposed on Venezuela through a sustained siege. Rather than spreading social media tabloids, we should reflect on the reasons why Venezuela lacks the machinery and capability to refine its heavy crude, or the barriers to investment in PDVSA and why it is severely limited in its capacity to engage in foreign sales. The answer to these is the reality of the US blockade.
It is painful to see revolutionaries shaking hands with kidnappers, but politics is not a movie. Expecting Venezuela to strike back militarily ignores reality. The US maintains an enormous armada off the Venezuelan coast, air bases nearby, and is strangling Cuba simultaneously. The US has proven that it will airstrike civilian targets and destroy civilian infrastructure and then brag about its crimes to the world and get away with it. This is exactly what happened in Yemen just last year and has been inflicted upon Gaza for over two years.
Therefore, negotiation is not betrayal; it is survival. We must distinguish between compromise of principle and compromise of necessity. Venezuela is being extorted to sell oil to US companies that supply the Zionist entity. This is not a choice; because the alternative is nothing. The reality, for millions of Venezuelans and the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela is that the revolution must retreat following military defeat, but it is not ideological surrender. Revenue returns to the people, preventing the total collapse of the government. We can compare this to the imperialist war on Syria, where US-backed terrorists stole oil revenues and strangled the state and its people.