Justin Podur - Extraordinary Threat: The U.S. Empire, the Media, and Twenty Years of Coup Attempts in Venezuela

In this insightful and highly-readable book, Joe Emersberger and Justin Podur tell the story of how Washingtonaided by powerful media interestsresponded with a relentless and brutal campaign to destroy Venezuelas model of independence and bring the country back under U.S. control. Its a sad and infuriating tale.LINDA MCQUAIG, author of The Sport & Prey of Capitalists

It is an essential corrective to the highly misleading accounts of the mainstream media, the U.S. government, and from human rights NGOs, which regularly demonize the Maduro government while falsely presenting the opposition as noble freedom fighters.GREG WILPERT, Co-Founder of VenezualAnlaysis.com and author of Changing Venezuela by Taking Power

The book, with abundant detail on every page, will be an invaluable tool for solidarity groups.STEVE ELLNER, Associate Managing Editor of Latin American Perspectives, retired professor at Venezuelas Universidad de Oriente

Seldom has a book expressed so clearly the outrages that the U.S. has visited upon the Venezuelan people.MARIA PEZ VICTOR, Venezuelan-Canadian political activist and sociologist

Beyond their detailed analysis of six coup attempts since 2002 reveals the deceptions beneath the concept of democracy for industrialized capitalist societies.JESS RODRGUEZ-ESPINOZA, editor, Orinoco Tribune

Demonstrates that Obamas 2015 declaration that Venezuela poses an extraordinary threat to the national security of the US was precisely an inversion of reality. This compelling account illuminates the hope that Venezuela holds for the peoples of the worldand the lethal costs of resisting the U.S. empire.ROGER HARRIS, Task Force on the Americas

Extraordinary Threat shows that without a doubt it is not Venezuela that represents a national security threat to the United States, as former U.S. President Obama would have you believe. Rather, it is the United States and its allies that represent an existential threat to Venezuela, as they deploy the weapons of liberal (capitalist) democracy against millions among their own citizens who find it increasingly hard to receive basic healthcare, put food on the table, or even secure a roof over their heads. A must read for anyone who cares about democracy, human rights, and just plain human decency.CLAUDIA CHAUFAN, MD, PhD, Associate Professor of Health Policy, York University, Canada

If the Biden administration is serious about ending the Venezuela policy that senator Chris Murphy rightfully dubbed an unmitigated disaster, it should look no further than Emersberger and Pudors fact-packed, well-organized and updated guide to twenty years of U.S. coup attempts in oil rich Venezuela.EIRIK VOLD, author of Hugo Chavez: the Bolivarian Revolution Up Close

This is a carefully documented book. It challenges mainstream media journalists and political analysts, among others, to read it with an open mind.NINO PAGLICCIA, editor of Cuba Solidarity

From media-styled to overt mercenary incursions and everything in between, Emersberger and Podur deconstruct the history of U.S. interventionism against Chavismo.TERI MATTSON, CODEPINK Latin American Campaign Coordinator

A detailed run-through of recent Venezuelan history and a thorough debunking of its terrible media coverage: Extraordinary Threat is an extraordinary book.ALAN MACLEOD, author of Bad News from Venezuela: Twenty years of Fake News and Misreporting

Extraordinary Threat

Joe Emersberger and Justin Podur

Copyright 2021 by Joe Emersberger and Justin Podur

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
available from the publisher

ISBN 978-1-58367-916-6 paper

ISBN 978-1-58367-917-3 cloth

Typeset in Minion Pro and Brown

MONTHLY REVIEW PRESS, NEW YORK
monthlyreview.org

5 4 3 2 1

for Monica

F or over a century, the United States has used terror tacticsincluding everything from direct military invasion to economic strangulationto assert its self-appointed right to rule over all countries in the Americas. It has smashed small countries such as Haiti, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala that could only have posed the threat of a good example by developing in defiance of U.S. orders. But Venezuela, at the start of the twenty-first century, threatened to do much more than that. For many years, it provided a promising example of democratic and social reform under a government described by itself and its adversaries as socialist. Venezuela also began to finance the liberation of other countries in the Americas. It helped Argentina pay off debt owed to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and launched an initiative called PetroCaribe that helped many countries in the region buy oil. Venezuela also spearheaded regional integration initiatives that sidelined Washingtonweakening the imperial grip of the United States.1

For two decades, despite winning elections, Venezuelas Chavista governments (under the presidencies of the late Hugo Chvez, who died in 2013, and then his protg and elected successor, Nicols Maduro) have been smeared as dictatorships. No one in the Western media is ever held accountable for telling outright lies about the country. And these lies have deadly consequences: as a result, the Western public has accepted sanctions that have killed tens of thousands of Venezuelans since 2017.2 If a military attack on Venezuela occurs at some point by the United States or its allies, the way will have been prepared by the stories that have been told about Venezuela over the past twenty years.

The most audacious lie told about Venezuelas government occurred when President Barack Obama imposed economic sanctions on Venezuela in March 2015. He issued an executive order that formally declared a national emergency based on the claim that Venezuela was an extraordinary threat to the national security of the United States.3 Every year since, the U.S. government has repeated this outlandish claim, to keep its increasingly murderous sanctions in place. The sanctions are designed to starve the Venezuelan government of the hard currency it needs to import food, medicine, and the parts required to maintain basic infrastructure such as its electrical grid.

A New York Times analysis in 2015, without being explicit, conceded that Obamas extraordinary threat claim was absurd, but focused instead on concerns that it may have backfired. And the article also downplayed the importance of Obamas lie by uncritically quoting U.S. officials saying it was a formality required by law in order to carry out sanctions.4 In fact, the article completely reverses the truth. Its the U.S. government that poses an extraordinary threat to Venezuela.

Why is it so easy to lie about Venezuela? Why is it so difficult to clarify the reality? The answer has to do with the structure of capitalist democracya structure that facilitates aggression by the worlds most powerful states. The limitations that capitalist democracy places on voters at home also constrict what voters can do to restrain their governments behavior abroad.