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Jan. 21, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
25:08
Anya Parampil : [The GrayZone] : Does Trump Understand Latin America?
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Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Wednesday, January 22, 2025.
Anya Parampo joins us now.
Anya, long time no see.
It's a pleasure.
Welcome here, my dear friend.
I have a lot of questions to ask you about Donald Trump and Latin America, the United States and Latin America, and particularly your field of expertise, which is Venezuela.
In light of your recent terrific book, Corporate Coup, but before I ask you those specific questions, give us the two-minute background of the United States and Venezuela.
That's a fun question.
Actually, it goes way back to the U.S. Revolution when Francisco Miranda and other Independence leaders that would later lead the fight against the Spanish in South America actually participated in the U.S. fight for independence against the British.
They actually laid siege to King George's troops in Pensacola, Florida, and saw their fight against the Spanish as linked to our fight against the British and went on to lead their own revolution just a few decades later.
Unfortunately, under the presidency of James Monroe, we got this introduction of the Monroe Doctrine, which defined Latin America and the Caribbean as the U.S.'s backyard.
And essentially, what that policy, even though it said there's no room for foreign interference in the Americas, What that was actually code for was, okay, the Spanish are out.
Now it is the right of the United States to inherit this imperial legacy in the Americas.
And unfortunately, that meant that for Venezuela and other Central and South American Caribbean countries, they struggled against what eventually became this neoliberal model of development that was...
Was basically defined the last century through which the IMF and the World Bank would come in to these countries, give them loans and support them as long as they remained under the influence and control of foreign banks and corporations.
Venezuela in the 1920s discovered that it was home to What was eventually calculated to be the largest oil reserves in the world.
That's still a fact to this day.
And from that moment on, oil production pretty much defined Venezuela and the U.S.'s relationship.
U.S. oil companies dominated their oil sector and pretty much the country was unable...
Under the neoliberal model, not allowed, prevented from developing its own domestic production capability.
It was just seen as a giant oil well.
And because of the fact that the wealth was all getting pumped out of the country, the country was very unequal.
Eventually, after years of civil unrest and protests in 1998, Hugo Chavez was elected democratically in Venezuela, promising to rewrite the country's constitution and kick out foreign oil companies.
He'd previously run a failed military coup in the country and was jailed, but eventually was released and ran the successful campaign, defined Venezuela's natural resources, which today also include the largest untapped gold deposits in the world,
as property of the Venezuelan state and people.
He pushed out Exxon and other foreign corporations from developing or just controlling and owning the Venezuelan oil economy.
And since then, they've been faced with sanctions coming from the United States and hybrid kind of dirty war tactics either through mercenary groups or USAID.
The NGO class in Venezuela since the time of Chavez is funded by USAID.
We know thanks to WikiLeaks that Venezuela was a major priority of these sort of regime change outposts that function around the world.
We see time and time again little color revolutions popping up in Venezuela and all of the leaders of those.
Protests are always, there's always a financial and a paper trail leading back to Washington.
And under Trump in the first administration in 2016 to 2020, Trump did launch this hybrid coup policy where he made the decision to recognize someone who had no authority in Venezuela as the president.
Didn't control the military, didn't control the borders, didn't control the oil industry, but that policy actually gave the United States cover to seize billions of dollars worth of Venezuelan assets that were stored in the United States,
including gold, including SICO Petroleum, the gas and oil company, and bank accounts belonging to the Venezuelan government.
And so while they didn't change anything on the ground in Venezuela, that eventually did lead to a...
De facto theft of the country's wealth and an increase in sanctions banning the sale of U.S. oil in the United States.
And that did help contribute to a rise in oil prices in the United States alongside Joe Biden sanctions against Russia.
And so now we're in a position in 2025 where it's pretty clear that this maximum pressure strategy has completely failed.
Maduro and the Chavista government are still firmly in power in Venezuela.
And so continuing down this path of maximum pressure, I think, is destined for failure.
Trump has an opportunity here to do the right thing, correct the course of his policy with Venezuela, and just deal with the government for what it is.
And there are some signals that that's exactly what he plans to do.
Has any American president in the post-World War II era treated Venezuela fairly and as an equal sovereign country?
No. And that's an issue across the world, but particularly in the Americas, where I think, as the U.S., we have an opportunity to become close with these countries and prosper as a region.
But we can only do that if we accept this is 2025.
The old harsh imperial model has definitely failed, but this new maximum pressure hybrid strategy of sanctions, covert destabilization, using NGOs, and basically doing what the right complains George Soros does in the United States to countries such as Venezuela,
it's not going to work.
Venezuela has strong partnerships with Russia, China, Iran, Turkey, countries that have invested a lot in Venezuela and picked up where we've, you know, when we put out sanctions or try to crush their economy,
these other actors have come in and built a relationship with Caracas that they see as valuable.
Russia has a military presence in the country.
Holds joint military drills with their military.
So this is not a country that we can just boss around.
And we've already attempted for the better part of a decade now to weaken their state and even undermine their military.
You might remember, and I write about this in the book.
Following Trump's recognition of this shadow government in Venezuela in 2019, the U.S. announced that it was going to deliver humanitarian aid through the country's border with Colombia, which basically translated into a U.S. military invasion of the country because Venezuela didn't want the aid.
They said this isn't an official international delivery from...
The U.N. or the Red Cross, this is just the U.S. military attempting to ram its hardware over our border.
Not to mention the fact that at the time, Elliott Abrams was serving as Trump's Venezuela envoy, and he'd previously run guns to militant groups in Nicaragua by using humanitarian aid as a cover.
That was actually how the U.S. helped support the...
The Contras and Nicaragua.
So it wasn't a really good signal from the Venezuelan perspective that this individual is involved in U.S. policy and now attempting to push U.S. military equipment over the border.
The reason that that policy and that attempt failed was because Venezuela's military stood to defend their border then.
I think the U.S. was testing to see whether or not they would fold.
And repeatedly since then, that tactic has failed.
Before I ask you a few more specific questions about President Maduro, Chris, put the full screen up again.
What is the significance of the title, Corporate Coup, subtitled Venezuela and the End of U.S. Empire?
What this book aims to demonstrate is that, as I said, this was a coup that didn't actually succeed in changing the political...
What that allowed for them to do was in the United States and in Europe, just as they later did with Russian financial assets, Governments seized and banks seized Venezuela's sovereign government assets in the United States.
This included billions of dollars worth of gold bars stored in the Bank of England that Maduro had previously asked to repatriate.
And so as a result, the Bank of England conveniently recognized this shadow government and said, oh, we don't actually know who.
It's called theft on a massive scale.
Why did the Biden administration just two weeks ago, a week and a half ago, impose a $25 million bounty on President Maduro?
This is a policy that was launched under Trump.
They've just been upping the reward.
But following the recognition of Guaido, this was basically a policy put forward by the State Department.
Let me just stop you.
Guaido is the American puppet who the Americans falsely claim is the true president of Venezuela.
Even though Nicolas Maduro has been elected twice.
Exactly. Guaido, I don't even mention his name much anymore because I think he's like a grad student in Miami at the moment.
But after the U.S. recognized this shadow puppet regime, the...
Through the State Department, and Mike Pompeo writes about this in the book, how the policy, his memoirs, how this policy was basically crafted.
They came up with this brilliant idea to, yeah, put a bounty on Maduro's head and encourage, basically, mercenaries to go and capture him, bring him to the U.S. And this was something that probably drove,
I don't know if you remember this, Bay of Piglets.
People called it attempted invasion in May of 2020 when a former U.S. Green Beret actually organized with two of his former colleagues and a bunch of Venezuelan defectors, military defectors that were training in Colombia.
They organized a failed mercenary invasion of Venezuela and were actually captured and put on trial by the government.
And they were later...
But that kind of mercenary action is, I think, what this policy of placing a bounty on the president of a sovereign country's head is designed to encourage.
It's very dangerous, and it doesn't make the U.S. look very good.
The Biden Justice Department recently persuaded a federal grand jury, correct me if I misstate this, To indict President Maduro, in the indictment they refer to him as former President Maduro,
the indictment is for conspiracy to export controlled dangerous substances to the United States.
Not actually doing so, but planning to do so.
More or less the same thing they indicted the former strongman of Panama back in the George H.W. Bush years.
Yes, and you'll recall that, and I write about this in the book, it was Bill Barr himself who wrote that policy under George H.W. Bush when it came to Noriega.
So this was a playbook that he revived under Trump in the first administration, and that...
The Biden administration ran with because there wasn't much of a change in their policy other than to let a little bit of oil start flowing back between the U.S. and Venezuela because of the Russia sanctions.
The U.S. needed to make up for its disastrous sanctions policy on oil.
Why do they call him, other than maybe to taunt him, former President Maduro when he was just re-elected and in fact was just inaugurated right before Trump?
Because they have yet to reverse this policy of recognizing an unelected government in Venezuela.
They have since transitioned from recognizing this figure Guaido to a man named Edmundo Gonzalez who ran in the last election against Maduro.
He's a former Functionary diplomat from the pre-Chavez era, who's quite old.
Actually, when you watch videos of him, he reminds you a little bit of Joe Biden walking around.
He couldn't really even stand at his closing rallies last year.
And he doesn't speak very clearly.
And now he's living in Spain.
So he's not in Venezuela either.
But this is the figure that the U.S. currently recognizes as the president of Venezuela, which is why they refer to Maduro as the former.
Is President Maduro in danger of enduring the same fate as Manuel Noriega, waking up some morning and finding a thousand American troops on the ground there to kidnap him?
I think if that were going to happen, it would have already happened, but that the reason that it is unlikely to take place in Venezuela is that Venezuela is not Honduras, where that actually did happen in...
And it's not Panama in the sense that the military itself in Venezuela is not controlled by the United States.
That's not the case in those other two countries.
But in Venezuela, as we've seen, the military repeatedly stands by Maduro.
The defense minister has successfully collaborated with U.S. officials in the past to make them think he was participating or going along with the coup, only to then turn around and stand by Maduro.
That happened under this policy of recognizing Guaido to the point that they even had the U.S. sent Bolton and Pompeo sent.
Guaido out in the street to lead a military uprising in April of 2019, thinking that the defense minister was going to go along with it.
And then they were surprised at the last minute when it was actually clear that they'd been They'd been tricked, and the military was staying by Maduro, and it only had the result of making the U.S.-backed opposition look really bad in the streets when they're outside of these military bases saying,
join us, join us, join us, and no one does.
You know, Donald Trump recently...
Kristen, we have this clip referred to...
John Bolton is stupid.
Now, I know John very well.
I worked with him for a number of years at Fox.
I don't agree with him on anything.
I never heard of anybody calling him stupid.
But maybe this is what Trump is referring to because he was so duped by this defense minister.
Watch this.
Why did they remove John Bolton's security clearance, sir?
Because I think that was enough time.
We take a job.
You take a job.
You want to do a job.
We're not going to have security on people for the rest of their lives.
Why should we?
I thought he was a very dumb person, but I used him well because every time people saw me come into a meeting with John Bolton standing behind me, they thought that he'd attack them because he was a warmonger.
He's the one that got us involved, along with Cheney and a couple of others, convinced Bush, which was a terrible decision, to blow up the Middle East.
You know, it blew up.
I think that was a personal rancor, probably because of John's book about the president.
I don't know that he was evaluating the coup.
If you could put your finger or the failed coup...
If you could put your finger on one or two things that the American foreign policy establishment has traditionally misunderstood about Latin America, what would those one or two things be?
Most countries in Central and South America as equal to us, as people that also fought for their independence from European powers that actually have a lot in common with us.
The Venezuelan constitution and the original fight against the Spanish was inspired by our founding fathers' fight and their values.
And I find that when I travel throughout South America that It's a place where culturally and just in terms of the mentality of the people is most similar to the United States, more so than even Europe,
where you have more of this class-based, aristocratic, they still have monarchies over there.
All these things that we've worked to remove ourselves from are still present in Europe, but in the Americas, we've embraced The concept of liberty and everybody being equal under the law and there's no caste system or anything like that.
And so when it comes to dealing with these countries such as Venezuela, we should understand that they're not...
As weak as we think they are.
I mean, they're not just going to fold under our maximum pressure campaigns.
They're instead going to turn to the rest of the world and contribute to the growth of a multipolar world order that maybe leaves the United States behind if we don't just wake up now in the 2020s and say it's time to accept the reality of these countries.
We can't change them.
We cannot have a foreign policy decided by ideology.
That's just about, oh, we hate communism, socialism, whatever.
We just need to say, if this is the country, if this is the way forward for stability in the country, if this is the government that controls the borders and controls the military, then that's the country we have to deal with.
And most of all, when it comes to the US, and particularly Trump, We need to move away from having a policy that is controlled by people who come here from these countries, Cuba, Venezuela, settle in Florida,
and then have used their political power to basically hold our policy hostage and not do what is best for America first, but what is best for their own interests based on their relationship with their former home countries.
I mean, Marco Rubio is a great example of someone who represents this class of people who's not actually working in the interests of the United States or America First when he talks about Venezuela or Cuba.
He's actually speaking as a Cuban whose family came here just a few decades ago, and he and others would like to have their friends and their collaborators return to power in these countries, even if it means Sanctioning them to the point that it's not even in the US's interest anymore.
And so I think that's been a big...
Hurdle for the United States.
And I think that Trump needs to accept that the Venezuelans and Cubans that are trying to bully him into taking a radical position on Venezuela are going to probably vote for Republicans anyway.
And we need to stop making this an issue of electoral politics.
This is about foreign policy.
This is something that should be decided not.
By special interest groups or foreign lobbying groups, which is exactly what the Venezuelan opposition would prefer, and actually sit back and look at reality pragmatically and say, how do these countries function and what kind of positive relationship can we have going forward that embraces our shared history of people who are defining the Americas as a place based on liberty,
prosperity, and Sovereignty.
That's the number one defining characteristic that should illuminate U.S. policy going forward.
Well, we'll give Trump the benefit of the doubt.
He's only been president for two days.
He's trying to change the Constitution on his own, but we'll see what happens in America.
I wish he would call you or engage your advice, but thank you, Anya.
It's a pleasure, my dear friend.
Chris, put the book up again if anybody is interested in this.
This is a wonderful read, Corporate Coup, Venezuela and the End of the U.S. Empire by my dear friend and colleague Anya Parenville.
Thank you, Anya.
Always great to talk with you, Judge.
Thank you.
And coming up later today at 3 o'clock, Phil Giraldi, and at 4 o'clock, the always worth waiting for, Scott Ritter, Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.
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