May 2, 2019 - Steve Pieczenik
04:45
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Hi, I'm Dr. | |
| Buchanan. | |
| Today I want to talk about the attempted coup in Venezuela. | |
| The opposition to the ongoing illegal President Maduro, who is a handpicked candidate from the former illegal communist, Hugo Chavez. | |
| So what do we have right now? | |
| We have a country that's in bankruptcy. | |
| Three million Venezuelans have left. | |
| They can't export anything. | |
| They don't have any businesses. | |
| There's a paucity of food, medical care, and they're rioting in the streets on both sides. | |
| At this particular point, our government is on the right side of the equation, i.e. | |
| trying to help Guayado, but they're taking a very long time. | |
| I'm not surprised because John Bolton and Pompeo have never really had any experience on coup d'etats. | |
| They don't know how to affect them. | |
| They don't understand that has to be done very swiftly. | |
| Elliot Abrams, however, has been involved in coup d'etats. | |
| He remembers Allende to Pinochet. | |
| And other coup d'etats in Latin America. | |
| As a matter of fact, we've been very successful in Latin America, where we've had many countries which we've overthrown and assassinated many people whom we didn't want. | |
| I know that sounds callous, but nevertheless, that's what the American interest is. | |
| At this particular point in time, Cuba is involved on the side of Maduro. | |
| Russia is helping out Maduro because they have an agreement on oil. | |
| The Chinese are helping out Maduro, but they've lost billions of dollars in contracts to oil. | |
| So we are negotiating behind the scenes to tell the Russians and the Chinese and Cuba to cool it. | |
| Now, let me give you a little bit of the history of Venezuela. | |
| Venezuela has not been a republic that's been totally stable. | |
| What do I mean? | |
| It's had the following coups, if you can count them. | |
| There was a coup in 1945. | |
| It was a civilian military coup. | |
| There was a coup in 1948, another civilian military coup. | |
| There was a coup in 55 and 58. | |
| Then there was a coup in 1992 where Hugo Chavez, the predecessor to Maduro came in. | |
| And then there was the most interesting of all coups I found. | |
| Which was the 48-hour coup in 2002 where Hugo Chavez, the corrupt left-wing leader who was funded by Castro and the DGI, which is the Cuban intelligence unit, was thrown out by a million protesting Venezuelans, | |
| but he had the good fortune to have the Navy and certain elements of the Air Force behind him, so he was in prison for 48 hours and came back To lead the government again into bankruptcy and corruption. | |
| So what do we really have here? | |
| What we have is an ongoing scenario where countries in Latin America are not well stabilized for the simple reason that they depend very heavily on one resource. | |
| For Venezuela, it was Sitco. | |
| There was no question that the export in oil had to go primarily to Sitco, but they could not refine the heavy oil. | |
| We had to refine it down in Louisiana and in Texas, and then we sold it back to them. | |
| However, once we became oil exporters, and I must give credit to Obama's administration, we did begin to export oil all over the world. | |
| However, before we exported oil, Venezuela had to compete with Saudi Arabia, that was a far more aggressive exporter of oil, and literally knocked down the price of oil in Venezuela by 80%, almost 60% to 80% at any given time. | |
| So Venezuela has to be reconstituted. | |
| I have no doubt that eventually our side will win, Guayala will come in, and the military will assist him, but I do have some questions as to where he will proceed from this point onward. | |
| He needs really economic advice and not a left-wing ideological orientation, and that's where we can help him out immensely. | |
| Hugo Chavez, who had been thrown out and died running Venezuela, said that America has been rapacious and has nothing but hostility to Latin America, and we have killed many of their leaders. | |
| That is true. | |
| John F. Kennedy, who once saw Three Days of the Condor written by a friend of mine, James Grady, enjoyed that film because it was a film about a coup in the White House. | |
| Ironically, he wouldn't realize or understand that eventually he would have a coup against him and he was assassinated by our own people. |
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