Dossier 17: Venezuela and hybrid wars in Latin America

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/jglobfaul.6.1.0070
• Pages: 70--89
• Published date: 01 August 2019
• Date: 01 August 2019

70

Dossier 17: Venezuela and hybrid wars in Latin America

Dossier 17: Venezuela and hybrid wars in Latin America

[Originally published: The Tricontinental (June 3, 2019)]

On 29 April 2019, the attempted military uprising against the government of Nicolás

Maduro failed. Two months beforehand, there was an attempt to breach Venezuela’s bor-

ders at the Colombian city of Cúcuta under the pretext of delivering humanitarian aid. U.S.

President Donald Trump attempted to intensify the economic, financial, and military block-

ade of both Venezuela and Cuba. The U.S. and UK appropriated Venezuelan assets held

outside the country, and Trump openly threatened military action against Venezuela.

Meanwhile, the opposition – without popular support – urged protests inside the country

and intervention from outside.

Venezuela and its Bolivarian Revolution have been the terrain of a major battle since

1998 – when Hugo Chávez won his first election. It intensified after the coup d’état in

Honduras in 2009. Harsh U.S. sanctions and threats of war transformed internal disputes in

Venezuela into the centrepiece of a global geo-political confrontation. This U.S.-driven pol-

icy threatens war and destruction in Latin America.

Open threats of war come alongside a repertoire of tactics used by the U.S. govern-

ment and its allies to undermine the Venezuelan government and the Bolivarian Revolution.

These tactics include a long history of economic pressure that began with the failed coup

attempt against the government of Hugo Chávez in 2002 (Stedile, 2019). This is known as a

hybrid war – a combination of unconventional and conventional means using a range of

state and non-state actors that runs across the spectrum of social and political life (Ceceña,

2012; Borón, 2012; Korybko, 2015).

Korbyko (2015) defines the term hybrid war as:

Externally provoked identity conflicts, which exploit historical, ethnic, religious,

socio-economic, and geographic differences within geo-strategic transit states

through the phased transition from colour revolutions to unconventional wars in

order to disrupt, control, or influence multipolar transnational connective

infrastructure projects by means of regime tweaking, regime change, or regime reboot.

The methods of intervention are developed in what Korbyko refers to as Full Spectrum

Dominance, meaning that they operate with full military and cultural power over various forms

of social life, especially over the hearts and minds of the population (Ceceña, 2013; Boron, 2019).

Journal of Global Faultlines, 2019

Vol. 6, No. 1, 70–89.

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Dossier no. 17 from Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research reflects on the hybrid

war unleashed against Venezuela. We document the repertoire of tactics, but also the

motives behind them. We are interested not only in the recent attack on Venezuela, but in

the similarities between this attack and others in Latin America over the past decades. This

general onslaught in Latin America needs to be understood not in terms of the war against

this country or that one, but in terms of the method of domination that shape the current

neo-liberal and imperialist offensive in the region.

El Mango Village in the town of Argelia, Department of Cauca, Colombia.

Courtesy of Marcha Patriótica

The Nature of the Neo-liberal Offensive and Resource Wars Against the

Commons

The general economic crisis of 2007–2008 signified the decline of the hegemonic project of

the United States of America. A set of so-called emerging countries – especially from East

Asia – gradually transformed the axis of capital accumulation. China, in particular, appears to

be one country capable of challenging U.S. hegemony through projects such as the ‘New Silk

Road’ (Merino and Trivi, 2019), which has been extended from its original Eurasian territorial

span into Africa and Latin America.

The United States has reacted to its economic decline in many ways, but one salient

approach has been through a new neo-liberal offensive of predatory accumulation and a

deepening of finance capital’s hold on the economy. At the centre of this new neo-liberal

project is a battle over the control of resources – both goods that had either been held in

common or in the public sector and untapped natural resources. Today there is a height-

ened competition over the control of territories and resources – a competition that has

resulted in many belligerent conflicts, from conventional to unconventional wars.

Energy sources, especially oil and natural gas, remain key. Ana Esther Ceceña’s map

shows how the areas rich in oil and natural gas are also prone to conflict and war. Thomas

Barnett, formerly of the U.S. Naval War College, says that this belt of countries indicates ‘the

Pentagon’s primary area of interest.’ A zone rich in energy becomes a zone of war. In these

zones, U.S. hegemony is challenged by ‘emerging powers’ such as Russia and China. China’s

Belt and Road Initiative, for example, runs through Iran and absorbs North Korea, two coun-

tries under U.S. pressure.

The United States considers Latin America to be its ‘natural zone of influence’ and

even its ‘backyard’. This is a region rich in natural resources. It is important to list the