The Venezuelan War is a Racket

The Venezuelan war is a racket by Vincent Cook.

The Mises wire had just barely published my article criticizing the national security

strategy.

When hours later, the news broke that the Pentagon had escalated Trump's undeclared

war against Venezuela by attacking the Forte Tuna military base and various air defense

installations in and around Caracas, killing Forty Venezuelans and abducting President

Nicholas Maduro and his wife to put them on trial in the United States.

In the press conference shortly after his blatant crimes against peace and fresh violations

of the U.S. Constitution, Trump proclaimed, we will run Venezuela.

The EU referring to his fellow war criminals standing on the stage behind him, while helping

himself to Venezuelan oil, ostensibly to boost its production and make Venezuelans richer,

but also to make certain American oil companies richer too.

The latter are the real beneficiaries of this action because nobody with an ounce of common

sense believes that abducting Maduro will have the slightest impact on the availability

of illegal narcotics in America.

This war is about extorting oil revenues.

In spite of Trump's bluster, he and his team of war mongers who managed to bomb seven

countries in 2025 without constitutionally required declarations of war from Congress.

They are not actually running Venezuela yet.

As I write this, unrepentant Maduro Regimus, led by Vice President Delci Rodriguez, are

still in power.

As I explained in my previous article, legacy military methods of blitzkrieg and shock

and awe, airstrikes have given way to boots on the ground, slugfest featuring missiles,

drones, rocket propelled grenades, roadside bombs, minefields, automatic rifles, etc.

If one wants to really control a foreign country against determined opponents armed by hostile

powers like Russia or China, it would take a lot more than just brief hit and run delta

force raids to get the job done.

The Pentagon would have to deploy large occupation forces and wage the sort of forever wars

that most Americans detest and that the American economy can no longer sustain.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio appeared the next day on NBC's Meet the Press, CBS's

Face the Nation, and ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos to argue that the Venezuelan

government may be more compliant now that Maduro is out of the way.

Rubio insisted that the ongoing quarantine on Venezuelan oil would achieve this outcome

while chiding critics for allegedly conflating Latin American conditions with those encountered

in Libya, Iraq, or Afghanistan, where prior regime change operations famously didn't

lead to the outcomes desired by the foreign policy establishment.

Rubio offered no evidence that Vice President Rodriguez or her interior and defense ministers,

both hardcore Shavismo stalwarts, are any more eager to do Trump favors than Maduro was.

However, there are a couple of senses in which Rubio is correct about Latin America differing

from the Middle East.

Based with its jungles and mountains and its long borders with neutral to mildly Trump

unfriendly states, Venezuela more closely resembles the former South Vietnam than any

place in the Middle East.

Second Latin America has a long history of military dictatorships being installed to act as

junior partners of American imperialism, which created problems quite apart from the risks

of forever wars breaking out.

Over a century ago, when the imperialistic Roosevelt and large corollaries were added to

the Monroe doctrine, an America was actively grabbing and exploiting overseas colonies

of its own, Smetley Darlington Butler served in the U.S. Marine Corps for 34 years at

the cutting edge of numerous Latin American and East Asian interventions.

He received two medals of honor and three other medals for his heroism and rose to the

rank of Major General.

A few years after his retirement in 1933, Butler gave a speech denouncing his own military

career, characterizing himself as having been a high-class muscle man for big business,

for Wall Street and for the bankers.

Major General Butler made these observations about the wars he had fought in.

I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time.

Now I am sure of it.

With all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left

the service.

My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher

ups.

This is typical with everyone in the military service.

I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interest in 1914.

I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City bankboys to collect

revenues in.

I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of

Wall Street.

The record of racketeering is long.

I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912.

I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interest in 1916.

In China, I helped to see to it that standard oil when it sway unmolested.

During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket.

Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints.

The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts.

I operated on three continents.

Note that Butler wasn't complaining about these interventions, failing to achieve their

intended objectives, and instead descending into forever wars.

Rather, he was complaining about the intended objectives themselves.

The United States government was systematically plundering other countries within its sphere

of influence for the benefit of a narrow set of business interests, all paid for by the

blood of American soldiers and money of American taxpayers, and all bound to stir up the undying

enmity of Latin Americans against Yankee aggressors.

United relations between the U.S. and Venezuela of this type got their start in 1895 in connection

with a centuries-old border dispute between Venezuela and the British colony, to its east,

British, Guiana, now the independent state of Guiana.

With several gold fields having been discovered in the disputed territory and British mining

companies moving into most of them,

Venezuela's dictator asked American President Grover Cleveland to enforce the Monroe doctrine

and kick the British out.

Instead of doing that, Rubio's predecessor, Richard Olney, declared that the United States

is practically sovereign on this continent, and its fiat is law, and referred the dispute

to a rigged arbitration tribunal that awarded most of the gold fields to Britain in 1899.

When Venezuela was blockaded by several European powers in the winter of 1902 for not paying

its debts and, again, appeal to the U.S. for enforcement of the Monroe doctrine, it got

cold shouldered again by President Theodore Roosevelt.

In 1908, Venezuela got a brutal dictator, General Juan Vicente Gomez, who managed to learn

the fine art of being sufficiently compliant to Yankee imperialists, well enough to stay

in power for 27 years until he died of old age and unusual cause of death among Latin American

dictators.

Venezuela's granted oil concessions to members of his family, around Lake Marraquivo,

which in turn were sold to foreign oil companies with suitable kickbacks to the general and

hefty royalty payments to the general's government.

Such was the original nature of American oil investments in Venezuela and its leader.

The big winners in the Marraquivo Basin were a standard oil of New Jersey, the corporate

successor of the original standard oil trust, and later renamed Exxon, the Royal Dutch Shell

Group, and Gulf Oil.

Three of the seven major oil companies, the Seven Sisters, that dominated international

distribution and refining of crude oil from the early to mid-20th century, and which used

their control over refineries and over distribution networks as well as their political, military,

and banking connections, and their tie-ins with each other to squeeze oil exporting countries,

thus keeping their crude input prices low and their concessionary royalty payments low.

Venezuela eventually got an oil minister, Juan Pablo Perez Alfonso, who figured out how

to turn the tables on the Seven Sisters.

Under him, Venezuela got a bigger royalty share, got refineries built in Venezuela to

capture more of the downstream revenues, and teamed up with Arab oil exporters to

found the organization of petroleum exporting countries.

OPEC was the real game-changer, not only to obtain better crude prices for its members,

but also to end numerous exploitative concessions that had been extorted from its members decades

earlier by rapacious Western government for the benefit of the Seven Sisters and Wall Street.

In Venezuela's case, the legislature simply passed a law in 1971 prohibiting the renewal

of concessions that were already due to expire in 1983, and the concessionaires almost

immediately abandoned their investments, obliging the Venezuelans to take over ahead of schedule.

Trump and his minions, like Stephen Miller, characterized this as theft of American investments.

Perhaps, but who were the original thieves who used political means to dominate access

to undeveloped resources in the first place, and who paid for these political means?

Major General Butler's analysis answers these questions.

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