MariCori and Pretty Boy Leo…hereditary sellouts.
Good evening, and welcome to tonight’s installment of VenOpIronía, in which we learn the meanings of two seemingly contradictory words — patriotismo and vendepatriotismo — which the Venezuelan opposition has conveniently fused into one and the same. Just like their great-grandparents did over 150 years ago:
The hereditary bourgeoisie of Venezuela — there are no others, unless they enriched themselves preying on the resources of our land — have been a lumpen-bourgeoisie for centuries, for whom the least important thing is their country. This was shown by a document in the book The Time of Ezequiel Zamora, in which it is shown that ancestors of Leopoldo López and María Corina Machado were linked to the dispossession of an important part of Venezuela on the part of the United Kingdom.
The foreign minister of the Republic, Elías Jaua, linked to an extract of this document yesterday in his Twitter account, @JauaMiranda, in which the ancestors of López and Machado are tied to the offering of part of the national territory to the UK in 1861, in exchange for British intervention in the Federal War.
“Those who permitted the dispossession of a good part of our territory are the grandparents and great-grandparents of López, Machado and others”, wrote Jaua on Saturday. He finished by adding, “Deputy Machado and Leopoldo López are direct heirs of the sellout bourgeoisie which in 1861 offered territory to the English.”
In the document, there is an exposition “of many inhabitants of Venezuela” who called upon the Queen of Great Britain for that nation to intervene in the Federal War, in light of the positive commercial consequences which this could have brought the Britons.
“There is in Venezuela, among the thinking men, the opinion that it would benefit them to detach the territory of Guayana and negotiate with Great Britain, using it to pay the foreign debt contracted with the English, and also the external debt of the Republic which will recognize or pay in the terms it stipulates…” reads the text.
Translation mine.
Guayana, the region in Venezuela, butts up against Guyana, the English-speaking country next door. The similarity in names is no coincidence. The territory in question — claimed by both countries — is still a bone of contention in a long and confusing dispute. Venezuelan maps, particularly since Chavecito took office in 1999, show it as an extra “leg” on the country’s eastern flank. Guyanese maps, of course, do nothing of the sort. And neither, apparently, do those of the US and UK, both of whom had much to do in this arbitrary and unsatisfactory divvying-up of Latin America. Well, unsatisfactory for Venezuela, anyway…since 90% of that gold-rich region, and all its mines, was ceded to Britain with US “Manifest Destiny” presiding. (Hmm, maybe not so arbitary after all? Yup.)
Frankly, it doesn’t surprise me that MariCori and Pretty Boy Leo’s ancestors had something to do with this unholy mess. MariCori, after all, got to shake hands with Dubya:
And this at a time when Chavecito — you know, the actual PRESIDENT of Venezuela? — was being assiduously shut out by that same White House. The US has a long standing history of rewarding local oligarchs with plummy amounts of money and “aid” (often consisting of weapons shipments, mercenaries, and torture devices) in order to make sure its own commercial interests in resource-rich regions are not threatened. And the Brits are, as we have seen with this week’s ongoing Syrian farce, often a proxy for you-know-who.
Just like old times, eh?
