Carlos Ron is Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs for North America and heads Venezuela’s Simón Bolívar Institute, which promotes peace and solidarity among the world’s peoples. In part one of this interview with Venezuela Analysis, they talk to Ron about two opposing worldviews: Bolivarianism versus Monroism. Ron argues that the US employs Monroism against Venezuela to topple its government.
Originally published in Venezuela Analysis.
The Monroe Doctrine, now 200 years old, has been historically linked to the US’ self-assigned right to hegemonize North and South America. By contrast, the Bolivarian Revolution promotes what is known as “Bolivarian Diplomacy.” Can you explain these two opposing visions?
This continent has been struggled over for more than 200 years. Even before Monroe’s famous speech, the idea existed that the US had some sort of right to the whole continent. The thirteen colonies achieved independence first, creating a republican system that was considered an improvement over the absolutist monarchies of Europe. For that reason, they felt destined to expand their system. From the beginning, they viewed the south of the continent as their home turf. They felt it was their “destiny” to control all the territories.
However, the perspective of the incipient US republic – conceived by and for white land-owning men – starkly contrasted with the Bolivarian one. The Bolivarian conception was also republican, but it was opposed to all aspects of colonialist oppression. In other words, revolutionaries in South America aimed to defeat absolutism and create a republic, but they also struggled to achieve social emancipation.
Inspired by the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, Bolívar envisioned a radical social transformation that would include land reform, the abolition of slavery, and universal education. That is, the transformation he had in mind was not limited to a change of rulers; our Independence Revolution was about entirely changing the society.
Bolívar’s vision included not just the independence of every colony, but also the unification of South America. The Bolivarian project was a national liberation process, not an expansionist one. That is key to understanding our Independence Revolution. Bolívar understood that South American countries needed to be strong and deal with other nations on equal terms, so integration was necessary. However, respecting the interests of each formerly colonized country was just as important.
Bolivar sought the unity of the former colonies in benefit of the whole people. It was not just a struggle of a few privileged individuals who aimed to do away with external domination while recreating the old forms of oppression.
As opposed to US independence, our national liberation process was not expansionist. The aim was not to be a superpower but to build a nation that could deal with other nations on equal terms. You can even see seeds of multipolarity in Bolívar’s thought.
Bolívar was convinced that the interests of every nation should be respected and believed that they would balance each other out. That’s what Bolívar called the “equilibrium of the universe.” He was opposed to one nation overpowering other nations. Instead, he believed in balance and complementarity.
It is easy to see how that enters into contradiction with the Monroe Doctrine and also later iterations of US foreign policy.
Later on, I want to ask about the Monroe Doctrine as it relates to the Bolivarian Process today. However, as background, could you explain what happened in Venezuela between its independence and Chávez’s coming into power in 1998?
After Venezuela’s independence, despite Bolívar’s best efforts, internal struggles and civil wars persisted for more than a century. In 1914, with the discovery of oil, things changed: US imperialism entered Venezuela’s daily life, taking control of much of the country’s political and economic organization. Why? The country had to become a reliable provider of oil to the US.
Venezuelan society, however, remained impoverished because this wealth was going to transnational corporations and a very small group of Venezuelans. There were indeed some social-democratic reforms at the time that led to Venezuelans having a higher standard of living than in other countries in the region. But inequalities and dependence on the US persisted.
Then, in the 1980s, neoliberalism entered the scene, and the country began moving backward in terms of social welfare. Poverty and exclusion increased. This is the context in which the Bolivarian Revolution took shape, with Chávez at its head.
The clash between these two visions, between Bolivarianism and Monroism, has intensified under the Bolivarian Revolution. Can you give us an overview of US meddling in Venezuela?
By going back to Simón Bolívar, Chávez wasn’t reviving an anachronistic project. Instead, he was activating Bolívar’s project of social transformation and emancipation.
Over the past 25 years, the Bolivarian Revolution has been working to pay off an accumulated “social debt.” In the early days of Chávez’s tenure, he began to challenge US policy towards Latin America. The Bolivarian Revolution has striven to assert itself, which includes taking real control of its resources and deciding how those resources will be used.
This was key to the Bolivarian Revolution. The political will and steps taken meant the resources resulting from our national [oil] industry could be invested in healthcare, education, and development in general. There was also a process of democratization of information, with Chávez inviting communities to organize and create alternative outlets to complement public media. All this, of course, challenged private and commercial media interests.
There was another aspect of the Bolivarian Revolution that affected the interests of the United States in geopolitical terms: the revolution’s commitment to promoting regional institutions. Chávez promoted integration with other countries. His conception of continental integration took into account the social and economic composition of each country, ensuring that nobody will lose out. In short, Bolivarian unity seeks complementary relations that will strengthen each country to guarantee that the process of integration makes everyone stronger.
Finally, Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution have amplified and enriched our democracy over the past 25 years. This rubs imperialism the wrong way. Here, we are talking about a democracy where people elect their president and representatives, but also in which people make decisions about their destinies through direct participation in day-to-day issues.
There had been experiences in direct participation in recent times, including the participatory budget initiative in Porto Alegre. However, Venezuela’s democracy is not only about opening up to participation; it is also about our people being the protagonists of their own transformation.
If you really want to transform society, two things will have to coexist: on the one hand, political will from the top to open the avenues for transformation and, on the other, organization from below that is capable of carrying out transformations. That, precisely, is what makes the Bolivarian Revolution so strong and so difficult to defeat.
The Bolivarian Revolution represents a radical shift away from compliance with the US State Department’s agenda. This includes control over our resources and a new conception of democracy.
Also, with Chávez, Venezuela became one of the first countries in the region to advance its own policies. With the Bolivarian Revolution, there began a continent-wide drift away from the dictates of the US. All this was (and remains) unacceptable to the US State Department.
As soon as Venezuela began to alter the organization of the continent, taking it away from the configuration preferred by the US, we began to experience unusual attacks. First came the coup d’etat [2002], where we saw a sector of the military collude to take over the country, attempting to assassinate or exile Chávez. It was the Venezuelan people who brought Chávez back.
After that, came a calculated asphyxiation of the country via the oil lockout [2002-2003]. That was followed by countless destabilization attempts and constant instances of sabotage, from street violence to questioning every electoral victory, during the Chávez era.
When Chávez passed away in 2013, that initiated another period of imperialist aggression. The US has never been able to understand that our process of transformation has altered Venezuelan society as a whole. They thought that it was a process dependent on a leader, and that the project wasn’t going to be able to survive Chávez’s death.
To hurry things along, the US first orchestrated attacks aimed at impeding President Maduro from being elected. Then, when he was elected, they tried to sabotage everything the Bolivarian government was doing. That was followed by guarimbas [violent street protests], economic attacks, induced migration, blackouts, and an all-encompassing economic blockade that sought to prevent Venezuela from exporting oil.
There was also a diplomatic offensive which, among other things, attempted to get Venezuela censored by the Organization of American States [OAS] and the United Nations. Additionally, there has been a constant media campaign distorting what happens in Venezuela. All the elements of hybrid war have been deployed against our country: from economic to diplomatic, from military to mediatic ones.
The US does this to put Venezuela back in its place. They thought it would be easy to do so, because they didn’t understand that Nicolás Maduro has plenty of popular support and that Venezuelans have left behind the societal model that was in place before the revolution.
Imperialism isn’t static, but rather morphs and changes its tactics. Could you talk about the character of imperialism today, which some have chosen to call “hyper-imperialism”?
Imperialism entered a new phase, and became desperate, with the 2008 financial crisis. It became obvious then that the hegemonic model’s economic foundations were no longer stable. In other words, they could no longer guarantee the reproduction of capital in the same way.
Everybody saw the collapse of banks and corporations at that time, and the US had to use all the economic power of the dollar to bail out the bankers and venture capitalists. More recently, the COVID pandemic showed that the imperialist system couldn’t guarantee the lives of its own citizens, because the “most powerful country on the planet” cannot offer basic healthcare to its people. Not only is the system unable to reproduce capital as it had done historically, but it cannot guarantee life!
All this is taking place in an age when there is growing competition with other global powers, including China and Russia. These emergent powers are challenging the financial gains and technological advances of US monopolies.
The US wants to preserve its hegemony, so this situation is making it more desperate. To maintain global hegemony, the United States has only two weapons: perpetual war around the world and control of information through a biased media narrative.
This is how imperialism morphed into what we call hyper-imperialism. It’s the phase of imperialism in which war – even when it could lead to the destruction of the planet, the loss of millions of lives, and the ultimate collapse of capitalism – also means profit.
Now, where is Venezuela in all this? On the one hand, we are on the receiving end of imperialist wrath. On the other, the Bolivarian Revolution shows that through a combination of cooperation, solidarity, and complementarity initiatives, we can build a different type of society, based on different values. Under the worst attacks possible — under the most draconian sanctions regime except for that of Cuba — Venezuela was able to preserve the lives of its people and defeat the pandemic (something that neither the US nor Brazil was able to do).
In a situation of global crisis and blockade, Venezuela has been able to increase its own food production. The revolution shows that it is possible to effectively confront imperialism with a different set of values. I think this is the key role of the Bolivarian Revolution on a global scale.
Cira Pascual Marquina is a Political Science professor at the Universidad Bolivariana de Venezuela in Caracas. She is also co‐producer and co‐host (with Chris Gilbert) of the Marxist education program Escuela de Cuadros . She is actively engaged with grassroots organizations in Venezuela and abroad, and is dedicated, both as a militant and as an investigator, to communal initiatives.
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