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Venezuela: Cuba and Iran in the picture

Yesterday’s referendum results will remain symbolic, by design:

“In reality, it is the Venezuelan regime that has already brought foreign intervention into Venezuela by calling on Cuba, Iran, and Russia to circumvent its sovereignty and provide lethal aid to its violent suppression and intimidation of the Venezuelan people.”

Cuba:
How Cuba Runs Venezuela. Havana’s security apparatus is deeply embedded in the armed forces.

To keep its hold on Venezuela, Cuba has embedded a Soviet-style security apparatus. In a July 13 column, titled “Cubazuela” for the Foundation for Human Rights in Cuba website, Roberto Álvarez Quiñones reported that in Venezuela today there are almost 50 high-ranking Cuban military officers, 4,500 Cuban soldiers in nine battalions, and “34,000 doctors and health professionals with orders to defend the tyranny with arms.” Cuba’s interior ministry provides Mr. Maduro’s personal security. “Thousands of other Cubans hold key positions of the State, Government, military and repressive Venezuelan forces, in particular intelligence and counterintelligence services.”

Every Venezuelan armed-forces commander has at least one Cuban minder, if not more, a source close to the military told me. Soldiers complain that if they so much as mention regime shortcomings over a beer at a bar, their superiors know about it the next day. On July 6 Reuters reported that since the beginning of April “nearly 30 members of the military have been detained for deserting or abandoning their post and almost 40 for rebellion, treason, or insubordination.”

The idea of using civilian thugs to beat up Venezuelan protesters comes from Havana, as Cuban-born author Carlos Alberto Montanerexplained in a recent El Nuevo Herald column, “Venezuela at the Edge of the Abyss.”

Iran:
Venezuela is Syria in the New World
Podcast:

Read more (emphasis added)

An ongoing political-military buildup has been taking place in Venezuela over the last decade. While the country is short on food and medicine, there is an abundance of military armament courtesy of Iran, Russia, and China. This buildup culminated this January with a joint, multinational military exercise called Zamora 200, in which over a half million military members and civilian militiamen rehearsed Venezuela’s defense to invasion by a NATO force led by the United States and Colombia. Colombia began talks with NATO in late 2016 to potentially become a full member. The wargaming exercise conducted in Venezuela obviously had this in mind.

The Zamora 200 military exercise had three distinct phases, the last of which culminated in the breakout of a civil war. The Venezuelan regime wants the world to believe that Plan Zamora, which is the real-time execution of the military exercise, is a civil-military plan to quell the insecurity and instability in the country and prevent any so-called “coup d’etat.” In reality, Plan Zamora is likely designed to manufacture a coup, catalyze a civil war, and provoke the U.S. to intervene.

This is a tactic taken from Cuba’s counterintelligence playbook on disinformation and deception, planned and perfected for years throughout the Havana- and Caracas-led Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA).

Prof. Steve Hanke tweets,

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Comments

  1. Venezuela is a colony of the Cuban empire, you know, communist colonialism and imperialism. Kind of like Grenada or Eastern Europe was at one time. The colony only benefits the mother country as usual.