‘PR stunt to justify intervention in Venezuela’: Experts slam US regime change ‘gangsterism’

23 Feb, 2019 23:35 / Updated 6 years ago

The battle over ‘humanitarian convoys’ is just a big PR operation designed to provoke scenes of violence and justify further US intervention to oust Nicolas Maduro from power in Venezuela, political experts have told RT.

“This is an attempt to set out a pretext for some kind of intervention,” political analyst and journalist John Wight told RT. “The Red Cross and all the other international aid agencies are refusing to touch this because they know that this is a Trojan horse, deployed to try to foment the kind of scenes we're seeing at the border.”

Also on rt.com Red Cross denounces unsanctioned use of its emblems to smuggle US aid to Venezuela

Considering the US history of regime-change operations in Latin America, in particular how the hawkish US envoy for Venezuela Elliott Abrams helped smuggle weapons into Nicaragua, William Mallinson, a professor at Guglielmo Marconi University in Italy, warned that “leopards don’t change their spots.”

We’re seeing a very big PR operation… US doesn’t care about welfare of Venezuelan people.

The crisis in Venezuela was to a high degree “directly caused by the United States' sanctions and embargoes,” Mallinson said, asserting that opposition leader Juan Guaido was simply picked by the US to do their bidding, selected to secure Washington’s political and economic interests.

Also on rt.com Venezuelan government condemns US-orchestrated ‘propaganda show’ at Colombian border

While Mallinson stressed that the US-led ‘humanitarian’ intervention might be aimed at keeping the country “as much as possible away from Russia and China,” Wight slammed the American policies as a pure form of “gangsterism.”

“Does anybody really think that Donald Trump, Mike Pompeo, John Bolton Elliott Abrams care one bit about the welfare of the Venezuelan people?” he wondered, rhetorically. “These are thugs in tailored suits whose views are far closer to Al Capone than to Thomas Jefferson.”

This is gangsterism masquerading as statecraft.

“They want their hands on the oil, this regime change; and this is about US hegemony, red in tooth and claw,” Wight added.

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