The Axis of Evil in Latin America

The South American nation of Venezuela has been invaded by Cuba. It was accomplished without any military resistance through the help of a quisling, Hugo Chávez. After his demise Nicolás Maduro now rules the country as a puppet for Cuba. His regime is illegitimate for a number of reasons, including several blatant violations of the constitutional succession order, and a completely flawed election that, according to a source that infiltrated their network, was controlled from Cuba. In fact, yours truly knew the official “election result” with two decimals just when the polling places closed, and 4 hours before the national election council announced them, since the data sent from Cuba had been intercepted by this source and leaked.

All the institutions of the Venezuelan state are in the control of the Cuban regime: The presidency, the congress, the supreme court, the election authority, the security apparatus, and the military. Furthermore they have access to a militia composed of heavily armed thugs on motorbikes, who are kept by the regime as “storm troopers” to beat down peaceful protesters. There are also terrorists allied with the regime, such as FARC, ELN, ETA, and Hezbollah (Iran is a de facto ally of Cuba, as is, indirectly, North Korea). If all of this fails Cuba also has a hidden occupation force, an army of people who supposedly are there on “social missions” but who have access to military uniforms and weapons on short notice. They number in the tens of thousands according to most estimates. How to disentangle this?

First we have to look at the larger picture. The three maps show the world at WWI, WWII, and now. The present map does not represent a (hot) war, but to some extent it does represent a new cold war. North Korea and Iran are under embargoes. They are clearly de facto-allies, sharing some of the embargoed military technology: Missiles and nukes. What is equally certain but less discussed in Europe is that Cuba is also an ally of Iran. However, Cuba is acting through what was until just a year ago a seemingly democratic front: Venezuela. In reality Venezuela is a nation occupied by Cuba, and the democratic facade is maintained with the help of sham elections, assisted by an opposition that has for years sworn that there is no fraud, even though it has been proven scientifically that elections have been stolen since at least 2004.

Green = western democracies and their allies, orange = the enemy, light orange = assisting the enemies to various degrees. Grey were neutral, white are neutral or hard to define.

Two things differ between the WWI and WWII maps on the one hand, and the present situation on the other. First, there is a change of geographic location. With the help of Cuba, the new axis of evil has got a strong foothold on the American double-continent. For the first time they are in America’s back yard. Venezuela was the first target, and it provided the oil revenues that made it possible to co-opt the other democracies and install electoral dictatorships in them as well. Apart from the countries marked here, there are several more that are in the process, such as Argentina.

Second, the new axis of evil does not have a strong domestic military production capability in terms of conventional warfare. They depend on Russia and China for things like tanks and fighter planes, although Iran is trying to produce them domestically. However, they cannot face the allies in a conventional war. They instead rely on asymmetric warfare, war of attrition, and terrorism. The most successful strategy has been been developed by Cuba: to use intelligence and corruption to take over target nations from the inside with the help of a quisling, while maintaining the impression of democracy. This has given them the added advantage of being able to use these pseudo-independent nations to propel their propaganda.

Most important of these efforts is the international news television network TeleSur, based in Venezuela, which is a pure propaganda outlet whose message is as controlled from Havana, Cuba, as the reporting of Pravda was controlled from the Kremlin. But without the link being visible to credulous reporters in the West who picked up their stories and based their world view of Latin America on it.

After analyzing the present situation, several facts become obvious: First, the clandestinely occupied countries are not at peace. They are in a state of war and under occupation. This means that military action against the invader is justifiable under international law, taking into account the laws of war.

Second, the occupying force in Venezuela has deployed considerable resources in terms on unconventional warfare in order to prevent a liberation. The national military remains only on paper. In reality it is disarmed and rather toothless. There is little if any effective defense against a foreign invasion, and the little there is, is provided by Cuban or Russian military personnel. On the other hand, there is a huge militia that is inefficient against a traditional military, but capable of beating down a popular uprising almost regardless of its size. Tens of thousands of thugs on motorbikes have been provided with automatic guns in order to savagely slaughter unarmed demonstrators. Furthermore large swaths of Venezuela are controlled by drug-smuggling terrorist guerrillas. Finally, Cuba has a “sleeping army” of tens of thousands of troops, pretending to be doing social work, but in reality just being on notice to take on their Venezuelan style army uniform. Unlike the real Venezuelan army, these Cubans do have access to weapons and ammo.

There is of course no way for anybody to know if it is possible or not for the Venezuela armed forces to stage a successful mutiny and defeat the Cuban occupation force. What is clear, however, and the point of this article, is that they would act in accordance with their constitution and international law in doing so.

As far as a civilian uprising is concerned, I don’t see that it would have any chance of succeeding. Venezuela is not like Tunisia or Egypt. It is not run by a domestic dictator whose security forces can abandon him. Venezuela is run by a cruel and vicious foreign dictatorship, one of the worst on the planet. Recall Angola: When the opposition claimed that there had been fraud in the elections, the Cuba-supported dictator (who is still in office!) murdered tens of thousands of the supporters of the opposition candidate – as well as his negotiating team. More recently we remember Gaddafi, another friend of Cuba. Castro pulled out all stops to try to help him stay in power, and had no qualms about his shooting down tens of thousands of unarmed civilian demonstrators (Castro used his Venezuelan propaganda machine TeleSur). Still ongoing is the civil war in Syria, Assad being another of Castro’s friends. Same thing: Shoot’em down, as long as the dictator wins no price seems to high to pay. Everything can be fixed with propaganda (and – amazingly – there are “peace” groups in Europe that are making Assad’s case right now; the Cuban propaganda machine is very efficient in Europe).

Although I don’t believe that USA would intervene, ironically it would probably be rather easy, since the Cubans have disarmed the Venezuelan armed forces. Just as one example, the fighter planes and their weaponry are not even kept in the same state, for fear that the air force might think of trying to assassin the president, as Pinochet did with Allende on September 11, 1973. Moreover, the American planes are no longer operational, and the Venezuelan pilots don’t seem to get training on the Russian jets. Most of what the military is doing seems to be smuggling cocaine, nowadays.

In spite of these difficulties the regime is very weak, since the economy of the nation is collapsing, there are acute food shortages, and people are plundering stores for food. The militia may well turn against the regime one day, and all might dissolve in chaos. Or alternatively, a Cuban regime will be introduced, with the population totally controlled by a despotic regime. The development is going fast now.