The Grayzone meets Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro: meeting a determined, passionate yet humble leader

Ben Norton and Max Blumenthal, “The Grayzone meets Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro” (The Grayzone Project, August 2019)

Filmed by fellow Grayzone journalist colleague Ben Norton, Max Blumenthal’s interview with Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, whose Bolivarian socialist government has been a target of regime change by the United States ever since he succeeded Hugo Chavez as Venezuela’s leader in 2013, is a highly revealing conversation about the South American country’s determination in forging ahead with a new revolutionary society and the extent of American and Western criminality in trying to destroy that society and its leaders. The interview took place outdoors in a lovely garden setting in Caracas with both journalist and leader in a relaxed mode and Maduro in his ubiquitous tracksuit jacket.

The two discuss how Maduro’s legitimacy as President was affirmed by 120 countries which also condemned US economic, trade and financial sanctions against Venezuela at the ministerial summit of the Non-Aligned Movement in mid-2019. Issues of climate change, efforts to achieve peace and avoid or prevent war, control of natural resources, and concerns over conventional, biological and chemical weapons of war were also aired. Several countries that sent representatives to the summit themselves are also subject to US sanctions, which led Blumenthal and Maduro to discuss the ways in which Venezuela is resisting the sanctions and building relationships with other sanctioned nations to resist US hybrid warfare. Maduro ticks off the ways in which Venezuela is being pressured by the US: expropriating Citgo, a US-based petrochemical corporation in which Venezuela holds a majority shareholder stake through the state energy company PDVSA; freezing over US$1.4 billion of Venezuela’s gold reserves together with the British government; and preventing Venezuela from obtaining essential foods, medicines and other much-needed goods. He expounds on current government programs aiming at supplying and distributing subsidised food products to families and communities.

Blumenthal and Maduro also discuss the US drone assassination attempt on Maduro in August 2018; Maduro links this assassination attempt to Venezuela’s politics and practice of democracy, and claims to have evidence of the identities of the people who ordered the attack on his life. He admits there is corruption within his government and that a number of senior government officials have either been charged and jailed for corruption or have fled the country for safe havens in the US and Europe. Maduro then talks about the political opposition in Venezuela and how it is controlled by Washington DC.

What viewers are likely to come away with from the interview is an impression of Maduro as a passionate and determined fighter who deeply believes in the ideals of Bolivarian socialism and whose faith in the revolution begun by his predecessor Hugo Chavez in 1999 is firm and unshakeable. He emphasises that everything that Venezuela has striven for and achieved over the past 20 years was attained through sheer hard work, often in the face of global hostility and aggression, and through the practice of open democracy. The man’s humility – Maduro refers to himself as a humble bus driver – is in stark contrast with the cynicism and vicious behaviour of Western leaders towards their publics and beyond their nations’ borders. The interview ends on a high note of hope that the truth about Venezuela and US aggression towards the country will prevail among the American public.