Speech by Ambassador Samuel Moncada at the Permanent Council of the OAS

Mr. President A pile of lies, falsehoods, manipulations and calumnies has been constructed; a whole world parallel to reality, a whole alternate fantasy that serves to confuse millions of people about what is happening in Venezuela. Today I come to make contact with reality and tell the world what our truth is. Firstly, I would like to clarify what happened here regarding which government the OAS recognize. That is the first farce, a swindle, a fraud, a trick, a maneuver, a manipulation. They are all trying to play tricks. Yet, it continues to work for them, and they keep repeating it. Mr President The only way that I get out of this char, as a representative of the Venezuelan State, and representative of the government of Constitutional President Nicolás Maduro Moros, full member of this Organization with all the rights exercised for more than 70 years, without violating international law, without violence, without cheating, without fraud, without manipulation and without arbitrariness, is that you, Mr. President, receive in your hands the resolution approved by the Extraordinary General Assembly of the OAS where 24 member states would have voted for the suspension of the rights of the Venezuelan State in this Organization. Mr. Chairman Without that General Assembly resolution, every act is null and void, and it would translate in the destruction of this Organization. What we have just heard from the Secretary-General is false, he lies, he swindles, he says it in front of everyone. That is why member states of CARICOM complained to him about it. It is not true that a Permanent Council resolution with 18 votes can ignore a member State. It is false, it is just propaganda. The only penalty, in all the statutes of this Organization, that can be applied to a State is suspension and occurs with 24 votes in a General Assembly of Foreign Ministers, and that has not happened. Everything else is false. All those lies are quelled the minute that I sit here. Everything else collapses, the lie collapses, the fraud collapses. Stop lying, get the 24 votes of the Assembly needed, and I would only then get out of here legitimately. They permanently threaten to take away our visas. Doing so would be a scam. The U.S. is using its personal or bilateral enmity with Venezuela to affect our multilateral functioning.   We have already broken off relations with the U.S. from a bilateral point of view. We have to dismantle all this and bring light to the darkness of lies from the eyes of the majority of the people and international public opinion. Each State is free to recognize whoever it wants, but what is certain is that in order to get us out of here it is necessary to comply with the Charter. Enough of this scam! Let us now explore the core of the other topics. Mr. President A wave of self-proclamation runs through the hemisphere. In Venezuela, a congressman stands in a square and proclaims himself president; in Miami tourists gather in a restaurant and self-proclaim themselves the Venezuelan Supreme Court of Justice. Here, in this room, the Secretary General proclaims himself head of the OAS and begins to disregard states and give orders without having the authority to do so. He begins to take orders on behalf of the states. He is not the head of the OAS. He speaks as if he were the president of those states, but that doesn’t work that way. Please, you have to understand what the function of this gentleman is here! When he calls for war, he violates everything he is doing here. In the very OAS, an employee of Washington’s propaganda bodies proclaimed himself Ambassador of Venezuela without anyone understanding how he can occupy this post. That’s why he’s not sitting here, because he proclaimed himself! To add to the confusion, a U.S. senator proclaims himself Chief of our Bolivarian National Armed Force and threatens our officers in Venezuela. An advisor to the White House proclaims himself the owner of our oil and robs the Venezuelan people of more than 30 billion dollars in just a week ago while we were all discussing which article of the Constitution was applicable to the situation, and to avoid making the longest list, Mr. Trump, the highest leader of the aforementioned self-proclaimed individuals, also proclaimed himself the owner and lord of the natural resources, territories and settlers of the colony he calls Venezuela. We have a true epidemic of self-proclamations. Mr. President What’s going on? How do you explain this nightmare? Let’s look at it item by item. The self-proclaimed Venezuelan government approved the U.S. government’s dispossession of our people’s property for tens of billions of dollars. He accepted at face value the appointment made by a Senator Florida of an employee of a U.S. oil company as Venezuelan ambassador in this country. He also said that he was willing to authorize U.S. troops to invade Venezuela, and even a U.S. Congressman reminded him that U.S. military interventions can only be authorized by the U.S. Congress.   In order not to make the list too long, the self-proclaimed defended the measures of economic asphyxiation against our people, for they produce the necessary suffering for the military to decide to support him in power. Mr. President The coup d’état is victorious in Washington, where everyone celebrates the plundering of our nation, but it has been a failure in Venezuela where the leader needs the protection of embassies of foreign governments, even to sleep. In our country, one given day Washington’s puppet threatens the Bolivarian National Armed Forces to obey him; yet another day he accuses them of corruption and murder; then a third day he offers them amnesty and forgiveness; and a fourth day he bribes them. Finally, when everything fails, he ends up threatening to assassinate them with the U.S. armed forces. That is not the behavior of a Venezuelan President, that is the behavior of an agent at the service of a foreign power. It is obvious that the puppet obeys orders from abroad, specifically from here in Washington. In Venezuela, the coup d’état failed and the Bolivarian National Armed Forces, together with the people, are a guarantee of peace and freedom for the nation. From here we send you a message of pride. We are proud of our Armed Forces because they have resisted a wave, a psychological war, bribes, threats. Today they have just issued new sanctions, believing that a diplomatic visa is the supreme happiness of a Venezuelan General. I am proud of my diplomats here at the OAS, who have had a war waged on them so that they switch sides. They have offered them money, visas. They have threatened them, but they have resisted. I am proud of my diplomats in the United States who have been threatened and bribed, but they have left for their homeland as it should be, the duty of a man and a woman who admires and respects their country. We are patriots, we are not traitors! The failure of the coup is so clear that they have already abandoned the Constitution to justify their actions. Now their maximum law is a transitional statute that allows them to remain in power indefinitely. They have already approved it. Now they do not need elections and neither do they need to recognize other public powers. It is the pure and hard dictatorship that leaves all those who supported this atrocity without argument because they fought for a republic of laws. The purpose of this meeting, that you can’t hold elections in Venezuela and you have to let the puppet stand there for several years, because according to what we hear here the system is so bad that you have to end chavismo first, you have to get rid of all those people, everywhere, even the governors said the super expert, you have to get rid of all the governors to call an election. All the elections were bad, they were terrible, except where they won in the National Assembly, those were marvelous. They don’t realize the farce, what they are doing is justifying the dictatorship in Venezuela. They ran out of arguments because the coup failed, the coup in Venezuela doesn’t exist! The coup d’état failed because in Venezuela its leaders do not pay a salary to anyone, they do not control one single police car, they do not issue identity cards, they do not open a school, they do not even produce a barrel of gasoline. It’s a pathetic, surreal fantasy, a fiction that serves to plunder its masters in the United States. Because the true nature of what is happening is not a coup d’état, it is a project to convert Venezuela into a colony governed by local salaried workers, in the manner of Puerto Rico. These self-proclaimed are actually a U.S. representative office in Venezuela and not a National Government. That has always been the U.S. colonial model, unlike Europeans, they don’t send rulers from the metropolis but use their local employees as administrators. This is an attempt to reconquer Latin America as the backyard of the empire ruled by the most self-proclaimed: Donald Trump. The real object of this whole process of aggression is loot, pillage and plunder. The biggest robbery in Venezuelan history occurred last week. Mr. Trump’s government robbed the Venezuelan people of at least thirty billion dollars in oil refineries, in bank accounts of the Central Bank of Venezuela and PDVSA, in debt bond transactions and I say no more for reasons of time. Mr. President Mr. Bolton, an advisor to the White House, states that he is already distributing oil concessions in Venezuela to U.S. companies. When our oil refineries were stolen, the first person to sit down with the company’s managers was not a Venezuelan: it was Mr. Bolton, the same man who today threatens India and other countries that buy oil from Venezuela. Mr. Bolton proclaimed himself colonial administrator of Venezuelan oil. It is the Trump doctrine, who stated that he would only send his troops to other countries if fifty percent of the loot was stolen. I am not exaggerating; millions of people have seen this explained on social networks. It is the doctrine of war for oil, of greed, hatred and ambition. The Trump doctrine is joined by other European countries. The Bank of England stole from the Venezuelan people more than 1.2 billion dollars in gold, simply because they can do it. No explanation needed. With the return of the pillage and plunder of colonialism, confidence in bank deposits of all countries in the world in American and British banks is destroyed. The United States and the United Kingdom would steal the savings of the people if they would have the opportunity. It is the business of plundering and assaulting those who believe in their promises of neutrality and impartiality. International law and all contracts lose meaning when trap and greed is the moral basis of empires. It is the Trump Doctrine: the winner takes the spoils. At least 50%. Mr. President And with the greatest looting of our people in centuries, with gigantic theft accompanied by the most abject surrender we arrive at the infamous humanitarian crisis. The propaganda machine hides the motives of the aggression, and the scale of the robbery concentrates on the humanitarian motives of the thieves who, now converted into some sort of Mother Teresas of Calcutta, feel an enormous concern for the suffering of Venezuelan people. We must thank the looters for offering us the crumbs from the loot they took. By destroying the economic sources of the country, they inflict a massive violation of human rights of our people, generating chaos and maximum collective suffering. They use our people as hostages to destroy social peace and weaken the strength of the nation, this is a war of attrition. The aggressors impose a narrative of humanitarian rescuers. They now want to overthrow the government because they have to save the hungry and sick that they themselves are producing. If they really care about the needy, just returning the stolen would help immediately, but that is not the goal. Of the 30 billion dollars that were stolen, 30 million are announced to alleviate the effects of crime; that is an immoral and barbaric act and that is what they call “humanitarian aid.” This is about a gigantic propaganda operation. The simplest solution is to eliminate the measures of foreign extortion against our people, but considering that it is about imposing a colonial government, the handouts must be given using foreign military force. In the same way, some gentlemen in Miami who proclaim themselves a court and who have already authorized a military invasion against their own country by the United States recognize this. They said it yesterday here in this building. Mr President True humanitarian aid can only be neutral, independent, universal, non-political and delivered at the request of the recipient state. It can never be used for purposes of extortion or aggression, let alone to justify war. This trap is clearly seen by serious humanitarian organizations such as the international Red Cross or the United Nations, which have refused to participate in this propaganda operation because it attacks the essence of what endures humanitarianism in the world: trust, goodwill and peace. If they want additional and definitive evidence of the perversity and immorality of this aggressive project, they find it in the fact that the person in charge of the U.S. operation today is exactly the same person who organized, in 1986, the clandestine shipment of weapons for the civil war in Nicaragua in airplanes camouflaged as humanitarian aid, sending weapons as if they were humanitarian aid to kill Nicaraguans. There is no greater cynicism in the message they are sending to the world. They are the same actors, the same tricks, it is the same simulation of interest in those who suffer. They are the same sickly messages that one day express interest in Venezuelan children and the next day they say that they are going to invade us to bring help. They are going to kill us to save us. They are going to bomb us to feed us. It is colonial humanitarianism that offers relief but ends up selling the war of conquest. Yesterday President Trump declared a security and humanitarian emergency on his southern border. Does that mean he is going to send food and medicine to migrants approaching his border? No, he is going to build the wall for them.   Is it impossible to believe that those who put children in cages in the U.S. and build humiliating walls are sincere when it comes to Venezuelan children? If you want to help Venezuela, don’t threaten us with wars. Instead, give us back what you stole from our people. Mr. President, Now, the last point. What’s going to happen now? The failed coup removed the disguise of the colonial invasion. The self-proclaimed have no national fiber for the country to follow. Now they are desperate with coarser, more insolent, more strident threats. Stuck in the swamp of a delirious plan, they can only save it with increasingly dangerous and repugnant actions. The first is the policy of calculated cruelty. They are going to treat Venezuela as a gigantic experiment in economic deprivation and wait for the country to burst inside and then appear as if they were the saviors. They believe that in a few weeks the national suffering will be intolerable and as a besieged city of antiquity the population will surrender on its own. The second is even worse, while the moral, economic and military resistance capabilities of the nation are deteriorating and clandestine operations are being prepared to justify external military action, we know that there are secret military movements at this very moment, as we have denounced. I want to warn of two things: either US Ambassador Carlos Trujillo had supernatural powers of prediction several months ago when he announced that Colombia’s military forces were going to attack President Maduro, using the ELN as an excuse, that is, he listened to what the Colombian ambassador said today, with his marvelous powers, of a gifted man; or they are in a plan that they had known for several months. You tell me which one you prefer: whether the supernatural and mystical explanation or the secret, clandestine, cruel and miserable plan. They are the horsemen of the apocalypse: hunger, war and death to obtain the conquest. All in the name of humanitarianism that conceals its cruel ambition. Only twisted minds, souls poisoned with hatred and greed can design such vile and low plans. These are the works of criminal organizations and not of responsible governments. They are driving the region to the abyss while propaganda machines hypnotize international public opinion. There is one last scenario: US public opinion itself can react and reject Trump, on its behalf, using its armed forces in colonial wars against countries on this continent, which has already declared the continent a zone of peace. It is also possible that a peace movement will emerge that prevents the death traffickers, including the Secretary General who calls for war all the time, from deceiving the world in the name of their greed for oil and domination.   The nations of the region and of the world can decide to defend the principles of the Charter of the United Nations and of the OAS itself and reject the military adventure of the supporters of the Trump doctrine, of the doctrine of 50%. Our people also understand the existential danger they face and strengthen their patriotic conscience, women and men, civilian and military, from all regions and social origins, organize themselves into a powerful national movement for the salvation of the homeland and for peace. This reaction weakens the forces of destruction and leaves no room for those who initiated this dangerous adventure. We are in the process of a second liberation of our homeland and we will not fail in our duty.