On Monday, April 12, 19 years after the coup-monger opposition’s siege against the Embassy of the Republic of Cuba in Venezuela amid the coup against Commander Hugo Chávez in 2002, Venezuela’s Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza pointed out that the actions of the Venezuelan right wing do not have precedents in Latin America’s recent history.
Arreaza recalled that day “an attack against a brother country was launched. This did not even happen in Pinochet’s Chile or Videla’s Argentina. It was a savage aggression against a brother country.”
Those “who dared in 2002 to promote and execute the siege against this Embassy are the same who today are trying to remove the Venezuelan people from political power to steal Venezuela’s wealth. It’s the US imperialism working through them,” said the Venezuelan diplomat.
In a public reparation ceremony at the Cuban Embassy in Venezuela, Foreign Minister Arreaza said that the Embassy was surrounded by “the strongest dose of fascism ever,” referring to leaders of the Cuban exile in Venezuela, followers of different opposition political parties and groups supporting self-proclaimed president Pedro Carmona Estanga who carried out the attack.
Arreaza said that amid the coup, Venezuelans showed their courage and demonstrated that “when the people take their course, nothing and nobody can stop them.”
Cuba’s Ambassador Dagoberto Rodríguez highlighted that the attack against the diplomatic facility was part of a coup plan “to install an ignominious regime in Venezuela. They showed fascism’s sinister face. The behavior of the enraged horde overflown by their anger and resentment was a taste of what was coming for the Venezuelan people.”
Rodríguez extolled the strength of the Venezuelan people, “who took to the streets to save the revolution and prevented a new outbreak of the fascist project in Latin America and the Caribbean,” and also praised the resistance of the Cuban staff in the Embassy that day as they joined the Bolivarian struggle, reaffirming the unity and solidarity promoted by Commanders Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro.
“We are a threat to the capitalist system”
“Let’s always bear in mind that here in Latin American and the Caribbean, the capitalist system won’t give us another 100 years if we do not start to revert it (…) but particularly in the countries of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America,” said in his statement the Venezuelan foreign minister, who also extolled the socialist processes of Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia as a reference to the world.
In this regard, Arreaza said that these Latin American Governments are seen as a threat by imperial powers, and asserted: “We are not an unusual, extraordinary threat to the United States security; we are a threat to the capitalist system, and we are seen as a hope by the rest of the world.”