On June 24, 1821, Simón Bolívar, the great Liberator, led his forces against the Spanish Army at the Battle of Carabobo. Five days later, Bolívar entered Caracas in triumph. The Spanish had not yet been defeated across South America, but the Spanish monarchy no longer had the will to fight back. The rest of the battles — including the Battle of Pinchincha on May 24, 1822 — merely finished up what Carabobo had established, namely that South America’s many republics wanted to be sovereign. Bolívar’s comrades assembled in Cúcuta to write a new constitution and to elect him as the president. But Bolívar would not rest. He mounted his horse, went southwards to ensure that the sovereignty of South America would be permanent.
The story of Bolívar and Carabobo is deeply felt among Venezuelans of all classes. When I asked Venezuela’s Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza about the meaning of this battle, he dug deep into the history books to explain that the Carabobo “was more than a battle. It was a geopolitical campaign”. After Bolívar’s armies defeated the Spanish on those battlefields west of Caracas, the new States that emerged from Gran Colombia (Colombia and Venezuela) down to Bolivia (1825) produced a dynamic sense of their own sovereignty. Carabobo was “an important step towards the whole independence of South America”.
A decade ago, I remember hearing Hugo Chávez on Carabobo, his voice emotional, his sense of the possibilities opened up by Bolívar total. No wonder that Chávez named the process opened up by his election in 1998 as the Bolivarian Revolution and that he named the regional process, the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA). Venezuela has also celebrated the battle with a Bicentennial Congress of the Peoples of the World. The theme is not the independence of South America alone. It is sovereignty for the world.
The woes of States
Two hundred years after Carabobo, the South American States struggle to be independent. Venezuela itself remains locked in a dangerous conflict with the United States, whose government continues to tighten the sanctions regime that inflicts harm against the Venezuelan people. Recently, the U.S. government’s secondary sanctions pushed UBS to refuse to complete transactions by the Venezuelan government to the COVAX alliance so as to ensure delivery of vaccines for COVID-19. Increasingly, U.S. sanctions block the ability of Venezuela to conduct normal commercial relations with other countries. The U.S. has been able to exercise this overwhelming power over Venezuela — and several other countries under unilateral U.S. sanctions — because of U.S. dominance over trade and investment, international financial systems, and global information flows.
Monroe Doctrine
Just when Bolívar’s armies defeated the Spanish, the U.S. President James Monroe on December 2, 1823, crafted the Monroe Doctrine. This policy suggested that now that European powers had lost their grip on the Americas, the United States of America will be the guarantor of continental stability. At that time, the U.S. did not have the technological or military means to subordinate all of the hemisphere. In 1898, when the U.S. intervened to remove the last vestiges of Spanish colonialism in Cuba and Puerto Rico, it took over both islands. Subsequently, U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt in his corollary to Monroe’s doctrine in 1904 said that the U.S. would exercise its influence over the Americas. Military invasions from Nicaragua to Panama (1989) and coups from Guatemala (1954) to Bolivia (2019) brought Monroe’s speech into the world.
The U.S. stand
It meant little that U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said in 2013, “The era of the Monroe Doctrine is over.” This statement came four years after the U.S.-backed coup in Honduras, and also before the U.S. coup in Bolivia. Mr. Kerry made that remark while he served under President Barack Obama and Vice-President Joe Biden. Mr. Biden, now U.S. President, has no intention of renouncing the Monroe Doctrine. His Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, has interfered in the legal processes in Bolivia, put in place a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agent, Lisa Kenna, as Ambassador to Peru, and deepened U.S. sanctions against Venezuela. For these men, there is no evidence of a policy shift.
In February 2021, UN Special Rapporteur on the negative impact of unilateral coercive measures, Alena Douhan, wrote that due to the U.S. unilateral sanctions, the Venezuelan government revenue shrank by 99% and the country is living on 1% of its pre-sanctions income. Venezuela, she wrote, “faces a lack of necessary machinery, spare parts, electricity, water, fuel, gas, food, and medicine”. Over the past six years, 2.5 million Venezuelans have slipped into food insecurity, while electricity generation levels have fallen to 20%. Venezuelan assets frozen in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Portuguese banks amount to U.S.$6 billion.
But Venezuelans remain defiant. “We stand firm,” says Mr. Arreaza, who has just returned to Caracas from Moscow. Monroe is another name for unipolarity. Despite the residual power of the U.S., Monroe is of the past. Carabobo, for the Venezuelans, signals multipolarity. It is, they believe, the way forward.
Vijay Prashad is the Director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Chief Correspondent for Globetrotter, and Chief Editor of LeftWord Books
