When Colombia’s government, headed by U.S. puppet Álvaro Uribe Vélez, launched a secret military offensive into Ecuadorian territory on March 1, killing several people including FARC-EP leader Raul Reyes, it immediately accused Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez of aiding the Colombian leftist guerilla army. Supposedly, the Colombian commandos who bombed the FARC-EP camp found Reyes’s laptop, on which there was evidence of direct material aid from Venezuela’s government.
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Citing these unsubstantiated claims—which Chávez has vehemently denied—the U.S. ruling class is obviously hoping to add Venezuela to its list of “state sponsors of terrorism.” The U.S. ruling class, as always, is attempting to criminalize anti-imperialist mass movements founded on revolutionary politics. The “state sponsor of terrorism” label would provide the legal basis for the U.S. government to intensify its destablization campaign against Venezuela.
The hypocrisy of the imperialists and their lackeys should be obvious. It was Colombia—not Venezuela—that invaded its neighbor. Further, the U.S. government, with wars raging in Afghanistan and Iraq and more than 730 military bases worldwide, should be the last country to accuse another of foreign “meddling.”
Still, the latest round in the demonization of Venezuela has raised important questions among supporters of the Bolivarian Revolution and supporters of revolution in general. Does a revolutionary government or movement have the right to render material aid to revolutionary forces outside of its borders? Would such assistance represent inappropriate foreign “meddling” or revolutionary internationalism?
The role of the CIA
Washington and other imperialist governments long ago reserved the right to render military and financial aid to foreign forces in order to suppress the rebellious instincts of colonized and oppressed peoples.
The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency was first created in 1947. Originally meant to prevent revolutionary overturns in Western Europe, the CIA was later the Cttbroadened to weaken and demoralize the socialist camp and the world revolutionary movement.
The CIA advanced this quest by granting political and material support to forces that strove to restore capitalism in countries where it had been overthrown. Despite the rhetoric about the Soviet Union’s supposed threat to world peace, it was the U.S. government that played an offensive role through espionage and economic sabotage.
From the very start of the anti-communist fever, following the triumph of the 1917 Russian Socialist Revolution, German, French, British, Japanese and U.S. imperialism were determined to destroy the Soviet Union as a diametrically opposed social system.
The triumph of the Chinese, Korean, and Yugoslav revolutions after World War II seemed to confirm the imperialists’ worst fears: that revolutionary socialism was sweeping the globe.
During this period of intense global class struggle, misnamed the “Cold War” by bourgeois analysts, the U.S. government engaged in many subversive actions against any entity it deemed a threat to its system. The U.S. government conducted a range of spy and military operations against socialist states and national liberation movements of Africa, Asia and Latin America.
The CIA was behind “Operation CHAOS,” a project started under President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1959 aimed against U.S. citizens active in the anti-war and progressive movements. Tens of millions of dollars were allocated for mobilizing informants, buying the favors of the leaders of movements and governments, and financing blackmail and assassination.
In 1954, democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán of Guatemala was overthrown by a CIA-staged coup d’état after Arbenz announced a wide-ranging plan of land reform benefiting the poor. The CIA orchestrated a similar coup a year earlier in Iran, when democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh’s nationalization policy threatened U.S. and British oil interests.
In the Congo, the CIA partook in the capture and murder of revolutionary leader Patrice Lumumba. The CIA provided the racist, apartheid government of South Africa with information that was used against the African National Congress and was instrumental in the capture of Nelson Mandela.
In Nicaragua, the Pentagon covertly supplied arms to the right-wing Contras to topple the revolutionary Sandinista government. In Afghanistan, the U.S. imperialists gave military and financial backing to fundamentalist groups to fight the pro-Soviet government in Kabul. The list goes on, and this pattern continued through every administration, Democratic or Republican.
The CIA always financed, armed and trained the more developed opposition forces in countries where revolutionary or socialist governments existed in order to build for their final overthrow. This is still the policy of the U.S. government towards Cuba, despite nearly 50 years of failed invasions, assassinations and destabilization campaigns.
State sponsors of revolution
During the wave of anticolonial struggles in the decades that followed World War II, Washington routinely denounced the Soviet bloc for rendering material aid to freedom fighters in Vietnam, Angola, Egypt, South Africa and Northern Ireland. China was demonized for its support of insurgencies in Burma, Thailand and Vietnam. When Cuba took its internationalism to the highest level—sending its armed forces to Africa to assist in the continental struggle for liberation—the U.S. ruling class shrieked in outrage.
Cuba earned an extra dose of hatred when it created a school for training insurgents throughout Latin America and the world in the tactics of guerilla warfare. Amongst its many students were members of Puerto Rico’s Macheteros and the Palestine Liberation Organization. In addition, Cuba served as a safe haven for revolutionaries on the run from imperialism, many of them from the Black liberation movement—including Robert Williams, Huey Newton and Assata Shakur.
The U.S. corporate media attributed every victory of the oppressed to outside communist infiltration. The socialist states did often provide indispensable assistance to revolutionary movements, but these movements always had organic roots in the oppressed classes of their country.
Revolutionary Marxists completely reject the categories and slanders of the imperialist ruling class. Instead of being “state sponsors of terrorism,” the Soviet bloc and China (when it pursued a progressive internationalist foreign policy) represented state sponsors of revolution. Their absence from the global revolutionary struggle represents a giant step backward for all people fighting for liberation.
As an imperialist power, Washington must engage in subversive, terrorist activity to intimidate or destroy states and movements that chart an independent path. All revolutionaries inevitably confront this international and predatory nature of imperialism, which never respects the sovereignty of its opponents. To ask a revolutionary government to blind itself to this reality—and to ask it to view its political and military existence as self-contained and isolated—is to ask it to commit suicide.
Marxists defend the right of socialist and revolutionary governments to protect their existence by any means necessary. Accordingly, this right must include the right to use military force, both in defensive and offensive operations, and to assist progressive and revolutionary movements in their struggles.
