Post #1369

On October 4th, Venezuela’s Attorney General, Tarek William Saab, announced a warrant for the arrest of Juan Guaidó on charges including treason, false representation and corruption stemming from his time as head of the US-appointed “interim government” of Venezuela. Guaidó is alleged to have exploited state resources to fund his parallel administration, resulting in the potential loss of a staggering $19 billion in public assets. Taking to social media from the safety of his Miami home, he claimed in response that “this is how the dictatorship’s machine for promoting lies works”. Unfortunately for him, the US’ own court documents prove that this charge was factually based. Guaidó, in fact, did preside over the loss of at least $19 billion in state holdings through his management of Citgo, a subsidiary of Venezuela’s state-owned PDVSA. How did this happen? How did a man, powerless within his own country, lose its largest overseas asset? “All that was privatised”, said then-president Hugo Chávez of the telecommunications giant CANTV, “let it be nationalised”. Thus began the 2007 nationalisation wave that took control of mining, oil, and agricultural operations for the people of Venezuela. This move represented an important step in the Bolivarian Revolution’s promise of wealth redistribution and of changing Latin America’s peripheral role as raw material supplier to companies in the Global North. https://venezuelanalysis.com/opinion/guaido-citgo-and-the-19b-hole/