US regime change blueprint proposed Venezuelan electricity blackouts as ‘watershed event’ for ‘galvanizing public unrest’
The
US-funded CANVAS organization that trained Juan Guaido and his allies
produced a 2010 memo on exploiting electricity outages and urged the
opposition “to take advantage of the situation…towards their
needs”
by
Max Blumenthal
Part
2 - Rubio vows “a period of suffering” for Venezuela hours before
the blackout
The
Venezuelan government has placed the blame squarely on Washington,
accusing it of sabotage through a cyber-attack on its electrical
infrastructure. Key players in the US-directed coup attempt have done
little to dispel the accusation.
In a
tweet on March 8, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo framed the
electricity outage as a pivotal stage in US plans for regime change:
At noon
on March 7, during a hearing on Venezuela at the Senate Foreign
Relations Subcommittee, Sen. Marco Rubio explicitly called for the US
to stir “widespread unrest,” declaring that it “needs
to happen” in order to achieve regime change.
“Venezuela
is going to enter a period of suffering no nation in our hemisphere
has confronted in modern history,” Rubio proclaimed.
Around 5
PM, the Simon Bolivar Hydroelectric Plant experienced a total and
still unexplained collapse. Residents of Caracas and throughout
Venezuela were immediately plunged into darkness.
At
5:18 PM, a clearly excited Rubio took to Twitter to announce the
blackout and claim that “backup generators have failed.”
It was unclear how Rubio had obtained such specific information so
soon after the outage occurred. According to Jorge Rodriguez, the
communications minister of Venezuela, local authorities did not know
if backup generators had failed at the time of Rubio’s tweet.
Back in
Caracas, Guaido immediately set out to exploit the situation, just as
his CANVAS trainers had advised over eight years before. Taking to
Twitter just over an hour after Rubio, Guaido declared, “the
light will return when the usurpation [of Maduro] ends.” Like
Pompeo, the self-declared president framed the blackouts as part of a
regime change strategy, not an accident or error.
Two days
later, Guaido was at the center of opposition rally he convened in
affluent eastern Caracas, bellowing into a megaphone: “Article
187 when the time comes. We need to be in the streets, mobilized. It
depends on us, not on anybody else.”
Article
187 establishes the right of the National Assembly “to authorize
the use of Venezuelan military missions abroad or foreign in the
country.”
Upon his
mention of the constitutional article, Guaido’s supporters
responded, “Intervention! Intervention!”
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