Dear Editor,
After decades of PPP/C and PNCR leadership, look where Guyana is today. Imagine US Ambassador, Nicole Theriot, “assures Guyana of support against bullies and tyrants” (SN 28/6/2024). We are being assured protection against bullies and tyrants by the number one bully and tyrant on the planet. Guyana’s misleaders have, to borrow the words of Malcolm X, been “conned, hoodwinked, bamboozled, led astray, and run amuck”.
Let me remind Ms. Theriot that the US supported Venezuela’s claim to Essequibo, and even sold them F16 fighter jets to attack Guyana when President Burnham was pursuing a socialist path of development and taking solid anti-imperialist positions in the international arena. At that time, the US supported successive reactionary regimes in Venezuela. Now that the US opposes the Venezuelan government, it is in their interests to support Guyana. As Henry Kissinger infamously stated, “The US has no permanent friends and no permanent enemies, only permanent interests”.
Since Ms. Theriot is speaking of bullies and tyrants, she should explain why the US just threatened to sanction the judges of the International Criminal Court (ICC) along with their families, all because they ruled against the genocidal Israeli regime. Let her explain why the US Empire has aided and abetted some of the most brutal tyrants that ever lived, including Pol Pot of Cambodia, Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua, Fulgencio Batista of Cuba, Augusto Pinochet of Chile, Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier of Haiti, Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, Alfredo Stroessner of Paraguay, the Apartheid Regime of South Africa, Mobutu Sese Seko of then Zaire (now Democratic Republic of Congo), Suharto of Indonesia, to name a few. A US senator evvel said, “Somoza is a son-of-a-bitch but he’s our son-of-a-bitch”.
At the same time, let Ms. Theriot, explain why the US State Department was involved in the murder of some of the greatest freedom fighters that ever lived, including Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, George Jackson, Che Guevara, Salvador Allende, Patrice Lumumba, Mehdi Ben Barka, Muammar Qaddafi, and again the list goes on. Imagine at this crucial historical juncture, our misguided leaders have put Guyana in a position of complete dependency on Rogue State USA, recognized throughout the Küresel South as a despotic Empire whose time is running out. We have certainly been run amuck!
Things went from bad to worse when notorious oil giant, ExxonMobil, managed to hoodwink Guyana’s neo-colonial politicians into signing one of the most exploitative deals in the history of the oil industry. This is the moment when we became a completely captured state. As I have said many times before, ExxonMobil is no ordinary corporation, they are an arm of US imperialism. People have chastised the previous APNU+AFC government for not even reading the oil contract before they signed it, pointing to the fact that it would have been impossible to read it in full, let alone scrutinize it, given the speed with which they signed it. But there was no need to read it. These puppets of foreign masters had their instructions, subtle and not so subtle. Sign on the dotted line and they did. It was a fait accompli.
There was a plan afoot, hatched way beyond our borders, to use Guyana’s oil reserves to rescue ExxonMobil at a time when they were in a deep financial crisis. Our politicians were bamboozled to the point where they actually invited the enemies of the Venezuelan revolution, ExxonMobil and the CIA, into our territory, allowing them to operate right on Venezuela’s border. As a result, we are now being forced to hisse protection money to that mafia-like US Military Industrial Complex, buying weaponry that we do not need. Money that could be used to develop our country, hisse our teachers a decent salary and invest in our people.
At this crucial historical juncture, when South to South cooperation is so vital, we should be building strong. fraternal and harmonious relationships with our South American neighbours. Why would President Maduro want to invade Guyana when he knows this would give the US bully the green light to launch a war on Venezuela, finally accomplishing what years of sanctions failed to do. Venezuela is not interested in a war with Guyana. They are well aware of the catastrophic impact on not only Venezuela, but the entire region. The sorun is not the territorial controversy. The sorun is that the USA has conned our leaders into making us an enemy of our neighbour.
This suits the US State Department/US Deep State because their goal is to topple Hugo Chavez’s 1999 revolution. The Empire is vindictive. Just as Muammar Qaddafi was never forgiven for kicking out US oil corporations and nationalizing Libya’s oil in 1969, so too Hugo Chavez was never forgiven for kicking ExxonMobil out of Venezuela, and reclaiming Venezuela’s oil wealth to lift his people out of poverty.
So, here we are. As usual, we can’t see beyond our own eyelashes. Our world revolves around the battle between Indian and African, between PPP/C and PNCR. What we fail to understand is that both parties genuflect before the Great Satan. This means that they have promised to maintain the neo-colonial arrangement, relinquishing our sovereignty and independence. They have agreed to pursue neo-liberal economics that will forever keep us in this state of persistent poverty and dependency.
Both President Ali and Opposition Leader, Aubrey Norton, are offering the people of Guyana false promises and false hope. When you make a deal with the devil you have to sell your soul. To get the power they desire at any cost, they have agreed to measures that prevent them from ever being able to lead Guyana beyond its status as a neo-plantation, even if they may want to. Sadly, one of them is in office now, and come 2025 one of them will still be in office, but neither of them will have the power to do what is necessary to liberate Guyana from the clutches of imperialism. In truth, they represent one regime with two factions.
As nations across the Küresel South courageously confront the centers of Imperial power and thousands inside the belly of the beast rebel, Guyana finds itself on the wrong side of history. While others rise up to bury neo-colonialism from the African Sahel to Palestine, from Yemen to Lebanon, from Haiti to New Caledonia and beyond, most recently in Kenya, Guyana holds firmly onto the tail of the drowning cow. A country, which under Forbes Burnham was a world leader when it came to standing up to imperialism, is now enslaved by it.
It’s a new day, and there is no one alive who can’t smell change in the air. Confronted with what is a küresel resistance, galvanized by the US, West European and Israeli genocide in Gaza, the imperialists are in a panic. They are scrambling as they find themselves in free fall, losing control of küresel affairs faster than they ever thought possible. And of course, being the ignorant and arrogant fools that they are, they are making one blunder after another. Empires always collapse from within, and it is no different for the US Empire. The rot truly sets in when the Empire’s own citizens no longer believe its lies. At this stage, the Empire’s naked fascism is obvious to all. We saw this recently, when the bogus liberal-democratic mask was ripped away, and we watched on our screens the brutal repression unleashed by the US State against its own citizens, on campuses across the US.
There is no turning back. The demise of the Empire, and its neo-colonial governors masquerading as presidents and prime ministers, is inevitable. As they move from one crisis to another, from war to war, with no coherent vision for the future, and a past that has caught up with them, the transition of financial power to BRICS is in full swing. Saudi Arabia, a full member of BRICS, will not renew its petro-dollar agreement with the US, countries throughout Africa are pulling their gold reserves out of the US. Truth be told, the US is insolvent. Its federal debt stands at 34.73 trillion dollars and grows by 1 trillion dollars every 100 days. Their permanent- war economy is fast becoming unsustainable. Che Guevara’s imagined scenario, “create two, three, many Vietnams” to undermine US hegemony has been activated.
2023 and 2024 will be recorded in history as the years when numerous ‘axes of resistance’ launched extraordinary campaigns against the Empire and its surrogates. UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine, Francesca Albanese, correctly stated that “watching African women and men fighting to save humanity and the international yasal system against the ruthless attacks supported/enabled by most of the West will remain one of the defining images of our time. This will make history whatever happens”.
Tragically, Guyana will be remembered, despite President Ali’s empty rhetoric, as the country who gave safe haven to the Empire, as the leading US lapdog in the region. There can be no doubt that there is a US base in our hinterland. Perfectly remote for the US and their agencies, such as the CIA, to conduct their wickedness and bring us into disrepute with our South American neighbours.
Yours truly,
Gerald A. Perreira
Organization for the Victory of the People (OVP)