No Mr Blinken, Juan Guaido is not the interim president of Venezuela and Venezuela is not a wholly-owned subsidiary of Washington

Confirmation that the office of US Secretary of State should rightly be renamed the office of US Secretary of US Imperialism has just been provided by the current incumbent, Anthony Blinken.

In a recent tweet Mr Blinken continued the charade begun by former US President Donald Trump in referring to Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Gauido as the country’s interim president. This he did in the context of a recent video of Mr Gauido being attacked and chased out of a restaurant in the Venezuelan town of Cojedes by a large group of local residents, who consider him to be an agent of the US rather than any kind of president, interim or otherwise.

Mr Blinken’s tweet also confirmed that rather than any serious departure from the Trump administration, Joe Biden’s administration is fits into the category of ‘meet the new boss, same as the old boss’ when it comes to foreign policy.

The legacy of Hugo Chavez

From the beginning, ever since Hugo Chavez dared liberate Venezuela from the iron grip of a US-controlled local oligarchy in the late 1990s, Washington has engaged in a concerted and unrelenting effort to return the oil-rich country to the status of a wholly owned subsidiary.

And with Venezuela possessing the largest proven oil reserves in the world, for a Trump administration that in many respects evinced the character of a New York mafia crime family more than a serious government, it was always inevitable that this campaign would be ramped up rather than tamped down upon his arrival in the White House in 2016.

Maduro under attack

Venezuela’s current ‘legally elected’ president, Nicolas Maduro, took over the presidency after Hugo Chavez died in 2013, pledging to protect and continue the legacy of radical reforms Chavez inspired and introduced. And under the aegis of the Bolivarian Constitution, the achievements of those reforms cannot be gainsaid.

The mass literacy program known as Mission Robinson was the biggest and most ambitious ever undertaken in the region since the Cuban Revolution. Its success was recognized by UNESCO in 2005…