The US State Department just lost another election in Venezuela

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

Mr Blinken’s response to Maduro’s election victory in Venezuela is of a piece with the long and sordid history of US foreign policy towards the energy rich Latin American state. To be blunt, Washington views Venezuela as a wholly owned subsidiary that has had, and continues to have, the temerity to act as an independent sovereign country.

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 fold as a neo-colony in all but name.

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. 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…