(News) Was an invasion of Venezuela prepared in 2019? The documents unveiled in Argentina that recall the most critical moments of the Trump era

[Askor lml]

That a government in economic crisis like the Argentine one participates in a warlike and complex event today seems truly crazy, but in that first half of 2019 that became a scenario with significant degrees of probability.

Once the documents of the Puma operation have been disclosed, by the Argentine portal El Cohete a la Luna, according to which the Argentine Army designed and carried out military exercises under the scenario of an invasion of Venezuela, it seems more verifiable than the phrase of Donald Trump when he warned that "all the cards are on the table", with which he referred to the South American country towards the end of 2018 to introduce the idea of a military or armed invasion, it was not just another bravado, but had a real intention.

Or at least that is what the then president of Argentina, Mauricio Macri, and a part of the Army of that country believed, which was prepared for an action of this type -just in the moments of greatest tension regarding the issue in question, between the months of April and June 2019– through military exercises commanded by the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Argentine Armed Forces.

Almost three years after this series of events, in which the governments of the region promoted a self-sworn parallel cabinet, and after the "fever" that the issue of Venezuela provoked in right-wing actors and the media, it seems that Evidently, and Horacio Verbitsky's research confirms, that there were real intentions on the part of some States to generate actions that transcended diplomatic tensions and entered a properly warlike scenario.

This scandal, which will surely not reach the world media, shows that there are political and military actors who were willing to invade Venezuela; and they were not just inciting the invasion, but preparing it.

The mere hypothesis of invasion of a country is in itself a pre-war situation. Now, if they prepared military forces for this purpose, the chances of this happening were growing. As revealed in the reports, the intention was to form a multinational force in which Argentina would participate to invade Venezuela, from preselected flanks.

The odds of a war event
That a government in economic crisis like the Argentine one participates in a warlike and complex event today seems truly crazy, but in that first half of 2019 that became a scenario with significant degrees of probability.

The world media and the actors of the right and left in Latin America saw the option of an invasion of Venezuela led by the United States growing at a peremptory time. And the regional right, on the rise, signed up to help in some way so that said act could take place.

We pause the argument that tries to answer the original question of the text to ask another question: how would the situation of Venezuelan migration in all the countries of the region be today if this war had taken place?

In any case, this scandal, which will surely not reach the world media, is evidence that there are political and military actors with state command who were willing to invade Venezuela. And it confirms, too, that political actors from the radical right, as well as US military actors, were not only inciting it, but preparing it.

The journalist who publishes the documents confirms chronologically that while the military exercises were taking place in June 2019, Craig Faller, the head of the US Southern Command, visited Argentina with a rather warlike speech.

At that time, General Hamilton Mourao, current vice president of Brazil (which according to leaked reports would lend himself to serving as an attacking country), said a few weeks before taking office, in December 2018, that "the United Nations will have to intervene through the UN peacekeepers... and there is the role of Brazil: to lead the peacekeepers".

During those months, we once again witnessed a cold war situation in Latin America, now concentrated on Venezuela, in which most governments raised the tone of aggressiveness against Nicolás Maduro and began to take concrete actions such as the visit of the Chilean president, Sebastián Piñera, together with the Colombian president, Iván Duque, to the Colombian-Venezuelan border to support the entry of humanitarian aid, in February 2019.

All this escalation was after the abstentionist call of the Venezuelan opposition in the 2018 presidential elections to try an armed route that would not only take the government from Chavismo, but also erase this actor from the political map.

This action, in fact, took the same geographical direction as the Argentine military intelligence report: from Cúcuta (on the Colombian border; called 'Ceres' in the document) to north-central Venezuela.

It must be remembered that all this escalation was after the abstentionist call of the Venezuelan opposition, which reneged on the electoral path in the 2018 presidential elections to try an armed path that would not only take the government from Chavismo, but also erase this actor from the political map. .

It is interesting that the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Argentine Armed Forces produced the Intelligence report seven days before the military coup of April 30, 2019, in which the self-proclaimed president Juan Guaidó tried to take over a military air base in eastern Caracas with a resounding failure as a result.

There would be some coordination, or some information circulated.

Effect and conclusion of public knowledge of the report
One of the main affected by this leak of documents is the Government of Alberto Fernández, since General Juan Martín Paleo, appointed for directing the military exercises, has been promoted to chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Armed Forces during his administration. .

However, no official response from the current Argentine government has emerged, despite the fact that the Venezuelan president himself, Nicolás Maduro, has already requested an investigation.

But the revealed report also allows us to conclude that the Argentine Armed Forces are quite cautious with Venezuela and do not consider it a country that allows military facilities. The report states that Venezuela had "the largest air defense in Latin America", with important international allies.

Any military analyst could conclude that the theater of operations represented a difficult scenario and that it could become even more complex because the incursions would be by land, a terrain that at least the Argentine military is unaware of.

In this way, the next conclusion is that, knowing what these soldiers think about Venezuela, it can be inferred that a military scenario is less and less likely, even if radical right-wing governments emerge again on the continent.

In addition, today we are more certain that the impact of a confrontation in the north of South America would not only be localized there, but would spread throughout the continent due to the strong migratory waves that it would produce, with all the problems of internal public order that it would entail. .

Ociel Alí López is a sociologist, political analyst and professor at the Central University of Venezuela. He has been the winner of the 2015 Municipal Prize for Literature with his book Give More Gasoline and the Clacso / Sida prize for young researchers in 2004. He is a collaborator in various media in Europe, the United States and Latin America.
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