The president of Venezuela’s National Assembly, Jorge Rodríguez, asserted that Venezuela is exercising full control of its sovereignty while advancing in the construction of new diplomatic and energy relations with the US under principles of mutual respect and collaboration.
Through social media, the legislator reported on an interview he gave to US journalist Robert Stephen Schmitt, of the far-right Newsmax television channel, in which Jorge Rodríguez explained the guidelines of the Chavista foreign policy.
Jorge Rodríguez: “President Maduro and Celia Flores should be freed immediately”
And no snap elections.
Sorry for linking to a Nazi outlet, but various types of creeps claiming the U.S. dictatorship succeeded in overthrowing Chavismo are WRONG. https://t.co/CFi8rhAJtn
— Joe Emersberger (@rosendo_joe) February 10, 2026
“We are working on new diplomatic and energy relations with the United States of America, for the common good of our nations,” Jorge Rodríguez said in his message.
The website of Venezuela’s Ministry of Communication and Information stated that during the dialogue, the head of the Venezuelan legislature emphasized that these ties aim to promote cooperation and mutual benefit, especially in the hydrocarbons sector.
Jorge Rodríguez pointed out that Venezuela maintains an open-door foreign policy as long as it is based on the recognition of Venezuela’s legitimate authorities and respect for self-determination.
Strengthening foreign policy with Washington represents a path to finding joint solutions internationally without compromising the integrity of the republic, the parliamentarian emphasized. In this regard, he reaffirmed Venezuela’s commitment to defending national sovereignty and consolidating a diplomacy of based on peace in this new scenario of strategic cooperation.
During the interview, he also addressed the issue of the Amnesty Law currently under parliamentary debate. Jorge Rodríguez indicated that the law, unanimously approved in its first reading, is being promoted for all sectors of the opposition residing abroad, including those who instigated violence, so that they can return to the country in accordance with the law.
What Does Venezuela’s Amnesty for Democratic Coexistence Bill Propose?
When asked about the military attack carried out by US forces on January 3 and the abduction of President Nicolás Maduro, the legislator described the event as “very traumatic” but stressed that it was received with “great maturity” by an “incredibly mature” country.
(Telesur)
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
OT/JRE/SL
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It’s impossible to be sure, but they seem to underestimate the billions invested in ‘covert actions’/‘foreign influence’, and are heading towards a coup reinstating a power of the wealthy.
They most likely know ‘by now’/‘after all these years’ that no amount of openness will satisfy the west, only their cessation of socialism.
China survived while the ex-u.s.s.r. countries returned to being ruled by the wealthy, as all bourgeois democracies do, and all regimes did these past millenias, the party ought to protect itself(, and the population,) from their power if they don’t want to end up like the west(, and most of the Global South).
Or they can innovate and try something that would protect their revolution from the influence of the wealthy while not being accused of authoritarianism by the west, but that last point is too unlikely. Russia wouldn’t be considered authoritarian if it switched its foreign policy by abandoning its former allies, just like we supported anti-communist dictators. The problem with direct democracy may be its weakness to foreign&internal influence, but there could be a way in that direction if the population is (made )aware enough, i’m not sure.Fighting the influence of the wealthiest venezuelans and yankees could mean fighting their covert operations, forbidding their subventions, banning their medias, …, but it shouldn’t mean thoughtcrime since that would weaken the citizens, unable to understand why the opposite side is wrong and only knowing what s·he isn’t allowed to say. I.m.o. the u.s.s.r. post-50s would have had more convinced citizens by allowing pro-capitalist opinions as long as the wealthy minority had as much power to diffuse it as any other minority, that’s the true marketplace of idea(l)s. It’s the west that’s afraid of socialism, because they know they’re wrong, and there’s nothing to fear about the falseness of pro-capitalist opinions.
In any case they were doomed as soon as they opposed the empire, who’ll never let go of a prey until it achieves global hegemony, as empires do.
In the same line of thought, here’s one of their western-backed dictator :
In his song “Alberto Lovera hermano,” the popular folk singer Ali Primera commemorates Alberto Lovera, a teacher, leftist activist and secretary general of the Venezuelan Communist Party (PCV) who was kidnapped, tortured and killed by Venezuelan security forces in Caracas on October 17, 1965.
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Lovera’s body, wrapped in metal chains, got caught in a fisherman’s net in the coastal state of Anzoátegui ten days later. Lovera’s face, fingers and teeth had been crushed to complicate the identification process.
Albero Lovera was far from being the only prominent political activist who died by the hands of the police and security forces during the Punto Fijo period.
Other high-profile victims include Fabricio Ojeda, the leader of the Patriotic Junta that overthrew the dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez, and Jorge Rodriguez, the founder and secretary general of the political movement and party, Liga Socialista.Other particularly notorious episodes from the Puntofijo period include the Massacre of El Amparo in the state of Apure in 1988, where 14 fishermen were shot from behind and later presented as Colombian rebels killed in combat by Venezuelan security forces.
Six years earlier, 23 members of a guerrilla cell from the radical underground movement of Bandera Roja (a political party as of 1994) had been ambushed and assassinated in what is called the Massacre of Cantaura, in the state of Anzoátegui.
In May 1986, in what is called the Massacre of Yumare in the state of Yaracuy, nine political activists were captured and killed, and many of them tortured. The initial official version in all cases was that these individuals were guerrilla members killed in combat by security forces.Venezuela received relatively little international attention for its human rights situation at the time. As reports of the gross human rights violations taking place elsewhere at the continent slowly became known, the world’s attention was focused on the brutal dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay in the southern cone, and Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador further north.
Approximately 30,000 people were killed during Argentina’s “dirty war.”
In Chile, approximately 3000 were killed and 40,000 tortured under General Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship.
In Guatemala, it is estimated that 200,000 people were killed, the majority from the indigenous population.
(…)
« I remember once when we were kids … we had a communist flag hidden beyond the refrigerator … this was after they banned the communist party, we had to hide such things … outside our house, we were living over at Monte Piedad then, a group of adecos and copeyanos were gathered together with some police … my little brother found the communist flag behind the refrigerator and ran out and past them waving the flag, split naked!! My mother yelled that I had to go after him, I ran after him and got him back home in the house … but the police came to our house and beat up my father …. But then they let him go to the toilet … he climbed out of the a small window and ran away as fast as he could and hid over there in the barrio … the day after we were at school, down there in la Cañanda, and someone told us that the police was on its way … »Read after the p.70 if you want to know what happened next, but you get the general idea.
And also this poem :
What does it mean to be from the Sambil Society ?
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It is to talk negatively about Venezuela and her people while drinking whisky in a bar in Las Mercedes (and the most fortunate ones in London), and when they meet for a business lunch in Altamira (idem in Paris).
It is to blame the Venezuelan people suffering in poverty for being lazy and irresponsible when it is these people who produce goods and riches for those parasites and for the gringo empire that they admire so deeply.
(…)
It is to imitate foreign fashion promoted on television, and to despise as monkeys and marginals the creole traditions and customs. It is to dress the mind with T-shirts of Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears, and to look ugly upon those who dress their body in T-shirts of Ali Primera and Simón Bolívar. In a few words, it is to speak Spanish and think in English.
It is to feel pain for the dead North Americans in the World Trade Center in New York, and not feel anything for our dead Latino brothers in the Chorillos neighborhood when the United States invaded Panama.
(…)
It is to die from hunger in a shack on the shantytown hills, while thinking and wanting to be like themAnd if Venezuela ever end up failing, many(, not enough,) won’t forget that it succeeded :
The story about the transformation of Ramón’s and Abigayl’s lives reminds us of a fundamental aspect of the Bolivarian process ; namely, that throughout the years of the Chávez government, millions of poor people saw their lives improve.
They were better fed ; were better schooled ; acquired better housing, received free healthcare, wheel chairs, vaccinations, university scholarships, single mother scholarships, and pensions ; and participated in sports programs and cultural education.
According to ECLAC, the United Nations Economic Commission on Latin America and the Caribbean, income-based poverty rates fell from 48.6% of the population in 2002 to 27.8% of the population in 2010 (Tinker Salas 2015:192).
Per the National Statistics Institute, overall poverty levels fell from 55.6% in 1998 to 21.2% in 2012. Extreme poverty dropped from 25.5% in 1998 to 6% in 2012.
In addition, there were significant welfare improvements not captured through income-based statistical methods (Weisbrot and Sandoval 2007).
In a UN-Habitat report from 2012, Venezuela was ranked with a Gini index of 0.41, the best score in Latin America (the lowest level of economic inequalities). This is a significant improvement compared to the 1990s (UN-Habitat 2012).During my time in the barrios in the Chávez era, people responded rather univocally that they had never before had such access to social welfare (though it was by no means perfect).
Indeed, people’s subjective assessment of the situation for themselves as well as their peers was that not only was poverty reduced and social services more available, but also that they enjoyed increased access to different arenas and venues for self-development, being it through education, community media, sports, culture or work programs.
I met numerous people who expressed that their lives significantly changed for the better through the government’s policies. To present a few examples : one was my neighbor in 23 de Enero, a slim, nervous single mother of three, constantly biting her teeth. She was a beneficiary of Misión Madres de Barrio (Mothers from the Barrio), through which she had gotten a small scholarship while following courses and other requirements that the program demanded. She told me with pride about when she resigned her scholarship from the government and signed a contract with Metro de Caracas. For the first time in her life, she had a job with pension benefits and cestatickets.
Another one was a young girl who was severely physically dysfunctional because of a rheumatic condition, presumably because of an untreated virus infection when she was a child. Her condition was irreversible, and the doctors who originally treated her said that she was bound to end totally crippled in bed. It could perhaps be halted through operations, medication and physiotherapy, but it would require intense follow-up, which the family was not able to pay for through private medical insurance. At the time, public health was also in shambles, and it required a lot of payment on the side. In the early years of the Bolivarian process, her family sought out help through the Cuba-Venezuela health program. The girl was sent to Cuba several times together with her mother, all expenses paid for. The longest stay lasted for three months. Today, the accentuation of her condition has been halted. Two years ago, she graduated as a lawyer at the Bolivarian University (Universidad Bolivariana).
Another example is the numerous elderly people who underwent free surgeries for cataracts and similar conditions. This is a quick and relatively cheap procedure, but it had been out of reach for numerous people in the barrios. Through the so-called Misión Milagro set up by the Chávez government, 676,790 people had undergone eye surgery by 2012 (Correo del Orinoco 2012). One of them was Elizabeth, who lived together with her sons, their girlfriends and her grandchildren in a barrio in Catia. She had slowly lost her eyesight over several years, and when I first met, her vision was so bad that she did not dare to leave her house. After the operation, it was as if she could resume her life all over again.
Another example, again of which there are many, is the numerous people, above all women, who went back to school through the government’s educational missions. One was my neighbor in Propatria, a dark-skinned, slim woman in her fifties. Her seven children, whom she had raised alone, were grown-ups (and one was dead). After having completed high school through Misión Ribas (high school level educational program), she was now studying comunicación social (journalism) through Misíon Sucre (university level educational program). She, as many others middle-aged beneficiaries of the educational missions I spoke to, expressed that going back to school above all meant an increase in self-respect and a new sense of purpose. As many worded it, “it has opened our eyes.”
Another example is the numerous people who were able to upgrade their homes. In the context of housing projects, the phrase recurrently used was to have a vivienda digna (a dignified home). Over the years, I have visited countless barrio homes. While some are quite comfortable, others live in substandard and even dangerous conditions. In one home I visited, one of the walls was completely covered with mold, producing a nauseating smell and tickling sensation that made me instinctively want to run out. A whole family lived and slept in this room, including children. Their grandmother had recently died from a respiratory disease. Another home was flooded every time it rained, damaging their belongings and furniture. The children had become traumatized and started crying and screaming that they had to move their things out every time rain started. In innumerable homes, people shower and go to the toilet behind a curtain or an old sheet in the absence of a door. In most barrio homes, people share beds and bedrooms, and often they cook, sleep and spend their time in the same room. People may spend years and decade improving their homes, slowly saving up money to add an extra room or construct a proper bathroom. The housing rehabilitation (or relocation) projects therefore represented a giant leap for many people in terms of living conditions, but also for their sense of dignity.I am emphasizing these histories for two reasons : one is in order to highlight the subjective experiences of poverty reduction, welfare improvements and improved life opportunities that undercut people’s embrace of the Chávez government’s pro-poor policies. Another is to provide a preamble for the ensuing discussion about the contradictions and paradoxes surrounding the use of oil revenues for collective consumption. Because all these social policies cost money. State money. Oil money. The social justice ethos of the Bolivarian process hinged on the promise of repaying the state’s social debt to the poor.
(…)
« Before, Venezuela was run by three families. The Cicneros, the Zulvaga and the Phelps. It is in their nature to oppose Chávez because he runs against their interests. I accept that they oppose him. It is in their nature. But look how much this government is spending on the poor and still there is money left ! »
(…)
the government pledged that everyone who was left homeless would be relocated to new and safe housing. When the mission was launched, everyone living in inadequate housing conditions was encouraged to apply for a new home. The government vowed to build 2 million new homes between 2011 and 2017, which was the estimated housing deficit across Venezuela. This would be done through a concerted effort of the state, the private sectors and the communal councils, as well as the communes. More than 10 million people registered, supplying data on social and economic conditions, which would be the basis for an analysis on who was in fact eligible. By the end of November 2012, 293.799 homes, apartments or houses, depending on location, had been constructed. The overall goal was set to 3 million homes by the end of 2019.
(…)
However, as a final comment I want to suggest that there is reason to be cautious when notions of “rentist citizens” and “oil pathologies” are brought up, both in scholarly analysis and as articulated in “folk wisdom.” These are seductive templates that may be used and manipulated in ideological and class-biased discourses without making explicit underlying political assumptions or agendas. As the Venezuelan economist and oil analyst Carlos Mendoza Potellá maintains in the case of Venezuela :
« The abusive use of the label “rentist” has served the supporters of oil expansion [privatization] in a subordinated association with foreign oil capital in discrediting the Venezuelan struggle for ensuring a just distribution of wealth of national patrimony. (Flama 2011:39, interview) »
Chávez’s critics repeatedly framed social spending for the poor as populist oil-demagoguery. This position is also reflected in the scholarly literature (e.g., see Corrales and Penfold 2007; Penfold-Becerra 2007; Rodríguez 2007).
However, these arguments often serve as barely concealed resistance against the very idea that the Venezuelan state should control and prioritize redistributing oil revenues toward its poor citizens.
