"The work that we have done over these past months has been building to the place that we find ourselves today, and I would fully expect that there will be further actions that the United States will take to continue to support President Guaido and the Venezuelan people," Pompeo said.

The U.S. has tried to topple the government of Venezuela since 1998. What threatened the government of the United States since then was the Bolivarian dynamic set in motion by the election of Hugo Chávez as president of Venezuela that year. Chávez won the elections with a mandate from Venezuela’s workers and poor to overhaul the country to tend to their long-neglected needs.

Venezuela, with the world’s largest proven oil reserves, had enriched the U.S.-based oil companies and its own oligarchy. Venezuela’s key oil minister in the early 1960s Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonso rightly called oil the “devil’s excrement.” Chávez arrived as the embodiment of popular hope. He threatened the oil companies and the oligarchy, which is why the United States tried to overthrow him, now his successor, Nicolás Maduro. (ILKHA)