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Increasing surveillance on the leadership of PDVSA, the most important company in a South American nation seen as hostile to U.S. corporate interests, was a priority for the undisclosed NSA division to which the analyst reported. “Plainly speaking,” the analyst writes, they “wanted PDVSA information at the highest possible levels of the corporation – namely, the president and members of the Board of Directors.”

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Inflation, devaluation of the local currency and falling oil prices have marked the Venezuelan economy in recent years. To better understand the situation, Granma interviewed Alfredo Serrano Mancilla, PhD Economist, director of the Latin American Strategic Center of Geopolitics (CELAG), and author of the book, The Economic Thought of Hugo Chávez.

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El Salvador joined the near unanimous appeal by Latin American and Caribbean governments for the Obama Administration to repeal its executive order declaring Venezuela a “threat” to national security. The U.S. is now issuing veiled threats that it might deny El Salvador’s participation in its proposed $1 billion Alliance for Prosperity program for Central America, which ostensibly is designed to reduce the influx of migrants to the United States.

What the sanctions made clear is that President Obama’s opening to Cuba represented exactly zero change in Washington’s overall strategy toward the region: The intention of expanding commercial and diplomatic relations with Cuba was mainly to pursue a more effective strategy of undermining the Cuban government--and all of the left governments in the region.

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On Monday, the White House took the absurd step of declaring Venezuela an “unusual and extraordinary threat.” Obama is channeling Ronald Reagan, adopting practices similar to those used against the Nicaraguan Sandinista government. But, the world has moved forward, even if Washington has not. Venezuela today has very strong backing from its neighbors against what almost every government in the region sees as an illegal attempt to destabilize the country.

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