“On the campaign trail, she [María Corina Machado] was received almost as a religious figure, often wearing white, promising to restore democracy and reunite families torn apart by an economic crisis and mass migration. ‘María!’ her followers shouted, before falling into her arms,” the New York Times reverently reported.
Indeed, Machado’s personally chosen surrogate to contend in last July’s Venezuelan presidential election, Edmundo González, did fall into her arms. But that was because her infirm disciple had trouble, both literally and figuratively, standing on his own two feet.
Machado was the main Venezuelan opposition figure backed by the US. Her platform of extreme neoliberal shock therapy was rejected by the electorate. Most Venezuelans oppose her call to privatize nearly all state institutions serving the people – schools, hospitals, public housing, food assistance, and the state oil company, which funds social programs. Nor is there any popular appetite for Machado’s plan to radically reorient foreign policy to subordination to Washington and support of US imperial wars in Ukraine and Palestine.
A hagiography, such as this one by the Times, includes an investigation into the life and miracles attributed to the would-be saint. The article on Machado, penned by one Julie Turkewitz, does just that and more. The article also unintentionally reveals that the far-right opposition advocates foreign intervention to overthrow the democratic will of the Venezuelan people. Its title clearly states: “Trump to Save Her Country.”
It took the US until November 19, nearly four months, to declare González as the legitimate president-elect of Venezuela. The recognition likely signals a shift in the lame-duck Biden administration’s policy from negotiation to all-out hostility towards Venezuela, paving the way for a smooth handover to the new Trump team. Previously, Washington simply called for a “peaceful transition.”
The miraculous opposition primary
Turkewitz reported that Machado won “an overwhelming victory in a primary race.” She uses the weasel-construction “a primary” rather than “the primary,” because Machado’s “primary” was not one conducted by the official Venezuelan electoral authority, the CNE. Rather, it was a private affair administered by the NGO Súmate. That NGO, as the article admits, is funded by the US.
Machado prevailed in a crowded field of 13 candidates with a miraculous 92% of the vote. When some of the other candidates called fraud, Machado had the ballots destroyed. She could do so because Súmate is her personal organization.
The Times intimates that Machado “galvanized a nation” around an opposition agenda. That is something Uncle Sam has so far failed to achieve despite a quarter of a century of meddling in Venezuela’s internal affairs.
The empire’s newspaper of record reports that Machado is “wildly popular.” But that’s in the halls of the US Congress, where she was vetted and then anointed “leader of the opposition” even before the so-called primary in Venezuela. Unfortunately for Machado that popularity with the Yankee politicos did not travel as well back home. In Venezuela, even within her corner of the far-right, Machado is resented. Far from unified, the opposition in Venezuela is today ever more divided.
Contested election results
The official Venezuelan electoral authority (CNE) declared incumbent President Nicolás Maduro the winner with 52% of the vote. That outcome was subsequently audited and confirmed by the Venezuelan supreme court (TSJ).
González, the person whom the Times declared the winner, came in second with 43% of the vote, according to the official count. González claimed that he had evidence that proved he won the presidency, but he refused to show it to the TSJ, even when he was summoned to do so.
Moreover, the Times reports that the US-backed opposition has tallies from some 80% of the precincts, which were published on a private blog site. Sources supporting the Venezuelan government then published analyses showing that evidence to be bogus, while counter claims from those favoring regime change purport to confirm their validity.
The problem of privately posting evidence, while refusing to submit it to official channels, is that it leaves the Venezuelan authorities no constitutional path for accepting it even if it were valid. The question ignored by the article is: If “their team collected and published vote-tally receipts” proving its victory, why did they not settle the matter by submitting them?
The answer, not one that the Times would admit to, is that the far-right opposition and its US handlers never made a good faith attempt to win the election.
Washington’s strategy was to delegitimize the election, not to win it
The opposition’s platform could never be a winning ticket, which they knew. The only way to achieve it would be an extra-legal regime-change operation predicated on delegitimizing the democratically-elected government. And that is precisely what is being played out today in Venezuela.
There were a number of more moderate opposition figures with experience and popular followings. Had the US been interested in simply an electoral defeat of the ruling Socialist Party, they could have backed a less extreme candidate and offered to ease their punishing “sanctions” on Venezuela. Instead, Washington backed the far right, which took the supremely unpopular position of advocating for yet more sanctions on their own country to precipitate regime-change.
With nine other contenders on the presidential ballot, name recognition was important. Literally nobody had heard of González until Machado personally chose him as her surrogate. She had been disqualified from running back in 2015 for constitutionally mandates offenses.
Machado’s political party, Vente Venezuela, lacked ballot status because her party had boycotted recent Venezuelan elections in keeping with the far-right’s stance that the Venezuelan state is not legitimate. Once the party decided to again participate in the electoral arena in 2024, she could have petitioned for recognition of her party. But she didn’t bother.
González, who had been in retirement, had no political following or experience. He had been a Venezuelan diplomat to El Salvador back in the 1980s, where he had been implicated in supporting US-backed death squads.
Maduro crisscrossed the country in an all-out campaign effort, exhaustingly visiting over 300 municipalities. His ruling Socialist Party, in power since 1999, had cadre in every corner of the country who were mobilized. They didn’t need to be told that an opposition victory could mean not only loss of a job, but they might face retribution from the far right.
In contrast to Maduro’s strong ground game, the US-backed opposition was weak in the streets. González himself sat out the campaign in Caracas, while Machado barnstormed the hinterlands with a paper poster bearing his visage. Indicative of popular following were the turnouts at political rallies, both during the campaign and after, where Maduro attracted many times more supporters than González.
Forecast
The Times not only maintains that González “won the July vote by a wide margin” but he “should be taking office in January.” González, too, claims he’ll be back in Caracas for the inauguration. After the election, he voluntarily left Venezuela for Spain in a transfer negotiated with Caracas and Madrid governments.
The Times further reports that Machado predicts Maduro will voluntarily “negotiate his own exit.” Even more fantastic, the Times asserts González “garnered almost 70 percent of the vote.”
In a revealing lapse from her otherwise editorializing, Turkewitz correctly reported that Machado “has spent roughly two decades trying to remove Mr. Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chávez, from power.” Conveniently omitted is that effort included a number of coup attempts, including the 2002 US-backed coup that temporarily deposed then President Chávez. Machado signed the infamous Carmona Decree then, which voided the constitution and disbanded the courts, the legislature, and executive.
That 2002 coup lasted less than 48 hours because the people of Venezuela spontaneously rose up and confronted the traitorous military. If Machado indeed had the backing of 7 in 10 Venezuelans, she too could have taken the presidential palace regardless of the official election report.
The Timescalls her Venezuela’s “Iron Lady” for her “steely resolve.” Meanwhile Hinterlaces,reporting from Venezuela, speculates Machado has fled the country:
The failure of the insurrectionary strategy in the absence of a social explosion or a rupture in the Bolivarian civic-military alliance, the lack of convincing evidence on Edmundo González’s alleged electoral victory, since they do not really have the minutes to demonstrate it, convinced Machado to leave the country.
Nicolás Maduro will be inaugurated on January 10. As confirmed by the Venezuelan supreme court, the majority voted for him to continue Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution.
This November, US president Joe Biden will leave office with the world in turmoil and US fingerprints on the bodies of untold thousands across the globe: in Gaza and Lebanon, Yemen and Syria, Cuba and Venezuela, Pakistan and Haiti, and elsewhere.
While Biden attempted to cast his foreign policy actions as defending “democracy” against “authoritarianism,” this framing is a lie. The real motive force behind the Biden administration’s bloody foreign policy is a fear of waning hegemony – of losing the benefits the US economy derives from political and economic domination of the global majority.
In that vein, the US is still trying to suffocate the model of socialist Latin American integration forwarded by Cuba and Venezuela. Washington is still arming the Israeli genocide in Palestine, the invasion of Lebanon, and other Israeli aggressions against “Axis of Resistance” forces in the region, namely Iran. On top of this, the US is still supporting or carrying out airstrikes against Yemen and Syria, still hoping to bleed Russia dry in Ukraine, still backing a Pakistani military dictatorship imposed with US backing, still engineering the re-invasion of Haiti, and still plotting an economic war (and perhaps a hot one) against China.
The Biden administration genuinely believed it could remake the world in its vision, and particularly the Middle East à la the neoconservatives of the George W. Bush administration. A Nation article by Aída Chávez laid out Biden’s disturbing plan for the Middle East and wider world, a plan that relies on Israel successfully carrying out the ethnic cleansing of Palestine:
One goal of the “Biden doctrine,” as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman called it, is to achieve the “global legitimacy” necessary to “take on Iran in a more aggressive manner.” With Hamas out of the picture and a demilitarized Palestinian state under the influence of the Gulf regimes, the thinking goes, the US will have Arab cover in the region to be able to counter Iran – and the cheap drones they’re worried about – and then put all of its energy toward a confrontation with China.
Following Israel’s killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, US officials jumped at the chance to push “a much wider agenda – including an opening for the next stage of America’s geopolitical ambitions.” This “next stage” includes the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the signing of a US-Saudi defence treaty, and the Gulf monarchies leading Gaza’s so-called “reconstruction” as a pro-US “emirate,” in the words of Republican Senator Lindsey Graham.
Following the killing of Sinwar, Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal stated, “After recent conversations w/leaders of Israel, Saudi Arabia & UAE, I have real hope that Sinwar’s death creates truly historic opportunities for Israel’s security, cessation of fighting & regional peace & stability through normalization of relations. The moment must be seized.” Lindsey Graham elaborated on the “historic opportunities” of which Washington hopes to take advantage. “MBS and MBZ at the UAE will come in and rebuild Gaza,” he said in a recent interview. “[They will] create an enclave in the Palestine.”
According to Bob Woodward’s new book War, Graham reportedly told Biden, “It’s going to take a Democratic president to convince Democrats to vote to go to war for Saudi Arabia.” To which Biden responded, “Let’s do it.”
While Washington aims to violently remake the Middle East to serve its geopolitical aims – a stark contrast to China’s recent peacemaking between Saudi Arabia and Iran – other targets of imperialism continue to suffer as well.
In April 2022, the Biden administration helped engineer the removal of popular Pakistani president Imran Khan from office. The US wanted Khan ousted because he entertained positive relations with China and Russia, two powers that Washington views as a threat to its hegemony. As Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs Donald Lu stated in a now infamous cypher to the Pakistani military, “if the no-confidence vote against the Prime Minister succeeds, all will be forgiven in Washington.”
Since the US-backed coup against Khan, the Pakistani military has taken extreme measures to prevent the ousted president’s return to power, including legal onslaughts, the arrest of thousands of supporters, crackdowns on social media activists, the imprisonment and torture of independent journalists such as Imran Riaz Khan, the decimation of Khan’s party Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), and the rigging of an election earlier this year.
In other words, a de facto military junta has seized total power in Pakistan, and Washington backs them because they have reversed Khan’s non-aligned position and returned the country to the US orbit.
Meanwhile, Haiti has become a target of Washington once more. Earlier this year, the Biden administration courted Kenya’s President William Ruto to lead a US-funded invasion force into Haiti, which is wracked by violence after over a century of exploitation and underdevelopment by the US and allies, including Canada. The mission’s ostensible goal is to free Haiti from warring paramilitary gangs – however, the invasion force and its backers ignore the reality that the paramilitaries are a consequence of the brutally unequal political, economic, and social hierarchies imposed on Haiti by Global North powers. In reality, Haiti requires sovereignty and respect, not a new spiral of bloodshed and misery.
Haiti’s Caribbean neighbours, Cuba and Venezuela, have also endured immense suffering due to Biden’s imperialist policies. Cuba and Venezuela have long been targets of US imperialism – Cuba for over sixty years, Venezuela for twenty-five – and the Biden era continued this brutal interventionism. In the case of Cuba, Biden kept in place the hundreds of additional sanctions and the egregious “state sponsor of terrorism” designation imposed by Donald Trump. The Trump-Biden sanctions are harsher than any previous president’s, depriving the small Caribbean nation of billions of dollars per year. “The sanctions today,” says political scientist William LeoGrande, “have a greater impact on the Cuban people than ever before.” People are going hungry, hundreds of thousands hope to migrate, and most recently, the country’s power grid collapsed under the weight of Biden’s coercive measures.
As Drop Site news contributor Ed Augustin wrote in early October:
Government food rations [in Cuba] – a lifeline for the country’s poor – are fraying. Domestic agriculture, which has always been weak, has cratered in recent years for lack of seeds, fertilizer, and petrol, forcing the state to import 100 percent of the basic subsidized goods. But there’s not enough money to do that. Last year the government eliminated chicken from the basic food basket most adults receive. Last month, the daily ration of bread available to all Cubans was cut by a quarter. Even vital staples like rice and beans now arrive late. Food insecurity on the island is rising, according to a recent report by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Vulnerable groups – older people, pregnant women, children and people with chronic illnesses – are most affected by the knock-on effects of US policy.
In all the cases described above, the Biden administration has taken extreme measures to snuff out challenges to its imperialist hegemony – measures that manifest first and foremost in the physical destruction of Palestinians and Lebanese by US-made weapons, the imposition of hunger, desperation, and migration crises on Cuba and Venezuela, the US-backed occupation of Haiti, the violent repression of Pakistanis’ desire for sovereignty and non-alignment, and more. Meanwhile, one-third of the world’s nations – and 60 percent of poor countries – face some type of US sanctions for having displeased the imperial hegemon.
The prevailing world system, a system defined by US imperialism and the imposition of the neoliberal Washington Consensus around the globe, is facing an array of challenges, from Latin America and the Caribbean to Palestine to East Asia.
How is Washington responding? Through the economic strangulation of countries like Cuba and Venezuela that present an alternative model; through a “day after” plan in the Middle East that would reduce Gaza to a neocolony of Washington and the Gulf monarchies; through coups against popular non-aligned leaders like Imran Khan; through the re-invasion of Haiti, a nation whose sovereignty has long been subverted by imperialism; through pressuring the Ukrainian government to lower the draft age so Kyiv can continue sending its young people into the meat grinder on behalf of Washington’s geopolitical aims; and through continuing to trudge the path toward war with China.
Ironically, the US empire’s violent response to its waning hegemony is expediting the emergence of an alternative world order, one marked by the de-dollarization and South-South cooperation of the BRICS group. As Biden leaves office and Trump returns to the White House, we can safely assume that the violence of imperialism will continue, perhaps intensify, and at the same time, the global majority will continue its efforts to forge new relationships outside the umbrella of US unilateralism.
Rubio and Trump during a break in the 2016 presidential debate. AP photo.
Of all Trump’s choices for his foreign policy team, Marco Rubio is the least controversial to the neoconservative foreign policy establishment in Washington, and the most certain to provide continuity with all that is wrong with U.S. foreign policy, from Cuba to the Middle East to China.
The only area where there might be some hope for ending a war is Ukraine, where Rubio has come close to Donald Trump’s position, praising Ukraine for standing up to Russia, but recognizing that the U.S. is funding a deadly “stalemate war” that needs to be “brought to a conclusion.”
But in all the other hot spots around the world, Rubio is likely to make conflicts even hotter, or start new ones.
1. His obsession with regime change in Cuba will sink any chance of better relations with the island.
Like other Cuban-American politicians, Marco Rubio has built his career on vilifying the Cuban Revolution and trying to economically strangle and starve into submission the people of his parents’ homeland.
It is ironic, therefore, that his parents left Cuba before the Revolution, during the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, whose executioners, secret police and death squads killed an estimated 20,000 people, according to the CIA, leading to a wildly popular revolution in 1959.
When President Obama began to restore relations with Cuba in 2014, Rubio swore to do “everything possible” to obstruct and reverse that policy. In May 2024, Rubio reiterated his zero tolerance for any kind of social or economic contacts between the U.S. and Cuba, claiming that any easing of the U.S. blockade will only “strengthen the oppressive regime and undermine the opposition… Until there is freedom in Cuba, the United States must maintain a firm stance.”
In 2024 Rubio also introduced legislation to ensure that Cuba would remain on the U.S. “State Sponsor of Terrorism List,” imposing sanctions that cut Cuba off from the U.S.-dominated Western banking system.
These measures to destroy the Cuban economy have led to a massive wave of migration in the past two years. But when the U.S. Coast Guard tried to coordinate with their Cuban counterparts, Rubio introduced legislation to prohibit such interaction. While Trump has vowed to stem immigration, his Secretary of State wants to crush Cuba’s economy, forcing people to abandon the island and set sail for the United States.
2. Applying his anti-Cuba template to the rest of Latin America will make enemies of more of our neighbors.
Rubio’s disdain for his ancestral home in Cuba has served him so well as an American politician that he has extended it to the rest of Latin America. He has sided with extreme right-wing politicians like Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Javier Milei in Argentina, and rails against progressive ones, from Brazil’s Ignacio Lula da Silva to Mexico’s popular former President Lopez Obrador, whom he called “an apologist for tyranny” for supporting other leftist governments.
In Venezuela, he has promoted brutal sanctions and regime change plots to topple the government of Nicolas Maduro. In 2019 he was one of the architects of Trump’s failed policy of recognizing opposition figure Juan Guaido as president. He has also advocated for sanctions and regime change in Nicaragua.
In March 2023, Rubio urged President Biden to impose sanctions on Bolivia for prosecuting leaders of a 2019 U.S.-backed coup that led to massacres that killed at least 21 people.
Rubio also condemned the government of Honduras for withdrawing from an extradition treaty with the United States this past August, in response to decades of U.S. interference that had turned Honduras into a narco-state riven by poverty, gang violence and mass emigration, until the election of democratic socialist President Xiomara Castro in 2022.
Rubio’s major concern about Latin America now seems to be the influence of China, which has become the leading trade partner of most Latin American countries. Unlike the U.S., China focuses on economic benefits and not internal politics, while American politicians like Marco Rubio still see Latin America as the U.S. “backyard.”
While Rubio’s virulent anti-leftist stands have served him well in climbing to senior positions in the U.S. government, and now into Trump’s inner circle, his disdain for Latin American sovereignty bodes ill for U.S. relations with the region.
3. He believes the US and Israel can do no wrong, and that God has given Palestine to Israel.
Despite the massive death toll in Gaza and global condemnation of Israel’s genocide, Rubio still perpetuates the myth that “Israel takes extraordinary steps to avoid civilian losses” and that innocent people die in Gaza because Hamas has deliberated placed them in the way and used them as human shields. The problem, he says, is “an enemy that doesn’t value human life.”
When asked by CODEPINK in November 2024 if he would support a ceasefire, Rubio replied, “On the contrary. I want them to destroy every element of Hamas they can get their hands on. These people are vicious animals.”
There are few times in this past year that the Biden administration has tried to restrain Israel, but when Biden begged Israel not to send troops into the southern city of Rafah, Rubio said that was like telling the Allied forces in World War II not to attack Berlin to get Hitler.
In a letter to Secretary of State Blinken in August 2024, Rubio criticized the Biden administration’s decision to sanction Israeli settlers linked to anti-Palestinian violence in the occupied West Bank.
“Israel has consistently sought peace with the Palestinians. It is unfortunate that the Palestinians, whether it be the Palestinian Authority or FTOs [Foreign Terrorist Organisations] such as Hamas, have rejected such overtures,” Rubio wrote. “Israelis rightfully living in their historic homeland are not the impediment to peace; the Palestinians are,” he added.
No country besides Israel subscribes to the idea that its borders should be based on 2,000-year-old religious scriptures, and that it has a God-given right to displace or exterminate people who have lived there since then to reconquer its ancient homeland. The United States will find itself extraordinarily isolated from the rest of the world if Rubio tries to assert that as a matter of U.S. policy.
4. His deep-seated enmity toward Iran will fuel Israel’s war on its neighbors, and may lead to a U.S. war with Iran.
Rubio is obsessed with Iran. He claims that the central cause of violence and suffering in the Middle East is not Israeli policy but “Iran’s ambition to be a regional hegemonic power.” He says that Iran’s goal in the Middle East is to “seek to drive America out of the region and then destroy Israel.”
He has been a proponent of maximum pressure on Iran, including a call for more and more sanctions. He believes the U.S. should not re-enter the Iran nuclear deal, saying: “We must not trade away U.S. and Israeli security for vague commitments from a terrorist-sponsoring regime that has killed Americans and threatens to annihilate Israel.”
Rubio calls Lebanon’s Hezbollah a “full blown agent of Iran right on Israel’s border” and that wiping out Hezbollah’s leadership, along with entire neighborhoods full of civilians, is a “service to humanity.” He alleges that Iran has control over Iraq, Syria, the Houthis in Yemen and is a threat to Jordan. He claims that “Iran has put a noose around Israel,” and says that the goal of U.S. policy should be regime change in Iran, which would set the stage for war.
While there will hopefully be leaders in the Pentagon who will caution Donald Trump about the perils of a war with Iran, Rubio will not be a voice of reason.
5. He is beholden to big money, from the weapons industry to the Israel lobby.
Open Secrets reports that Rubio has received over a million dollars in campaign contributions from pro-Israel groups during his career. The Pro-Israel America PAC was his single largest campaign contributor over the last 5 years. When he last ran for reelection in 2022, he was the third largest recipient of funding by pro-Israel groups in the Senate, taking in $367,000 from them for that campaign.
Rubio was also the fourth largest recipient of funding from the “defense” industry in the Senate for the 2022 cycle, receiving $196,000. Altogether, the weapons industry has invested $663,000 in his Congressional career.
Rubio is clearly beholden to the US arms industry, and even more so to the Israel lobby, which has been one of his largest sources of campaign funding. This has placed him in the vanguard of Congress’s blind, unconditional support for Israel and subservience to Israeli narratives and propaganda, making it unlikely that he will ever challenge the ongoing extermination of the Palestinian people or their expulsion from their homeland.
6. He’s so antagonistic towards China that China has sanctioned him–twice!
Speaking at the Heritage Foundation in 2022, Rubio said: “The gravest threat facing America today, the challenge that will define this century and every generation represented here, is not climate change, the pandemic, or the left’s version of social justice. The threat that will define this century is China.”
It will be hard for our nation’s “top diplomat” to ease tensions with a country he has so maligned. He antagonized China by co-sponsoring the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which allows the U.S. to bar Chinese imports over alleged Uyghur rights abuses, abuses that China denies and independent researchersquestion. In fact, Rubio has gone so far as to accuse China of a “grotesque campaign of genocide” against the Uyghurs.
On Taiwan, he has not only introduced legislation to increase military aid to the island, but actually supports Taiwanese independence — a dangerous deviation from the US government’s long-standing One China approach.
The Chinese responded to Rubio by sanctioning him, not once but twice–once regarding the Uyghurs and once for his support of Hong Kong protests. Unless China lifts the sanctions, he would be the first U.S. secretary of state to be banned from even visiting China.
Analysts expect China to try to sidestep Rubio and engage directly with Trump and other senior officials. Steve Tsang, the director of the China Institute at the U.K.’s School of Oriental and African Studies, told Reuters, “If that doesn’t work, then I think we’re going to get into a much more regular escalation of a bad relationship.”
7. Rubio knows sanctions are a trap, but he doesn’t know how to escape.
Rubio is a leading advocate of unilateral economic sanctions, which are illegal under international law, and which the UN and other countries refer to as “unilateral economic coercive measures.”
The United States has used these measures so widely and wildly that they now impact a third of the world’s population. U.S. officials, from Treasury Secretary Yellen to Rubio himself, have warned that using the U.S. financial system and the dollar’s reserve currency status as weapons against other countries is driving the rest of the world to conduct trade in other currencies and develop alternative financial systems.
And yet Rubio has continued to be a leading sponsor of sanctions bills in the Senate, including new sanctions on Iran in January 2024 and a bill in July to sanction foreign banks that participate in alternative financial systems.
So, while other countries develop new financial and trading systems to escape abusive, illegal U.S. sanctions, the nominee for Secretary of State remains caught in the same sanctions trap that he complained about on Fox.
8. He wants to crack down on U.S. free speech.
Rubio wants to curtail the right to free speech enshrined in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. In May, he described campus protests against Israel as a “complete breakdown of law and order.”
Rubio claimed to be speaking up for other students at American universities. “[They] paid a lot of money to go to these schools, [but are being disrupted by] a few thousand antisemitic zombies who have been brainwashed by two decades of indoctrination in the belief that the world is divided between victimizers and victims, and that the victimizers in this particular case, the ones that are oppressing people, are Jews in Israel,” said Rubio.
The Florida senator has said he supports Trump’s plan to deport foreign students who engage in pro-Palestinian campus protests. In April, he called for punishing supporters of the Israel boycott movement as part of efforts to counter antisemitism, falsely equating any attempt to respond to Israel’s international crimes with antisemitism.
And what about those crimes, which the students are protesting? After visiting Israel in May, Rubio wrote an article for National Review, in which he never mentioned the thousands of civilians Israel has killed, and instead blamed Iran, Biden and “morally corrupt international institutions” for the crisis.
Marco Rubio expects Americans to believe that it is not genocide itself, but protests against genocide, that are a complete breakdown of law and order. He couldn’t be more wrong if he tried.
Students are not Rubio’s only target. In August 2023, he alleged that certain “far-left and antisemitic entities” may have violated the Foreign Assistance Registration Act by their ties to China. He called for a Justice Department investigation into 18 groups, starting with CODEPINK. These unfounded claims of China connections are only meant to intimidate legitimate groups that are exercising their free speech rights.
Conclusion
On each of these issues, Rubio has shown no sign of understanding the difference between domestic politics and diplomacy. Whether he’s talking about Cuba, Palestine, Iran or China, or even about CODEPINK, all his supposedly tough positions are based on cynically mischaracterizing the actions and motivations of his enemies and then attacking the “straw man” he has falsely set up.
Unscrupulous politicians often get away with that, and Rubio has made it his signature tactic because it works so well for him in American politics. But that will not work if and when he sits down to negotiate with other world leaders as U.S. secretary of state.
His underlying attitude to foreign relations is, like Trump’s, that the United States must get its way or else, and that other countries who won’t submit must be coerced, threatened, couped, bombed or invaded. This makes Rubio just as ill-equipped as Antony Blinken to conduct diplomacy, improve U.S. relations with other countries or resolve disputes and conflicts peacefully, as the UN Charter requires.
For the thirty-second time in so many years, the US blockade of Cuba was globally condemned at the UN General Assembly’s annual vote in October. Only Tel Aviv joined Washington in defending the collective punishment, which is illegal under international law.
For the vast majority of Cubans, who were born after the first unilateral coercive measures were imposed, life under these conditions is the only normalcy they have known. Even friends sympathetic to socialism and supporters of Cuba may question why the Cubans have not simply learned to live under these circumstances after 64 years.
The explanation, explored below, is that the relatively mild embargo of 1960 has been periodically intensified and made ever more devastatingly effective. The other major factor is that the geopolitical context has changed to Cuba’s disadvantage. These factors in turn have had cumulatively detrimental effects.
Cuba in the new world order
The Cuban Revolution achieved remarkable initial successes for a small, resource-poor island with a history of colonial exploitation.
After the 1959 revolution, the population quickly attained 100% literacy. Life expectancy and infant mortality rates soon rivaled far richer countries, through the application of socialized medicine, prioritizing primary care. Cuba also became a world sports powerhouse and made noteworthy advances in biotechnology. At the same time, Cuban troops aided in the overthrow of apartheid in South Africa, among many other exercises of internationalism.
Cuba did not make those advances alone but benefitted from the solidarity of the Soviet Union and other members of the Socialist Bloc. From the beginning of the revolution, the USSR helped stabilize the economy, particularly in the areas of agriculture and manufacturing. Notably, Cuba exported sugar to the Soviets at above-market prices.
The USSR’s military assistance in the form of training and equipment contributed to the Cuban’s successfully repelling the US’s Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. In addition, the Socialist Bloc backed Cuba diplomatically in the United Nations and other international fora. East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, for example, also assisted with economic aid, investment, and trade to help develop the Cuban economy.
The implosion of the Socialist Bloc in the late 1980s and early 1990s severely impacted Cuba.
No longer buffered by these allies, the full weight of the US-led regime-change campaign sent Cuba reeling into what became known as the “Special Period.” After an initial GDP contraction of about 35% between 1989 and 1993, the Cubans somewhat recovered by the 2000s. But, now, conditions on the island are again increasingly problematic.
A new multipolar world may be in birth, but it has not been able to sufficiently aid Cuba in this time of need. China and Vietnam along with post-Soviet Russia, remnants of the earlier Socialist Bloc, still maintain friendly commercial and diplomatic relations with Cuban but nowhere the former levels of cooperation.
Ratcheting up of the US regime-change campaign
The ever-tightening US blockade is designed to ensure that socialism does not succeed; to strangle in the cradle all possible alternatives to the established imperial order.
The initial restrictions imposed by Dwight Eisenhower in 1960 banned US exports to Cuba, except for food and medicine, and reduced Cuba’s sugar export quota to the US. Shortly before the end of his term in 1961, the US president broke diplomatic relations.
He also initiated covert operations against Cuba, which would be significantly strengthened by his successor, John Kennedy, and subsequent US administrations. Since then, Cuba has endured countless acts of terrorism as well as attempts to assassinate the revolution’s political leadership.
John Kennedy had campaigned in 1960, accusing the Eisenhower-Nixon administration of failing to sufficiently combat the spread of communism. Kennedy was determined to prevent communism from gaining a foothold in America’s “backyard.” He made deposing the “Castro regime” a national priority and imposed a comprehensive economic embargo.
After Kennedy’s failed Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961 and the Cuban missile crisis the following year, he initiated Operation Mongoose. The president put his brother Robert Kennedy in charge of attempting to overthrow the revolution by covert means. This CIA operation of sabotage and other destabilization methods was meant to bring to Cuba “the terrors of the earth.”
Post-Soviet era
Subsequent US administrations continued the policy of blockade, occupation of Guantánamo, and overt and covert destabilization efforts.
Former CIA director and then-US President George H.W. Bush seized the opportunity in 1992 posed by the implosion of the Socialist Bloc. The bipartisan Cuban Democracy Act passed under his watch. Popularly called the Torricelli Act after a Democratic Party congressional sponsor, it codified the embargo into law, which could only be reversed by an act of congress.
The act strengthened the embargo into a blockade by prohibiting US subsidiaries of companies operating in third countries from trading with Cuba. Ships that had traded with Cuba were banned from entering the US for 180 days. The economic stranglehold on Cuba was tightened by obstructing sources of foreign currency, which further limited Cuba’s ability to engage in international trade.
The screws were again tightened in 1996 under US President Bill Clinton with the Helms-Burton Act. Existing unilateral coercive economic measures were reinforced and expanded.
The act also added restrictions to discourage foreign investment in Cuba, particularly in US-owned properties that had been expropriated after the Cuban Revolution. The infamous Title III of the act allowed US citizens to file lawsuits in US courts against foreign companies “trafficking” in such confiscated properties.
Title III generated substantial blowback and some countermeasures from US allies, such as the European Union and Canada, because of its extraterritorial application in violation of international trade agreements and sovereignty. As a result, Title III was temporarily waived.
Later, US President Barack Obama modified US tactics during his watch by reopening diplomatic relations with Cuba and easing some restrictions, in order to unapologetically achieve the imperial strategy of regime change more effectively.
But even that mild relief was reversed by his successor’s “maximum pressure” campaign. In 2019, US President Donald Trump revived Title III. By that time, the snowballing effects of the blockade had generated a progressively calamitous economic situation in Cuba.
Just days before the end of his term, Trump reinstated Cuba onto the list of State Sponsors of Terrorism (SSOT) after Obama had lifted it in 2015. The designation has had a huge impact on Cuba by reducing trade with third countries fearful of secondary sanctions by the US, by cutting off most international finance, and by further discouraging tourism.
President Joe Biden continued most of the Trump “maximum pressure” measures, including the SSOT designation, while adding some of this own. This came at a time when the island was especially hard hit by the Covid pandemic, which halted tourism, one of Cuba’s few sources of foreign currency.
In the prescient words of Lester D. Mallory, US deputy assistant secretary of state back in 1960, the imperialists saw the opportunity to “bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”
US siege on Cuba perfected
In addition to the broad history outlined above of incessant regime-change measures by every US administration since the inception of the Cuban Revolution, some collateral factors are worthy of mention.
Major technological advances associated with computer technology and AI have been applied by the US to more effectively track and enforce its coercive measures. In addition, the fear of US fines for violation of its extraterritorial prohibitions on third-country actors has led to overcompliance.
Uncle Sam has also become ever more inventive. Visa-free entry (VWP) into the US is no longer available to most European and some other nationals if they stopped in Cuba, thereby significantly discouraging tourism to the island.
The internal political climate in the US has also shifted with the neoconservative takeover of both major parties. Especially now with the second Trump presidency, Cuba has fewer friends in Washington, and its enemies now have even less constraints on their regime-change campaigns. This is coupled by a generally more aggressive international US force projection.
Under the blockade, certain advances of the revolution were turned into liabilities. The revolution with its universal education, mechanization of agriculture, and collective or cooperative organization of work freed campesinos from the 24/7 drudgery of peasant agriculture. Today, fields remain idle because, among other factors, the fuel and spare parts for the tractors are embargoed.
Cuba’s allies, especially Venezuela, itself a victim of a US blockade, have been trying to supply Cuba with desperately needed oil. Construction of 14 oil tankers commissioned abroad by Venezuela, which could transport that oil, has been blocked. Direct proscriptions by the US on shipping companies and insurance underwriters have also limited the oil lifeline.
Without the fuel, electrical power, which run pumps to supply basic drinking water, cannot be generated. As a consequence, Cuba has recently experienced island-wide blackouts along with food and water shortages. This highlights how the blockade is essentially an economic dirty war against the civilian population.
Cumulative effects on Cuban society
Life is simply hard in Cuba under the US siege and is getting harder. This has led to recently unprecedented levels of out migration. The consequent brain-drain and labor shortages exacerbate the situation. Moreover, the relentless scarcity and the associated compromised quality of life under such conditions has had a corrosive effect over time.
Under the pressure of the siege, Cuba has been forced to adopt measures that undermine socialist equality but which generate needed revenue. For example, Obama and subsequent US presidents have encouraged the formation of a small business strata, expanding on the limited “reforms” instituted during Raúl Castro’s time as Cuba’s president.
The Cubans will surely persevere as they have in the past. “The country’s resilience is striking,” according to a longtime Cuba observer writing from Havana.
Besides, the imperialists leave them little other choice. A surrender and soft landing is not an option being offered. The deliberately failed state of Haiti, less than 50 miles to the east, serves as a cautionary tale of what transpires for a people under the beneficence of the US.
Now is an historical moment for recognition of not what Cuba has failed to do, but for appreciation of how much it has achieved with so little and under such adverse circumstances not of its making.
The world’s peoples recoil in shock over the previously unimaginable barbarity of the US-Zionist assault on Palestine. The European Parliament is not impervious to what is transpiring. On the contrary, the body normalizes the cruelty by awarding its highest human rights award, the Sakharov Prize, to dissident Venezuelan genocide supporters.
This is an example of how Western “democracies” fail to respect democracy in the Global South. “Human rights” are weaponized and used to repudiate Venezuela’s right to choose its own leaders, while rewarding those who sell out their country. The US-aligned camp has a clear double standard on when and where upholding “democratic institutions” apply, considering their stances on Venezuela compared to Israel, described below.
The European Union functions as a factotum of the US empire, as is evident regarding its treatment of Venezuela. The European Parliament is a legislative body of the European Union (EU). Of the 27 member states, 23 are also members of the empire’s praetorian guard, aka NATO. The EU and NATO are official “partners” with integrated planning capabilities, closely linking security to the dictates of the US.
EU’s relationship with Venezuela
The EU is Venezuela’s fourth largest trading partner, but the relationship is abusive. The EU punishes Venezuela for being independent of the US empire when they are unwilling to do so themselves.
In 2019, the EU recognized the unelected and US-selected “interim president” of Venezuela, Juan Guaidó. In the same resolution, they imposed additional sanctions on Venezuela, hypocritically lamenting the “need of humanitarian assistance,” while making it more difficult for Venezuela to receive vital food, fuel, and medicines.
Following earlier extensions, in November 2023, the EU further extended its sanctions on Venezuela through May 2024. Then, a day before those sanctions were to expire and two months before the Venezuelan presidential election, the EU again extended their sanctions until January 2025.
The implicit message to the Venezuelan people was that they had better vote for the right candidate. Otherwise, when the new president is inaugurated on January 10, 2025, the sanctions would be extended yet again if not enhanced.
Defying foreign intervention, Venezuelans reelected incumbent President Nicolás Maduro on July 28. But from the EU’s perspective, the only possible explanation for the Venezuelans making what they viewed as the wrong choice is fraud. The EU consequently recognized the runner-up in the election, Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia, as the “legitimate president” of Venezuela. That individual was then awarded the EU’s Sakharov Prize. The Venezuelan opposition had itself renounced the corrupt Guaidó, who had been the EU’s earlier designated president of Venezuela.
A week later, the EU plus 33 individual countries signed a US-led “joint statement” expressing “grave concerns about the urgent situation in Venezuela” and calling for a political “transition” in Venezuela.
The Sakharov Prize
Gonzalez and his co-awardee Maria Corina Machado are typical recipients of the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought. Such folks are usually dissidents from countries that are targeted for regime change by US – and by default echoed by the European Parliament – such as Venezuela, but also Russia, Syria, Belarus, Cuba, and China.
Previously, the “democratic opposition of Venezuela” received the award in 2017. Ajamu Baraka of the Black Alliance for Peace commented on this “bizarre example of the reactionary nature of the European left [awarding]…a group that has openly attacked journalists and burned alive two dozen people of primarily Black or dark complexions who they assumed were probably government supporters because they were poor and Black.”
This year, beating out semi-finalist Elon Musk (I’m not making this up), the award again went to Venezuelan dissidents. Machado and Gonzalez were honored as fighters for “freedom and democracy.”
Machado’s “democracy” credentials include signing the infamous Carmona Decree, which shuttered Venezuela’s parliament, courts, and executive in a short-lived US-backed coup in 2002. After President Hugo Chávez was returned to his elected post by a popular uprising, he pardoned the coup plotters, including Machado.
Gonzalez’s “freedom” credentials include being implicated in the US-backed death squads in the 1980s when he was a Venezuelan diplomat in El Salvador. TeleSUR reported on Gonzalez’s “past of crimes against humanity.”
According to the EU’s announcement: “Machado won primary elections in 2023 to run as the candidate of the democratic opposition (Unitary Platform) in the 2024 presidential elections, but after she was arbitrarily disqualified by the Venezuelan regime, González became the candidate.”
Machado did in fact win a primary election, but not one conducted by the official Venezuelan electoral authority, the CNE. Rather, it was a private affair administered by the NGO Súmate, a recipient of funds from the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a CIA-cutout.
As Washington’s prechosen candidate, Machado won in a crowded field of 13 candidates with an incredulous 92%. When some of the other candidates called fraud, Machado had the ballots destroyed. She could do so because Súmate is her personal organization.
True, Machado had been barred from running, but that was back in 2015; the disqualification was reconfirmed by the Venezuelan supreme court this year. Far from “arbitrary,” she had accepted a diplomatic post with a foreign power in order to testify against her own country while serving in the Venezuelan parliament. Such treason is constitutionally prohibited in Venezuela as it is in many other countries.
For the US and its junior partner, the EU, Machado’s disbarment was a bonus. They could claim that their candidate was unfairly disqualified, when that was a given to begin with. Their intent was not to encourage a free and fair democratic process, but to delegitimize the one already in place.
Sakharov winners’ “strategic alliance” with Zionists
Venezuela’s far-right opposition, along with their international counterparts, support the US/Zionist campaign of extermination and regional domination in the Middle East.
Literally nothing is known about the political positions of Sakharov-winner Edmundo Gonzalez. Long retired, Gonzalez was personally chosen to run for the presidency by the other Sakharov winner, Maria Corina Machado. While the infirm “grandpa,” as the press dubbed him, convalesced in Caracas, Machado campaigned around Venezuela as his surrogate. After he lost the election, the EU’s designated president of Venezuela voluntarily left Venezuela for Spain.
In comparison, Machado is a well-known scion of one of the wealthiest families in Venezuela. Fluent in English, the photogenic Machado was first vetted for the Venezuelan presidency before the US Congress and given a bipartisan nod before running in her ersatz “opposition primary.”
Machado is a darling of the international far-right with close ties to Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu. In a leaked document signed by her, Machado requested military support from Netanyahu to overthrow the Venezuelan government in December 2018.
A month later, after Juan Guaidó self-appointed himself “interim president” of Venezuela, Machado publicly thanked Netanyahu for recognizing the US puppet and specifically called on Jews who had left Venezuela to return and help overthrow the elected government.
Machado gushed: “Prime Minister Netanyahu joins our many allies…We certainly have a common enemy with Israel: the criminal forces that undermine freedom and peace in the world.”
Later that year in an interview with the Israeli news outlet Haaretz, Machado appealed for help from Israel in “our goal of dismantling” Venezuela.
Machado’s Vente Venezuela and Netanyahu’s Likud parties publicly signed a cooperative agreement in 2020 to collude on “political, ideological and social issues.”
Venezuelan government supports Palestine
In contrast to the dissidents, the elected Venezuelan government is distinguished as a recognized world leader for, in President Maduro’s words, “unconditional support to the Palestinian cause.” Hugo Chávez cut diplomatic ties with Israel in 2009 in response to response to Israel’s military operations in Gaza back then.
The countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, including Venezuela, perhaps more than in any other region have expressed their solidarity with Palestine. Quite the reverse, on September 18, thirteen EU countries either abstained or voted against the UN General Assembly resolution demanding Israel end its “unlawful” occupation of Palestine. Meanwhile, the preponderance of humanity, 124 countries, voted to condemn the Zionist state.
It’s been nearly three months since the Venezuelans went to the polls on July 28, and there is still contention domestically and abroad regarding the winner of the presidential election. This is not unexpected.
The US has not recognized the legitimacy of the previous two presidential elections in Venezuela and had announced way before this election that if Washington’s chosen candidate lost, it could only be because of fraud.
The official Venezuelan electoral authority (CNE) declared incumbent President Nicolás Maduro the winner with 52% of the vote. The nearest contender, the US-backed Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia, got 43% of the vote.
That outcome was subsequently audited and confirmed by the Venezuelan supreme court (TSJ). Gonzalez claimed that he had evidence that proved he won, but refused to show them to the TSJ, even when he was summoned.
Washington contests the vote
US President Joe Biden had quickly called for new elections in Venezuela. Just as quickly, Biden’s handlers walked that back. The current US position is that the election was for sure fraudulent, but they are waiting for Caracas to issue data on individual polling places before declaring Washington’s designation of the actual president.
The Venezuelan electoral authority has not published detailed vote-count data. Their supreme court’s audit appears to be considered sufficient by the government. As Misión Verdad has noted in various Spanish-language social media, it is common in Latin America for courts to resolve electoral disputes:
Peru 2021 – Keiko Fujimori claimed fraud against Pedro Castillo. The national electoral court certified Castillo a month and a half later.
Brazil 2022 – Jair Bolsonaro challenged Lula da Silva’s victory before the superior electoral court. The court certified Lula 43 days later.
Paraguay 2023 – Two candidates did not recognize Santiago Peña’s victory. The electoral court ratified the results certifying Peña a month later.
Guatemala 2024 – Bernardo Arévalo was certified 5 months after winning the elections, when challenges in the first and second round were settled by the supreme electoral court.
Mexico 2024 – Xólchit Gálvez challenged Claudia Sheinbaum’s victory. The electoral court certified the winner two months later.
Even in the US, when Donald Trump claimed fraud against Joe Biden in several states in 2020, the courts rejected the complaints, and Biden was certified 41 days later.
Moreover, it is a near certainty that the US will not recognize a Maduro government as legitimate irrespective of how well the election is documented. As a UK blogger observes, “The CIA has reacted with disappointment after the world’s largest oil reserves ended up with the wrong leader again.”
Meanwhile, an over enthusiastic Western press claims that the US has already recognized Gonzalez as the legitimate president of Venezuela, despite any such declaration from Washington…yet.
Schemel is arguably among the most qualified people regarding public opinion in Venezuela. His firm, Hinterlaces, takes the pulse of the nation every two weeks. Their polls have been correct, calling most elections in the country within a few points, while most of Venezuela’s other polls have been distorted and politically biased.
Schemel himself is an independent, known for his objectivity. He has not been shy about criticizing the Venezuelan government. On the other hand, he fiercely opposes US unilateral coercive economic measures – euphemistically called sanctions – on his country.
What Schemel reports is that the number one issue on the minds of Venezuelans is not who won the electoral horse race but rather the state of the economy and, more to the point, their personal income. Hinterlaces reports 72% of Venezuelans want to “close the electoral stage and continue working.”
Venezuelans have conflicting views on who won the election. According to a Hinterlaces poll taken on August 9, a significant majority of 59% believe Maduro won. A very divided opposition, Schemel explained, did not have the capacity to mobilize voters.
Both pro-government chavistas and disaffected sections in the broader population are weary of the polarization, longing for national peace.
Polls show a consistently loyal 35% support for the government Socialist Party (PSUV). But even the party faithful seek a more effective and productive socialism.
A hardcore 14% fall into the committed opposition camp. But despite Washington anointing Gonzalez as the leader of a “unified opposition,” there is no one opposition politician that appears to have a dedicated following on the ground, according to Schemel.
Washington’s designated opposition leader, Edmundo Gonzalez, was completely unknown before he was personally chosen to run for the presidency by another US-anointed opposition leader, Maria Corina Machado. She was ineligible to hold public office due to past offenses.
In any case, Gonzalez voluntarily left Venezuela for Spain on September 8, taking the wind out of the opposition’s sails. His departure on a Spanish military plane was negotiated with the Venezuelan government.
US intervention in Venezuela
Gonzalez and Machado have welcomed US sanctions on their country and have called for even harsher measures to force Maduro out of office. In contrast, Hinterlaces reports 63% of Venezuelans believe that leaders who called for sanctions should be prosecuted.
Gonzalez ran on a platform of privatizing nearly everything, which runs contrary to most popular sentiment. Hinterlaces reports, for example, that 61% of Venezuelans reject the idea of privatizing PDVSA, the state oil company.
Schemel condemned the nearly one thousand sanctions by the US. What amounts to a blockade has devastated PDVSA, the primary source of funds for public services. Under the impact of US unilateral coercive economics measures, Schemel reports that the role of the state as a guarantor of social welfare has been eroded.
Washington’s “multi-dimensional war,” in Schemel’s words, has led to a decline in the quality of life. This “unfair and unequal” assault has generated anxiety and rage in the population.
The majority, Schemel reports, still favor a mix of socialist and private economic measures consistent with the chavista vision. Some 70% do not believe the opposition can solve the country’s economic problems. This majority wants to see the chavista model work more fruitfully, according to Schemel’s data. They do not want regime change but rather yearn for reconciliation and union.
In about six weeks from now, Venezuela will inaugurate its next president on January 10. Gonzalez, incredibly, claims that he will be back in Caracas to receive the presidential sash.
And what will Washington do? US Vice President Kamala Harris says “we’re not going to use US military” on Venezuela if Maduro doesn’t voluntarily leave office. Such a statement from the vice president of the world’s hegemon is to be welcomed. But the fact that she even thinks that the violent overthrow of a sovereign state is something worth explicitly ruling out itself speaks volumes.
Democratic leader María Corina Machado and exiled presidential candidate Edmundo González won the top human rights award for representing all Venezuelans who are “fighting for the restoration of freedom and democracy.” | Marcelo Perez del Carpio/Getty Images
The European Parliament on Thursday 24 October 2024 awarded the Sakharov Prize to Venezuela’s opposition leaders. Democratic leader María Corina Machado and exiled presidential candidate Edmundo González won the top human rights award for representing all Venezuelans who are “fighting for the restoration of freedom and democracy.”
The Venezuelan opposition leaders were nominated by the center-right European People’s Party (EPP) and the hard-right European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR). The far-right Patriots group rallied behind them after their original candidate, tech billionaire Elon Musk, failed to make the shortlist for the prestigious prize.
After Venezuela’s elections in late July, in which incumbent socialist President Nicolás Maduro declared victory for another term, the European Union’s foreign service said it would not recognize the results because the government had failed to release supporting voting records from polling stations.
The authoritarian Maduro’s disputed declaration of victory sparked massive opposition protests and a violent government crackdown that left more than two dozen people dead and nearly 200 injured.
Later, presidential candidate González — who fled to Madrid during the crackdown — was recognized by the European Parliament as the country’s legitimate leader.
Two other finalists made the shortlist. One was Gubad Ibadoghlu, a jailed Azerbaijani dissident and critic of the fossil fuel industry nominated by the Greens. The other finalist was a joint nomination of Israeli and Palestinian peace organizations Women Wage Peace and Women of the Sun. The groups, who announced a partnership in 2022, were nominated by the Socialists and the Renew group.
Sakharov prize goes to María Corina Machado and Edmundo González after contested presidential election
The European parliament has awarded its top human rights honor, the Sakharov prize for freedom of thought, to Venezuelan opposition leaders María Corina Machado and Edmundo González for “representing the people of Venezuela fighting to restore freedom and democracy”.
Machado was set to run as the democratic opposition candidate against the incumbent president, Nicolás Maduro, in Venezuela’s contested 2024 election, but she was disqualified by the government, so González took her place. He had never run for office before the presidential election.
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has accused tech tycoon Elon Musk of “investing” at least $1 billion in inciting violence in the South American country after the presidential election earlier this year.
Maduro was declared the winner of the July 28 poll by the national election authorities, though the US claimed that victory had been stolen from opposition candidate Edmundo Gonzalez.
During his weekly television program on Monday, Maduro alleged to have direct knowledge that Musk – with whom he has been engaged in a long-running public feud – had spent “no less than $1 billion” on “the coup d’etat, the fascist outbreak, the violence against the electoral process in Venezuela.”
The Venezuelan leader named his political opponent, businesswoman Maria Corina Machado, as the distributor of the alleged funding to “fascist” groups, claiming that the US government was ultimately behind attempts to oust him from power.
Following the vote in July, Musk accused Maduro of “major election fraud,” while the Venezuelan president declared the South African-born billionaire his “arch enemy” who “controls the virtual reality” created by social media. The two agreed to settle their differences in a fistfight, which never happened. Musk has also threatened to singe Maduro’s famous mustache “from space” in response to a threat to suspend his social network X in Venezuela.
US policy has long been to put economic and political pressure on Venezuela in an attempt to replace its government. For years, Washington and other Western nations recognized opposition politician Juan Guaido rather than Maduro as leader of Venezuela. This allowed the US-backed figure to press claims on Venezuelan national assets in Western jurisdictions, including stakes in oil companies on US soil and gold reserves held in the Bank of England.
Musk has previously expressed support for removing foreign governments in pursuit of his corporate interests. In July 2020, he was challenged online with a claim that Washington had orchestrated a coup against Bolivian President Evo Morales so that his electric car company, Tesla, could secure access to the country’s rich lithium reserves. Musk responded with a post: “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.”
Morales was ousted by right-wing political forces during the mass protests of 2019, which followed a disputed presidential election. His political force, Movement for Socialism, made a comeback by winning the 2020 general election and defeating an attempted military coup earlier this year.
Rights group in Caracas says at least 40 people affected, as Maduro government continues clampdown on opposition
The Venezuelan government has cancelled the passports of dozens of journalists and activists since President Nicolás Maduro claimed a re-election victory, part of what rights groups said is an intensifying campaign of repression against the authoritarian president’s opponents, the Financial Times has reported.
At least 40 people, mostly journalists and human rights activists, have had their passports annulled without explanation, the newspaper reported on Saturday, citing Caracas-based rights group Laboratorio de Paz.
Sen. Rick Scott and Sen. Marco Rubio seem to have issues with the elementary process of counting. Last time I checked, there were fifty states, not fifty-one states, in the United States of America. Unfortunately, Scott and Rubio seem to have missed this lesson in civics class and have somehow wound up believing that they are the representatives of the Venezuelan people.
While it is a tragedy that Scott and Rubio were not able to learn this basic fact prior to being elected to the Senate, it is not surprising. In recent years, Florida has become a platform for Neoconservatives to practice political grandstanding rather than good politics. Instead of focusing on issues which truly matter to their constituents, imperialists like Scott and Rubio have been focused on proposing legislation like the Securing Timely Opportunities for Payment and Maximizing Awards for Detaining Unlawful Regime Officials (STOP MADURO) Act. The STOP MADURO Act proposes that the already preposterously-high fifteen-million dollar bounty for “information leading to the arrest of Nicolás Maduro” to one hundred million dollars. The bill alleges that Maduro and other government officials have been engaged in “conspiring to import cocaine” and using and conspiring to use “machine guns and destructive devices” to carry out “narco-terrorism”.
While many Neoconservatives in Washington have sought to act as judge, jury, and executioner when it comes to the conspiratorial claim that Maduro is Venezuela’s Pablo Escobar, many independent journalists have pointed out the obvious flaws in this narrative. According to The Grayzone, the myth that Venezuela is a narco-state has already been debunked by the Washington Office in Latin America (WOLA), a think tank in Washington that generally supports US regime change operations… less than 7% of total drug movement from South America transits from Venezuela”. The bill also claims that Maduro had a “narcoterrorism” partnership with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) for the past twenty years. This similarly dubious accusation has also been discredited as far back as 2019, with Venezuelanalysis reporting that “…FARC was involved in the drug trade only at its lowest levels, levying taxes on coca sales. Moreover, since the 2016 peace accords and FARC demobilization, coca crops in Colombia have reached record levels year after year, confirming that the guerrillas played no major role in the illicit trade.”
Rather than working on behalf of the people of Florida to address the state’s terrible healthcare system, rampant homelessness, and extreme income inequality, Sen. Scott, Sen. Rubio, and their ilk have chosen to put ideology over policy. Instead of making the American Dream an American reality, Neoconservatives in Washington have forever sought to strangle all nations who do not conform to the dogmatic doctrine of market fundamentalism with the binds of sanctions. Sanctions, such as those currently targeting Venezuela, have been shown to lead to the deaths of countless civilians; in Iraq, for example, The Transnational Institute reports that “two million Iraqis… died from sanctions, half of them children”. Similarly, in Cuba, Al Jazeera reports that “With restrictions on the import of food, it has contributed to malnutrition – especially among women and children – and water quality has suffered with chemicals and purifying equipment banned.” For the Neoconservatives, no price is too high to pay for spreading corporate oppression throughout the world.
Clearly, the foreign policy priorities of Senators Scott and Rubio are not in tune with basic morality let alone the wants and needs of their Floridian constituents. Therefore, it is not astonishing that both Rubio and Scott are diehard supporters of Israel’s murderous rampage in Gaza. Both Senators have joined together in making the Orwellian assertion that Israel is the “victim” of Palestine in the United Nations. Furthermore, Rubio has made clear his support for genocide in occupied Palestine saying “I don’t think there’s any way Israel can be expected to coexist or find some diplomatic off-ramp with these savages…. They have to be eradicated.”
In comparison to Senators Scott and Rubio, Venezuela has consistently supported Palestine in its struggle against colonialism. In fact, prior to his passing, President Chavez was one of the most popular leaders in the Arab world for his fearless support of Palestinian self-determination and his efforts to hold Israel accountable for its numerous crimes. To this day, Venezuela has continued to support Palestine in the United Nations by backing South Africa’s International Court of Justice case against Israel. In stark contrast to Scott and Rubio who have poisoned the well of discourse with their irrational and destructive support for Israel, Venezuela has constantly acted as a voice for the voiceless in occupied Palestine.
As they carry on waging legislative warfare on Venezuela’s sovereignty with dubious bills like the STOP MADURO Act, one must ask: are Scott and Rubio truly interested in representing their constituents, or merely the interests of the rich and powerful? If Senators Scott and Rubio have any self-respect, they will cease being pawns in a larger geopolitical game and will redirect their focus back on their constituents. Florida deserves leaders who are problem solvers, not ineffectual thorns in the side of foreign governments.
Ms Machado is a co-founder and former leader of Venezuelan vote-monitoring and citizens’ rights group Súmate, a former member of Venezuela’s National Assembly and currently the National Co-ordinator of the Vente Venezuela political movement. Barred from running in Venezuela’s recent Presidential election, she went into hiding in August 2024, declaring that she feared for her life, her freedom, and that of her fellow citizens.
Opening the award ceremony, PACE President Theodoros Rousopoulos pointed out that today, 6 of the 11 previous winners of the Havel Prize are in prison, and urged their immediate release. “These individuals committed only one ‘crime’ – they simply wanted to make their voices heard, to share their vision of a just and free society.”
Making the award to Ms Corina Machado’s daughter Ana, the President underlined that the Council of Europe “stands alongside those who risk their lives to make our societies more democratic and just”.
Ms Corina Machado herself, addressing the Assembly remotely from Venezuela, said she was “deeply moved, honoured and grateful” to be the first Latin American to win the distinction. “I want to dedicate this recognition to the millions of Venezuelans who, every day, embody Havel’s values and ideas – some without even realising it.” Her movement had demonstrated “the victory of democrats over dictatorship” in Venezuela’s recent elections, she said, declaring: “Today our struggle continues, because the truth persists until it prevails.”
The two other shortlisted nominees were Azerbaijani human rights defender and activist Akif Gurbanov, who is currently in pre-trial detention in Baku, and Georgian feminist activist and human rights lawyer Babutsa Pataraia, who was present at the ceremony.
As part of the ceremony, the Assembly was also addressed by Russian opposition leader Vladimir Kara-Murza, who was being held in detention in Russia when he was awarded the Havel Prize in 2022. He was released in August of this year as part of a prisoner exchange.
They offered to release Guaita if her mother, Xiomara Barreto, who worked on the opposition campaign to defeat President Nicolás Maduro, turned herself in. Barreto, who is in hiding, rejected the proposal.
“My daughter is being held hostage,” Barreto said in an August 25 voice recording posted on social media five days after her daughter’s arrest. Then, addressing authorities holding Guaita, she said: “You are doing great damage to an innocent person just because you were unable to arrest me.”
Journalist Ana Carolina Guaita was arrested in the crackdown on the press after the July 28 Venezuelan election. (Photo: Courtesy of Guaita family)
Such extortion schemes are part of what press watchdog groups describe as an unprecedented government crackdown on the Venezuelan media following the election that Maduro claims to have won despite strong evidence that he lost to opposition candidate Edmundo González.
These journalists are among more than 2,000 anti-government protesters and opposition activists who have been detained following the July 28 balloting, a wave or repression that prompted González, who may have beaten Maduro by a 2-to-1 margin according to opposition tallies, to flee to Spain where he has been granted political asylum.
Opposition candidate Edmundo González holds electoral records as he and opposition leader Maria Corina Machado address supporters in Caracas after the election on July 30, 2024. González has since fled the country. (Photo: Reuters/Alexandre Meneghini)
‘This government has gone crazy’
Venezuela has now reached a decades-long high of journalists it has imprisoned, according to Marianela Balbi, director of the Caracas-based Instituto Prensa y Sociedad, and CPJ’s own data from prior years.
Like Guaita, several were arrested while covering anti-government protests. They face charges of terrorism, instigating violence, and hate crimes. If convicted, Balbi said, they could face up to 30 years in prison each, yet they have no access to private lawyers and have instead been assigned public defenders loyal to the Maduro regime.
Carlos Correa, director of the Caracas free press group Espacio Público, said security agents don’t even bother to secure arrest warrants and have, in some cases, demanded bribes of up to US$4,000 not to detain journalists. In addition, at least 14 journalists have had their passports canceled with no explanation, according to Balbi.
“This government has gone crazy,” Correa told CPJ. “The most hardline elements are now in control and they are angry about being rejected at the polls.”
Among the hardliners is Diosdado Cabello, the number two figure in the ruling United Socialist Party who last month was appointed interior minister. Cabello, who is now in charge of police forces, is a frequent press basher whose defamation lawsuit against the Caracas daily El Nacional prompted the Maduro regime to seize the newspaper’s building as damages in 2021.
Cabello also uses his weekly program on state TV to insult and stigmatize journalists. On the September 5 episode, for example, Cabello accused the online news outlets Efecto Cocuyo, El Pitazo, Armando.Info, Tal Cual, and El Estimulo, of trying to destabilize Venezuela and, without evidence, claimed they were financed by drug traffickers.
All this has created “a lot of fear and frustration,” Balbi said. “This is what happens in countries with no rule of law.”
Journalists flee amid sharp drop in press freedom
To be sure, Venezuela’s press freedom erosion predated the election, as the Maduro government has closed TV and radio stations, blocked news websites, confiscated newspapers, and fomented fear and self-censorship over its 11 years in power. But since the vote, the situation has deteriorated precipitously with the government imposing internet shutdowns and blocking communication platforms, while individual journalists face impossible choices to continue their work.
Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro addresses government loyalists one month after the presidential vote, in Caracas, Venezuela, on August 28, 2024. (Photo: AP/Ariana Cubillos)
Several reporters have fled the country. One journalist, who had been covering anti-government protests in the western state of Trujillo, was tipped off last month by a government security agent that her name was on an arrest list. She hid with friends and then, after learning that police were staking out her home, made her way to neighboring Colombia.
“There is so much dread,” said the journalist who, like several sources for this story, spoke to CPJ on condition of anonymity. Government officials “don’t care that you are innocent. Never before have I felt so fragile and vulnerable.”
Those who remain in Venezuela are exercising extreme caution. They are self-censoring, staying off-camera in video reports, leaving their bylines off digital stories, and avoiding opposition rallies. Some radio news programs have gone off the air or have switched to musical formats.
A journalist in western Falcón state told CPJ that security agents are tracking the articles and social media posts of individual journalists and said they have filmed her while covering opposition rallies.
“They make you feel like a criminal or a fugitive from justice,” said the reporter who is considering leaving journalism and fleeing Venezuela.
A veteran reporter in Carabobo state, just west of Caracas, told CPJ that she has worked for years to make a name for herself as a fair and balanced journalist but is now being told by her editors to remove her byline from her stories for her own protection.
Meanwhile, it’s become more difficult for reporters to interview trusted sources and average Venezuelans because, even when they are promised anonymity, they fear government reprisals, a journalist based in western Zulia state told CPJ.
CPJ called Maduro’s press office and the Interior Ministry for comment but there was no answer.
Outlets band together and use AI to shield individual reporters
To protect themselves, many journalists are staying off social media and are erasing photos, text messages, and contacts from their mobile phones in case they are arrested and the devices are confiscated. Some have gone to opposition marches posing as members of the crowd rather than taking out their notebooks and recording gear and identifying as journalists. On such outings, some are required to check in with their editors every 20 minutes to make sure they are safe.
“We are trying to report the news while also protecting our people,” said César Batiz, the editor of El Pitazo, who fled the country several years ago and works from exile in Florida. “We realize that no story is more important that our journalists’ safety.”
Since the election, El Pitazo is jointly publishing stories with several other media outlets in an effort to make it harder for the regime to target any individual news organization. For added protection, many of these same news sites are taking part in Operación Retuit, or Operation Retweet, in which their journalists put together stories that are narrated on video by newsreaders created by artificial intelligence.
“So, for security reasons, we will use AI to provide information from a dozen independent Venezuelan news organizations,” says one of the avatars, who appears as a smiling young man in a plaid shirt in the initial Operación Retuit video posted on X on August 13.
Thanks to all of these efforts important stories are still being published, including reports on regime killings of protesters, the imprisonment of minors arrested at anti-government demonstrations, and electoral observers describing government fraud during the July 28 balloting.
Or, in the words of Batiz: “The regime is cracking down so we have to be more creative.”
Still, Correa, of Espacio Público, says the repression is taking its toll. “Without a doubt there are fewer journalists covering important stories in Venezuela, and much more caution and fear.”
The peoples around the world have looked to Venezuela as a vanguard leading Nuestra América in its second independence struggle, against the US. The US rulers operate as the inheritor of the European colonial empires, assuming the right to interfere in other countries’ elections, and dictate who are the winners. No other country – save US underlings in Europe, and Israel – dares to violate international law so brazenly.
The Venezuelan right-wing had no real plan to win a democratic election, but instead prepared for a coup d’etat even before the polls closed. Working with the US government and corporate media, they allege President Maduro stole the July 28 presidential election, then committed human rights abuses to crush protests. This opposition declares it beat President Maduro 70% to 30% but refuses to present their “evidence” to the National Electoral Council (CNE) or Supreme Court. The opposition claimed fraud in every election during the 25-year period of Chavista rule – except twice, when they won.
The attempted coup bears much in common with recent US coup attempts in Nicaragua (2018), Bolivia (2019) and Venezuela (2013, 2014, 2017, 2019). If the US-backed candidates lose, the election is “fraudulent.” This scheme drove Evo Morales from power in Bolivia. The US even appointed its own president for Venezuela after its 2018 presidential election, and then proceeded to steal tens of billions of dollars of Venezuela’s resources held overseas.
US coup attempts use new tools besides the US-trained military as in the past
First, the US crushes a country with sanctions and economic blockades, causing scarcities and shortages, leading to discontent among the people over worsening living conditions. National Security gangster John Bolton said: “Sanctions are a means of repression and coercion between military warfare and diplomacy.” Richard Nephew, Treasury deputy secretary, adds: “Over the past decade, the most important tool for enforcing American power is the sanctions mechanism.” To justify sanctions, the US relies on its media, intellectuals, universities and think tanks, to make them seem humane to the public. In Venezuela, US sanctions caused government revenue to collapse by 99%, requiring dramatic cuts in the many social programs. The sanctions killed over 100,000 civilians, Venezuelans knew that voting for Nicolas Maduro would mean a worsening of the US-EU economic warfare they face.
Second, corporate media and social media now play a coup-making role similar to that of Pentagon-trained generals in the past. Supervised by the CIA, this media blanketed a targeted country and the world with disinformation against its government, seeking to foment a “regime change” mass movement.
Six corporations control over 90% of the US media and so own the news. They dominate the world media just as the US dollar dominates the world financial system. The all-important weapon, social media, which saturates billions of mobile phones, are in the hands of Elon Musk (X, formerly Twitter), and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram). Working with the CIA, they can impose an alternative reality, seen in Nicaragua in 2018, Bolivia during the 2019 coup, and Venezuela today.
Corporate media describe the elected Maduro government – and the elected ones in Nicaragua and Cuba – as dictatorships.
Delegitimizing Venezuelan elections in advance followed a pattern used in Bolivia (2019) and Nicaragua (2021). The US created automated networks of thousands of fake social media accounts to swamp the public with fake news. These accounts generate streams of posts in a coordinated manner, creating the appearance of popular repudiation of Evo Morales, Nicolas Maduro, or Daniel Ortega.
Bots were used in a massive way against Evo’s government. The two main coup leaders created 95,000 twitter accounts before the coup to spread the election fraud story and call for violent protests. Over 68,000 false accounts were set up to legitimize the army’s overthrow of Morales and justify killing those protesting the coup.
US social media control in these countries drowns out pro-government and independent voices not just by saturating the online conversation, but by shutting them down. After the US annointed Juan Guaido the Venezuela president, Twitter closed thousands of Chavista accounts to foster the impression that most Venezuelans supported Guaido.
Governments in countries like Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia cannot respond effectively to the US media disinformation warfare against them any more than to the US blockades imposed on them. It takes them years to build up national media networks, and even then, their resources are minor compared to what the US commands.
Third, the US relies on cyberwarfare to incapacitate its opponents. In Bolivia in 2019 a cyberattack of the electoral system’s computers disrupted the vote count, preventing the authentic results being issued. The US-backed opposition then claimed Evo delayed the vote count because he was fixing it.
After the July 28 election, 126 digital platforms of the Venezuelan state suffered cyberattacks, the most significant being the CNE, the constitutional agency recording the vote. Hacked over 100 times that night, it could not operate normally, delaying for days the release of the results. Again, this was used to claim the vote totals were being fixed.
At times 30 million cyber attacks per minute occurred between July 28 and August 9th. Such an attack disables Venezuelan government computer systems and paralyzes operations. These large-scale cyberattacks generated hundreds of gigabytes per second (your laptop system memory may have 16 gb).
These attacks falsified IP links, duplicated links, reconfigured government portals and hijacked information. Names and addresses of government workers were released on social media to “comanditos” (opposition gangs), creating physical threats for those affected.
The US powerful media and cyber weapons, able to swamp a country’s airwaves with CIA concocted “news,” while disrupting the country’s response, open the door to violent protests against the government.
Fourth, having created the conditions for opposition leaders to assert the Maduro government stole the election, they then called people into the streets to protest and create chaos or guarimbas. “Comanditos” (small groups paid to instigate violence), caused destruction and violence, killed 25 and injured 192, burned buildings, sacked several regional CNE headquarters, blocked roads, attacked police and military, beat up people who “looked” Chavista, attacked local community leaders, food distribution centers, public schools, hospitals, offices, ransacked warehouses, the transportation system, the electrical grid, all to paralyze the country. The US media could portray to the world a picture of national chaos, inviting military intervention to restore order, meaning a US neo-colonial regime.
These protests (as in Bolivia in 2019 and Nicaragua in 2018, Cuba in 2021) are portrayed in the corporate media as peaceful democracy rallies. When police forces and mobilized Chavista organizations attempt to stop the violence, the corporate media charges democracy protests are being repressed. This has been a habitual corporate media scam in US regime change operations, yet people still fall for it. In fact, the strategy was first used in the coup against the democratic government of Iran in 1953.
National Assembly President Jorge Rodríguez noted the comanditos were financed entirely by NGOs. “When the actions and financing of these groups were investigated, it was discovered that they were financed by organizations of dubious origin from Europe or by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)”
Eva Golinger wrote years ago, “Wherever a coup d’etat, a colored revolution or a regime change favorable to US interests occurs, USAID and its flow of dollars is there…The same agencies are always present, funding, training and advising: USAID, National Endowment for Democracy [NED], International Republican Institute [IRI], National Democratic Institute [NDI], Freedom House, Albert Einstein Institute [AEI], and International Center for Non-Violent Conflict [ICNC].”
Fifth, US coup attempts count on funding NGOs to carry out “regime change.” Besides the CIA-controlled USAID, NED, NDI, and IRI, NGOs receive millions from Open Society Foundations, Ford Foundation, and others. The US uses them to buy an internal opposition, similar to AIPAC in the US – except here AIPAC works to disenfranchise we the people.
NED funds NGOs worldwide to incite color revolutions against those the US empire finds not properly subservient. Between 2016-2019 1600 NGOs received NED grants, highlighting the value the US places on the NGO coup-making tool. Needless to say, the US does not tolerate foreign countries funding NGOs pressing for political change here.
From 2000-2020, the US spent $250 million funding “regime change” NGOs in Cuba. Tracey Eaton wrote, “An extensive network of groups financed by the US government sends cash to Cuba to thousands of ‘democracy activists,’ journalists and dissidents every year.” Since 1996, the US spent $20-$45 million dollars a year to fund these Cuban groups. These NGOs created the CIA Cuban social media ZunZuneo, and even infiltrated the Cuban hip-hop scene, laying the basis for the 2021 protests.
From 2017 through 2019, USAID admitted giving nearly $467 million to the Venezuelan opposition. USAID committed another $128 million to US appointed president Juan Guaidó. In 2006, Ambassador William Brownfield in 2006 revealed the goals of USAID funding: “1) Strengthening Democratic Institutions, 2) Penetrating Chavez’ Political Base, 3) Dividing Chavismo, 4) Protecting Vital U.S. business, and 5) Isolating Chavez internationally.” The NED disclosed in 2010 that agencies funded the opposition $40-50 million annually.
Venezuela and Nicaragua recently passed laws controlling NGOs – which the US painted as a sign of their dictatorial nature.
How Venezuela Defeated this Five-Pronged CoupAttempt
The Maduro government had campaigned for months educating and warning the people of opposition schemes to disrupt the election, refuse to recognize the results, create new guarimbas, and that united popular action could stop this. They succeeded. The violent coup attempt on July 29-30 failed; on July 31 the terrorists were being rounded up, and calm restored. On August 3, more than half a million Chavistas marched to support President Maduro and peace.
Internationally, the Maduro government benefited from the considerable prestige it had gained standing up to everything the US rulers threw at it. The US has likewise lost much credibility, especially over its full support for the endless massacres in Gaza. It could not even get the subservient OAS to condemn Maduro.
Venezuela, like Cuba, has developed a strong civic-military union supported by thousands of voluntary militias that has been a bastion against the war – economic, military, propaganda, and cyberwar – against the country. Moreover, the Venezuelan military command, like in Cuba and Nicaragua, is dedicated to defending the constitutional order, denying US coup-plotters an opening. A people’s militia in Bolivia, which did not and still does not exist, could have maintained order in October 2019 after the police and military commands declared they would not stop right wing violence.
Besides the mass civic-military union, the Venezuelan government, like Cuba, relies on mobilizing the people. President Maduro’s closing campaign rally culminated in over a million marching on July 25th. Right after the July 28 election, hundreds of thousands of Chavistas took to the streets of Caracas and other cities. This was an antidote to the coup attempt and violence, since these mobilizations vastly outnumbered the capacity of the opposition.
After 25 years of the US forcing the Chavista leadership live under pressure cooker conditions, it has been unable to divide them and overturn the revolution as it has so often elsewhere, such as Grenada, Burkina Faso, Algeria, the Soviet bloc, and now threatens Bolivia.
The Maduro government maintains broad popular support because of its commitment to the people. The oil industry was nationalized and its income, while curtailed due to the US blockade, benefits the people. Mass literacy campaigns ended illiteracy. Over 5.1 million homes have been built for the poor. Venezuela has become almost self-sufficient in food production. The CLAP program distributes discounted or free food to 7.5 million families every month. Free health care and education through university are provided to all. Venezuela is overcoming the US blockade with the economy expected to grow 10% in 2024, and has the lowest inflation rate in 14 years. In recognition, about one million Venezuelans have returned home.
Chavismo defeated this coup because of its organic connection with the people, because of the class consciousness that has matured in its citizens since Hugo Chavez initiated the Bolivarian process, and because of the political clarity and determination of the Chavista leadership. Their victory is one for the peoples of the world.
The Biden/Harris administration is renewing its attacks on Venezuela. On Monday, September 2, US officials seized a jet plane belonging to the Venezuelan government when it was in the Dominican Republic for servicing, then flew it to Florida.
Contrary to a false report in the NY Times, the plane was not “owned by Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro”. It is owned by the Venezuelan government and used for travel by various Venezuelan officials in addition to the president.
The NYT article claims, “The Biden administration is trying to put more pressure on Mr. Maduro because of his attempts to undermine the results of the recent presidential election.” This is another inversion of reality. The US government is trying to undermine the results determined by the Venezuelan National Election Council (CNE) and ratified by their Supreme Court.
Contrary to Western claims, the Supreme Court and Election Council are not synonymous with the government. They are approved by Venezuela’s elected national assembly. While one opposition member of the Election Council criticized the results, he did not attend the count or meetings. He does not ordinarily live in Venezuela and has returned to his home in the USA. Meanwhile, another opposition member of the Election Council, Aime Nogal, participated and approved the council’s decision.
Before the election, polls showed vastly different predictions. The US-funded polling company, Edison Research, showed the Gonzalez/ Machado opposition winning. Other polls showed the opposite. Polls are notoriously unreliable, especially when the poll is funded by an interested party. A better indication was the street demonstrations where the crowd in support of the coalition led by Maduro was near one million people. In contrast, the crowd for Gonzalez was a small fraction of that.
Increasingly, countries throughout the Global South are rejecting and criticizing Washington’s intervention in other nations’ internal affairs. On August 28, the president of Honduras, Xiomara Castro Zelaya, terminated the long standing extradition treaty with the United States and denounced US meddling after the US Ambassador commented negatively on Honduran – Venezuelan discussions. Along with many other Latin American countries but the dismay of the U.S., Honduras recognized the results of the Venezuelan election.
For over twenty years, the US has been trying to overturn the Bolivarian revolution. In 2002, the US government and elite media supported a coup attempt against President Hugo Chavez. To their chagrin, the attempt collapsed due to popular outrage. Since then, there have been repeated efforts with the US supporting street violence, assassination attempts, and invasions. Under Obama, Venezuela was absurdly declared to be a “threat to US national security”. This was the bogus rationale for the economic warfare which the US has waged ever since. Multiple reports confirm that tens of thousands of Venezuelans have died as a result of hunger and sickness due to US strangulation of the economy. Again, the truth is the opposite of what Washington claims: the US is a threat to Venezuela’s national security.
Unknown to most U.S. residents, in December 2020 the U.N. General Assembly declared US unilateral coercive measures (sanctions) are “contrary to international law, international humanitarian law, the Charter of the United Nations and the norms and principles governing peaceful relations among States.”
Illegal U.S. measures were used to justify the kidnapping and imprisonment of Venezuelan diplomat, Alex Saab. They have now been used to justify the theft of a et plane needed by Venezuelan officials.
Previously, sanctions were used to justify the seizure of Venezuela’s CITGO gas stations and freezing gold reserves in London. It comes after the U.S. and allies pretended for several years that an almost unknown politician, Juan Guaido, was the president of Venezuela.
The reasons for Washington’s repeated efforts to overturn the Bolivarian revolution are clear: Venezuela has huge oil reserves and insists on its sovereignty. Under Chavez and Maduro, the Bolivarian revolution has sought to benefit the vast majority of Venezuela’s people instead of a small elite of Venezuelans and foreigners. Washington cannot tolerate the idea that those resources are used to benefit the Venezuelan people instead of billionaires like the Rockefeller clan, which made much of its wealth from Venezuela.
Under the Bolivarian revolution, Venezuela insists on having its own foreign policy. In 2006, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez denounced the U.S. invasion of Iraq and compared U.S. President Bush to the devil. In May this year, Venezuelan President Maduro denounced Israel’s genocide in Gaza and accused the West of being “accomplices.”
The cost of seizing Venezuela’s plane on foreign soil was probably greater than the $13 million value of the plane. So why did the Biden administration do this now? Perhaps it is to garner the votes of right-wing Cubans and Venezuelans in Florida. Perhaps it is to distract from their foreign policy failures in Gaza and Ukraine.
Whatever the reason, the theft of the Venezuelan jet plane is an example of U.S. foreign policy based on self-serving “rules” in violation of international law. It shows who is the rogue state.
President Xiomara Castro of Honduras is representative of the wave of disgust with US interference, crimes, and arrogance. In the past, Honduras was called a “banana republic” and known as “USS Honduras”. Now its president says, “The interference and interventionism of the United States … is intolerable. They attack, disregard and violate with impunity the principles and practices of international law, which promote respect for the sovereignty and self-determination of peoples, non-intervention and universal peace. Enough.”
Mexico City, September 3, 2024—The Committee to Protect Journalists and #KeepItOn coalition partners have called on Nicolás Maduro’s government to stop imposing internet shutdowns and blocking essential communication platforms in Venezuela in response to post-election protests.
After Maduro was declared the winner of the July 28 presidential contest, authorities shut down the internet and blocked platforms like X, Reddit, and Microsoft Teams and the encrypted messaging service Signal. Such shutdowns violate Venezuela’s constitution and the right to freedom of expression.
The coalition urged the international community, including the Freedom Online Coalition, the United Nations, and the Organization of American States, to call for an end to the crackdown and hold Maduro to account for all human rights abuses.
We must speak the truth: therein lies our strength, and the masses, the people, the multitude will decide in actual practice, after the struggle, whether we have strength.
Hugo Chavez will live on as one of the most outstanding foes of US imperialism in our time. His defiance of successive US governments was truly remarkable. Situated in the US backyard, Venezuela — under Chavez’s leadership — brought joy and admiration to millions throughout the world and inspired others in Central and South America to mount their own response to US domination. Faced with foreign intervention, coup attempts, and a vicious domestic opposition, Chavismo will be honored for rebelling against US arrogance and aggression long after his death.
However, Chavismo was not socialism, nor did it construct a path to socialism. Chavez brought a Christian love and respect to the poor and disadvantaged and offered a dash of utopian “socialism” gleaned from Western leftist “advisors.” The movement was multiclass, with the working class playing no special role. The transformation of the state into a peoples’ democracy was never projected. In short, a radical transformation was not and is not secured against the maneuvers of the domestic bourgeoisie and foreign intervention.
Consequently, Venezuela’s path is very susceptible to detours, reversals, and backsliding, especially in the face of potent domestic reaction and foreign intervention. History has shown that mobilization and empowering of the working class is the most important barrier that a government can erect against the machinations of hostile class forces. The ready cooperation of the parties of the most militant workers– the Communists– is essential to this effort.
Yet, the Maduro government not only rejected the collaboration of the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV), but effectively banned the PCV and obstructed its electoral participation. This unprincipled attack on the PCV is well documented; no one among the international solidarity community has disputed its veracity.
Yet those who know of the complicity of the Venezuelan Supreme Court in enforcing the ban choose to ignore the Court’s failure. They choose to look away from the denial of any hint of due process or transparency in the Court’s slavish toadying to the Maduro government.
It speaks poorly of a left that indignantly rallies against comparable politically tainted decisions of the highest courts in their own lands.
The recent Venezuelan election is the object of intense contention. Ultimately, the Venezuelan people will resolve the question of its legitimacy, as they, and they alone, must do.
Does it help Venezuelans find the truth for some to pretend that the most recent electoral process measured up to the past practices applauded by a number of recognized international observers? One prominent left commentator appealed to the Venezuelan Constitution to sheepishly note that the Constitution did not mandate that the electoral council respect those past practices — hardly, a ringing defense of the results that he, and many others, stoutly maintain.
Of course, it is scandalous that the Maduro government marked “Paid” on the election results through the same compromised Supreme Court that attempted to arbitrarily shape the outcome beforehand by denying ballot status to some parties, including to the Communist Party.
To be sure, the Venezuelan people will overcome this blemish on the legacy of Hugo Chavez and return to a political process that will welcome the most ardent champions of working people, the Communists.
The selection panel of the Václav Havel Human Rights Prize, which rewards outstanding civil society action in defence of human rights in Europe and beyond, has announced the shortlist for the 2024 Award.
Meeting in Prague, the panel – made up of independent figures from the world of human rights and chaired by the President of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) Theodoros Rousopoulos – decided to shortlist the following three nominees, in alphabetical order:
Akif Gurbanov, Azerbaijan
The nominee is a human rights defender, political activist and active member of the Azerbaijani civil society. He is the co-founder of the Institute of Democratic Initiative (IDI) and of the Third Republic Platform. He was arrested in March 2024 in a wave of arrests targeting journalists and activists in the country.
María Corina Machado, Venezuela
The nominee is a leading political figure in Venezuela engaged in denouncing human rights abuses in her country and defending democracy and the rule of law. She is the co-founder of the Venezuelan volunteer civil organisation ‘Súmate’ for civil and political freedom, rights and citizen participation.
Babutsa Pataraia, Georgia
The nominee is a leading feminist activist and human rights lawyer in Georgia. She is the Director of ‘Sapari’, an NGO focusing on women’s rights and providing support for victims of violence since 2013. She has worked for over a decade to fight against feminicide, sexual violence against women, and sexual harassment.
Don’t ask what business the US had in backing a candidate in Venezuela’s July 28 presidential election. Certainly that was not a question that the corporate press ever asked.
Of course, the US should never have been meddling in Venezuelan elections in the first place. But given the machinations of the hemisphere’s hegemon, it is instructive to examine why and who Washington backed.
Insurrectionary rather than democratic strategy
It came as no surprise that the US-backed opposition called the 2024 Venezuelan presidential election fraudulent when they lost. They had announced that intention before the election.
Cries of fraud have been the far-right’s practice in nearly every one of the 31 national contests since the Bolivarian Revolution began a quarter of a century ago, except for the two contests lost by the Chavistas, the movement founded by Hugo Chávez and carried on by his successor Nicolás Maduro.
That is because this far-right opposition, funded and largely directed by Washington, pursues an insurrectionary strategy, rather than a democratic one. Neither they nor the US have recognized the legitimacy of the Venezuelan government since Maduro was first elected in 2013.
The US-backed opposition boycotted the 2018 election in anticipation of what appeared to them as an imminent governmental collapse under US assault. But in 2024, they were compelled to contend in the presidential contest. Conditions had changed with the successes by the Maduro administration in turning around the country’s economic freefall, largely precipitated by US unilateral coercive measures. In addition, Washington had failed to diplomatically isolate Venezuela by such stunts as recognizing the self-proclaimed “interim presidency” of Juan Guaidó.
US picks its candidate
The reentry of the US-backed opposition into the electoral arena was not based on democratic participation that recognized the constitution or the institutions of the Venezuelan state. The US-backed opposition’s “primary” was not conducted by the official Venezuelan electoral authority, the CNE, as had previous ones. Rather, it was a private affair administered by the NGO Súmate, a recipient of US National Endowment for Democracy (NED) funds, a CIA-cutout.
Washington’s prechosen candidate, Maria Corina Machado, won in a crowded field of 13 candidates with an incredulous 92%. When some of the other candidates in the primary called fraud, Machado had the ballots destroyed. She could do that because Súmate was her personal organization.
Ms. Machado was despised by much of the other opposition. A faux populist, she is a member of one of the richest families in Venezuela, went to Yale, and lived in Florida. While the populace suffered under US unilateral coercive measures, she championed them and even called for military intervention. Internationally, Machado has strong ties with the international far-right, notably Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.
Washington backed Machado knowing full well that in 2015 she had been barred from running for office. Back then, while she was a member of the National Assembly, she had accepted a diplomatic post with a foreign country in order to testify against her own country. Such treason is constitutionally prohibited in Venezuela as it is in many other countries.
For the US, Machado’s disbarment was a bonus. The State Department could claim that its candidate was unfairly disqualified, when that was a given to begin with. Washington’s intent was not to encourage a free and fair democratic process, but to delegitimize the one already in place.
Disbarred, Machado then personally chose her surrogate, Edmundo González. The former diplomat from the 1980s was completely unknown and with no electoral experience. The infirm surrogate literally had to be propped up by Machado at campaign rallies, although most of the time he convalesced in Caracas while she barnstormed the country.
An alternative strategy
Contrary to the nonsense in the corporate press of a “unified opposition,” the non-Chavista elements have been anything but unified. Had they been, they may have made the most of the 48% of the electorate that did not support Maduro according to the count by the CNE.
The assertion by Machado/González that they had won the 2024 election by a margin of 70% lacks credibility. That seven out of ten Venezuelans supported them was not proven in the streets. Machado called her followers out on the 3rd and again on the 17th, but the turnout was smaller than even her pre-election rallies. Meanwhile pro-Maduro rallies dwarfed the opposition’s. This was an indication of the high level of organization and popular support for the Bolivarian Revolution.
Still, in retrospect, the US could have tried to galvanize support for an alternative project. There were politically moderate state governors and legislators, who might have unified the fractious opposition. Instead, the US, anticipating a Maduro victory, obstinately clung to the disqualified Machado with her surrogate González.
The Machado/González platform was not a popular one, calling for extreme neoliberal privatization of education, health care, housing, food assistance, and the national oil agency. A far more attractive and winning platform would have been to retain the social benefits of Chavismo with the promise of relief from US unilateral coercive measures.
In backing someone as unattractive, unknown, and unpopular as González, the US showed its disinterest in a good faith engagement in the democratic electoral process.
The real obstacle to free and fair elections in Venezuela
That brings us to the heart of the matter. Truly free and fair elections in Venezuela were impossible – not due to the supposed conspiracies of the ruling Chavistas – but because of conditions imposed by Washington by their hybrid war against Venezuela.
The 930 unilateral coercive measures imposed on Caracas by Washington – euphemistically called sanctions – are no less deadly than bombs, causing over 100,000 casualties. This form of collective punishment is illegal under the charters of the UN and the Organization of American States (OAS) and even US law.
In short, the Venezuelan people went to the polls on July 28 with a gun aimed at their heads. If they voted for Maduro, the coercive measures would likely continue and even be intensified. This fundamental reality was ignored by the Western press and other critics.
The narrative on Venezuela has been shifted by Washington and echoed in the corporate press. The paramount interference of US’s coercive measures was ignored, while attention was shifted to the intricacies of Venezuelan electoral law. The larger picture got lost in the statistical weeds. This shifted narrative is designed to place the burden of proof on the sovereign government to prove its legitimacy.
Solutions are being proffered by outside actors calling for new elections in Venezuela and establishment of a “transitional government.” However, there are no constitutional mechanisms for doing that in Venezuela. Nor are there any such mechanisms in most countries, including the US. More importantly, this is a gross violation of Venezuelan sovereignty. Even the far-right opposition in Venezuela rejected these as unacceptable.
The CNE has by law 30 days after the election to release the official results. Meanwhile in response to the accusations of fraud, the Maduro administration turned the matter over to the Venezuelan constitutional institution designed to adjudicate such matters, which is the Electoral Chamber of the Venezuelan Supreme Tribunal of Justice (TSJ).
On August 22, the TSJ affirmed the CNE’s count, confirming Maduro’s victory. A Hinterlaces poll found that 60% of Venezuelans trust the CNE’s results.
President Maduro commented: “Venezuela has the sovereignty of an independent country with a constitution, it has institutions, and the conflicts in Venezuela of any kind are solved among Venezuelans, with their institutions, with their law and with their constitution.” The US responded with a call for a regime-change “transition.”
Insistence on its rightto defend national sovereignty in the face of continued US imperial aggression will make for tumultuous times ahead for Venezuela.
On 16 August 2024, the Organisation of American States (OAS), whose 1948 formation as a Cold War institution was instigated by the United States, voted on a resolution regarding the Venezuelan presidential elections. The nub of the resolution proposed by the US called upon Venezuela’s election authority, the National Electoral Council (CNE), to publish all the election details as soon as possible (including the actas, or voting records, at the local polling station level). This resolution asks the CNE to go against Venezuela’s Organic Law on Electoral Processes (Ley Orgánica de Procesos Electorales or LOPE): since the law does not call for the publication of these materials, doing so would be a violation of public law. What the law does indicate is that the CNE must announce the results within 48 hours (article 146) and publish them within 30 days (article 155) and that the data from polling places (such as the actas) should be published in a tabular form (article 150).
It is pure irony that the resolution was voted upon in the Simón Bolívar room at the OAS headquarters in Washington, DC. Simón Bolívar (1783–1830) liberated Venezuela and neighbouring territories from the Spanish Empire and sought to bring about a process of integration that would strengthen the region’s sovereignty. That is why the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela pays tribute to his legacy in its name. When Hugo Chávez won the presidency in 1998, he centred Bolívar in the country’s political life, seeking to further this legacy through initiatives such as the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our Americas (ALBA) that would continue the journey to establish sovereignty in the country and region. In 1829, Bolívar wrote, ‘The United States appears to be destined by providence to plague [Latin] America with misery in the name of liberty’. This misery, in our time, is exemplified by the US attempt to suffocate Latin American countries through military coups or sanctions. In recent years, Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela have been at the epicentre of this ‘plague’. The OAS resolution is part of that suffocation.
José Chávez Morado (Mexico), Carnival in Huejotzingo, 1939
Bolivia, Honduras, Mexico, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines did not come to the vote (nor did Cuba, as it was expelled by the OAS in 1962, leading Castro to dub the organisation the ‘Ministry of Colonies of the United States’, or Nicaragua, which left the OAS in 2023). Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (known as AMLO) described why his country decided not to appear at the OAS meeting and why it disagrees with the US-proposed resolution, quoting from article 89, section X of the Mexican Constitution (1917), which states that the president of Mexico must adhere to the principles of ‘non-intervention; peaceful settlement of disputes; [and] prohibiting the threat or use of force in international relations’. To that end, AMLO said that Mexico will wait for the ‘competent authority of the country’ to settle any disagreement. In Venezuela’s case, the Supreme Tribunal of Justice is the relevant authority, though this has not stopped the opposition from rejecting its legitimacy. This opposition, which we have characterised as the far right of a special type, is committed to using any resource – including US military intervention – to overthrow the Bolivarian process. AMLO’s reasonable position is along the grain of the United Nations Charter (1945).
Many countries with apparently centre-left or left governments joined the US in voting for this OAS resolution. Among them are Brazil, Chile, and Colombia. Chile, even though it has a president who admires Salvador Allende (killed in a US-imposed coup in 1973), has displayed a foreign policy orientation on many issues (including both Venezuela and Ukraine) that aligns with the US State Department. Since 2016, at the invitation of the Chilean government, the country welcomed nearly half a million Venezuelan migrants, many of whom are undocumented and now face the threat of expulsion from an increasingly hostile environment in Chile. It is almost as if the country’s president, Gabriel Boric, wants to see the situation in Venezuela change so that he can order the return of Venezuelans to their home country. This cynical attitude towards Chile’s enthusiasm for US policy on Venezuela, however, does not explain the situation of Brazil and Colombia.
Pablo Kalaka (Chile), Untitled, 2022, sourced from Lendemains solidaires no. 2.
Our latest dossier, To Confront Rising Neofascism, the Latin American Left Must Rediscover Itself, analyses the current political landscape on the continent, beginning by interrogating the assumption that there has been a second ‘pink tide’ or cycle of progressive governments in Latin America. The first cycle, which was inaugurated with the 1998 election of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and came to an end following the 2008 financial crisis and US counter-offensive against the continent, ‘frontally challenged US imperialism by advancing Latin American integration and geopolitical sovereignty’, while the second cycle, defined by a more centre-left orientation, ‘seems more fragile’. This fragility is emblematic of the situation in both Brazil and Colombia, where the governments of Luiz Inácio ‘Lula’ da Silva and Gustavo Petro, respectively, have not been able to exercise their full control over the permanent bureaucracies in the foreign ministries. Neither the foreign minister of Brazil (Mauro Vieira) nor Colombia (Luis Gilberto Murillo) are men of the left or even of the centre left, and both have close ties to the US as former ambassadors to the country. It bears reflection that there are still over ten US military bases in Colombia, though this is not sufficient reason for the fragility of this second cycle.
In the dossier, we offer seven explanations for this fragility:
the worldwide financial and environmental crises, which have created divisions between countries in the region about which path to follow;
the US reassertion of control over the region, which it had lost during the first progressive wave, in particular to challenge what the US sees as China’s entry into Latin American markets. This includes the region’s natural and labour resources;
the increasing uberisation of labour markets, which has created far more precarity for the working class and negatively impacted its capacity for mass organisation. This has resulted in a significant rolling back of workers’ rights and weakened working-class power;
the reconfiguration of social reproduction, which has become centred around public disinvestment in social welfare policies, thereby placing the responsibility for care in the private sphere and primarily overburdening women;
the US’s increased military power in the region as its main instrument of domination in response to its declining economic power;
the fact that the region’s governments have been unable to take advantage of China’s economic influence and the opportunities it presents to drive a sovereign agenda and that China, which has emerged as Latin America’s primary trading partner, has not sought to directly challenge the US agenda to secure hegemony over the continent;
divisions between progressive governments, which, alongside the ascension of neofascism in the Americas, impede the growth of a progressive regional agenda, including policies for continental integration akin to those proposed during the first progressive wave.
These factors, and others, have weakened the assertiveness of these governments and their ability to enact the shared Bolivarian dream of hemispheric sovereignty and partnership.
Antonia Caro (Colombia), Colombia, 1977.
One additional, but crucial, point is that the balance of class forces in societies such as Brazil and Colombia are not in favour of genuinely anti-imperialist politics. Celebrated electoral occasions, such as the victories of Lula and Petro in 2022, are not built on a broad base of organised working-class support that then forces society to advance a genuinely transformative agenda for the people. The coalitions that triumphed included centre-right forces that continue to wield social power and prevent these leaders, regardless of their own impeccable credentials, from exercising a free hand in governance. The weakness of these governments is one of the elements that allows for the growth of the far right of a special type.
As we argue in the dossier, ‘The difficulty of building a political project of the left that can overcome the day-to-day problems of working-class existence has unmoored many of these progressive electoral projects from mass needs’. The working classes, trapped in precarious occupations, need massive productive investments (driven by the state), premised on the exercise of sovereignty over each country and the region as a whole. The fact that a number of countries in the region have aligned with the US to diminish Venezuela’s sovereignty shows that these fragile electoral projects possess little capacity to defend sovereignty.
Daniel Lezama (Mexico), El sueño del 16 de septiembre (The Dream of September 16th), 2001.
In her poem ‘Quo Vadis’, the Mexican poet Carmen Boullosa reflects on the problematic nature of pledging allegiance to the US government’s agenda. Las balas que vuelan no tienen convicciones (‘flying bullets have no convictions’), she writes. These ‘progressive’ governments have no conviction regarding regime change operations or destabilisation efforts in other countries in the region. Much should be expected of them, but at the same time too much disappointment is unwarranted.
In the quarter century of the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela, initiated by the election of Hugo Chávez and continued by his successor Nicolás Maduro, 31 national elections have been held. Invariably, the US-backed opposition claimed fraud in all but the two contests that they won. Equally unvaryingly has been the corporate press’s supporting and indeed embellishing of the claims of fraud as described below.
Blackmailing the Venezuelan electorate
The moment that Venezuela’s election authority (CNE in its Spanish initials) reported that incumbent Maduro had prevailed in the July 28 presidential contest over his nearest challenger, Edmundo González, howls of fraud were to be heard throughout the world’s corporate press. Just a few hours after the CNE announcement, CNNreported that the vote “was marked by accusations of fraud and counting irregularities.”
The next day, CNNprovided a backgrounder on “what you need to know” about the election. Leading off was the risible description “of a unified opposition movement that overcame their divisions.” Such a misrepresentation is indicative of a press that confounds the “Washington consensus” for the will of the Venezuelan people.
In fact, there were nine candidates on the ballot besides Maduro; all of them were opposition. They were not unified and for good reason. In its meddling into the internal affairs of Venezuela, Washington has backed the far right in the opposition spectrum.
The US-backed González ran on a platform of radically reorienting Venezuela’s foreign policy from support of the Palestinians to unconditional approval of the current campaign of genocide by Israel and the US. Domestically, he stood for an extreme neoliberal program of privatizing practically everything – schools, transportation, national oil company, housing, hospitals, food assistance. These were not stands that could possibly unify the opposition and certainly were not stands that would appeal to the vast majority of Venezuelans.
So why would the US choose a completely unknown and inexperienced candidate running on an unpopular platform when they could have given the nod to a moderate opposition politician with far more political backing and experience? This is the elephant-in-the-room that CNN and the rest of the corporate press ignore.
Left out of the media barrage against the government of Venezuela has been reporting on the context of the 930 unilateral coercive measures that Washington has levied on Venezuela with the explicit intention to asphyxiate the economy and cause the people to abandon the Bolivarian Revolution. The US banked on blackmailing Venezuela to vote out Maduro or continue to suffer what are euphemistically called “sanctions.”
Battle of the bean counters
Now that the election is over, followed by the predictable accusations of fraud, the corporate media has intensified its campaign to delegitimize the results. In particular, we analyze a CNN article that reports “after Venezuela’s contested presidential vote, experts say government results are a ‘statistical improbability.’”
CNN casts doubt on the results of the Venezuelan presidential election based in part on a post published by the Quantitative Methods in Social Science program at Columbia University. The post cites the official results published by the CNE showing the votes for each candidate followed by their percentage of the total rounded to a single decimal place.
Then the post notes that using the original percentages (51.2, 44.2, and 4.5) to compute the votes for candidates results in fractional vote counts that do not match the original vote totals published by the CNE:
Of course, the counts don’t match but that is an artifact of the misuse of statistics by the post. For example, let’s apply the same method to the official results of the 2020 US presidential election, published by the US Federal Election Commission (FEC):
Biden 81,268,924 51.31%
Trump 74,216,154 46.86%
Total 158,383,403 100.00%
If you multiply the percentage given for Biden 51.31% times the total number of votes, (158,383,403), the result is 81,266,524, which is different from the total reported by the FEC above (81,268,924). Perhaps CNN has uncovered and should be reporting on statistically significant evidence of fraud that was committed by the FEC in the 2020 presidential election?
Nevertheless, the post concludes, referring to the discrepancy that they created: “If it is not evidence of fraud by itself I do not know what is.” Then the posts wildly speculates: “Anyhow, the image of the Chavista bosses fabricating the results with a napkin and their phone calculators seems to be as plausible as amusing.” The post continues: “That seems fishy… Can it be, that instead of calculating the percentages from the number of votes, someone decided the percentages and then calculated the number of votes?”
So there you have it. The “Chavista bosses,” starting from their desired fabricated percentage results, computed candidate totals (using phone calculators on a napkin!), only to be exposed because their clumsily computed fabricated totals do not match their fabricated percentages!
But what CNN is really doing is statistical arm waving. The supposed discrepancy that CNN exposes is nothing more than their misuse of statistics.
The CNN article then goes on to provide additional dramatic and equally sketchy evidence for fraud, citing Andrew Gelman, a professor of statistics and political science at Columbia University who “ran a mathematical simulation with a probability model.” Gelman apparently concluded that “there is about a 1 in 100 million chance that this particular pattern will occur by chance.”
Are they correct? The short answer is that CNN is trying to baffle us.
There is a simple response that provides an easy (and highly probable) explanation of the results published by the Venezuelan CNE: the percentages were computed by dividing the reported vote totals for each candidate by the total number of votes cast, and then the result was rounded to one decimal place.
This is the normal and standard practice. Voting percentages in elections aren’t usually published and displayed to seven decimal places.
If the starting point is the observed vote totals, the percentages can be computed and then rounded to one decimal place as shown in the CNE report. This is nothing more than a simple case of rounding numbers for the purpose of displaying them in a readable form.
Professor Gelman’s “dramatic” simulation only shows that rounding can have a significant impact on decimal calculations; not any evidence of fraud.
In technical jargon, rounding X/N and then multiplying the result times N almost never equals N, unless N is a multiple of X. If you randomly generate a million numbers and divide them each by their sum, it is extremely unlikely that any of the numbers is a factor of the sum. It says nothing about whether the proportion X/N is fabricated or not.
In lay terms, Gelman is misleading readers by misapplying statistical modeling.
Misuse of statistics
The starting point for the post cited by CNN is the assumption that there are “strong allegations of fraud in the recent Venezuelan elections.” The goal of exposing an imagined scenario of “Chavista bosses fabricating the results” as well as other political comments present in the post (comparing, for example, the supposed fraud in Venezuela to the US election deniers and January 6th), indicates that this “expert analysis” providing “strong evidence of fraud” had political motivations. There may be other aspects of the election pointing to fraud, but none of the above does so.
By falsely generating suspicions of fraud in the election, CNN heightens the risk of violence, extra-constitutional resolution of the crisis, and support for outside interference in the electoral process. If you are looking for trustworthy, unbiased reporting and analysis of the Venezuelan election, stay away from CNN
Human rights investigators say ‘escalating’ crackdown has seen 23 deaths and over 100 children and teens detained
United Nations human rights investigators have urged Venezuela’s authoritarian leader, Nicolás Maduro, to halt the “fierce repression” being perpetrated by his security forces after last month’s allegedly stolen presidential election.
In a statement published two weeks after the 28 July vote, the UN’s fact-finding mission to Venezuela condemned Maduro’s “escalating” crackdown, during which more than 100 children and teens have been detained. The UN investigators said they had recorded 23 deaths, the vast majority caused by gunfire and nearly all young men.
Corporate media’s coverage of Venezuela’s July 28 presidential election is akin to an investigation of a homicide that is focused not with identifying the murderer but with an unpaid parking ticket of the victim. Likewise, the media has shifted the narrative into the minutia of electoral procedures, ignoring the much larger issue of US interference in the internal affairs of another sovereign county.
Nowhere in the corporate media is there even an inkling that US-imposed regime-change activities in Venezuela or elsewhere might violate some basic principles.
US is not interested in democracy
Ours is a homeland where the likes of George Clooney and Melinda Gates have the prerogative, because they are rich, to demand that a sitting president abandon his reelection bid. In this “land of the free,” corporations are considered persons, political bribery is an exercise in free speech, and no candidate for public office is competitive unless they accept bribes from corporate interests. Yet Washington considers itself to be the ultimate arbiter of what constitutes democracy in other countries.
The truth is that Washington is not interested in democracy in Venezuela, but rather is keenly concerned with Caracas’s geopolitical role as an exemplar of independent sovereignty from the empire. For that reason, Obama and every subsequent US president has declared Venezuela to be “an unusual and extraordinary threat” to US national security.
Of course, the notion that Venezuela poses a national security threat to the US is preposterous. Former US President Trump correctly identified Washington’s actual motives when he openly boasted: “When I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse. We would have taken it over; we would have gotten all that oil.” Similarly, Biden’s four-star military commander for Latin America, Laura Richardson, opined: “…the importance of the region cannot be overstated enough, the proximity, number one, but all of the resources. This hemisphere is very rich in natural resources.” Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves.
US hybrid war against Venezuela is the biggest obstacle to free and fair elections
Venezuelans went to the polls with a gun pointed at their heads. This is because a vote for the Bolivarian Revolution’s socialist project would de facto mean a continuation and likely intensification of the US hybrid war. In other words, one purpose of the coercive measures is to incentivize Venezuelan voters to vote for the US-backed opposition and disincentivize them to vote for the Chavistas.
So hell-bent has Washington’s determination been to affect the outcome of the election that Venezuela now has some 930 unilateral coercive measures imposed on it by the US, making it the second most sanctioned country in the world after Russia.
The Washington Postcarps about the “overuse of sanctions” because it “risks making the tool less valuable.” Besides, “Wall Street power brokers started to grumble about the costs of complying” with the unilateral coercive measures. Further, “sanctions make it risky to depend on dollars.” Pity the poor banker, we are told, but damn the people of Venezuela.
While correctly labeling the US efforts as “economic warfare,” neither the WaPo nor the other media inform their readers that these unilateral coercive measures – euphemistically called “sanctions” – are illegal under international law, the charters of both the United Nations and the Organization of American States, and even under US domestic law.
Take, for example, a recent program on Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! Ms. Goodman has come a long way from her humble origins as an alternative news source. She interviewed Jeff Stein with the WaPo about the efficacy of what is in effect collective punishment.
The thrust of the interview was the angst over the so-called sanctions not “working”; that is, not achieving regime change, despite the horrific toll they are taking on its victims. Goodman, for her part, was not so rude as to ask her guest whether the US should be in the business of overthrowing governments not to its liking or even query about the legality of sanctioning one third of humanity.
Throughout the interview, Stein used the term “we” to describe the actions of the US government. Any pretense of a separation between the reporter and the subject being reported is dropped by such stenographers for the State Department.
US planned to claim fraud all along
This election is far from the first time Washington has tried to interfere in Venezuela’s democratic processes. Nicolás Maduro won the Venezuelan presidency in 2013 in a constitutionally mandated “snap election” after the untimely death of his predecessor Hugo Chávez, founder of the Bolivarian Revolution. The US was the only country in the world not to recognize Maduro.
For the 2018 election, the US claimed fraud six months in advance. Washington ordered its Venezuelan collaborators to boycott the polls, going so far as threatening sanctions against a moderate opposition candidate for running anyway. Regime change could be accomplished, Washington reasoned, by the one-two punch of the impact of a collapse in international oil prices on the petro economy and US coercive measures designed to impede recovery.
But this time around conditions were different. Venezuela had reversed the economic freefall and begun to diversify the economy. GDP growth is projected to be amongst the highest in the hemisphere. Under such circumstances, boycotting was out of the question. Instead, Washington adopted a belt-and-suspenders strategy of contending in the presidential election while setting the stage to claim fraud if their preferred candidate did not prevail.
Given the pain of sanctions on the Venezuelans, Washington might have allowed a centrist opposition candidate to emerge and banked on a repeat of what happened in Nicaragua in 1990. The leftist Sandinistas were voted out of office then under the threat of a continuing US-backed contra war.
However, the US chose to promote the far-right Maria Corina Machado, who they knew had been banned since 2015 from running for office because of past misdeeds. Eventually, the completely unknown Edmundo González, who had no previous electoral experience, was chosen to run as Machado’s surrogate, given her electoral disqualification.
While the infirm González convalesced in Caracas, Machado barnstormed the country carrying his paper image. The campaign vowed to privatize the national oil company and promote a strongly Zionist foreign policy.
Foreign Affairs reported on how the opposition united around González; in fact, nine opposition candidates appeared on the ballot. You would also read that Machado “won the opposition primaries by a landslide.” You would not know that Machado circumvented the official electoral authority. Instead, she staged a private primary run by her own NGO, a recipient of US funds earmarked for regime change. Her 92% win in a field of thirteen candidates was highly suspicious. When other candidates called fraud, the ballots were destroyed.
Most significantly, Foreign Affairs admitted that the far-right coterie is largely a Yankee astroturf operation: “In the absence of this sustained [regime-change] effort over successive US administrations, the Venezuelan opposition may well have boycotted the 2024 election entirely…Washington’s approach toward Venezuela furnishes a remarkable example.”
The author of the article should know. Jose Ignacio Hernández was Venezuela’s pretend attorney general under the now disgraced Juan Guaidó “interim presidency” farce.
US-backed candidate never agreed to be bound by the election results
While weary of the Yankee hybrid war, many Venezuelans also deeply resent the far-right, which had called for even harsher measures and military intervention. The massive outmigration from Venezuela, fueled by US coercive measures, had also disproportionately eroded the opposition’s political constituency, because the affluent have better means to leave.
Tellingly, the Machado/González campaign had, weeks before the election, signaled that they would not abide by the results if they lost. Upon announcement of the official election results, rampaging opposition elements, embolden by US support, killed Venezuelan security personnel and massively destroyed public property in what Venezuelan-Canadian sociologist Maria Paez Victor called an “attempted coup.”
The wave of violence has since largely dissipated in the face of huge demonstrations supporting Maduro. The government’s civic-military union held firm. Chastened by its failure to overthrow the Bolivarian Revolution by violence or by the ballot, Washinton as of August 6 supports negotiations with Maduro and will not call González “president-elect,” according to the Miami Herald. This is a sign that regime-change advocates have downgraded their objectives…for now.
So who won?
Edison Research’s election exit poll found 65% for the US-backed candidate and 31% for Maduro. An exit poll by Hinterlaces had the opposite results: Maduro 55% and González 43%; similar to the official results of 51% for Maduro and 44% González.
Hinterlaces is a long established and respected Venezuelan polling firm, whose owner has been critical of the Maduro administration. Edison, on the other hand, works for CIA-linked US government propaganda outlets such as Voice of America, which are operated by the US Agency for Global Media, “a Washington-based organ that is used to spread disinformation against US adversaries.”
The question remains, was the Venezuelan election free and fair? However you weigh the evidence, at least some skepticism is warranted regarding sources that brought us the Iraq War based on “weapons of mass destruction.” Moreover, we must ask whether anyone should look up the US as a good arbiter of electoral integrity when it has constantly intervened in other countries’ elections. As Mexican president-elect Claudia Sheinbaum has counseled: “We should…leave self-determination to the Venezuelans.”
Corporate media’s coverage of Venezuela’s July 28 presidential election is akin to an investigation of a homicide that is focused not with identifying the murderer but with an unpaid parking ticket of the victim. Likewise, the media has shifted the narrative into the minutia of electoral procedures, ignoring the much larger issue of US interference in the internal affairs of another sovereign county.
Nowhere in the corporate media is there even an inkling that US-imposed regime-change activities in Venezuela or elsewhere might violate some basic principles.
US is not interested in democracy
Ours is a homeland where the likes of George Clooney and Melinda Gates have the prerogative, because they are rich, to demand that a sitting president abandon his reelection bid. In this “land of the free,” corporations are considered persons, political bribery is an exercise in free speech, and no candidate for public office is competitive unless they accept bribes from corporate interests. Yet Washington considers itself to be the ultimate arbiter of what constitutes democracy in other countries.
The truth is that Washington is not interested in democracy in Venezuela, but rather is keenly concerned with Caracas’s geopolitical role as an exemplar of independent sovereignty from the empire. For that reason, Obama and every subsequent US president has declared Venezuela to be “an unusual and extraordinary threat” to US national security.
Of course, the notion that Venezuela poses a national security threat to the US is preposterous. Former US President Trump correctly identified Washington’s actual motives when he openly boasted: “When I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse. We would have taken it over; we would have gotten all that oil.” Similarly, Biden’s four-star military commander for Latin America, Laura Richardson, opined: “…the importance of the region cannot be overstated enough, the proximity, number one, but all of the resources. This hemisphere is very rich in natural resources.” Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves.
US hybrid war against Venezuela is the biggest obstacle to free and fair elections
Venezuelans went to the polls with a gun pointed at their heads. This is because a vote for the Bolivarian Revolution’s socialist project would de facto mean a continuation and likely intensification of the US hybrid war. In other words, one purpose of the coercive measures is to incentivize Venezuelan voters to vote for the US-backed opposition and disincentivize them to vote for the Chavistas.
So hell-bent has Washington’s determination been to affect the outcome of the election that Venezuela now has some 930 unilateral coercive measures imposed on it by the US, making it the second most sanctioned country in the world after Russia.
The Washington Postcarps about the “overuse of sanctions” because it “risks making the tool less valuable.” Besides, “Wall Street power brokers started to grumble about the costs of complying” with the unilateral coercive measures. Further, “sanctions make it risky to depend on dollars.” Pity the poor banker, we are told, but damn the people of Venezuela.
While correctly labeling the US efforts as “economic warfare,” neither the WaPo nor the other media inform their readers that these unilateral coercive measures – euphemistically called “sanctions” – are illegal under international law, the charters of both the United Nations and the Organization of American States, and even under US domestic law.
Take, for example, a recent program on Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! Ms. Goodman has come a long way from her humble origins as an alternative news source. She interviewed Jeff Stein with the WaPo about the efficacy of what is in effect collective punishment.
The thrust of the interview was the angst over the so-called sanctions not “working”; that is, not achieving regime change, despite the horrific toll they are taking on its victims. Goodman, for her part, was not so rude as to ask her guest whether the US should be in the business of overthrowing governments not to its liking or even query about the legality of sanctioning one third of humanity.
Throughout the interview, Stein used the term “we” to describe the actions of the US government. Any pretense of a separation between the reporter and the subject being reported is dropped by such stenographers for the State Department.
US planned to claim fraud all along
This election is far from the first time Washington has tried to interfere in Venezuela’s democratic processes. Nicolás Maduro won the Venezuelan presidency in 2013 in a constitutionally mandated “snap election” after the untimely death of his predecessor Hugo Chávez, founder of the Bolivarian Revolution. The US was the only country in the world not to recognize Maduro.
For the 2018 election, the US claimed fraud six months in advance. Washington ordered its Venezuelan collaborators to boycott the polls, going so far as threatening sanctions against a moderate opposition candidate for running anyway. Regime change could be accomplished, Washington reasoned, by the one-two punch of the impact of a collapse in international oil prices on the petro economy and US coercive measures designed to impede recovery.
But this time around conditions were different. Venezuela had reversed the economic freefall and begun to diversify the economy. GDP growth is projected to be amongst the highest in the hemisphere. Under such circumstances, boycotting was out of the question. Instead, Washington adopted a belt-and-suspenders strategy of contending in the presidential election while setting the stage to claim fraud if their preferred candidate did not prevail.
Given the pain of sanctions on the Venezuelans, Washington might have allowed a centrist opposition candidate to emerge and banked on a repeat of what happened in Nicaragua in 1990. The leftist Sandinistas were voted out of office then under the threat of a continuing US-backed contra war.
However, the US chose to promote the far-right Maria Corina Machado, who they knew had been banned since 2015 from running for office because of past misdeeds. Eventually, the completely unknown Edmundo González, who had no previous electoral experience, was chosen to run as Machado’s surrogate, given her electoral disqualification.
While the infirm González convalesced in Caracas, Machado barnstormed the country carrying his paper image. The campaign vowed to privatize the national oil company and promote a strongly Zionist foreign policy.
Foreign Affairs reported on how the opposition united around González; in fact, nine opposition candidates appeared on the ballot. You would also read that Machado “won the opposition primaries by a landslide.” You would not know that Machado circumvented the official electoral authority. Instead, she staged a private primary run by her own NGO, a recipient of US funds earmarked for regime change. Her 92% win in a field of thirteen candidates was highly suspicious. When other candidates called fraud, the ballots were destroyed.
Most significantly, Foreign Affairs admitted that the far-right coterie is largely a Yankee astroturf operation: “In the absence of this sustained [regime-change] effort over successive US administrations, the Venezuelan opposition may well have boycotted the 2024 election entirely…Washington’s approach toward Venezuela furnishes a remarkable example.”
The author of the article should know. Jose Ignacio Hernández was Venezuela’s pretend attorney general under the now disgraced Juan Guaidó “interim presidency” farce.
US-backed candidate never agreed to be bound by the election results
While weary of the Yankee hybrid war, many Venezuelans also deeply resent the far-right, which had called for even harsher measures and military intervention. The massive outmigration from Venezuela, fueled by US coercive measures, had also disproportionately eroded the opposition’s political constituency, because the affluent have better means to leave.
Tellingly, the Machado/González campaign had, weeks before the election, signaled that they would not abide by the results if they lost. Upon announcement of the official election results, rampaging opposition elements, embolden by US support, killed Venezuelan security personnel and massively destroyed public property in what Venezuelan-Canadian sociologist Maria Paez Victor called an “attempted coup.”
The wave of violence has since largely dissipated in the face of huge demonstrations supporting Maduro. The government’s civic-military union held firm. Chastened by its failure to overthrow the Bolivarian Revolution by violence or by the ballot, Washinton as of August 6 supports negotiations with Maduro and will not call González “president-elect,” according to the Miami Herald. This is a sign that regime-change advocates have downgraded their objectives…for now.
So who won?
Edison Research’s election exit poll found 65% for the US-backed candidate and 31% for Maduro. An exit poll by Hinterlaces had the opposite results: Maduro 55% and González 43%; similar to the official results of 51% for Maduro and 44% González.
Hinterlaces is a long established and respected Venezuelan polling firm, whose owner has been critical of the Maduro administration. Edison, on the other hand, works for CIA-linked US government propaganda outlets such as Voice of America, which are operated by the US Agency for Global Media, “a Washington-based organ that is used to spread disinformation against US adversaries.”
The question remains, was the Venezuelan election free and fair? However you weigh the evidence, at least some skepticism is warranted regarding sources that brought us the Iraq War based on “weapons of mass destruction.” Moreover, we must ask whether anyone should look up the US as a good arbiter of electoral integrity when it has constantly intervened in other countries’ elections. As Mexican president-elect Claudia Sheinbaum has counseled: “We should…leave self-determination to the Venezuelans.”
Within hours of polls closing in Venezuela, the US began to circulate claims that incumbent President Maduro had stolen the election. There was just one problem—these claims emanated from outside the country before election results were even announced. The absence of evidence didn’t stop corporate media outlets from running with the story. The accounts of more than 800 international election observers on the ground, however, paint a very different picture. While there is certainly political division within Venezuela, opposition to Maduro and the Bolivarian Revolution does not constitute an overwhelming majority. To understand why, it’s crucial to examine the sides of the story left out in the corporate media narrative: the impact of US sanctions, the multiple US-backed coup attempts in Venezuela in the past 20 years, and the political and economic factors driving both support for and opposition to the Bolivarian Revolution.
Studio Production: Dave Hebden, Cameron Granadino Post-Production: Alina Nehlich
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Ju-Hyun Park:
Welcome to The Real News Podcast. This is Ju-Hyun Park, engagement editor at The Real News.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And I’m Maximilian Alvarez, editor in chief at The Real News Network.
Ju-Hyun Park:
Today, we’re discussing the recent elections in Venezuela and the fallout from them.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Now, before we begin, we’d like to extend our gratitude on behalf of The Real News team to you, our listeners, and our supporters. We are beyond proud to be a nonprofit newsroom that tells the stories corporate media won’t. And as part of that commitment, we don’t take ad money or corporate donations, period. We depend on listeners like you to make our work possible. So please consider becoming a sustainer of The Real News today by going to therealnews.com/donate. It really makes a difference.
Ju-Hyun Park:
Venezuela is back in the spotlight. After the recent presidential elections held on July 28th, just hours after the polls closed, the United States began to doubt the validity of the elections, even though the results had not been released yet. When the official tally pronounced a win for incumbent President Maduro and the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, with over 51% of the vote, cries of fraud began to emerge, followed by rioting across the country.
Maximillian Alvarez:
As the Associated Press reports, quote, “The Biden administration has thrown its support firmly behind the opposition,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken released a statement Thursday citing, quote, “Overwhelming evidence that opposition leader Maria Corina Machado and her handpicked presidential candidate, Edmundo Gonzalez, were the victor and discrediting the National Electoral Council’s official results.” End quote. In response, Reuters reports, quote, “Venezuela’s Foreign Minister Yvan Gil said on Friday that the United States is, quote, ‘At the forefront of a coup attempt against the South American country amid a dispute over presidential election results that sparked protest.’” End quote.
So what’s going on? What do we know for sure and who should we believe? Today, we are joined by Manolo De Los Santos, executive director of The People’s Forum. Zoe Alexandra, editor in chief of Peoples Dispatch. And Andreina Chavez, a writer for Venezuelanalysis. Welcome you all to The Real News Network. Thank you so much for joining us today.
All right. So as you can imagine, and as I’m sure your readers are also bombarding you with these very same questions, we here in the United States are getting overwhelmingly in our current corporate media ecosystem, a lopsided narrative about the Venezuela elections and how people should understand the results of them and what they should expect next. And so we wanted to get y’all on a call today and help our listeners and viewers sort of navigate this scene right now. And so we want them to benefit from your firsthand experience in Venezuela observing the election, reporting on the election, being on the ground there in a way that so many here have not.
And so, Andreina, I want to start with you and just kind of launch into the accusations of election fraud that, as Ju-Hyun mentioned, began with an hours of the polls closing. So this is a really fast pace for the US and other doubters of the election results to draw that conclusion. It usually takes days, if not weeks, to determine whether or not an election has been stolen as it is accused of being stolen. So where do the claims of election fraud come from and are they credible?
Andreína Chávez Alava:
Thank you so much for having me. And I mean, first of all, I think I do need to say that it is without a question, Venezuela is right now facing a coup attempt and it is being led by the US Government. And we know this because immediately after we have the first results of the election, what we saw was the United States Government immediately backing the opposition, backing these claims that they won the election, given this announcement that they were going to recognize the opposition candidate, Edmundo Gonzalez, as the winner. So all of these things happened so quickly, so fast, and we’ve seen this movie before. We know the script from years behind. So we know that this is a very meticulous plan, a meticulous strategy to create a condition for a coup in Venezuela. So that is what is going on right now.
So now to explain what happened during the elections and the electoral results. Well, first of all, on Sunday on July 28 when we held the elections, the process was completely peaceful, completely normal. I was going to electoral centers all across Caracas. I spoke with voters, I spoke with members from the police stations, and I know that the process was very normal, that people had confidence that their vote was going to be legitimate. And what we saw that day at midnight on Sunday is that the National Electoral President, Elvis Amoroso, gave the first results of the election and he proclaimed Maduro as the winner. Minutes before that, almost immediately after that, the Venezuelan opposition led by Maria Corina Machado said that they were going to accept these results and that they actually said that they had won based entirely on these electoral records that they collected on their own, but that nobody can actually verify to be true.
And you have to remember that the opposition said even weeks before the election happened, even months before the election happened, that they were never going to recognize the results. So we knew from the beginning that they were never going to accept anything that Venezuela’s National Electoral Council said on the day of the election. So of course, we were expecting that we were going to reject this electoral results, and we were expecting that we’re going to immediately call for violence. And that’s what they did. They rejected the electoral results, they immediately called for violent protests in the streets. We have seen really terrible fascist actions happening in Venezuela all these days. In fact, two Chavista popular organizers in Aragua and Bolivar states were murdered, were assassinated these past few days by these fascist opposition groups. So we have seen this very planned violence in the streets.
And of course, the opposition has now created this new narrative that they have these electoral records, and they published three different websites where people can allegedly consult these electoral records that they collected. The problem is that just by doing a superficial analysis of these electoral records that they published, you can tell that there are so many inconsistencies that you can already know that most of these evidence, it was forged, it is prevalent in many ways. Not to mention the fact that President Nicolas Maduro went to the Supreme Court of Venezuela demanding that the Supreme Court intervenes in this process and certifies and verifies and reduce the electoral results in order to be completely sure that these results are legitimate. And the Venezuelan opposition, even though they claim they have overwhelming evidence that Edmundo Gonzalez won, they decided not to show up to the Supreme Court. So all of this tells you that there is not a drop of innocence in these actions that they’re carrying right now.
And just to clarify, it is true that the National Electoral Council of Venezuela hasn’t published the detailed results voting center by voting center in Venezuela. They haven’t done that, and they have claimed that there’s been a cyber attack going on against the electoral transmission, against the electoral system. So they haven’t been able to publish the entire results. Nonetheless, they have given two electoral reports where they confirmed that Maduro won. And not only that, but this electoral results actually give Edmundo Gonzalez quite an amount of votes. So you can tell that the results are quite true. They really represent the reality of Venezuela, that there is a sort of polarized context with a lot of people who in recent years have begun voting for the opposition. So we know that this electoral result actually truly reflect the reality on the ground in Venezuela, which is completely different to the one the opposition is claiming in which they say that Edmundo won with more than 70% of the votes.
And only by looking at the Chavista March, the Chavista rallies, all this data having happened in Venezuela, you can tell that there is an absolutely absurd representation of reality in the country. So I hope that clarifies a little bit about this whole issue with the electoral results.
Ju-Hyun Park:
Thank you so much for that explanation, Andreina. Manolo, and Zoe, we want to turn to you because you were recently in Venezuela during the electoral process, where you joined some 800 other people who were acting as international election monitors. Can you describe the election process as you observed them? And what did you see from your perspective on the ground in the aftermath that people who were following the story from overseas might’ve missed?
Zoe Alexandra:
Great. Well, yeah, I was on the ground in Venezuela as a journalist covering the elections. It was really interesting to be there, to be seeing what was happening, to be in dialogue with those who were monitoring the elections, the over 800 international election monitors, to be seeing the different polling stations, to be talking to people on the streets, and then be receiving New York Times notifications on my phone that allegedly the electoral process, which I had just seen happen, which I had spoken to people about, which had been developing in front of my eyes, was apparently something else. And so we saw, as Andreina mentioned, as soon as polls closed, we see these accusations start to fly. We saw that the New York Times, I think just after polls closed, published an article calling into question whether or not the electoral process had gone through smoothly, talking about long lines that people were subjected to, talking about some isolated incidents, which saying that people were unable to vote.
And this is clearly, as Andreina also mentioned, these are clearly narratives that had already been in place and they were just waiting to unleash them. They didn’t have any correlation to what had happened on the ground. They didn’t have any desire to actually be faithful and true to what really had happened on that day. I visited various polling stations seen in the morning, there had been longer lines, there had been a call for people to vote early. I think this is a normal thing that happens in countries where you have voting on a Sunday, on a day where you don’t have to go to work, people like to get voting over with. And in the afternoon largely a lot of the polling stations were pretty empty, a couple people coming in here and there, but a lot of tranquility, easy, peaceful. Again, the Venezuelan voting system is electronic, so it is a process takes less than a minute to actually complete. I saw several people vote and was astonished by the ease in which this happens.
And so at first, seeing these reports from Western media outlets that allegedly there had been all of these different obstacles to people exercising their right to vote and that already creating this climate of fraud. Fraud because they weren’t able to vote, fraud because the counting was suspicious, fraud because the witnesses weren’t able to enter the polling stations for the count. All of these different lines of suspicion and doubt that they started to breed. And what’s so nefarious about this is that these aren’t empty words, but actually they served as a justification for all of the violence that we saw unfold on Monday. And so you see an extremely peaceful, orderly voting process on Sunday. And starting on Monday morning, acts of horrific far-right, racist, fascist violence unfolding all on the basis that what all of the millions of Venezuelans had participated in the day before was fraudulent, was fake, was corrupted. And these are narratives that, of course, the Venezuelan right wing had been installing in the media for months, but was fomented by Western media.
And so when we saw, for example, that offices of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela had been attacked, that there had been physical attacks to members of PSUV and the Great Patriotic Pole parties, when statues had been torn down, all of these active violence justified by this narrative of fraud. So it was a really bizarre experience to actually see how that reporting in many ways, what was it trying to serve? It obviously had a clear political intention, which is to serve these narratives that had been already concocted. If you read the reporting from New York Times, from Wall Street Journal, from the Washington Post, in months leading up to these elections, they’re almost using the same formulations. But then on Sunday, just kind of saying, “And see, everything we said happened.”
So I think that when we saw that happening in real time on Sunday and then on Monday, it was clear that there was a disconnect between what had happened and what they were saying and that we had to be very distrustful of these acts of violence that were in seeming perfect coordination happening all on Monday with clear political targets and with this desire to kind of upset political stability, economic stability, and the well-being of the people of Venezuela.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Please, Manolo, hop in and tell us a little more about what you yourself saw as well and anything else that you want to add to from the previous two questions.
Manolo De Los Santos:
Well, I think adding to what Andreina and Zoe have laid out, I think having observed, monitored, accompanied multiple elections throughout the Global South, Venezuela stands out above all in terms of transparency, in terms of easiness of voters being able to participate. I mean, from the fact that it’s on a Sunday, a day off where working people can actively be able to participate in the election process, to the fact that everything from just being able to get on a line, verify your identification, and easily vote on a digital machine that is not connected to the internet, meaning it cannot be hacked, there’s no fraud element that can be introduced, there’s no virus that can be introduced into the actual voting machine, your vote is actually respected, is remarkable.
And I intentionally on the day of the election, chose to go to voting centers in opposition-heavy areas because I was keen to ask and talk to people who were clearly voting for Edmundo Gonzalez. I mean, it’s interesting that while the opposition says there was fraud, the Chavistas are not saying that there wasn’t a large number of people who voted for the opposition. I mean, by all accounts, millions of people voted for the opposition. And in talking to many of them on voting day as after they had voted, most of them, I would say 99% of the people I talked to, and I talked to hundreds of people that day, clearly said they were happy with the election process. It was easy, it was quick. Most of them didn’t take that long. They said it was all fine and dandy. But clearly that was not the agenda that had been set, not just by Maria Corina or Edmundo Gonzalez, I think the agenda had really been set by Washington months before this election was even called for.
I mean, when we look back at the agreements that had been signed by the opposition and the Venezuelan Government ahead of time in Barbados, in Mexico City, in Qatar, all of these agreements literally point out to the fact that all the guarantees were being placed on the table. But every time the Venezuelan Government intended to fulfill these agreements, the opposition, always with the backing of the United States Government, always has an excuse for why they wouldn’t fulfill their part of the agreement. I mean, at this point, it’s clear that Blinken and the US Government have completely taken responsibility for the coup attempt, a coup attempt that in many ways has failed in those same ways that all previous coup attempts in Venezuela have failed, because they don’t actually have majority support. The only thing that the opposition continues to have in their favor is the overwhelming support of foreign governments led by the United States.
And I think we’re a dangerous sort of moment in history because having gone through years of sanctions, sanctions that have crippled the Venezuelan economy, after years of violence unleashed on the streets that have killed, and I like to remind listeners, have led to the lynching of Black people on the streets accused of being Chavistas, after all of this and a false presidency under Juan Guaido pushed by the US, the US Government goes again to this failed tactic. What is left for the US to do? Invade? Directly come in and topple the Venezuelan Government? Is that the only thing they have left in the arsenal essentially to ensure that so-called transition that they’re calling for to Edmundo Gonzalez? That is quite worrisome. And I think that should be ringing bells across the United States, particularly in Washington, as to is this really how US foreign policy is going to be behave in the 21st century?
I mean, when we look at the fact that Ukraine refuses to call for elections, but it’s called a democracy. And then Venezuela holds elections in the middle of sanctions, in the middle of what you could essentially call a war climate, and is considered a dictatorship. Something is wrong with US politics. The politics of imperialism is quite sick, it’s quite delusional. And the American people need to actually break public opinion, need to break with the consensus that has been imposed.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I want to pick up on that particular point here, and I want to pose this question to all three of you, and I apologize that the question may sound obtuse, but again, we’re trying to appeal to our listeners and viewers who are well-meaning, want to know how to navigate this environment, and want to know what to believe and what they can believe. But they are navigating an environment that is just so chock-full of propaganda, of doubt, of foreign interests that they may not be getting the full scope of. But as Manolo just touched on, I mean none of this is happening in a vacuum. I mean, we practically lost count of the times that the US has tried to institute a coup in Venezuela. There was one under the Trump administration for which the Green Beret that tried to organize it was just arrested, a coup attempt that was described by one Navy SEAL as, quote, “So mind-bogglingly dumb as to bear disbelief.”
But you mentioned Juan Guaido declaring himself the interim president of Venezuela with the immediate backing of the United States. And so that of course is in the back of people’s minds, but I think the question here to ask is why? I mean, so I wanted to ask if we could go back around the table and just remind folks about the ongoing and long historical effort by the United States especially, to institute governmental change in Venezuela over and over again through different means. How should viewers and listeners understand the current narrative about the elections within that historical context? And what is your answer to them about why the US especially, but also trusted mainstream media outlets that people want to believe, are pushing this narrative that the election was clearly fraudulent and that people here should support the opposition taking power? So, Andreina, why don’t we start back with you and then we’ll go back around to Zoe and Manolo.
Andreína Chávez Alava:
Yes. So I would like to add something about what Manolo said that I think is so important, the fact that Venezuela celebrated elections while we’re still under US sanctions, while our economy is still being crushed by US sanctions. And if you ask me, in order to have free elections, the most important thing will be not to be suffocated by a military economic power, foreign power, that is trying to destroy your government, that is trying to create the conditions for regime change, and that is trying to suffocate the people of Venezuela so they don’t vote for the government that they want, so that they feel sort of blackmail to do the opposite. Because for example, one of the things that you need to consider is that when people went to vote for President Nicolas Maduro, they also voted knowing that US sanctions were going to continue oppressing Venezuela, they also voted knowing that most likely the US was going to impose more sanctions against Venezuela.
So in no way you can call this free elections when you take into consideration that we have the most powerful country in the world oppressing our economy. And that said, I do think it’s important to remind people that Venezuela has been facing a coup attempt since the beginning of the Bolivarian Revolution. We saw a coup attempt against Hugo Chavez in 2002. It was actually a successful coup attempt, although it didn’t last very long. It lasted for 48 hours, and then the Venezuelan people sort of rescued Chavez and rescued the democracy. And after that, which has several violent attempts to overthrow the government, we saw it in 2004, we saw it in 2014 when we had really violent protests across Venezuela and more than 40 people die. We saw it in 2017 when we also have these massive violent fascist actions going on across Venezuela. And this is when we saw one of the most horrifying events that Venezuela has seen in its recent history, which was a young Black man that was burn alive and he died because of those injuries.
After that, in 2019, we saw Juan Guaido, who was a completely unknown figure in Venezuela, we saw him proclaim himself interim president of Venezuela, and we saw the United States and many right-wing governments across the region support Guaido. So it’s amazing that for countries that are always alleging that they are worried about Venezuelan democracy, that they are worried about Venezuela having free and fair elections, they have absolutely no problem proclaiming president a guy who didn’t go to any election, nobody voted for him, and they were completely fine with that, and they thought that was the pinnacle of democracy. But on the other hand, we have President Maduro, who goes to elections, and he wins the elections and he wins with a majority of votes. That is true. Well, he actually wins with a normal majority of vote. By that I mean that he got around 6.4 million votes and Edmundo Gonzalez got 5.2 million million votes. So you can tell that this is something that is completely… It reflects very well Venezuelan society.
We know that there are many people, many opposition supporters who don’t necessarily like Edmundo Gonzales or Maria Corina Machado, but voted for them. This is very representative of Venezuelan society of how a country continues to function after 25 years of revolution. So yeah, I think that if you take all this into consideration, all these coup attempts that we’ve been living through for many years and US sanctions against the country, and so many calls for foreign intervention, so many calls for invading Venezuela because we’ve seen this before. We also saw in 2020 when a group of mercenaries tried to invade Venezuela, and of course they failed in this attempt. So this isn’t new for us. We know that the possibility that a coup was going to happen immediately after the elections was very real. We were expecting it, and we were more or less on guard waiting to see what was going to happen. And right now, nothing is surprising us. Everything we’ve seen, we’ve seen it before. So we know exactly that they’re following the exactly same script that they’ve done in 2014, 2017, 2019, 2020, and now today.
Zoe Alexandra:
Yeah, I think that what Andreina said that this is something that we’ve seen before is so important to keep in mind. And especially when thinking about the kind of installation or preparing for what may be a parallel government of Edmundo Gonzales, what were the US and its allies able to achieve by essentially a name only parallel government of Juan Guaido. Well, they were able to seize billions of dollars in Venezuelan assets, they were able to essentially force Venezuela into a very compromised position for them then to negotiate about restarting oil trade. The function of proclaiming Edmundo Gonzalez as president isn’t just because… And it isn’t because the US thinks that he’ll actually be able to control the institutions of Venezuela. They know that Nicolas Maduro is president, they know that actually he’s the one who has the majority of support of the people, they know that Edmundo Gonzalez, there’s no way that he’s actually going to be able to take control over these institutions.
And actually yesterday, The New York Times published an article essentially saying the only way for this to happen, for Maduro to be taken down and actually legitimately out of power, is if the military turned on him, aka a military coup. So that’s what the New York Times is calling for. But essentially recognizing that the US declaring Edmundo Gonzalez as president does not mean that he’s president. But it does give the United States once again, as we saw before, another reason to increase sanctions to essentially bully other countries for doing business with Venezuela, to continue seizing the billions of dollars in Venezuelan assets in different banks across the world, the gold that’s held in the Bank of England and the many other assets that are of the Venezuelan people that have been seized by foreign powers. This essentially gives them the justification to do all of that.
We saw that after the war in Ukraine broke out, the US was sort of forced to actually recognize that in fact, Juan Guaido isn’t president. He does not control the institutions of Venezuela, and he will not be able to negotiate with the US about selling oil to the US in this time of an energy crisis. So how long will they hang onto this narrative? How far will they actually go? Will it just be recognizing Edmundo Gonzalez won the elections? Are they going to actually go further and say that he is the rightful president? Are they going to, once again, in some countries, as we saw that happened in the US, which still haven’t been recovered, are the embassies going to be under attack? Are different governments going to try to hand them over to the opposition? I mean, we’ll see how far they’ll go in this ridiculous sort of parallel reality. But in essence, it is in order to maintain control over Venezuelan assets and pressure Venezuela into conceding different things.
It’s also very important to point out when we say why is the US interested in regime change in Venezuela? It’s very simple, Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the entire world. So any way that the US can weaken the position of the Bolivarian Revolution to get its hands on those oil reserves, it will do. Under Hugo Chavez, these oil reserves were nationalized. These US-based companies were no longer able to loot the oil as they pleased. And essentially, they’ve been trying for the past 25 years to get back in the position where they can control these reserves, where they can control the gold reserves and all the other precious minerals that Venezuela has. But as The New York Times recognized, unless they’re able to actually topple the infrastructure, the institutions of the Venezuelan state, which they would need the support of the military in order to do, in essence, this is not going to happen.
So the devastating thing is that in all of these efforts, the people that they’re hurting most are the Venezuelan people and they continue to resist, they continue to say no to imperialism, they continue to defend the revolution. But of course, the siege is meant to weaken morale, it’s meant to devastate people, it’s meant to make life difficult, and it has been able to do that. But as we’ve seen in the past couple of years, there has been recovery when they’re threatening sanctions now it’s not 2017, they’ve been through it. They’ve actually built pathways to overcome these sanctions, there are international partnerships that didn’t exist back in 2017, and the Venezuelan people and the Venezuelan Government are in a much better place to actually withstand the US siege than they were five years ago.
Manolo De Los Santos:
Maximilian, I think you raised, it’s not an obtuse question, it’s actually the most important question, why? Why is it that the United States Government has essentially invested for over 20 years millions of dollars, not just in financial and economic resources, but in human resources, in order to overthrow this one government in South America? And there are many factors and things that we can bring to light here like Zoe and Andreina have raised already. There’s the largest oil reserves, over 300 billion barrels, there’s the vast mineral resources. But in this battle, which ultimately is not really between Maduro and the far-right opposition, in this battle that’s really between the US and Washington, both Republican and Democratic administrations, one after another. From Bush all the way to Biden now, and who knows, possibly Trump in a few months. What has been clear is that Venezuela is a counter-hegemonic force that has in many ways prevented the US from fully achieving its foreign policy objectives in the region.
The objectives of imposing far-right and neoliberal presidents like they did in Brazil with Bolsonaro, with Milei in Argentina. In a sense, I would say that Venezuela is the bulwark against fascism and neoliberalism in the region. And for as long as the Venezuelan Government continues to stand in the region as an independent, sovereign force, that it not only defends its own democratic process, but actively encourages, and we could even admit supports in many ways the democratic efforts of other countries and movements around the region, the US will now be able to fully achieve its highly sought political, economic, and financial hegemony in Latin America. In many ways, Venezuela is a bigger threat to the United States politically than Cuba ever was in the last 60 years, because Venezuela as a country does not only present democratic values and ideals, but Venezuela actually has had over time the financial resources to support the rise of democratic figures like Evo Morales in Bolivia, of Fernando Lugo in Paraguay, and so many other countless stories of democratic renewal across the region.
So at the end of the day, the why is really about Washington’s unending goals of completely dominating Latin America at all costs. And at this point, there’s a little rock called Venezuela that stands in its way.
Ju-Hyun Park:
Beautifully put. To bring this conversation back to some prior discussions we’ve had about similar contexts in other places, I’m thinking particularly, Manolo, when you’ve been on in the past to discuss Cuba, the US is also very, very clear about its intention behind sanctions and blockades. We can look to the Mallory letter, which is a State Department memo circulated in 1960 at the start of the Cuban blockade, which clearly states that the intention of that is to, quote, “Bring about hunger, desperation, and overthrow of government.” End quote. And I think we can safely assume that this is a playbook that is being intentionally repeated throughout the region and really around the world.
Now, to round out our conversation, I’d like to return again to a point, Manolo, that you raised earlier. If we take the official numbers, we can clearly see that there is an obvious polarization occurring within the Venezuelan body politic. Close to 52% of voters cast their ballot for Maduro and the PSUV, and about 44% cast their ballots for Gonzalez, the opposition. So there is a clear outcome here, but there is also clear and very sharp disagreement. So having just been on the ground, and this is a question for everyone, what is your take on the issues that are driving this polarization? Who is supporting the opposition and why? And why does the majority still stand by the current Government of Venezuela? Maybe we can do a little reversal of the order we just went in. So, Manolo, I would invite you to go first, followed by Zoe, and then Andreina.
Manolo De Los Santos:
There’s definitely a high level of polarization among voters, but I would not say that that’s the complete story of the population in Venezuela. My sense from talking to people across social segments, sectors of society, I would say that the majority of people want to just live in peace. I think the majority of people want to build their lives again, I think the majority of people want to be able to start their businesses again, I think the majority of people want to be able to send their kids to school without worrying about what they’re going to feed them at lunch. I think that the majority of people honestly want to move beyond these years of constant strife. I think majority of people are sick and tired of dealing with US intervention, whether they consider themselves on the left or not.
And I think this is an interesting moment in Venezuelan history. I think the challenges that Maduro faces as incoming re-elected president are high because he will have to speak to this population that wants to see a rise in quality of life, that wants to see better standards of living, that wants to be able to, again, see their country developed. And in a sense, we already saw a glimpse of that in the last couple of years. I mean, despite sanctions, besides how difficult things have been, there’s been a steady improvement in life. We already saw that of the millions of Venezuelans who were migrating abroad to the United States, to Europe, to other parts of Latin America, hundreds of thousands already starting to come back, not just because they want to go back home, but because now things are beginning to stabilize enough for them to be able to rebuild a life in Venezuela. I think that’s telling of the reality that’s coming.
Again, sadly, we will have to contend with the fact that it is not up to the Venezuelan people to decide for themselves, sadly. Sadly, the United States continues to intervene in this process and it will continue to financially and politically sponsor a far-right opposition. And I say far-right very intentionally because even if these folks sound liberal in many ways, Maria Corina, Edmundo, all come from a dark past in the far-right and are key players in the far-right networks across Latin America and Europe. I mean, these are the people who when they come to the US, they come speak at CPAC conferences, and they meet with the most ultra right-wing figures of even beyond the Republican Party in the United States. So they will continue to be sponsored financially by the United States, they will continue to be sponsored politically. And these groups in a sense, despite having failed multiple times, still seem to have not learned the lesson and seem to want to continue going against the wind, against the grain, against their own people’s interests.
Zoe Alexandra:
Yeah. And I mean, I would add that I think that what people want is an end to sanctions, whether they’re voting for the opposition, the far-right opposition, or whether they’re voting for the Great Patriotic Pole Alliance, as Manolo said, people want an improvement in quality of life, they want an end to the strife. I mean, what the sanctions have been able to do really, I mean since they intensified in 2017, completely changed the quality of life of the people of Venezuela, the migrants that were forced to leave. These are all because of these sanctions, the drop in the GDP because of the sanctions. People want a return to the way things were in the 2000s. There was not the same wave of migration from Venezuela in the 2000s when there was a much less… Of course, there were still attacks in the Bolivarian Revolution, but nowhere near the same number of unilateral coercive measures against the Venezuelan economy.
So when people say they want… We’ve seen this in many cases, people vote for what they think is going to change their situation. And so if the opposition is promising a better quality of life, it’s not necessarily that they’re voting for the political project of the opposition, which actually includes privatization, which would actually make a lot of the rights that people had won under the Bolivarian Revolution out of access, out of reach for a lot of people. Oftentimes, this is just expressing the desire for change. And what the US has done is made it so it’s not really about two political projects, but it’s about forcing people into such difficult conditions that they’re just trying to vote for a change. Of course, we know that voting for the Maria Corina Machado project is like voting for Milei. This is not going to cause a betterment in quality of life of the people. Even if it promises change, change does not always mean that it’s going to cause an improvement.
And so I think these are really crucial questions to keep on the table. And as Manolo said, Venezuela went to elections and the middle of a war, an economic war with many attempts of political destabilization, of military invasions, of many different attempts of not only the economic war, but also attempts at magnicide and other assassination attempts. And so going to elections in the middle of a war means that the terrain is not like a country at peace. It’s not that you’re making these two deliberations based on, “Okay, do I like these political proposals better? Do I like these political proposals better?” So it’s very difficult to also understand where the people are at right now, because again, they’re in a state of war. I think that if the sanctions were not suffocating the Venezuelan economy, were they able to carry out all of the different social programs in the way that they had been carrying out for the past decade before the sanctions, I think we’d be looking at a very different scenario, one where there had been possibility of dialogue with different political sectors.
Even throughout this period of economic war, Maduro and the Bolivarian Government has attempted to engage in different rounds of dialogue with the far right in order to bring down this very tense, as you said, polarization that exists in the country. This has been possible with some sectors of the opposition. There is harmony. I think that a lot of times there’s this narrative and dialogue that Venezuela is a country that’s in very high political tension, a lot of violence, but for the most part, there are very genuine attempts to actually resolve political differences through dialogue and maintaining peace. So I think underscoring the fact that people do want peace, they want an end to the sanctions, and they want change, it’s impossible to say that over the past seven years since these sanctions that things have been easy in Venezuela.
Of course, they’re getting better right now, but I think that people want to continue on this path of improvement of economic growth and of actually just being free of the chains and the boot of imperialism on the economic growth of their country. This is something that people across the world, over 30 countries across the Global South are under the boot of US sanctions. It means that your country cannot develop in peace with the same conditions that a country that does not have sanctions can do. So in the US I think it remains critically important as we’re looking at Venezuela to continue to demand an end to these completely unilateral measures that are levied against the Venezuelan people. This is no way for a country to actually exist in peace and to thrive if they have these measures just sitting on top of them.
Andreína Chávez Alava:
I agree completely with everything Zoe was talking about. From a personal point of view, I just want to add that these past seven, eight years have been in many ways very traumatizing for the Venezuelan people because we’ve come from this internal war and the fascist right wing imposed against us in which they were hiding food, they were doing things to destabilize the Venezuelan Bolivar, the Venezuelan national monetary. Then we had US sanctions, and then we saw these enormous crises happening in the country. We saw family members, friends from our childhood go away, migrate to other countries.
And for example, in 2021, I traveled to Ecuador to visit with my family and half thinking that I might stay there, half thinking that I’m going to come back. A year later, I decided to come back and I cannot tell you the actual fear that I had, thinking that I’m going back to a war zone, I’m going back to a place where the reality can change from one day to the other one. That today I might be okay, the next one might not have food. The economy might destabilize even more. Maybe the Bolivar is going to be even less power for them it was yesterday. So you have to live in this sort of constant fear that everything’s going to change, that you have to be prepared for a warlike scenario any other day. So that is a constant fear that we’ve been living for many years now.
So when you present yourself in these elections, when you go to elections, you’re not just voting for two political projects, just like Zoe was talking about. You are voting taking into consideration all these elements that might happen to you. For example, you vote for President Maduro and you know that you US sanctions are going to continue oppressing the economy, you know that it might get worse, you know that there might be threats of military intervention, you know that right-wing governments in the region are going to once again try to destabilize the country. So you know all these things, you’re not going to vote just for a political project. You’re voting thinking about the entire aggression that you’re going to face because of that sovereign decision that you’re making as a Venezuelan, as a voter.
And the same thing for people who vote for the opposition. When they go to vote for the opposition, they’re not voting for Edmundo Gonzalez or for Maria Corina Machado, they’re voting for them because they think that it might in some way improve their life, any kind of change to Venezuela. That being, getting rid of US sanctions or getting rid of all this aggression that we are always facing. So it’s not as simple as just voting for a political project. Venezuela is always facing the immense dilemma of what to do, how to create a future where we can live in peace? Because by the end of the day, working-class Venezuelans, whether they are Chavista or a opposition, they want the same thing. They just want a peaceful country, they just want a normal economy, they just want a normal country that nobody else is trying to interfere with, nobody else is trying to create damages to create destabilization just so they can put a US puppet as a president. So that’s basically what Venezuelans in the majority, no matter what political project they support, want, just peace and a normal economy.
You have to remember that Venezuela has an immense amount of oil, so we’re actually capable of being a country that can develop very well, that can have a really good life, really good life conditions. And we saw it in the first years of the Bolivarian Revolution with Hugo Chavez, we saw how many people learn how to read, many people went to school for the first time, they graduated. I mean, I have family members, my mother including, who was able to go to school for the first time because of the Bolivarian Revolution. So we know that this great country can happen. We know that it can happen with the ideas of the Bolivarian Revolution, we know that anything happen with this political project that we have now. But we also know that it’s going to always be blocked by these foreign powers that do not want a socialist alternative to thrive in Venezuela, because we know that that is a threat for the entire left in not only Latin America, but the entire world.
As you know, the Bolivarian Revolution, Hugo Chavez and President Nicolas Maduro, they support Palestine, they support the Palestine people’s fight for liberation. And that is something that a government like Venezuela, a country like Venezuela that is rich in all resources supporting social [inaudible 00:48:09] like Palestine, it’s an absolute threat for US imperialism. Maria Corina Machado is one of the biggest allies of fascist governments in the world, including the Israel Government. So as you can see, Venezuela, these elections are not just about who wins the election. It is about completely changing the path of a country who is right now on the path of sovereignty and what they want for us is to be on the path of being a US client state.
Ju-Hyun Park:
Thank you so much for those thoughtful answers and for this very productive conversation bringing to bear all your very important perspectives on Venezuela. As we close out, could we just do a quick go around and could you let our listeners know how they can keep in touch with you?
Andreína Chávez Alava:
Okay. So my name is Andreina Chavez. I am an independent journalist in Venezuela. I am based in Caracas, and right now I am a staff writer for Venezuelanalysis. Venezuelanalysis is an independent English media outlet that is on the ground in Venezuela. It has been here for more than 20 years, and you can find us on social media at venezuelanalysis.com.
Zoe Alexandra:
Great. Zoe Alexander, I’m the editor of Peoples Dispatch. You can find us on all social media platforms @PeoplesDispatch, and on our website, peoplesdispatch.org.
Manolo De Los Santos:
And you can find The People’s Forum on Twitter, Instagram, social media, website, peoplesforumnyc.
Maximillian Alvarez:
All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. Once again, we want to thank you for listening to The Real News Network Podcast. I am Maximillian Alvarez.
Ju-Hyun Park:
I’m Ju-Hyun Park. And our guests today, once again, were Manolo De Los Santos of The People’s Forum, Zoe Alexandra of Peoples Dispatch, and Andreina Chavez of Venezuelanalysis.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Before we go, we’d like to thank you, our listeners, one more time. And we also want to take a moment to recognize our incredible real news studio team, David Hebden, Cameron Granadino, Kayla Rivara, and the great Alina Nelich, who make all of our work possible. Thank you all so much behind the scenes. And a final reminder to all of you listening out there, you make our work possible by supporting it. So please tell your friends about us and go to therealnews.com/donate and become a supporter today if you aren’t already. And thank you so much to all of you who are.
Ju-Hyun Park:
Stay tuned for further updates from Venezuela and everywhere else that working people are on the front lines of struggle to fight for a better world. Stay hopeful, keep fighting. This is The Real News. Over and out.
I have been in Caracas, Venezuela, for the past two weeks, before and after the presidential election on 28 July. In the run-up to the election, two things became clear to me. First, the Chavistas (supporters of Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian project that is now led by President Nicolás Maduro) have the enormous advantage of an organised mass base. Second, knowing that the odds were not in their favour, the opposition, led by far-right María Corina Machado and the US government, were already signalling defeat before the election even took place by alleging that it would be fraudulent. Since at least the 2004 recall referendum, when the opposition tried to remove Chávez from office, it has become a right-wing cliché that the electoral system in Venezuela is no longer fair.
Just after midnight on election night, July 28 (Chávez’s seventieth birth anniversary), the National Electoral Council (CNE) announced that, with 80% of the votes counted, there was an irreversible trend: Maduro had won re-election. These results were then validated a few days later by the CNE with 96.87% of the votes counted, showing that Maduro (51.95%) defeated the far-right candidate Edmundo González (43.18%) by 1,082,740 votes (the other opposition candidates received merely 600,936 votes combined, which means that even if the votes received by other opposition candidates had gone to González, he still would not have won). In other words, with 59.97% voter participation, Maduro received just over half of the votes.
I talked to a high-level advisor to the opposition, who asked to remain anonymous, about the results. He said that, though he sympathised with the opposition’s frustration, he felt that the final result seemed about right. In 2013, he explained, Maduro won by 50.62%, while Henrique Capriles received 49.12% of the votes in the presidential elections that took place just over a month after Chávez’s death. This was before the oil prices collapsed, and before sanctions tightened. At that time, with Chávez gone, the opposition smelled blood, but they could not prevail. ‘It is hard to beat the Chavistas because they have both the programme of Chávez and the ability to mobilise their supporters to the ballot box’, he said.
It is not that the far right does not have a promise of social transformation; they want to privatise the state-owned oil company, return expropriated property to the oligarchy, and invite private capital to cannibalise Venezuela. Rather, it is that their promise of social transformation is at odds with the dreams of the majority. That is why the right cannot win, and that is why an important line of attack since 2004 has been to cry fraud.
And so, on election day, just after polls closed and before any official results had been released, Machado and Washington, as if in concert, began to bleat about fraud, building on a line of attack that they had been establishing for months. Machado’s followers immediately took to the streets and attacked symbols of Chavismo: schools and health centres in working-class areas, public bus stations and buses, offices of Chavista communes and parties, and statues of figures who had set the Bolivarian Revolution in motion (including a statue of Chávez as well as the Indigenous Chief Coromoto). At least two militants of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), Isabel Cirila Gil from Bolívar state and Mayauri Coromoto Silva Vilma from Aragua state, were assassinated in the aftermath of the election, two sergeants were killed, and other Chavistas, police, and officials were brutally beaten and captured.
It was clear by the nature of the attack that these far-right forces of a special kind wanted to erase the histories of Venezuela’s indígenas and zambos, as well as the working class and the peasantry. Every day since the election, hundreds of thousands of Chavistas have taken to the streets of Caracas and elsewhere. The pictures in this newsletter were taken by Francisco Trías at the 2 August Women’s March, by Zoe Alexandra (Peoples Dispatch) at the 31 July March of the Working Class in Defence of the Homeland (two of many mass mobilisations that have taken place since the elections), and by me at a pre-election rally on 27 July. In each of these marches, the chant no volverán – they will not return – reverberated amongst the crowd. The oligarchy, they said, will not return.
Credit: Vijay Prashad
The Bolivarian Revolution began in 1999, when Chávez ascended to the presidency. Waves of elections were held to change the constitution and overcome the oligarchy’s resistance (as well as that of Washington, which has tried many times to overthrow Chávez, such as the failed coup d’état in 2002, and Maduro, such as the ongoing use of sanctions as a tool for regime change and attempts to invade the Venezuelan border). Chávez’s government nationalised the oil industry, renegotiated rent prices (through the 2001 Hydrocarbons Law), and removed the layer of corrupt officialdom from the spigot of national profits.
The national treasury was able to earn a greater percentage of royalties from multinational oil firms. The stated-owned oil company Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA) set up the Fund for Social and Economic Development (Fondespa) to finance schemes benefitting oil workers, their communities, and other projects. The oil wealth was to be used to industrialise the country and to halt Venezuela’s dependency on its oil sales and on imports. Diversifying the economy is a key part of the Bolivarian agenda, including reviving the country’s agriculture, and in so doing working to meet the fifth strategic objective of The Plan for the Homeland to ‘preserve life on the planet and save the human species’.
It was because of that oil money that Chávez’s government could increase social spending by 61% ($772 billion), which it used to uplift the lives of the population through large-scale programmes such as various misiones (missions) that set out to make the rights enshrined in the 1999 Constitution a reality. For example, in 2003 the government set up three missions (Robinson, Ribas, and Sucre) to send educators into low-income areas to provide free literacy and higher education courses. Mission Zamora took in hand the process of land reform, and Mission Vuelta al Campo sought to encourage people to return to the countryside from urban slums. Mission Mercal provided low-cost, high-quality food to help wean the population off highly processed imported foodstuffs, while the Mission Barrio Adentro sought to provide low-cost, high-quality medical care to the working class and poor and Mission Vivienda built more than 5 million homes.
Through these missions, poverty rates in Venezuela declined by 37.6% from 1999 to the present (the decline of extreme poverty is stunning: from 16.6% in 1999 to 7% in 2011, a 57.8% decline, and if you begin measuring from 2004 – the start of the missions’ impact – extreme poverty declines by 70%). Venezuela, one of the harshest unequal social orders prior to 1999, became one of the least unequal societies, with the Gini coefficient dropping by 54% (the lowest in the region), indicating the impact that these basic social policies have had on everyday life.
Over the past twenty years, during my frequent stays in Venezuela, I have spoken with hundreds of working-class Chavistas – many of them Black women. Since the tightening of the sanctions, Venezuelans have faced immense privations and freely proffered their complaints about the direction of the revolution. They do not deny the problems, but unlike the opposition, they understand that the root of the crisis is the US hybrid war. Even if there is increased social inequality and corruption, they locate these ills in the violence of the sanctions policy (which even the Washington Post now admits).
During the massive marches to defend the government in the week following the elections, people openly described the two choices that faced them: to try and advance the Bolivarian process through Maduro’s government or to return to February 1989 when Carlos Andrés Pérez imposed the IMF-crafted economic agenda known as the paquetazo (packet) on the country. Pérez did this against his own election promises and against his own party (Acción Democrática), provoking an urban rebellion known as the Caracazo in which as many as 5,000 people were killed by government forces in one fateful day (though death toll estimates vary widely).
Indeed, many feel that Machado would usher in an even worse era in the country, since she has none of the social democratic finesse of Pérez and would like to inflict shock therapy on her own country to benefit her own class. A popular Venezuelan saying captures the essence of this choice: chivo que se devuelve se ’esnuca (the goat that returns breaks its neck).
Canadian billionaire Peter Munk, who owned Barrick Gold, wrote that Chávez was a ‘dangerous dictator’, compared him to Hitler, and called for him to be overthrown. This was in 2007 when Munk was upset because Chávez wanted to control Venezuela’s gold exports. The general orientation of the Chávez government was to ‘delink’ from the global economy, which meant preventing multinational firms and powerful countries in the Global North from setting the agenda of countries such as Venezuela.
This idea of ‘delinking’ is the main focus of our latest dossier, How Latin America Can Delink from Imperialism. Building upon the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America – Peoples’ Trade Treaty (ALBA-TCP) 2030 Strategic Agenda, the dossier proposes four key areas that must be delinked in order to set the foundation for a sovereign development strategy: finance, trade, strategic resources, and logistical infrastructure. This is precisely what the Bolivarian process has set out to do, which is precisely why its government has been so harshly attacked by US imperialism and by multinational corporations such as Barrick Gold.
On the day after the election, it rained. At one of the marches to defend the Bolivarian process that day, a Chavista recited a few lines from a 1961 poem by the Venezuelan poet Víctor ‘El Chino’ Valera Mora (1935–1984), ‘Maravilloso país en movimiento’ (Marvellous Country in Motion).
Marvellous country in motion
Where everything advances or retreats
Where yesterday is a push forward or a farewell.
Those who don’t know you
Will say that you are an impossible quarrel.
So frequently mocked
Yet always standing upright with joy.
You will be free.
If the condemned do not reach your shores
You will go to them another day.
I keep believing in you
marvellous country in motion.
On Sunday, July 28th, President Nicolas Maduro won reelection there. According to the country’s national electoral council, he took 51% of votes over 44% for his rival Edmundo González Urrutia.
But the opposition called fraud, claiming that they actually won the vote. Most international media have been on board with that narrative. In fact, the United States, and several other right-wing led Latin American countries have now recognized the opposition candidate as the victory. At the same time, more than 40 other countries have recognized Maduro.
To make sense of it all, and the media spin that’s influencing this story, we speak with Alan MacLeod, a journalist and the senior staff writer at Mint Press News, with a PhD focused on media coverage of Venezuela.
Under the Shadow is an investigative narrative podcast series that walks back in time, telling the story of the past by visiting momentous places in the present.
In each episode, host Michael Fox takes us to a location where something historic happened—a landmark of revolutionary struggle or foreign intervention. Today, it might look like a random street corner, a church, a mall, a monument, or a museum. But every place he takes us was once the site of history-making events that shook countries, impacted lives, and left deep marks on the world.
Hosted by Latin America-based journalist Michael Fox.
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Michael Fox:
Hi folks. This is Michael Fox, host of Under The Shadow. So I’m still working on the latest episode to season one of the series on Central America. This last episode, episode 13, will focus on Panama and the legacy of the 1989 US invasion. I’ll have that to you in a couple of weeks, I promise, but in the meantime, I have a real treat for you. You can think of this as a sneak preview of season two of Under the Shadow, which will look at the long legacy of US intervention in South America. And this one is also a bridge between the regions, because today I’m going to be diving into the question of media spin and the US-backed media war in the region.
Today’s interview is really focused in the present, but I’ll also be referencing the past, Nicaragua of the 1980s and the revolving door between US officials and corporate media. But above all, the focus today is on Venezuela. Of course, Venezuela has been the big news in Latin America in recent days. On Sunday, July 28th, President Nicolas Maduro won re-election there. According to the country’s National Electoral Council, he took 51% of the votes, over 44% for his rival Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia. But the opposition immediately called fraud, claiming that they actually won the vote. Most international media have been on board with that narrative. In fact, the United States and several other right-wing Latin American countries have now recognized the opposition candidate as the victor, think Juan Guaido 2.0. At the same time, more than 40 other countries have recognized Maduro. To make sense of it all and the media spin that’s influencing this story today, I’m speaking with Alan MacLeod.
Alan MacLeod:
So I’m a journalist and the senior staff writer at MintPress News, where I also produce the podcast there as well.
Michael Fox:
He says that in his previous life, he was an academic where he looked at the intersection of Latin American politics and media studies.
Alan MacLeod:
My PhD was all about the media coverage of Venezuela, specifically in Western outlets such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, and I was trying to look at the question of, number one, how does the media cover Venezuela, and number two, why does it cover it in such a biased and one-sided way?
Michael Fox:
He was on the ground in Venezuela observing the July presidential elections.
Alan MacLeod:
And what I found was a very interesting system, which seemed quite fluid, quite open and transparent, but that’s certainly not how the media is presenting it over here.
Michael Fox:
Here is the interview in its entirety. Alan, so yes, as I said, I’m just such a huge fan of your work and this is so great. I’m so glad you’re available and this is such an important topic. So I’ll just start by saying thank you so much.
Alan MacLeod:
Well, it’s great to be with you, Michael. It’s great to be with you and talk to you finally. I think we’ve talked before, but not for this long. Not for a long time as well.
Michael Fox:
Exactly. Okay, Alan, let’s just start off, what did you see on the ground and how long were you in Venezuela for?
Alan MacLeod:
Sure. I was there for a little less than two weeks, and I’ve just got back. It was during election season. I was invited to be an international observer, partially because I had written a lot about Venezuela, a book and many academic articles, as well as journalistic articles. And so I saw the whole process unfold, from the final days of the election, rallies from both sides, et cetera. The campaigning, to election day itself, to the aftermath of the election. On election day itself, I visited five polling stations in the Caracas area. Most of them seemed to be working very well. The election system itself is well known around the world as one of the most robust systems that they have going.
In order to vote, Venezuelans need to produce their national ID card, and then the picture on that is then checked against them from a voting official. If that passes, they then go to a fingerprint machine where they have to give their thumbprint onto a machine that should match the one that’s on the records. And if both of those things match, they’re allowed to vote on an electronic voting system which resembles a computer. Once they’ve voted on that machine, the computer spits out a paper ballot, the voter must check the paper ballot. The paper ballot’s got a barcode on it, some numbers, and the candidate. If that is correct, they then proceed to put that piece of paper in the box. Not only that, once they have voted, they also have to sign an electoral register to say they have voted, and they also have to put their thumb in an inkwell and then put their thumbprint on a piece of paper. So there are many, many checks and balances there to make sure there’s no voter fraud or any kind of impersonation going on.
At the end of the day, all the electronic results, which have been sent to head office in Caracas, are then checked against the paper ballots that are there. The paper ballots are counted in front of representatives of the community and of different political parties. Those paper ballots have to match a hundred percent to the electronic results that the CNE, the National Electoral Council has. If there is even a discrepancy of even one vote, that triggers a massive audit and all hell breaks loose. The 2013 election, which is the one I know best, apart from this 2024 election, the electronic vote was correct to a percentage of 99.98%, and that was because 22 people across Venezuela had voted on the machines but not put their paper ballot in the box.
This election so far, what I saw on the ground, I was traveling with other journalists. I rocked up to, as I said, five different polling stations with a camera and a tripod. I found no strife from any of the election officials. Their range of emotions went from polite indifference to welcoming, in my experience. We were not hassled or pushed around. We could film wherever we wanted. We could talk to whoever we wanted. The only thing we couldn’t do was actually film people on the voting screens themselves. So that seems like a completely reasonable thing we weren’t allowed to do. We spoke to dozens of people, opposition supporters who told us that they hated Maduro, government supporters who said that they love Maduro, government supporters that said that they didn’t like Maduro, but they were voting for him anyway because he was better than the opposition candidate.
So there’s a very wide range of people we talked to. We even, in one central Caracas voting station, talked to the lady who was in charge of the entire operation in that voting center, and she’s told us openly, to me and election observers from Zambia, South Africa and the United States who were with me at the time, she told us openly that she was a member of the opposition, that she hated the government, that she thought the economy was in shambles, and she was only doing this because she needed the money. Nevertheless, she said that the voting system, she had complete confidence in it, and we spoke to lots of election officials that day, and the two words that came up constantly were [Spanish 00:07:17], which means calm, and [Spanish 00:07:19], which could mean smooth or fluid in that process.
So ultimately, the process went very well. The main drawback I saw, and other election observers saw, was that turnout was very high and both parties told their supporters to go out and vote early. What that meant, that was that at one election station that I visited, there were very long lines where people were forced to wait multiple hours and it was very hot and sunny day. Now, I would say that that election station was actually in a very, very strongly pro-government area, and the ones that we visited in the opposition areas actually didn’t have quite as many long lines. Nevertheless, those lines dissipated long before lunchtime and by the afternoon, everything seemed to be working very well. So I and the more than 900 international observers, that I was with or that were observing the elections throughout Venezuela, have very little negative things to say about what happened. We saw a robust, a calm process that was very streamlined, and it seemed like everything went all right.
Michael Fox:
Alan, thank you so much. I want to dive into obviously the thing that everybody’s talking about, and the thing that you are so good at, and what all of your research, like you said, is on, and that’s what the media angle was on on this, right? So everything seemed, you’re on the ground, it seemed like everything went really well. How did that juxtapose from, A, what we heard from the opposition just hours later, once the results were released, and also what we’ve seen from the international reporting?
Alan MacLeod:
Yeah, sure. So as I said, everything seemed like a quite peaceful, calm, and smooth process on the ground. However, I would say that even weeks before the election, we knew that the opposition was not going to accept it. They were the only party who said they would not respect the results, whatever happened. This election was not just President Maduro versus Edmundo Gonzalez. There were actually 10 people on the ballot fighting against Maduro, and nine of them said that they would respect the results. It was only Gonzalez that said that he wouldn’t, and immediately after the election results were called, the initial results said that Maduro won with over 51% to Edmundo Gonzalez’s 44%, although those numbers have actually widened since then.
Immediately, Gonzalez and his supporters went out on the streets to vent their anger, and I saw what they did, or at least I saw the aftermath of what they did in those nights, which was to burn down cars, to block highways, to smash up pharmacies. They tried to destroy a hospital as well, and basically any visual reminder of the collectivist social democratic states that the Chavistas have been building for the last 20 years. Now, the way that the media in the west has portrayed this is, even months before the election they were describing this vote as a sham, a farce election overseen by a dictator, and that process has continued to this day, where we have big outlets calling this a troubled election, a flawed election, or just an outright sham or a disgrace. And the whole point is to heap doubt and cast aspersions against the Venezuelan electoral system, despite the fact that it is often called one of the best and most robust in the world.
The reason this is happening is because ultimately, Venezuela is a key thorn in the side of the United States government and its plans to control every part of the world. Venezuela has the world’s largest proven oil reserves, and the United States certainly does not want the government of Venezuela using the profits from those oil reserves to fund social programs like building housing, or community education, or healthcare. The United States thinks the profits of the oil industry should be going to investors in the West.
Venezuela, of course, ultimately, is very important on the world stage as a point of multipolarity, it has entered into strategic deals with Russia, China and Iran, all three of whom are big enemies of the United States. And so ultimately, I think the bigger picture here is one of the United States trying to undermine the electoral process here and try to put their candidate, Edmundo Gonzalez, and they’ve made absolutely no secret about the fact that they are supporting him and his backer, Maria Corina Machado, who is the real power broker in the opposition. They’ve made no secret that they are supporting this guy and they want him in power rather than Maduro, and that’s why we see such one-sided reporting in the US and the Western press more generally.
Michael Fox:
I think it’s so fascinating, Alan, obviously, I’m in the middle of working Under the Shadow, I’m on the last couple of episodes of this podcast. It’s all on US intervention in Latin America, and of course that’s history. Most of it has been history. The closest thing to current affairs that I’ve worked on was an episode on Honduras 2009 coup, post that. But it’s fascinating because it’s the same thing over and over again. I was shocked in the lead up to the Venezuelan elections, about the parallels between, say, Nicaragua in 1990, because you have the whole economic blockade, you have the sanctions against Venezuela, you have the impact of the sanctions that nobody’s talking about right now. That’s a whole other thing that’s just completely omitted in the press, right? But it still is, it’s shocking for me that there’s this almost disconnect of history of what the US has done historically and that this is a pattern that the US does, and then the media follows along, right? Is that something that you saw? Is that something that people were talking about?
Alan MacLeod:
Well, Venezuelans inside the country often talk about [Spanish 00:13:31], the media war, and they’re specifically talking about the media fight that goes on inside Venezuela, but they’re very aware that this is happening in the international media as well. The United States has placed Venezuela under a blockade for nearly 10 years now. It started in the Obama administration. They’ve placed more than 900 sanctions on the country, and those sanctions have wrecked havoc on Venezuela. Their international income has dropped by more than 99%, and that’s largely because they are no longer able to sell oil, partially because so many countries refuse to buy it because they’re afraid that United States will place secondary sanctions on them, and also because the oil industry has collapsed, because the Venezuelan oil industry was very close to the American one, that needed American spare parts to function, and they haven’t had access to those for years and years.
So the economy was shattered, and in fact, one American United Nations official who visited Venezuela, he estimated that more than 100,000 Venezuelans were killed because of this blockade, because of the punishing economic sanctions that made it impossible to import medical equipment, and drugs, and all sorts of things. He described it as akin to a medieval siege and said the United States was probably guilty of crimes against humanity. So the sanctions are very real and Venezuelans can feel it all day. President Maduro, in a lot of his speeches, I went to a lot of his speeches and he was constantly talking about the United States and its role. He talked about a media war. He talked about a dirty war being played out on social media against the government, and he was talking about the sorts of things that were going on on platforms like Twitter, where Elon Musk himself was coming out and talking about, we need regime change against this government.
So Venezuelans, they’re certainly aware of what’s going on, at least the ones that want to be. I did talk to many opposition figures or opposition supporters, who said that actually it’s the mismanagement of the economy, which is why Venezuela was in such a bad economic state for so many years, and actually the US sanctions did not have too much of an effect. But certainly, Venezuelans are very aware of what’s going on. You brought up the example of Nicaragua in the 1980s where the US basically did the same thing, tried to blockade the country, and eventually in 1990-
Alan MacLeod:
… thing tried to blockade the country and eventually in 1990 Nicaraguans gave in and voted for the U.S. candidate. But that hasn’t happened here, and partially the reason for that is because the government has managed to start to weather the sanctions. Inflation has been camped to a very low level. Actually, the inflation right now is lower than the inflation in the United Kingdom and many European countries. Venezuela now produces more than 96% of the food it eats, employment has gone up, and the government has also been able to build more than five million social houses, which it has mostly given away for free to the neediest Venezuelans.
So ultimately, we do have a picture of a country that’s starting to get over the worst of the sanctions right now. Touch wood that will continue. And yes, certainly the economic war continues and so does the media war, but it does seem that perhaps the tea leaves are showing that perhaps the Maduro administration has managed to weather the worst of that.
Michael Fox:
Alan, you mentioned something not from this question, but you mentioned something in the last question, the very end of it, that I think is really important, and it’s this connection between the United States and the mainstream media and how those two work together. What is their relationship? Because a lot of people would say, “Oh, well, we have a free press. Elon Musk wants freedom.” And so they’ll say, “We have a free press. We don’t have propaganda.” So the United States has its own thing, and then the mainstream media, it’s just doing their own thing freely. You’re someone who has researched a ton of this. This is your focus. What’s actually at play and what is that relationship between the U.S. government line and the mainstream media that we see from so many big outlets?
Alan MacLeod:
We like to think of propaganda as something that really only happens in enemy countries like North Korea or the Soviet Union. But actually, propaganda is much more refined in democracies like ours because we’ve had decades to try to tweak it and make it absolutely perfect. We like to think that there is a clear connection or a clear distinction between the deep state and the fourth estate, that big tech and Big Brother are completely defined, and that our media are plucky underdogs that are holding powerful people to account and speaking truth to power. But the reality is that, in our system, which is a corporate dominated society, when we have corporate media, that means corporate media is state media by default. And ultimately we see very, very close connections between big media and big government.
The New York Times, for example, admitted that it sends a lot of its stories to the CIA for editing before they send them out, specifically ones to do with national security and foreign policy. When we look at who actually writes for these big media outlets, a lot of the time they’re former state officials. There’s something of a revolving door between cable news hosts and government posts. I’m thinking of people like Jen Psaki, who leaves her job in the Democratic administration and immediately gets a job on MSNBC. And similar things happen on Fox with the Republican Party as well. So there are very close links between our media and our government. And when it comes to Venezuela, everybody seems to sing from the same song sheet, and that is that Venezuela is a threat that needs to get disposed of.
That’s why we see headlines in the Washington Post, for example, that read something like, “The odds of a coup in Venezuela are going up, but sometimes coups can lead to democracy.” That sort of thing shouldn’t be possible, but that is indeed the state that we find ourselves in. And on social media, it’s actually probably even worse in some ways. A lot of my research has been based around trying to uncover the connections between the national security state and big social media companies. And what I found was, just through doing things like going on LinkedIn and looking at who is actually working in top jobs in places like Facebook and Google and Twitter, looking at who is in their content moderation departments, I found that there was a network of hundreds of former CIA, FBI, NSA or State Department officials who have been parachuted into top jobs in big social media platforms.
All of them, really, including TikTok, even though we’re supposed to believe that is a Chinese government plant, we found hundreds of these officials who have been, as I said, parachuted into top jobs in politically sensitive fields. They’re not going into sales or customer service. They’re being put into content moderation and trust and safety policies. And so these are the sorts of people who decide not only what Americans see on their social media feeds, but also people from Botswana, Bhutan, Burundi, and Britain. It doesn’t matter where you are because these social media giants, these Silicon Valley behemoths, they are really the main source of information for the entire world now. These are global companies, but they’re being influenced by the United States government, and that is a huge national security threat for Venezuela and for every other country.
I’ll quickly give you one example. The most recent elections in Nicaragua, which we were referencing a little bit earlier, a week before the election, Facebook deleted more than 90 accounts belonging to top leftist officials, government officials, or big media sites. They said that they were doing this because of inauthentic behavior, and they thought it was a bot network, but it was clear that they were putting their thumb on the scale trying to swing the election away from the leftist, anti-imperialist Sandinista party and towards the right-wing U.S.-backed candidate, Miss Chamorro, whose family has been controlling Nicaragua on and off for over a century.
When these people poured onto Twitter to record videos of themselves saying, “I am not a bot. I’m a real person. Why has Facebook purged me?” Twitter went and deleted their accounts in what some analysts called a social media double tap strike. So clearly these big social media companies have the power to try to swing elections, and we should be very cognizant of that, and we should be designing strategies to get around that, actually.
Michael Fox:
Alan, I’m so glad you brought up social media because people have actually said this. Bolsonaro, he was elected with his social media campaign. Rodrigo Chavez, who is the President of Costa Rica in the ilk of Bolsonaro or Donald Trump, he himself said. “The rules of the games have changed and that I wouldn’t have been elected if it wasn’t for social media.” So it’s absolutely influencing populations.
My question for you, why is Elon Musk so worried about, say, the Supreme Court in Brazil, or in this case, the Venezuelan elections? There was numerous tweets. If it’s not, I mean, many, but potentially even dozens of tweets that he sent out over the last few days denouncing Venezuela and Maduro in the elections. Why is he so focused?
Alan MacLeod:
Sure. So unlike a lot of billionaires, Elon Musk is really not afraid to put out any opinion he has immediately to millions of people, and as you said, he has very strong opinions about socialism in Latin America, or socialism anywhere for that matter. Let’s not forget that Elon Musk has publicly endorsed Donald Trump for President and has reportedly given him more than $40 million. In fact, he’s giving a repeat donation every month of tens of millions of dollars to Republican PACs. So this guy is clearly a deeply conservative individual, to put it mildly. And of course, those sorts of people are not going to take kindly to countries going socialist, certainly not in America’s backyard, as it’s described by so many people in the U.S. and in Washington, D.C. in particular.
So yeah, as you said, Musk has been very forthright in denouncing the Workers’ Party and socialism in general in Brazil. He has fired off so many tweets talking about Maduro being a dictator and how everybody should be supporting Maria Carina Machado, who’s not actually the opposition Presidential candidate, but everybody knows that she is the real force behind Edmundo Gonzalez, who is a very frail, very old man who can actually barely stand and has trouble reading even off a script. There’s a lot of Joe Biden similarities there, actually. Yeah, so Elon has been tweeting nonstop about Venezuela, about how basically we need a coup d’etat in that country. And of course, this really mirrors what he did in Bolivia a few years ago where it’s rumored very strongly that he was actually involved in some of the shenanigans that went on against Evo Morales and the Movement to Socialism Party, where there was a military coup, which deposed Morales and kicked the Socialists out of power for an entire year.
Now, Bolivia is an enormous source of lithium, which is one of the key products that Musk needs to get his hands on because all of his Tesla cars run on lithium batteries. And the fact that Morales was not willing to play ball and he wanted to nationalize the lithium industry got Elon Musk extremely angry. He wanted to build a big Tesla plant in Brazil and got lots of help from the Bolsonaro administration doing so. I’m sure he has very many opinions about what the oil of Venezuela should be used for. Billionaires often do. This is a classic case of enormous oligarchs really thinking that they can control Latin America. And this goes back centuries.
The entire concept of a Banana Republic revolves around this. It revolves around Americans or Europeans, but Westerners in general, thinking that they have the power to come into Latin American countries, overthrow whoever they want, and install whoever they want as dictators so that their banana business or their mining company or whatever it is can continue and profits can keep growing. And so I really see this as another example of a centuries long trend of Western billionaires thinking that they can do whatever they want in Latin America.
Michael Fox:
Alan, one of the things I really appreciate about your work is how you’re constantly critiquing the media, but doing it in a very clear way where you’re showing people online over social media and Twitter exactly how the media spin is happening in real time, which it’s so important. And just to give a really quick example, you tweeted out, I think it was yesterday, one tweet in which you showed a BBC story. And you said, and it was a whole thread that you had here, but, “Western media’s finest propagandists are pulling out all the stops trying to de-legitimize the elections in Venezuela.” And then, of course, you dissect this in the thread, but the very first picture is a screenshot of an article from the BBC in which it says, “Choreographed celebrations in Venezuela as Maduro claims win.” And then you right next to it choreographed implying their fake or artificial.
And then as Maduro claims win, claims rather than just wins, this is so important for us understanding what is actually being done. And a lot of times if you’re not a journalist, if you’re not thinking about words and the way that things are scripted or written, you’re not looking at it. You’re not analyzing those titles, you’re not analyzing the articles in that way, which is why I just so appreciate your work in that sense. Can you just talk a little bit about how often the mainstream media is using these misleading terms, disinformation, whatever that is, and how often that’s the case, and how much have you seen of that over in recent weeks in Venezuela?
Alan MacLeod:
Well, when it comes to Venezuela, it’s constant, but it’s actually on every topic everywhere. So one of the most blatant lies we hear about Venezuela that appeared in that BBC article was that Maduro still has some support among some people, but it’s flagging. But when you actually come here, I was there on a Thursday just before the elections at Maduro’s final rally, there was something of the order of 1.5 to 2 million people at that rally. And not only were they there, they were astonishingly upbeat, and they were very confident of a victory. They sang and they danced for hours and hours. The juncture between image and reality when it comes to Venezuela, it really beggars belief. And the reason media can get away with this is because most people have a very, very limited understanding of Venezuela, or frankly, of many countries.
Most Americans, I believe, still don’t have a passport and the majority of those who do are Mexican-Americans going to see their families or Americans going on spring break to places like Acapulco. And that means that our images and our understanding of the rest of the world is mediated through media. And what I mean by that is a handful of gigantic corporations basically control everything we hear, read, and see about any country including Venezuela. And so media has this incredible power to frame debates and situations by queuing us, just that prodding us to think about issues in certain ways by using words. We hear a lot about the Maduro grip on power, as if he’s holding onto it. You don’t really hear people talking about Joe Biden keeping a grip on power. We also hear words like the Maduro regime rather than the Maduro administration. Nobody would use the word the Biden regime unless perhaps they were working at OAN or Fox News and they were trying to demonize the Biden administration.
But if you were working at CNN or any of the “respectable outlets” and you handed in some copy that said the Biden regime, your editor would look at you like crazy. You would get a phone call saying, “Why are you talking like this?” But when it comes to Venezuela, that’s just part and parcel of it. And these sorts of words and the way they frame things is very important because it gets people to believe that this person is a dictator without any real information or any real knowledge about the country. Another great example of this is if you read many articles about the Venezuelan elections, you will hear immediately probably that Maduro’s face appears 13 times on the ballot as if this is just another example of how crackpot this administration is. It feeds into all this Latin American strongman, tin pot dictatorship, Banana Republic framing that we’ve seen for many decades.
Now, that is actually true that Maduro does appear 13 times on the ballot. But when you actually see the ballot, it makes complete sense why…
Alan MacLeod:
Ballot, but when you actually see the ballot, it makes complete sense why that happens. There is a huge sheet. Venezuela has dozens of political parties, and Maduro was endorsed by 13 of those. So if, for example, you want to vote for the Green Party in Venezuela, you go to the machine and click Green Maduro, or if you want to vote for the Communist party, you write Communist Maduro. But what’s not said is that his main challenger, Edmundo González, was also endorsed by multiple parties, so his face appeared, I can’t remember the exact amount, but it was something like seven or eight times on the ballot as well. And then other opposition candidates appeared multiple times on the ballot too, and that was because a number of parties had endorsed those people. So again, out of context, you can make it sound like Maduro’s face appearing 13 times on the ballot is proof of a dictatorship, but the minute you actually have some background context and knowledge about Venezuela, that immediately just seems completely normal.
And in fact, when you look at the ballot, it’s much better than the ballot that we have in many countries where you don’t have the face, you don’t have colors, you’ve just got to name and maybe a party. That helps people who are visually impaired, especially in the global south, a lot of people don’t read and write very well. Those sorts of things help working class, ordinary people vote in the way that they want to vote. So these are actually things that help democracy rather than hinder it. But these sorts of factoids that journalists can drop in to an uneducated audience that doesn’t know anything about Venezuela is a way that they can deceitfully make people see the country in any way they want. And it’s very easy to play people when they don’t have a background knowledge of the country, and that’s exactly what the media has been doing for 20 years here.
Michael Fox:
Alan, incredible. I know it’s very late your time. For those people who are listening right now, it’s like midnight Alan’s time. He just flew in from Venezuela and he’s flying to Asia tomorrow. I thank you so much, so much. I just have a couple more questions for you, and it’s incredible. It’s great talking with you. How did you get interested in Venezuela and media spin in Latin America like this?
Alan MacLeod:
Oh yeah, sure. So I guess it starts when I was quite young and I lived through the 2008 financial crash. That really got me starting to think about alternative economic systems, and one of the most important and notable at the time was Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. And it seemed quite interesting what was going on here. And I heard from a lot of people, like respectable intellectuals that something incredible was going on in Venezuela. Democracy was deepening, that the poor were being uplifted in ways that they never had been before, but then I also read news reports that said that this place was the most evil dictatorship imaginable and that this place was worse than North Korea and that we really should be doing something like invading. And so that really piqued my interest. Who should I believe? Should I believe these intellectuals that have a lot of respect for international organizations or should I believe the media?
And I guess that’s how I got interested in Venezuela, trying to get to the bottom of this, because either way, the story seemed extremely juicy. Either there was a huge conspiracy on the part of groups like UNICEF or the United Nations or the World Health Organization or academics like Noam Chomsky who were all conspiring to make a dictatorship look like a paradise, or there was an even bigger conspiracy involving almost the entire media trying to demonize a progressive project. So really, that’s what I wanted to get down to the bottom of. It just seemed like an extremely juicy story. And that’s why I’ve always looked at Venezuela through the lens of Western media because that’s how I got involved in it in the first place.
Michael Fox:
Incredible. Incredible. And talk about your academic research. I love the fact that you are a journalist now using that same academic research that you did, and now you’re using it in the day in and day out constantly to be able to see the reality with this lens that you’ve studied for so many years. So many people study one thing and they go off and do something else. I studied environmental studies,. But talk about your academic research and what did you find?
Alan MacLeod:
Sure. So I did my PhD about media coverage of Venezuela, and then I produced a book and five peer-reviewed academic articles on the subject of Venezuela. And what I found was, number one, I found an extraordinary slant and bias against the country and towards presenting it as a dictatorship, ignoring any progressive changes that were going on and constantly demonizing it. That was overwhelming from both conservative and liberal media and both American and British media. So that’s the first thing I found. But perhaps the more interesting story is why this was going on. And in order to explain that and understand that question, I actually talked to the majority of journalists who were producing content on Venezuela for the Western audience. That actually wasn’t very hard because there’s quite a small number of Western journalists that produce pretty much all the news you hear out of this country. Nowadays, there’s only one newspaper with a full-time correspondent in Venezuela, that’s the New York Times with Anatoly Kurmanaev.
And I interviewed Kurmanaev many years ago now, and he was completely open about what he was doing. So I have him on record saying that he describes himself as a mercenary for hire, he and his colleagues, and that he intentionally plants false or grossly exaggerated stories about Venezuela into Western media because he has an agenda. He called this tactic sexy tricks, and he gave me one example of this. He got a story published that condoms in Venezuela cost $750. Now, he accepted that this was completely nonsense, but he said that this was… This story went viral across the world and it played into this Venezuela is a ludicrous failed state, tin-pot dictatorship, hyperinflation, etc. But yeah, he said that this wasn’t the case. And indeed it wasn’t actually. When I looked into a box of condoms in Venezuela cost $8, which I actually think that’s slightly cheaper than in the US. So there was no real enormous shortage or mad pricing. But people would do that deliberately, that journalists, because they had an agenda.
And I also spoke to other journalists that said that inside their newsroom, they called themselves “The Resistance” to Chavez and now Maduro. That’s how they talk about them. Another journalist said that other people in his newsroom said that we have to, “Get rid of this guy,” Meaning Chavez. So journalists were completely open about what their position was. They were the ideological tip of the spear trying to destroy socialism in its cradle. Other journalists who were quite critical of the coverage, and once they were out started blowing the whistle, told me that they felt that they had to self-censor constantly. So one journalist who worked for the Financial Times told me that the stuff that he wrote in his book he knew would never ever get published in the Financial Times, and so he didn’t even bother pitching it after a while. He just constantly got knocked back and he stopped pitching and he just started complying. He said it was complete self-censorship. That’s what he said.
And yeah, other journalists said that they had to temper what they wrote because they knew their editors didn’t like that, and there were people who were allied to the opposition local Venezuelans that they worked with in the newsroom. So there was this extremely partisan sense in the newsroom. Western journalists overwhelmingly live in the east side of Caracas, they live in gated communities, they have armed guards, they have servants, a lot of them don’t speak Spanish, and very few of them venture into the dilapidated slums of Caracas, which are bastions of government support. And so everyone they interact with on a daily basis hates the government and loves the opposition. And so they start to imbibe that, and that’s the content they produce. And so yeah, ultimately it really is a story of Venezuela being the ground zero for journalism in the sense that it is a fantastic case study that shows that journalists job, if you work in corporate media, is not to present the truth, but it is to push the agenda of the owners and advertisers of big corporate media outlets. So that is the billionaire class.
And so truth goes out the window when you’re fighting in an information war, and Venezuela is the perfect example of that. Truth has just completely escaped, just being totally de-fenestrated when it comes to this country and propaganda reigns supreme.
Michael Fox:
Alan, I’m so glad you brought up these points because I moved to Venezuela in 2006 to report on what was happening, and particularly my focus was doing stories in the Barrios, in the poorest communities about the missions, about how people’s lives were changing, about how people were being empowered by the Bolivarian process. And to get away from this kind of top down, oh, it’s either Chavez or at the time it’s Bush. Chavez and Bush, look at that fight that’s happening. Chavez and Bush. I want to talk about people’s lives and ended up co-authoring this book, Venezuela Speaks: Interviews with Grassroots Social Movements. But I saw that firsthand what you were just mentioning because like you said, every mainstream journalist lived in eastern side of Caracas, upscale neighborhoods, and many of them would tell me that they were afraid to go into the Barrios.
They were afraid to go talk to the poorest communities, and so they would step outside their house, interview somebody in the Plaza Altamira, and then send off their story and they’re done, right? So it’s this automatic thing that would just happen in Venezuela through journalism. Alan, I want to come now to where we are right now. A couple days after the elections, the opposition has been claiming fraud, can you talk about what the opposition is claiming, how that’s been lifted by the media, and what’s your analysis? What’s your take on where things stand right now?
Alan MacLeod:
Yeah, sure. Just a couple of points before I get into that. I do have Venezuela Speaks somewhere on my shelf there. I read it a long time ago. And yeah, actually I went to both the Rich Eastern side of Caracas and the Barrios, and I actually felt that I felt safest in the Barrios, in fact. I didn’t feel that they were a dangerous place at all. I felt that it was a community of extraordinary conviviality where children played together, people of all races seemed to know each other and were very friendly with each other. It was a lovely place to be, in fact. Whereas in places like Plaza Altamira, that was the scene of some of the worst violence on the Guarimbas where so many people got killed.
So over here, the opposition has been claiming fraud. They claim that their candidate, Edmundo Gonzalez, actually received more than 70% of the vote, and they basically got two sources of information for that. Number one is an American polling firm. This polling firm has got extensive links with the US government and even the CIA, so we have to take some of their results of the grain of salt, especially because why would this American polling firm have access to the voter registers and voter data. Polls in this country are probably the worst in the world. You can find a poll telling you whatever you want. You can find polls that say that the opposition will win by 30, 40, 50 points, and you’ll find the opposite where you’ll find government polls that show Maduro was ahead by vast margins as well, and everything in between. And basically you pay for what you got.
Some of the methodology on these polls is utterly ghastly. Some of them that are getting produced are literally based on Twitter polls. And of course, if you’ve got followers, we all know that our followers are a certain political or social group, and so if you set a poll up, you can basically already guess what the result is going to be. So yes, the opposition is crying fraud. I would say that they have actually refused to accept the results of every single election here in Venezuela since 2000, except for two cases, and in both cases, they were the ones that won. In 2007, they won a narrow victory in a constitutional amendment referendum. The government at the time, led by Hugo Chávez, immediately accepted the results and went on with it. So that’s pretty interesting. Edmundo Gonzalez, as I said earlier, called on his supporters to go out on the streets and defend their victory. And what that has meant in practice has meant tens of thousands of people going out at night and setting fires to things, attacking police, burning down pharmacies, burning buildings, even we saw in one city that a hospital was set on fire.
These, as I said, are political targets. They’re not going after businesses or whatever, they’re going after very politicized targets like hospitals and schools, which are very contentious things in Venezuela because the right wing doesn’t want to pay for those. They think that the oil industry money should be going to the oil industry executives and to shareholders. And so they hate the fact that they have to walk past these things every day, especially when they’re called things like the Hugo Chávez Maternity Clinic, and they have to be reminded that they had to endure, what, 14 years of rule by this guy that they consider a horrible dictator. So that’s where the opposition is. They’re being supported by the United States and a handful of countries in Latin America, but only a couple of days after the election, dozens of countries had come out and endorsed the Maduro victory. So I’m not really sure where this is going.
The United States has already recognized Edmundo Gonzalez as the legitimate president of the country, so we might be in for Juan Guaido two-point-oh operation where the U.S is going to try and support some sort of parallel government. How long that actually lasts really remains to be seen.
Michael Fox:
I think one of the interesting things, Alan, and I’m so glad you mentioned that about the opposition actually calling fraud in every election over the last 20 years because that’s what I saw firsthand. I covered several elections in the two thousands. I was there for 2007. I remember they did not call fraud for that one when they won it. But I think one of the interesting things this time around is that the opposition says they actually have the voting rolls and that they’ve started to publish some of those online. People can actually go onto the opposition’s website and see what they themselves have voted while the National Electoral Council website is down. So it…
Michael Fox:
… while the National Electoral Council website is down. So it’s like they’re garnering support and it seems like, with the mainstream media in particular, and obviously the United States, it almost seems like they’re saying, “Look, we are more legitimate than the National Electoral Council.” That’s the game that they’re trying to play.
So I guess my question for you, how substantial is it that they’re claiming to have even more validity than the National Electoral Council and how much clout does the National Electoral Council have right now kind of in Venezuela, right? Because it’s almost like this polarization of these two worlds. We simply see that media, obviously you have the pro-government media and then the opposition media, the countries completely polarized, but it’s almost now it depends on who do you trust, right? Do you trust the opposition and their voting roles that they say are online? Or do you trust the National Electoral Council, which has now been hacked and you can’t even get on their website?
Alan MacLeod:
Yes. I’m glad you brought that up again because I was meaning to talk about the opposition in the opposition’s methodology. In that last answer, I got sidetracked talking about that CI-linked American polling organization.
Yeah, so the way the opposition’s methodology works was they sent their supporters to every polling station in the country to watch the election results and to count the ballots themselves, or at least watch the ballots being counted. And what they did was, they had representatives looking at every single table in the country, and those representatives would then send WhatsApp messages on a group chat, which had all the information about the voters and how many people voted for each candidate. And then that would be tabulated by some sort of central opposition organization in CARACAS, and then they would have their own figures to publish. As you said, this happened at exactly the same time that the CNE, the National Electoral Council, their website got hacked and was taken down.
Now, opposition supporters who were talking to me showed me how this worked, and he showed me all the results that were coming in on his phone about which states was going where and which polling stations were showing what. And the results that were being brought into on his phone seemed frankly quite ludicrous to me, if I’m quite honest. You would see things like, “Polling Station 6, Lara Province, and then a town.” And they would say things like “Votes on Table 1, Maduro, 95. Gonzalez, 1,150. Others, 33.” If these things are to believed, Gonzalez would’ve won a victory, just a gigantic victory, an absolutely crushing landslide over landslide to end all landslides.
This really doesn’t seem to tabulate with other sorts of empirical data I got. If Maduro is so hated and unpopular that the opposition is getting three or four times the votes that he got, how was he able to pull almost 2 million people onto the streets in CARACAS on a Thursday evening. CARACAS being a city with what? Four or 5 million people in its metro area. This was a gigantic show of force by the Chavistas.
A lot of polling has shown that the public is starting to get on board with the economic message. It’s clear that Venezuela is nowhere near in such a perilous situation it was in five years ago, and things are getting much better. Just looking around, all the shops are full of goods. People don’t seem to be absolutely on the verge of complete devastation as they were four or five years ago.
So frankly, I think the opposition’s methodology, it lacks quite a lot because this is based on humans reporting exactly what they saw. And if any of them get their figures wrong or are just frankly lying, then the entire process goes to pot. So the opposition’s numbers are basically based on their own supporters’ self-reporting what each voting machine spits out. And of course, we’re going to have a situation that, as I said, if any of them are not being entirely truthful, then the whole process falls apart. And even if they were being entirely truthful, why should the government or the people of Venezuela accept the numbers coming out of these opposition WhatsApp groups?
Michael Fox:
Exactly. Well, there’s also no way to double check or confirm whether that’s correct or not. That the whole idea that the Venezuelan electoral system is set up so that you can double check and, “Here’s the results. And here’s this.” And it’s all these checks and balances, whereas this is just the opposition saying, “This is what we have, and this is ours.”
There was even an article, I think it was in the New York Times, that they… And you may have even have shared it was in the Washington Post or the New York Times, they said something like, “Well, according to the opposition, they’re way in the lead and they’ve essentially won. But we have no way of actually double checking those figures or confirming that those figures are correct.” Right? But this gets back into that same question of, who do you trust? If you’re in the opposition, that’s who you trust. You trust the opposition. I mean, the same question of Trump or Bolsonaro or his third of the population that says, “We trust Trump or Fox News or Breitbart or our social media. And yes, there’s a globalist cabal that’s trying to take over the world and Trump’s trying to fight it,” and that’s what you believe, right? And so this is why it’s so frustrating with Venezuela.
Alan, I’m not going to take any more of your time. Is there anything else to add? And thank you so much for this conversation. It’s been fantastic.
Alan MacLeod:
Maybe the only thing I should add is that I was part of a foreign delegation that was there. The armed opposition motorcyclists actually stopped a whole busload of foreign dignitaries from leaving Venezuela. They actually overpowered the police and forced the foreign dignitaries for the bus to reverse and go back to the hotel. And so they missed, all missed their flights. So that should be a news story that should be going wild right now, that dozens of politicians and electoral observers were, at gunpoint, forced back to their hotel, but I haven’t seen that reported anywhere in the corporate media.
Michael Fox:
Unbelievable. Alan, what do you see for the coming days, weeks, months? I know you don’t have a crystal ball, but where do you think things are headed?
Alan MacLeod:
Well, maybe history is a good teacher here. If we look at what’s happened after pretty much every electoral campaign in Venezuela, and there are a lot of them, Venezuela has more elections than pretty much any country you can think of, the opposition has tend to cry foul after all of them. There tends to be violence afterwards. It’s not clear whether that situation is going to peter out, but I would imagine that the fact that, number one, Maduro seems to have won such a large victory, it might be seven, eight, even nine points by the time the counting is completely finished and ratified. And that number two, the army and police have already came out and said, “We are fully in support of the government. The opposition needs to accept the results,” means that I don’t think any sort of opposition campaign to topple the government is really going to achieve its maximal goal. What it could do is make Venezuela ungovernable, and it might encourage the United States to place even more sanctions and take an even more aggressive lying towards Venezuela. But that remains to be seen.
Michael Fox:
Alan, does the National Electoral Council, they need to give their final report?
Alan MacLeod:
Yeah, that’s right. I mean, I believe they have the digital result instantaneously, but they also have to count every single paper ballot. And that does take quite a long time, especially because Venezuela is a very large country. There are very large parts of the nation, which are pretty much cut off from the rest of them. I mean, a huge part of Venezuela is actually gigantic jungles and forests and stuff. It’s an Amazonian country. And so it does take a while for officials to tally everything and get information out there. However, what I would say is it took the United States 30 days to formally ratify and count everything from the last election, and it’s only been a handful of days here in Venezuela. So we might give them a few more days before sending in the troops.
Michael Fox:
It’s so important, because that’s what we heard within a day. Even the United States was coming out the Carter Center, everybody else saying, “Well, we want everything. We want to see it all right now. And if you don’t, well then clearly something bad happened.”
Alan, I want to close with, what can people do when they’re watching news, they’re seeing information about Venezuela and they’re not sure what to believe? Where can people go? What can people do?
Alan MacLeod:
Well, in general, I guess the short answer is stop watching corporate media and start getting your news from more credible sources, from people who actually know the country. You should be looking at alternative media like the Real News, like our local Tribune, Venezuelanalysis, MintPress, wherever you want to look. But in the long term, I think you really have to develop critical media literacy skills, and that takes a little bit of time.
First thing I would say is you should be reading media from a wide range of sources and also a wide range of countries that will help you see biases inherent in your own country’s media that you might not be able to see otherwise, because you’ll see all sorts of different opinions, and you’ll be able to triangulate where the range of opinions is and start seeing biases on your own.
I would also say we have to start supporting and listening and reading to alternative media, media that is not controlled either by a government or by big corporations because they tend to have far fewer strains on the reporting and tend to do a much better job. And yet ultimately, I think we need to develop critical media literary skills. We always have to be constantly analyzing everything we read, asking where does it come from, who is writing it, what is their agenda, who is funding this organization. All sorts of questions like that. “Why are they saying it like this? Why are they choosing those words? What is the point of this article? What are they trying to get me to believe here?” Trying to understand all of those things. And really critically analyzing everything you read will turn you into a much more thoughtful person. And then suddenly you’ll be a human being rather than just a human doing. And I think that’s very important in this day and year.
Michael Fox:
Alan, incredible. Thank you so much for joining me today.
Alan MacLeod:
It’s been my pleasure, Michael.
Michael Fox:
That is all for this update to Under The Shadow. As always, if you like what you’re here, please check out my Patreon page, patreon.com/MFOX. There you can also support my work, become a monthly sustainer, or sign up to stay abreast of all the latest on this podcast and my other reporting across Latin America. Under the Shadow’s a co-production in partnership with The Real News and NACLA. The theme song is by my band Monte Perdido. This is Michael Fox. Many thanks. See you next time.
Bogotá, August 2, 2024—The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on Venezuelan authorities to allow the media to report safely on protests over President Nicolás Maduro’s widelydisputed claim to have won the country’s July 28 presidential election.
Government security forces shot and injured one journalist and arrested six others—two of whom remain in detention—while covering the protests.
“CPJ is extremely concerned about a sharp increase in the harassment and detention of journalists in Venezuela by government security agents following the contentious July 28 presidential election,” said Cristina Zahar, CPJ’s Latin America program coordinator, from São Paulo. “CPJ calls on authorities to allow the media to do its job of keeping the public properly informed in the aftermath of the vote.”
Venezuela’s National Press Workers Union (SNTP) said the state regulator Conatel warned numerous private radio stations in the states of Bolívar, Falcón, Zulia, Carabobo, and Aragua not to report on opposition protests, as broadcasting news that “violates elements classified as violence” could result in fines or the cancellation of their broadcast licenses.
Última Hora, an online newspaper in western Portuguesa state, said Friday that it would close after state governor Primitivo Cedeño accused local media outlets of “inciting hatred” in their coverage of the presidential election and its aftermath, according to the SNTP.
Members of the National Guard shot Jesús Romero, editor of news website Código Urbe, in the abdomen and leg while he was covering anti-government protests in Maracay, the capital of Aragua state, on Monday. Romero is recovering at a local hospital.
National Guard troops arrested Yousner Alvarado, a camera operator covering protests that same day for the online news site Noticia Digital, in the western city of Barinas. SNTP reported that he remains detained and has been charged with terrorism.
Police officers arrested Paul León, a camera operator for online TV station VPI-TV, while he covered protests in the western city of Valera on Tuesday. He remained in detention as of Friday, August 2.
CPJ’s calls seeking comment from Conatel and the Defense Ministry, which controls the National Guard, were unanswered.
