Congress and Corporate Media Deploy Massive Lie, Claiming Venezuelaâs Govât Threatened to Starve Non-Voters
By Max Blumenthal and Anya Parampil – Dec 6, 2020
Spun out by the US Congress and Wall Street Journal, the cynical deception is part of an assault on Venezuelaâs legislative election, in which even opposition politicians were sanctioned for participating.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and US corporate media declared Venezuelaâs legislative elections a âshamâ before results were even announced, opening a new front in the propaganda war on the besieged country and its leftist government.
Among the most blatant distortions deployed against President Nicolas Maduroâs United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) was a claim first advanced by Leopoldo LĂłpez, the far-right, US-backed opposition leader who recently fled to Spain.
On Twitter, LĂłpez tweeted a deceptively edited clip of Constituent Assembly President Diosdado Cabello addressing an election rally, and accused Cabello of âblackmailing the hungry people with food to force themâ to vote for his governing party.
Los culpables de la catĂĄstrofe humanitaria que vive Venezuela, son tan miserables que en su desesperaciĂłn por validar el FRAUDE del 6D, chantajean al pueblo hambriento con comida para obligarlos a ir al engaĂąo pic.twitter.com/xNnJWkxbVg
— Leopoldo LĂłpez (@leopoldolopez) November 30, 2020
LĂłpezâs assertion was propagated by the Wall Street Journalâs Ryan Dube, who claimed in an article about Venezuelaâs âshamâ election that Cabello âthreatened to withhold food handouts in a country where millions are going hungry.â
A bipartisan US congressional letter condemning Venezuelaâs election as a âshamâ also echoed the opposition leaderâs dubious interpretation, stating, âthe regime has threatened to withhold food from Venezuelans who do not vote in the sham elections.â
In their haste to shape a narrative delegitimizing Venezuelaâs legislative elections, the US government and its loyal pack of corporate media stenographers have relied on LĂłpez, a lead participant in at least two military coup attempts and a series of violent right-wing riots, as their house interpreter.
But the full statement by Cabello in its actual context tells an entirely different story. The complete speech, which López conveniently omitted, can be seen here.
Below is an English translation of the relevant section of Cabelloâs speech, which followed a competition between men and women over who could shout the loudest:
“The women won. Women always win, women always win and women are going to be at the forefront of this battle. I know that it is so. I know that it is the woman who is going to get up early and say at home, âHey, get up and go to the [Carabobo voting center] because you have to go vote!â
Of course, and those who do not vote, do not eat. For those who do not vote, there is no food. Whoever does not vote, does not eat, a quarantine is applied there without eating. But the woman is going to be there because the woman is going to say to the son: âLook son, you did not live what I experienced. You have not suffered what I suffered when I was young.â
Here, the youth and workers, and the working brothers, correct me if it is true or a lie: Here they had no life at all, they were persecuted. More than 11,000 dead, there are still 3,000 disappeared (âŚ) there was no peace with misery, there was no peace with men, with women.
A close review of Cabelloâs comments reveals both the devious nature of LĂłpez and the cluelessness of Washington.
In addition to serving as the president of Venezuelaâs Constituent Assembly, Diosdado Cabello is the host of Con El Mazo Dando, a popular Chavista broadcast variety show that serves as a platform for his unique brand of off-color humor.
With his story about Chavista women warning men that if they do not vote, they will not âeat,â Cabello was making a sexual double entendre that would be familiar to most Venezuelans. In Venezuelan culture, âcomerâ not only means âto eat,â but is also slang for having sex.
Thus Cabello was not threatening to withhold food to anyone; he was conjuring up a humorous and hypothetical scenario about revolutionary women denying sex to their husbands and boyfriends if they refused to vote.
His appeal was a Chavista-style blend of the Aristophanes play Lysistrada and the cringeworthy âGet Your Booty to the Pollsâ ad campaign Democratic Party supporters rolled out during the 2020 presidential election.
âThis is a classic Diosdado [Cabello] provocation,â explained Diego Sequera, a Venezuelan journalist and political analyst who has contributed to The Grayzone. âHis joke about those who donât vote not eating has a double sense, because âno comerâ also means to not have sex with your partner. Diosdado always talks in these terms, so itâs funny to see it getting spun all week.â
Cabelloâs rhetoric about the politics of food contained multiple layers of meaning. In his reference to mothers admonishing their sons to vote by reminding them of their countryâs history â âLook son, you did not live what I experienced. You have not suffered what I suffered when I was youngâ â the Chavista leader was invoking the pre-Chavez era of neoliberalism when Venezuelaâs poor and working class experienced abject misery, exclusion, and repression.
Cabelloâs comments also represented a clear warning to his partyâs base about the right-wing oppositionâs plans for a program of massive economic privatization that would deprive the countryâs most vulnerable sectors of basic provisions in the midst of a pandemic.
Indeed, nearly all of the opposition parties have campaigned to end the governmentâs CLAP program, which provides millions of Venezuelans with heavily subsidized food and sanitary supplies for little to no cost.
The US State Department has imposed sanctions on CLAP, and has kidnapped and allegedly tortured one of its key architects, Alex Saab.
The meaning of Cabelloâs actual remarks therefore represented the precise opposite of the deceptive interpretation put forward by LĂłpez, the US government, and its corporate media mouthpieces. Beyond the humorous double meaning of his yarn, he was warning poor and working class Venezuelans that the opposition â not his government â would impose policies of economic deprivation if they achieved power.
For Venezuelans old enough to remember the 1989 massacre that the Venezuelan military carried out to crush the poor peopleâs uprising known as El Caracazo, the fear of a return to neoliberal governance is very real. This painful event was the culmination of a period of brutal repression that Cabello invoked when he recalled âmore than 11,000 deadâ and âstill 3,000 disappeared.â
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Throughout the pandemic and its periodic quarantines, Venezuelaâs government has continued to supply its population with food and sanitary supplies through the CLAP program. The Grayzone has published several on-the-ground reports about the life-saving impact of this program, including with a visit to food fairs that municipal governments hold on a regular basis across the country.
The idea that the Venezuelan government could halt the CLAP program in the middle of a pandemic and crushing US economic blockade is simply unfathomable, and would likely lead to the kind of social unrest that the US government has tried and failed to provoke.
Did you know that in Venezuela,the government of The President @NicolasMaduro has ordered the home by home deployment of the #CLAP (a social program of subsidized food distribution) to serve the population during the #totalquarantine by #Covid_19?
#Venezuela. #COVID2019 pic.twitter.com/5wtInGdUWd
— ConsVEHongKongRAE (@ConsulRBVzlaHK) March 20, 2020
To complement the information war waged against Venezuelaâs legislative election, Washington has worked to intimidate opposition politicians into boycotting the race. So far, the US State Department has sanctioned Luis Parra, a right-wing opposition leader and former ally of GuaidĂł, along with an array of other opposition politicians including leading members of the traditional social democratic party, Democratic Action.
Their crime? According to Mike Pompeoâs State Department, by simply participating in the election, these opposition figures were guilty of ârob[bing] the people of Venezuela of their right to choose their leaders.â
The State Department has simultaneously praised coup leader Juan Guaidó and the US-funded extremist factions for boycotting the elections, branding them âVenezuelaâs champions for democracy.â
On election day, GuaidĂł urged Venezuelans to âStay at home,â exploiting a Covid-19 safety hashtag to enact a naked campaign of voter suppression.
#QuedateEnCasa
Hoy serĂĄ la mejor forma de rechazar el fraude— Juan GuaidĂł (@jguaido) December 6, 2020
Washington has worked to undermine Venezuelaâs election while President Donald Trump and his allies are still painting recent US election results as fraudulent.
The Congress, for its part, has gone months without authorizing any support for US citizens going hungry during a runaway pandemic.
And as lines for food assistance grow longer around the US and Trump increasingly retreats from public view, President-elect Joseph Biden has condemned what he called government âhandoutsâ for desperate American citizens.
Watch Max Blumenthalâs report from the closing rally of the PSUV party in Caracas:
Featured image: File Photo.
Max Blumenthal
Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books, including best-selling Republican Gomorrah, Goliath,The Fifty One Day War, and The Management of Savagery. He has produced print articles for an array of publications, many video reports, and several documentaries, including Killing Gaza. Blumenthal founded The Grayzone in 2015 to shine a journalistic light on Americaâs state of perpetual war and its dangerous domestic repercussions.
Anya Parampil
Anya Parampil is a journalist based in Washington, DC. She previously hosted a daily progressive afternoon news program called In Question on RT America. She has produced and reported several documentaries, including on-the-ground reports from the Korean peninsula and Palestine.
