Photo composition showing US President Joe Biden scratching his head seemingly lost, next to Venezuelan far-right candidate Edmundo González who is in a similar pose. Photo: Orinoco Tribune.
US President Joe Biden, apart from maintaining unilateral coercive measures against sovereign countries, has stirred up throughout his term a lot talk over his clumsy mistakes, such as confusing one country for another, asking about dead people, and even falling over. Edmundo González, the presidential candidate of the Venezuelan extreme-right, mirrored his imperial master’s actions by freezing in the middle of an answer he was giving about his neoliberal economic proposals.
Mark Green, president and CEO of the Wilson Center, a conservative US think tank, asked González, “If you win … you will face a crumbling economy and a crumbling infrastructure, so what will be your top priorities? How do you go from giving people hope on the campaign trail to actually giving them results as president?” For years this think tank has focused on attacking Chavismo and the Bolivarian Revolution.
González responded in perfect English, “Listen, a priori, it is very difficult to say just one, two or three of them because, as you say, the damage to the economy is so great that it is difficult to point out one of them.” He said this without mentioning the illegal US sanctions which have caused the economic crisis in Venezuela. Then he lost the thread of his idea and froze for about 5 seconds, and Mark Green tried to help him, with words like “please, please,” trying to bring the candidate back to what he had been saying earlier.
A few seconds later, González restarted, “We have people working on this for many weeks, even months, and we know what to offer, what are the points on which we focus, and we hope to embark on a very rapid reconstruction of the economy and the country as a whole.” He made no reference to the recently unveiled ultra-neoliberal program Tierra de Gracia, where he plans to privatize everything in Venezuela including the PDVSA and disband the Bolivarian Militia to allow the US Southern Command to regain control of Venezuela.
The interview took place on July 18 online, according to the Wilson Center website, where the whole interview can be watched. The section where candidate González froze begins at the 18 minutes 33 seconds mark.
In addition to stumbling in his response, González did not offer further details of his economic proposal, something that he has not done throughout his political campaign either. In an interview published on June 2 on the Prodavinci website, the far-right candidate said that if he wins the presidential election he would work with the Venezuela Tierra de Gracia program presented by the far-right leader María Corina Machado in October 2023.
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The Venezuelan writer Luis Britto published two articles on July 13 and 20, entitled Do you speak English? and Do you speak English? 2, on Últimas Noticias, where he revealed that the extreme right presented its government plan in English and kept it hidden from Venezuelans using geo-fences that can only be circumvented using VPNs.
The Wilson Center has supported and disseminated on its website several books penned by the fugitive and a public policy fellow for this far-right think tank, far-right politician Leopoldo López. One of the books is entitled Crypto in Venezuela: Two Sides of a Coin.
(Diario VEA) by Yuleidys Hernández Toledo, with Orinoco Tribune content
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
OT/JRE/MCM
