Venezuelan far-right politician María Corina Machado wearing a bike helmet and holding a blue purse, in a surreal video posted on social media on January 9, 2025. Photo: EDATV.NEWS.
By Clodovaldo Hernández – Jan 11, 2025
It is not nice to boast about the successes that one has as a political commentator, but from time to time one has to do it, because every grocer praises his own cheese. So I have to say, with great satisfaction, that my prediction of last week came true to the letter: they were going to be a few days of wishful thinking, with harsh reality crashing down on them, and days of perfidious staged incidents that would try to impose themselves as truths.
“Indeed, said and done / He hit the balls off the ceiling,” sang Venezuelan folk singer Simón Díaz in a witty humorous song, lost in the depths of his very flowery repertoire. The week that is ending was like this: the predictions-wishes guided the extremist leadership and part of the opposition support base, who wanted to believe that “this is over,” and ended up in an early frustration of the new year. One more frustration in a long history of disappointments and deceptions.
Well, let us be clear, this “prediction” that I made is not an achievement worth celebrating either. You do not need to be clairvoyant to predict the events regarding our opposition—it is ours, no one can take it away from us—because this political sector is more predictable than the end of a cowboy movie. And since they always repeat the same procedures and tricks, there is a high possibility that the results will also be repeated.
We must clarify that the leadership’s forecast-wish was one, and that of the support base, another, although they had a similar ending. The leadership predicted (and, in reality, wished) that the support base would fill the streets as in those years at the beginning of the century. They also wished that these people would go out ready to do anything, even to get hurt, and that a good part of them would show up armed, as recommended by the gangster of Miami, Iván Simonovis. But none of that happened. Neither did the streets get filled nor were the few attendees in the mood to die for Maria Corina or Edmundo. For this reason, in their secret corners, the leaders complained about the cowardice and lack of courage of the masses, whom they described as cowardly and fearful. (Well, in reality they used some more vulgar words, but I do not have to repeat them here.)
Meanwhile, the prediction-wish of many supporters was that the hard work of falling by the bullet and taking power by blood and fire would be done by the gringos, who are experts in that, either with their marines or with the hitmen and mercenaries hired by companies made in USA that specialize in killing people. They predicted (and, above all, wished) that the aforementioned forces would arrive, capture or assassinate President Maduro and the entire political and military high command, and put González Urrutia in the presidential chair (with great care, as befits the fragile load), who would immediately name Machado vice president and go to his penthouse to water the plants and feed the macaws. With the oligarch Machado in power, heads would begin to roll left and right (especially left) until Chavismo was eradicated, like bad weed.
But, as none of that happened either, those who harbored such humanistic and merciful desires fell into the clutches of depression and despair or they began to rant about such incapable and caricaturesque leaders (those were not the expressions used either, you already know that because, surely, you also heard the original ones… or said them!)
In short, the opposition leadership ended up blaming and cursing the supporters and viceversa: a far from encouraging scenario to start the year.
The shared end of the predictions-wishes of the leadership and the support base was that, one way or another, the swearing-in of the re-elected president, Nicolás Maduro, before the National Assembly was going to be prevented, and that, also in some way, González Urrutia was going to be sworn in. But if the marines and the hired assassins did not arrive on time, if the streets were not filled with furious anti-Chavista demonstrators, how were they going to prevent Maduro from taking office? How were they going to get González Urrutia to take office? The prediction, which was not a prediction but a wish, crashed and was abandoned on the side of the road, and its occupants are in the hospital, some with a reserved prognosis.
The staged incidents did not take hold
The failure of the leaders’ predictions-wishes at the origin forced them to put aside the staged incidents they had planned, their plan A. What was it? Well, the same as always (that is why it is easy to predict their actions, I insist): to lead their own people into a situation of confrontation with the Chavista masses or with state security forces, at which time the followers of Simonovis’ instructions would do their job of spilling enough blood to justify an international “humanitarian” intervention or a military uprising, wet dreams of the right, since it lost power in 1998.
Since the handful of attendees was not enough to materialize a staged incident of such apocalyptic dimensions, they opted for plan B, led by the histrionic main leader, Machado, who, by the way, should have had the most apotheotic of reappearances on the streets that day, another prediction-wish that completely failed.
After giving one of her characteristically strident and inconsequential speeches, in front of a few hundred people (the estimated number was given by Donald Trump himself, in a post on X), she was about to return to her shell as a brave commander in hiding when (here begins the climax of the staged incident) she was pursued by the regime’s henchmen, her motorcycle “caravan” was shot at and shot down, a motorcyclist was injured, and she was abducted and disappeared.
The explosive that every staged incident must contain immediately detonated: the support of media, journalists, communicators and influencers willing to spread fake news with maximum drama and zero professional or personal ethics.
At this point it was clear that each factor in the false flag operation knew what to do in a plan B like this. It was evident in the use of words like abduction (instead of arrest), disappearance (when only minutes had passed since the alleged incident), shooting, injuries, etc.
The media outlets went to the surreal extreme of using the phrase “unofficially confirmed” to give some credit to the alleged incident. In a place where, according to the same outlets, there were thousands of people, that is, thousands of cell phones, and a large number of professional photographers, none of them could capture, even with a bit of blur, the event itself or any of its consequences, such as, for example, the fall of the motorcyclists or the first aid to the person who, according to the story, had been shot.
And here a very pertinent reflection arises for those of us who embraced the profession of journalism many years ago and know the difference that should exist between a professional communicator and a citizen with a phone and a social media account. For truth be told: those who behaved most irresponsibly in this case (and it is not the first nor will it be the last) were those who have the journalism diploma framed on some wall in their house.
This has a corporate counterpart because the fake news, without the slightest verification, was spread by the most prominent media outlets in the US and Europe, a behavior that, almost certainly, was not the product of carelessness, but of the complicity of these newspapers, radio stations, television stations and websites with the macabre plan of the staged incident in progress.
Again, this is not a new behavior in these media, among which there are many that have never been good at anything, but also others that were once prestigious paradigms of good journalistic practice. What a pity! Or, as my mother used to say, “what a disgrace for a village when even the priest is crazy.”
It is obvious that the concerted purpose was to create a climate of indignation among Machado’s followers that would eventually lead them to take to the streets en masse and, eventually, to repeat situations of violence that had such terrible results in other times. In other words, that plan B would lead to plan A. The false abduction could also have served as an excuse for the marines or other thugs to enter the country to rescue Machado, the soldier Ryan and, in passing, the Argentinian gendarme Gallo.
The falsehood, already spread by the infamous media and communicators, was launched by the Comando por Venezuela social media account, that is, a direct source of María Corina Machado’s plan, therefore official (although very unreliable for a journalist who was not in the middle of it). To top it off, the lie was also replicated by a variety of Latin American presidents and ex-presidents.
By the way, all of them, even the “leftists,” demanded the immediate and unconditional release of the supposedly detained person, without having the slightest idea of what happened. It is the way to feed the trend according to which Venezuela is a failed state and, therefore, has no right to apply its own law in its territory. It is what we call around here “pissing outside the pot.” But that is another topic.
In short, the truth is that an event that never happened could have triggered a wave of riots, a civil war or a “humanitarian bombing,” which shows that these staged incidents are not an innocent political move, but a serious crime that has led to physical destruction of countries and genocide of their peoples.
Twist of comic realism
At this point, the staged incident of Machado’s “abduction” took a turn towards magic realism, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say comic realism, when the lady showed up on social media platforms, in a video recorded in a location with a certain bucolic hue, in which she, hooded and with a tone of a fashionable brat, contradicted her own party command and said that she had not been arrested, implying that she had cleverly eluded her pursuers, although with the unfortunate loss of her little blue purse.
The denial of a staged incident like this could not go without leaving the members of the battalion of painters who had rushed to decorate it with lurid colors in a bad position. They were all left hanging by the brush. Among the disoriented were the figures, figurines and extras of the Latin American right (and some of the “left”) who had already launched into the spiel of unconditional liberation, as well as, of course, the gang of journalists and influencers who had shaken their audiences with the fake news.
It was painful to see how some of these journalists tried to find explanations for the strange “appearance” of Machado (who, apparently, has taken the Sayona thing seriously). They dared to launch hypotheses such as that the video was fake, made with AI, that behind the cameraman there was an evil agent of the dictatorship pointing an AK rifle at Machado or that she had been drugged, because that tender little voice and that concern for the lost blue purse did not fit at all with someone who pretends to be an imitation of Iron Lady or Wonder Woman.
The outcome of the staged incident had the effect of a coup de grace for the supporters and the rest of the opposition leadership, which had already been exhausted by the absence of the marines or the other thugs and by the low attendance at the mobilizations. That day, Thursday, January 9, they only had the option of placing their hopes in the other prediction-wish: that on Friday González Urrutia would arrive in the country, accompanied by a group of former Latin American presidents (corrupt, inept and even a pedophile, but that did not matter so much) and would be sworn in by no one knows who (that did not matter either), instead of Maduro.
That is to say, the purpose-desire was focused on another pseudo-event and crashed against the reality of the five Venezuelan public powers functioning harmoniously in a ceremony carried out with the solemnity it deserves and in a Federal Legislative Palace surrounded by people.
That other expected staged incident (the false swearing-in) never happened. González Urrutia and his cronies of dubious moral character did not fly to Venezuela, their plane was not intercepted by a Sukhoi armed with artillery, nor did the aerial war break out over the Caribbean Sea. In the afternoon, the woman who was not kidnapped appeared—without the purse—claiming that the dictatorship is gasping, on the ropes, about to fall and that Edmundo will come soon and, then, we will be free and happy. Will someone tell me that they are not predictable?
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
OT/JRE/SC
Clodovaldo Hernández
Venezuelan journalist and writer. He writes regularly for La IguanaTV, Supuesto Negado, and Mision Verdad.
