Poster for the webinar Defending Bolivarian Venezuela Against Yet Another US-Led Coup Attempt. Photo: Orinoco Tribune.
Caracas (OrinocoTribune.com)—The International Manifesto Group and the Orinoco Tribune invite you to the third webinar of a series organized jointly to highlight the relevance and the regional and international implications of the July 28 Venezuelan presidential elections. This webinar will focus on election day and the post-electoral developments, as witnessed by a group of primarily international analysts.
The webinar is being presented with the co-sponsorship of the Alliance for Global Justice, Venezuela Solidarity Campaign (UK), Fire This Time Movement for Social Justice, and the Venezuela Solidarity Network (US).
A group of outstanding panelists have already confirmed their participation in the webinar, scheduled for Sunday, August 25, at 12:00 noon (EST).
The details of the webinar are presented below:
Date and time
Sunday, August 25, 12 p.m. (EST & Caracas), 5 p.m. (London, UK)
Speakers
Diego Sequera
Francisco Domínguez
Arnold August
Ivan Pankratz
Linda Christian
Alison Bodine
Dimitri Lascaris
Jesús Rodríguez-Espinoza (moderator)
You can register here by clicking on the link or by scanning the QR code on the poster.
Background
The Venezuelan presidential elections, held on July 28, concluded with the re-election of President Nicolás Maduro for the next presidential term (2025-2031), with about 51.9% of the votes, according to the second bulletin released by the National Electoral Council (CNE). Although he received over 7% more votes than his nearest rival, Edmundo González Urrutia of the far-right coalition Unitary Platform, the far-right opposition has refused to recognize the results, claiming that President Maduro and the governing United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) committed electoral fraud.
Just after the initial declaration of the results in the early morning of July 29 and the far-right’s non-recognition of them, violent protests erupted in several parts of Venezuela, causing widespread material and human losses, including loss of lives. These protests were reminiscent of the guarimbas in 2014 and 2017 and the violence that accompanied Juan Guaidó’s coup attempt in 2019. In parallel, the CNE’s data transmission system suffered an unprecedented cyberattack that delayed the transmission of results, as reported by the CNE while announcing its first bulletin. Taking advantage of this situation, far-right politician María Corina Machado published falsified voting records as “evidence” of electoral fraud and launched a media campaign presenting González Urrutia as the alleged winner of the July 28 elections. This narrative has been repeated and inflated by mainstream media outlets across the world and on social media. As expected, the United States declared its recognition of González as the “president” of Venezuela, and some of its vassals in Latin America and Europe have followed suit. However, the US government backtracked a few days later, announcing that it was monitoring the results of the elections very closely.
Was there really an electoral fraud in Venezuela? Is there a possibility of executing such a fraud and stealing an election in Venezuela? There were over 900 international electoral observers and 1,300 foreign journalists accredited by the CNE to witness Venezuela’s electoral process. What do they have to say about the elections and the fraud claims? To hear directly from some such observers and journalists, International Manifesto Group and Orinoco Tribune are jointly organizing a webinar on August 25, 2024, where we will be joined by several experts who were present in Venezuela during the electoral process.
Speakers
Diego Sequera is a journalist, writer, translator, editor, and political analyst based in Caracas, Venezuela. He is a founding member of Misión Verdad, where he writes about geopolitics, global conflict, and Latin American and Venezuelan history and politics.
Francisco Domínguez is a specialist on Latin America’s contemporary political economy, on which he has published extensively. A former refugee from Pinochet’s Chile, he is also the national secretary of the Venezuela Solidarity Campaign in the UK. He is involved in solidarity activities with Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Colombia, and Mexico. He makes regular contributions to various alternative media outlets. Domínguez is co-author of Right-Wing Politics in the New Latin America and author of the pamphlet Maduro: A decade continuing Chavez’s socialist anti-imperialist struggle.
Arnold August, M.A. in Political Science from McGill University, where he also completed two years of Ph.D. studies in the same field, is a Montreal-based author and journalist specializing in geopolitics and international relations, Global South, multipolarity, Latin America, ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance for Our America), Venezuela, and Cuba. He also focuses on Palestine, Indigenous peoples, China, BRICS, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). He has visited Venezuela five times, including for the July 28, 2024, presidential elections as an international observer, and has written over 40 articles on Venezuela, many of them also published in Spanish and French. From his 2013 book (published in English and Spanish) on comparative political systems, Cuba and Its Neighbours: Democracy in Motion, the section on Venezuela is still very applicable. His website: www.arnoldaugust.com
Ivan Pankratz is a Venezuela solidarity activist based in Winnipeg, Canada. In 2007, he went to West Africa, where he led workshops for local teachers. He is a math and physical education teacher.
Linda Christian works with the International Manifesto Group as an administrator. She completed a Ph.D. in history specializing in the history of the French Revolution during the Terror and Thermidorian periods. She was an international observer for the July 28 presidential elections in Venezuela.
Alison Bodine is a social justice and antiwar organizer and author based in Vancouver, Canada. She is on the editorial board of the Fire This Time newspaper, coordinator of the Fire This Time Venezuela Solidarity Campaign, and a founding member of the Venezuela Solidarity Network. She is the author of the book Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Venezuela (Battle of Ideas Press). She regularly publishes articles on climate justice, migrant and refugee issues, and Venezuela. Her articles have been published by Fire This Time, Venezuelanalysis, Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA), Common Dreams, Monthly Review, and CounterPunch. Bodine has traveled as a speaker and participant in international antiwar and anti-imperialist events in Cuba, Venezuela, Ireland, England, and the US. She has been an international elections observer in Venezuela on three occasions, including the 2024 presidential elections.
Sunday July 14 Webinar: Venezuela Chooses: What is at Stake in the Coming Elections? (Part 2)
Dimitri Lascaris is a lawyer, journalist and activist. After graduating from the University of Toronto Faculty of Law in 1991, Dimitri began his legal career at the Wall Street law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, first working from the firm’s New York offices and then joining the firm’s offices in Paris, France. In 2012, Dimitri was selected by Canadian Lawyer Magazine as one of the 25 most influential lawyers in Canada. In 2013, he was named by Canadian Business Magazine as one of the 50 most influential persons in Canadian business. Canadian Business Magazine described Dimitri as the “fiercest legal advocate for shareholder rights.” In 2023, Dimitri was nominated as one of Canadian Lawyer’s 25 most influential lawyers in Canada.
Jesús Rodríguez-Espinoza (moderator) is an expert in international relations, Venezuelan politics, and media and communication. He served several years as Consul General of Venezuela in Chicago (United States). Before that, he was part of the foundational editorial team of the Venezuelan online media Aporrea. He is the founder and editor of the Venezuelan anti-imperialist news outlet Orinoco Tribune.
Special for Orinoco Tribune by staff
OT/JRE/SC/SF
