Sunday July 7 Webinar: Venezuela Chooses: What is at Stake in the Coming Elections? (Part 1)

Caracas (OrinocoTribune.com)—The International Manifesto Group and the Orinoco Tribune invite you to a series of two webinars, jointly organized to highlight the relevance and the regional and international implications of the upcoming July 28 Venezuelan presidential elections. The first of these webinars will be held this Sunday, July 7, with the second scheduled for Sunday, July 14.

The two webinars are presented with the co-sponsorship of the Alliance for Global Justice, Venezuela Solidarity Campaign (UK), Geopolitical Economy Report, Louis Riel Bolivarian Circle, Fire This Time Movement for Social Justice, the Venezuela Solidarity Network (US), and MintPress News.

A roster of outstanding panelists have already confirmed their participation for both the first webinar, scheduled for Sunday at 12:00pm (EST) and for the second webinar, scheduled for Sunday, July 14, also at 12:00pm (EST). The organizers will additionally be putting together a post-election webinar with relevant speakers, tentatively planned for mid-September.

Below, you read the details for the series of webinars, entitled: “Venezuela Chooses: What is at Stake in the Coming Elections?”

Speakers
Part 1: Sunday, July 7, 12 p.m. (EST), 5 p.m. (London)

Joe Emersberger
María Páez de Victor
William Camacaro
Francisco Domínguez
Saheli Chowdhury, moderator

You can register here, by following the link below, or by scanning the QR code in the poster.

Part 2: Sunday, July 14, 12 p.m. (EST), 5 p.m. (London)

Diego Sequera
Steve Ellner
Ben Norton
Alan MacLeod
Radhika Desai, moderator

You can register here, by following the link, or by scanning the QR code in the poster.

Background
Venezuela goes to the polls on July 28, 2024, to elect its president for coming six-year term that will begin on January 10, 2025. This election is taking place amidst a hybrid war against Venezuela led by the United States and its imperial allies, encompassing the economic, financial, media, and geopolitical spheres.

This hybrid war involves 936 unilateral coercive measures against Venezuela, imposed by the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the European Union, that have negatively impacted all walks of life in Venezuela, not to mention recurrent coup attempts, assassination attempts, terror plots, and a fake government that nobody elected but that has access to Venezuela’s assets abroad with US blessings and collusion. In the international sphere, this war includes attempts to isolate Venezuela in multilateral instances, including the United Nations; these attempts have been largely unsuccessful, while in the mainstream media sphere there is a constant smear campaign against Venezuela’s popularly elected and constitutional authorities.

Despite all this, President Nicolás Maduro has continued the radical transformation of Venezuela that began under Commander Hugo Chávez. Under President Maduro’s leadership, Venezuela has weathered the storm: shortages and hyperinflation have been overcome, and in a remarkable transition that has not been televised, Venezuela has become self-sufficient across many sectors of industry and social services.

Similarly, in the political field, the Maduro administration’s strategy of dialogue and consensus has brought the extreme-right sectors back to the electoral path after years of abstentionism and violence, as evidenced by nine candidates representing diverse sections of the opposition in the presidential race. Nevertheless, the US and its Venezuelan vassals remain committed to their imperial “regime change” policy, with the US Congress now threatening to deny the legitimacy of the July 28 election result, claiming the elections are not “free and fair.” Simultaneously, the far-right opposition maintains a constant stream of media propaganda crying “fraud” even before the election has taken place.

These actions are probably due to the fact that as the election date approaches, all opinion polls carried out in Venezuela show the incumbent candidate Nicolás Maduro to be the clear favorite, with voting intentions for him crossing 50% across all polls regardless of source. Therefore, it appears that the Venezuelan far-right is resorting to its usual modus operandi to destabilize the strength of the Chavista movement, something that has had disastrous consequences for Venezuelans time and again, such as the guarimbas and violence of 2014 and 2017, or the self-proclamation of Juan Guaidó’s fictional government in 2019, accompanied by a violent coup attempt.

It is evident that the stage is being set for the US and its imperial allies to declare the Venezuelan elections fraudulent and illegitimate, and to continue its regime-change efforts against a sovereign nation that is at the forefront of the multipolar and democratic transitions in Latin America.

The webinar series will feature a wide range of experts across multiple organizations who will analyze the various aspects and challenges of this decisive moment in Venezuela’s history and the implications for the future.

July 28, an Equation With Multiple Unknowns

Introducing the speakers
María Páez de Victor is a sociologist, born in Venezuela and educated in Caracas, New York, Mexico City, England, and Canada. For several years she taught sociology of health and medicine, as well as health and environmental policies, at the University of Toronto. She is an expert in policy analysis and impact assessment, specialising in the areas of health, environment, and energy.

Joe Emersberger is an engineer, writer, and activist based in Canada, with Ecuadorian roots. His writing, focused on the Western media’s coverage of the Americas, can be found on FAIR.org, CounterPunch.org, TheCanary.co, Telesur English, ZComm.org, and Orinoco Tribune, which has published many of his writings. Joe is co-author, alongside Justin Podur, of the book Extraordinary Threat: The US Empire, the Media, and Twenty Years of Coup Attempts in Venezuela.

William Camacaro is a Venezuelan-American activist. He is national joint coordinator for the Alliance for Global Justice in the US. He is a co-founder of the Alberto Lovera Bolivarian Circle of New York, and Senior Analyst for the Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA). He has published in several progressive news outlets, and has organized delegations to Ecuador, Bolivia, and Venezuela.

Francisco Domínguez is a specialist on Latin America’s contemporary political economy, about which he has published extensively. A former refugee from Pinochet’s Chile, he is National Secretary of the Venezuela Solidarity Campaign in the UK. He is also involved in solidarity activities with Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Colombia, and Mexico. He makes regular contributions to various alternative media. He is co-author of Right-Wing Politics in the New Latin America and author of pamphlet, Maduro: A decade continuing Chavez’s socialist anti-imperialist struggle.

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 currently writes about geopolitics, global conflict, and Latin American and Venezuelan history and politics.

Steve Ellner is currently an Associate Managing Editor of Latin American Perspectives. He is a retired professor from the Universidad de Oriente in Venezuela, where he taught economic history and political science from 1977 to 2003. Among his more than a dozen books on Latin American politics and history is his soon-to-be released edited Latin America’s Pink Tide: Breakthroughs and Shortcomings (Rowman & Littlefield). He has published on the op-ed pages of the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.

Ben Norton is the founder and editor of the independent news website Geopolitical Economy Report, where he does original reporting in both English and Spanish. Benjamin has reported from numerous countries, including Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Ecuador, Honduras, Colombia, and more. His journalistic work has been published in dozens of media outlets, and he has done interviews on a wide range of relevant news outlets.

Alan MacLeod is a member of the Glasgow University Media Group and a Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles. He has also contributed to FAIR.org, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, and Common Dreams.

Moderators:
Saheli Chowdhury is a co-editor of the Orinoco Tribune. She is from West Bengal, India, studying physics for a profession, but with a passion for writing. She is interested in history and popular movements around the world, especially in the Global South.

Radhika Desai is professor at the Department of Political Studies and the director of the Geopolitical Economy Research Group at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada. She is the author of several books, with topics ranging across geopolitical economy, India, and the multipolar world. She is also the author of numerous articles on several relevant academic magazines, journals, and edited collections.

Special for Orinoco Tribune by staff

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