Venezuelans May Not Elect Their President, or the Saga of a Persecuted Nation

The latest is Trump’s wild accusation during the presidential debate on September 10, that Venezuela is free of crime because it sent all its criminals to the USA. It is so fantastical that it is actually very funny, because in reality, the Venezuelan criminals in the USA are those recruited by the CIA to overthrow the government of President Maduro.

Professor Noam Chomsky – not known for giving spurious or fake news – in his seminal opus Manufacturing Consent (p. xvii) reported there are 20,000 more public relations agents working to doctor the news today than there are journalists writing it. Hence the reason the news of Venezuela’s recent presidential elections has been vilified and lied about all over by the world’s media. It started way before the actual election date, preparing the terrain to infect people’s minds with the idea that the election would be fraudulent.

The mainstream media, now more than ever, is openly functioning as a propaganda machine for Washington’s narratives. These narratives reflect faithfully the interests of the US government and the powerful economic elites that in fact, own the media and, many would say, even the USA government itself.  The centralization of the media is such that about two dozen corporations control almost the entirety of the US media.

So, it is no wonder that the anti-Venezuelan slogans world-wide have been: “Nicolás Maduro is a dictator”; “The presidential elections in Venezuela were a fraud”; “The opposition candidate, González, won the elections by a landslide”; “The Venezuelan Electoral Authority (CNE) is biased”; “The Venezuelan election process is corrupt”; “The Venezuelan Supreme Court (TSJ) is an instrument of Maduro”; “It was the government that carried out the violence that occurred a day after the elections”; “The opposition candidates are threatened and harassed”; “Maduro blocked M.C. Machado from being a candidate”; “There was no massive cyberattack.” etc. etc. etc.

And reference to any concrete evidence be damned!

Suddenly, journalists and politicians who obviously have never read  the Venezuelan  Constitution, or anything up to date about  Venezuela’s political and legal system, who do not speak Spanish and most who have never even been to Venezuela,  instantly became experts in Venezuelan constitutional and electoral law.  They condemn anything and everything that the Venezuelan government, its president and its legal authorities say and do.

The media, USA and its subservient allies, paint a bleak picture of the country – never of course, admitting that the overwhelming reason for much of the Venezuelan people’s economic suffering has been due to the almost 1000 illegal economic sanctions they inflicted on them. These economic woes are used as proof that Nicolás Maduro is a bad president, an authoritarian who must be relieved of his position for the sake of “democracy” and the “people”. The policemen of democracy have spoken!

Add to this a myriad of continuous CIA conspiracies and sabotages.

Just this last year there were five assassination attempts against the president. It is not surprising since Washington, like in the films, placed a price of $15 million on the head of Nicolás Maduro, while the US Southern Command lurks threateningly near Venezuela’s coast.  Citizens of the USA, I appeal to you: do you agree that your own government should act like common thugs? Does anybody there feel any shame that Washington treats the head of state of a country that poses no threat to the USA, has done it no harm, and with which the USA is not at war, be treated with such appalling disrespect?  What if the president of the USA was to be treated that way?  But then that would hardly be novel or necessary since the USA has a dark history of killing its own presidents.

Why this focus of Venezuela? Is it the only nation with economic problems, with a migration situation, with election stresses? Does the USA not have some real heavy-duty problems, both internally and internationally, on which it should focus its attention and resources?  If I were a US taxpayer and citizen, I would seriously question Washington’s unhealthy, perverted and unintelligent obsession with Venezuela. What is it about Venezuela that warrants this kind of attention from this superpower?

The answer is and has always been the oil and the defiance of a Venezuela that asserts its sovereign ownership of that oil.

Measured in millions of oil barrels these are the extent of the proven oil reserves in the world:

1. Venezuela:            304 000 m

2. Saudi Arabia        259 000 m

3. Iran                       209 000 m

4. Canada                 170 000 m

9. USA                        48,300 m

This means that if present consumption stands, Venezuela has oil for the next 1,374 years.

There are no barriers stopping the USA and its corporations from buying Venezuelan oil – except their own sanctions. But that is not enough. The USA wants to own or control the oil. And they want a supine government ruling Venezuela that will meekly promote neoliberal policies to open up the country to privatization and corporate dominance of its resources. This is Washington’s desired future for Venezuela and is at the core of US policy towards it. It is an attempt to resurrect the Monroe Doctrine and its illusion of neo-colonization, which has been roundly rejected by the Venezuelan people who have a different vision for their country.

The most respected pollster in Venezuela, Oscar Schémel, has carried out reliable, statistically valid and verifiable studies of Venezuelan public opinion.  These are some of his key findings:

• The majority of Venezuelans attribute most of the country’s economic problems to the foreign sanctions imposed on the country.
• 86% reject the sanctions
• 90% state that sanctions affect all the population
• 69% are content with the economic model of the country described as a mix of socialism and capitalism
• The great majority do not want any radical change in the country’s economic model, and they specifically reject a purely neoliberal capitalist model.
• Chavismo has become a political culture with values and emotions, not a simple ideology, but a part of the national identity.  The ultra-right has no similar roots in most of the population.

This is a big problem for the ultra-right opposition that Washington backs, because its aim is to impose a strict neoliberal economic model. Its leaders stem from the privileged, racist social class that misruled the country for forty years and kept its distance and ill-gotten money from the common people. Its present leader, M. Corina Machado, scion of that comprador elite, has stated many times that she would privatize the oil industry, which is why Washington backs her. The privatization of oil is anathema to most of the population which is why she published her election promises in English on a USA website – not for the eyes of Venezuelan voters!

A multi-faceted coup d’etat unfolded before, during and after the elections. (See the evidential presentation that Samuel Moncada, ambassador of Venezuela, gave to the United Nations).

M. Corina Machado led this fascist coup, with the help of a seemingly endless amount of funds to pay her way. The aim was never an electoral win, as they knew that they did not have the popular votes to succeed democratically. It was always a coup, chaos, and then foreign intervention:

• Firstly, she orchestrated a faux “opposition primaries’ supposedly to pick one unifying candidate for the ultra-right parties. It ended up with many voting centres in private homes and to top it off, all votes and tallies were burnt! So there was no way of verifying the millions of votes she said she received. Other opposition leaders were banned from running so, in effect, she was the only possible winner. This was her way of presenting herself as the “elected” leader of the opposition. It was a total farce.
• There were 9 opposition leaders representing about 30 opposition parties running in the presidential election, not in Machado’s camp. They were furious at her bogus primaries but the mainstream media ran with this and hailed her, and only her, as the leader of the opposition.
• Machado thought her disqualification to run for office would be set aside, indeed she thought the Barbados Accord would reinstate her. Venezuela authorities were adamant: in 2015 she was duly and legally barred from elections for malfeasance and treason as she had asked for military intervention in Venezuela. This decision was reconfirmed by Venezuela’s Supreme Court in 2024.
• Her next ploy was to get a complete unknown, Edmundo González, to run as a “stand-in” candidate: something that has no legal foundation. González even admitted publicly that he would step aside if he won, and that Machado would take over – a legal impossibility.

The election took place peacefully but with the underlying backdrop of political blackmail and threat of foreign intervention: the opposition promising that the sanctions would cease if they won. The government faced a very unequal and unjust situation as the illegal sanctions were a great handicap.

• A massive cyberattack of 30 million attacks per minute for two consecutive days delayed the full count of the votes. Despite that gargantuan cyberattack, completion of the count, with 80% of votes counted results were released the day of the elections which indicated that President Maduro was the winner. In the end, five days later, the full count was able to be released: Maduro won by 51.95% whereas Gonzalez obtained 43.18%.

On the day following the election a carefully planned two prong attack was launched.

Firstly, the aim was to delegitimize the electoral process which has been recognized as one of the best in the world.  The day before the results came out, Machado released bogus tallies (“actas”). These are the tallies each party witnesses at the voting stations signs as assurance that the votes at the stations were accurately counted.  The opposition-led propaganda created a hysterical furor demanding the publishing of all the tallies of every witness of all the voting machines in the country. These tallies have never been published in the past 30 elections carried out. The results are normally presented in full by state, municipality, voting station and voting machine.  But this was an opportunity to give the impression that the government was “hiding” something to cover fraud. President Maduro confronted this hysteria by asking for what the Constitution prescribes; that is, that the Supreme Court (TSJ) review the results given by the CNE. After a full audit the CNE results were ratified by the Supreme Court.

However, this was not enough to get the US and its allies to admit that Nicolás Maduro had won fair and square, because they charge (with no evidence) that the judges of the Supreme Court  were “hand-picked” by Maduro and that the Court is corrupt. This is indeed rich coming from the United States where their judges have indeed been hand-picked by then President Trump to suit his political agenda. It is the Venezuelan congress that picks the judges after a very rigorous selection process in which care is taken that judges from the opposition are included. But who cares about these details? The point is to sling the mud in this relentless propaganda war against Venezuela making sure that some of it sticks.

The second attack on the day following the election was the unleashing of terror by well-known criminal gangs in service of Machado to attack community leaders, Chavista headquarters, schools, clinics, food warehouses, buses, statues, and community centres. Chavista leaders were attacked, two of them women who were hacked to death. Twenty-five people were killed and more than 190 injured.

Machado also orchestrated what she called her “little commandos” (“comanditos”). Knowing that by law minors cannot be jailed, with a vile and disgusting tactic, she recruited children, giving them not only dollars, but also drugs (the soldier’s drug CAPTAGON). Many of the arrested were minors. Of 100 arrested, shockingly 86 were minors, hence the reason Machado called them “little” commandos.

The latest event in what the Attorney General of the country calls a mediocre comic operetta, was the flight of the stand-in presidential candidate Edmundo Gonzalez to Spain.  The day before the elections, knowing he would lose, Gonzalez took refuge in the Netherlands embassy. He forgot all the bravado about leading the country. After a few days, he moved next door to the Spanish embassy to seek asylum. Negotiations were conducted, with President Maduro himself involved, in which a deal was made. Gonzales would receive an official pass to leave the country, and Spain would be allowed to send a military plane to Venezuela to take him to Spain. In return, Gonzalez agreed to recognize the Venezuelan institutions, Maduro’s electoral win, and not to say he won the election nor that he is the president.

And so ended the short-lived role of Gonzalez in this ultra-right political farce or so it seemed because now we learn that the Spanish Congress and Gonzalez himself have already started to renege on this agreement. Gonzalez publicly vowed to continue the fight against the supposed fraud. No honour there

President Maduro Honors Venezuelan Military Officials Sanctioned by the US

Meanwhile, in Venezuelan life goes. Its people feel optimistic about their future. A poll carried out by the conservative Catholic university concluded that 95% feels optimistic about the future, 93% feel better times will come despite uncertainty, and 63% are moderately optimistic of their future in Venezuela.

The continuing persecution of Venezuela by foreign forces has not broken the Venezuelan spirit and national identity. National aspirations and the determination to stay an uncolonized, free and sovereign nation that plots its own course, remain intact.

Often artists reveal what intellectuals struggle to communicate. In the 1960s, singer Tom Lehrer wrote a song that today has not lost its bite as he points to violence as the US’s preferred instrument of diplomacy. Here below are some of his stanzas:

When someone makes a move
Of which we don’t approve
Who is it that always intervenes?
U.N. and O.A.S.,
They have their place, I guess
But first send the Marines!

For might makes right
And till they’ve seen the light
They’ve got to be protected
All their rights respected
Till somebody we like can be elected!

MPV/OT