On 22 August, in accordance with the Constitution, Venezuela's Supreme Court of Justice validated the election results and Maduro's victory.
Have you noticed how, after a month of media bombardment, Venezuela suddenly disappeared from the headlines, only to re-emerge after a week's lull? There's no mystery to it. On 22 August, in accordance with the Constitution, Venezuela's Supreme Court of Justice validated the election results and Maduro's victory, and the idea was to cover up this embarrassing news.
From now on, the hype can resume with complete peace of mind, and you can bet that we will continue to be told in every possible way that the opposition won the presidential election, that the street unanimously supports its candidate Urrutia, that Maduro tampered with the ballot since the polls had given him a 70% lead, and that he persists in refusing to publish the detailed results of the vote in order to cover up his misdeeds.
If we take the trouble to pull up the rug and examine the beautiful narrative of the heroic struggle of the pure and valiant democratic opposition against the corrupt and evil dictator Maduro, the starvation of his people, the reality appears much more nuanced.
Instead, it seems that today we are dealing with a repeat of the same scenario as in 2021, when attempts were made to sell us the kindly self-proclaimed president Juan Guaido, an opportunist who came out of nowhere but was immediately recognised by Washington, London and the other Western capitals as the legitimate president of Venezuela. After months of protests, his attempt to seize illegitimate power failed, and he was abandoned by his bosses and consigned to the dustbin of history, with London continuing to block Venezuela's gold reserves in the name of democracy.
Let me reassure you: the point here is not to defend Maduro or make him out to be a white dove who has fallen from the nest - he is not one - but to highlight a perfectly well-tried scheme that has been applied with remarkable systemic spirit to countries hostile to Western domination, The aim is to derail the ordinary electoral process in order to install a compliant government, along the lines of what happened in Belgrade at the end of the 1990s, in Ukraine in February 2014, in Bolivia in 2019, in Minsk in 2020 or, slightly differently, in Peru in 2022 with the imprisonment of the democratically elected president Pedro Castillo.
Were the Venezuelan elections rigged? The thousand foreign observers present at the poll do not think so (see Alan Mc Leod, Venezuela: As US Leaders call Fraud, US Observers Endorse Results, Consortium News, July 30, 2024). According to Natalie Benelli, a Swiss sociologist who monitored the elections, the electoral procedure and the voting machines were validated and monitored by all the parties, including the opposition parties, before, during and after the vote.
Each vote is recorded and checked both electronically and on paper, and the two results are then compared. No party has access to the codes that would enable it to manipulate the election, as each party has a part of the code that is inaccessible to the others. She also mentions that there were more demonstrations in support of the regime than those of the opposition, despite the fact that our media knowingly ignored them.
Above all, despite its obvious shortcomings, the Chavista regime has had to cope with unprecedented destruction of its economy after Obama proclaimed Venezuela a ‘threat to US national security’ in 2015. 90% of Venezuelan state revenue has been lost as a result of the 930 sanctions, on an unprecedented scale, leading to a fall in oil exports and the currency, the collapse of social programmes, public education and access to food, which is largely imported from abroad, and the impossibility of obtaining spare parts for transport, electricity infrastructure and factories. To make matters worse, Venezuela's right to vote at the United Nations has been suspended because it has not been able to pay its dues in dollars.
American investigative journalists have also pointed out that the official opposition candidate, Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia, lives in Florida, not Caracas, and that his diplomatic activities, particularly during his time in El Salvador in the 1980s, were largely at the service of the United States and the military dictatorship during the civil war that pitted them against the Farabundo Marti Front.
Similarly, the wealthy families who sponsor the opposition are strongly suspected of having financed the use of Colombian death squads to sow chaos in the country. The opposition's links with the United States are well established, as revealed by the Swiss media, which welcomed the fact that its unofficial candidate, Maria Corina Machado, had access to the White House. It should be remembered that she was declared ineligible in 2015 for having, despite her Venezuelan parliamentary status, agreed to become Panama's official representative at the Organisation of American States and for having called for economic sanctions against her own country! (Cf. Carlos Ron on the democratic tradition of Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution, Peoples Dispatch, August 16, 2024).
Finally, it is amusing to note that the programme of the opposition Plataforma Unitaria Democratica was drafted in English. Unsurprisingly, it focuses on the complete privatisation of major companies, particularly oil, by handing them over to American multinationals on the pretext of modernising and adapting to competition.
Despite the difficulties and the pockets of misery that have driven millions of people into exile, the regime has been able to restore agricultural production to the point where it is virtually self-sufficient in food, something that had not happened for decades, and to build millions of homes for the less privileged classes, which no doubt explains the loyalty to Chavism of those who have stayed.
So it has to be said that, after the attempts to overthrow and assassinate Chavez in 2002, to destabilise the economy in 2015, to stage a legal coup d'état in 2021 and to abolish the electoral results in 2024, the blackmail ‘either you change regime or we starve you out’ has once again not worked as hoped./MPF/./MPF/
By Guy Mettan
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