US sanctions on Venezuela are acts of war, and election interference
Talk given at a webinar on July 23 organized by the Sanctions Kill Campaign and the Venezuela Solidarity Network
Thanks very much to everyone involved in organizing this webinar. I’m honored to have been asked to speak. I’ll be putting a transcript of this talk on my Substack page for people interested in citations that support what I say.
My task here is to discuss western media coverage of Venezuela’s upcoming election. I feel I must start by saying that the same big western media outlets that dare to impugn Venezuela’s election are, as I speak, facilitating a genocide in Gaza. In today’s world, where anyone with an iphone and an internet connection can potentially do very devastating journalism, the western media is not the effective gatekeeper that it used to be in the pre-Internet era. The same way we can readily access horrific images from Gaza every day, we can also easily access images of the huge and boisterous rallies Maduro has held all over Venezuela during his election campaign. We can easily access Telesur, Orinoco Tribune, VenezuelaAnalysis, Fair.org, Mint Press News and countless other voices online that refute in great detail what the nazified western media claims about Venezuela.
Nevertheless, western media will try to impose as much ignorance as it can, trap our minds within western imperial assumptions - and encourage the casual bigotry that has been fostered within western societies for centuries. Their power to do so is reduced from what it was decades ago, but it remains important, unfortunately.
As elections approach in Venezuela, we get the same toxic journalism about Venezuela that we always see from western media but more of it, and with a much heavier emphasis on polls.
I’ll pick an example from Bloomberg that was published on July 20. You really only need one example because it follows the same general pattern that’s been repeated constantly in one Reuters or Associated Press article after another over the past few months.
Bloomberg claimed that the election will be marred by (I quote) “an insufficient number of credible international observers this year” and that (I quote) “most credible polls in early July showed an average 20-point lead in the race by the opposition”. Bloomberg’s article does not explain why those polls and “international observers” like the Carter Center (whom it named) deserve to be labeled “credible”. I did a talk a few weeks ago that explained in detail why the Carter Center, despite not being as bad as other western imperial outfits, does not deserve the “credible” label.
Going back to the polls, Venezuelan economist Franciso Rodriguez, who is anti-Maduro, pointed out on Twitter that opposition-aligned pollsters have since 2015, and especially since 2017, greatly exaggerated opposition support. He did a mathematical adjustment of the polls for the upcoming election that took into account the inaccuracy of pollsters after 2015. Based on his analysis, he concluded that the opposition candidate (Edmundo Gonzalez who is a stand-in for the disqualified Maria Corina Machado) probably has a statistically negligible lead over Maduro of 0.2 of a percentage point, so absolutely nothing like the 20 point lead that Bloomberg claims.
In 2017, the opposition was widely predicted to sweep regional elections according to the pollsters Bloomberg labels as “credible”. The exact opposite happened. Maduro and his allies swept those elections, and fraud could not begin to explain the results. That’s a key point. Fraud has never been able to explain the inaccuracy of opposition-aligned pollsters. The Bloomberg article actually mentioned the 2017 regional elections in order to point to what it calls “proof of vote tampering” in one state that year. What the Bloomberg article didn’t tell readers is that the alleged vote tampering accounted for less than 5,000 votes in an election that the opposition lost (in the nationwide tally) by 700,000 votes. In other words, those elections showed that the pollsters Bloomberg labels as credible are not credible at all. Bloomberg knows this of course. How could Bloomberg know about less than 5,000 disputed votes in one state, but not know about the wildly inaccurate polling before those elections? And even if Bloomberg had no background knowledge, the obvious question any credible journalist will ask about a pollster is “How accurate has it been in the past?” But ignoring that obvious question allows Bloomberg to impugn the election results in advance if they don’t go the way Bloomberg wants - in other words, if Maduro wins. And if you discredit a Maduro victory in advance, then you are also helping the US justify its sanctions. That‘s what Bloomberg and all these outlets are up to when they uncritically report these opposition-aligned polls over and over again.
According to Rodriguez's analysis the election will likely be extremely close. Of course, there is no guarantee that the polling errors of the past will be repeated on Sunday. The errors could get smaller, stay the same as in recent years, or get even larger. Rodriguez was shocked by the regional election results of 2017 because the polling errors that year got much larger than they had previously been. But nobody should be shocked by a Maduro win, even a large Maduro win. The western media wants us to think that’s impossible without fraud. It knows that many casual readers will not delve into the details of how fraud-proof Venezuela’s electoral system is. So ignoring the track record of pollsters is a clever propaganda tactic.
Moving on, Bloomberg and all the others also have very little to say about Maria Corina Machado, who is the real driving force behind the Edmundo Gonzalez campaign. She is described merely as an opposition leader, sometimes as a “fierce critic” of Maduro, who has been banned from public office. That’s an incredibly light punishment for what she has done, but you’d never learn that from the likes of Bloomberg.
In talking about Machado, news articles never say that she has repeatedly tried to incite a foreign military invasion of Venezuela. For example, on February 11 of 2019, as many of us feared that Trump might go through with an invasion of Venezuela (US troops were menacingly stationed on the Colombian border as part of an aid stunt) Machado publicly called on the opposition-controlled national assembly at the time to invoke article 187 (sub-section 11) of Venezuela’s constitution which allows the national assembly to authorize foreign troops on Venezuela's soil. In the same speech in 2019 she called on the international community to apply the “responsibility to protect” doctrine to Venezuela. That’s the doctrine liberals invoked to justify NATO’s destruction of Libya in 2011. In the same speech, she also called on the Venezuela’s military to defy Maduro and accept the Trump-appointed Juan Guado as their Commander- in-Chief.
More often, Machado's repeated calls for foreign invasion take the form of incitement - depicting her country as a grave threat to the world. She has often done this in English on her Twitter account. Machado has tweeted for example “Venezuela is a hub for international organized crime, anti-western forces, drug trafficking and terrorism. We must act now!” She tweets this incitement in English but Western media hide it anyway. And I don’t even have time to get into her involvement with multiple US-backed coup attempts since 2002.
You cannot overemphasize the cynicism of the Bloomberg article and countless others just like it that make no mention of any of that. Maria Corina Machado should be in a Venezuelan jail. Unless you accept that the US and its allies have the right to rule the world as emperors, that's an inescapable conclusion. But there is no room for that perspective in the so-called free press that western imperialists claim they have.
If Venezuela was able to cripple the USA’s economy, if it made it perfectly clear that it would only stop doing so if a presidential candidate wins in November that it approves of, what conclusions would we draw from that? Wouldn't that be called illegitimate election interference? In this wildly hypothetical scenario, Venezuela’s actions would be called acts of war. The “election interference” aspect would be ignored completely. The only thing debated in western media would be how heavily to bomb Venezuela in retaliation for its acts of war.
As much as the media hides information, there are also times when it can’t help but reveal key truths, not out of integrity, but because of a deep seated belief that Venezuelans must submit to US-led rule.
I’ll leave you with some examples that I think are very important.
In 2003, two months after an opposition-led lockout of the oil industry devastated Venezuela’s economy but failed to overthrow the government, the New York Times reporter Juan Forero nonchalantly wrote:
“For some opposition leaders the strategy now is to lie low and watch the economy worsen, hoping that the president will be dragged down with it.”
Economic warfare and the hope it will install US-allies goes way back, as does the western media’s normalization of it.
Another, even more striking example, came in a June 9, 2017:Cry for Venezuela by Toronto Globe & Mail reporter Stephanie Nolen. It was a long article that was clearly intended to generate outrage against Maduro, but deep into the article Nolen wrote (I quote)
The opposition's chief hope is that the Maduro regime finally will go completely broke. When the food runs out entirely, the thinking goes, the streets will fill and people won't go home until he leaves
Nolen and her editors could not be bothered to remove these incredibly damning lines from their article. Canada’s allies in Venezuela want the country to starve but Nolen and her editors didn’t notice anything shocking about that. Not surprising, if you see the US and its allies as the world’s rightful rulers.
Another example: a Reuters article of August 28, 2020 mentioned in passing that
“...the United States this month seized four cargoes of Iranian fuel bound for Venezuela, where fuel shortages are once again worsening.”
Again, that’s another perfunctory mention of a US crime against humanity: an act of war against a civilian population.
Final example is from a New York Times editorial of July 22, 2023 It stated that US sanctions are (I quote) “deeply unpopular” in Venezuela. So it admits that the sanctions that Washington imposes under the pretext of “restoring democracy” aren’t actually wanted by Venezuelans. That’s an outrageous thing to concede, unless you’ve completely internalized the idea that the US is the legitimate ruler of Venezuela, not Venezuelans.
Even the title of the editorial gives US barbarism away . The title refers to ‘America’s Foreign Policy Arsenal”. Note the word “Arsenal”. What “arsenal” would Venezuela be allowed to use against the United States according to the New York Times? The editorial writers also concede that US sanctions on Venezuela have been lethal. In their words the sanctions “exacerbated a humanitarian crisis” which can only mean that they’ve killed people. How many people would Venezuela be allowed to kill in the United States with an economic arsenal?
To sum up, US sanctions on Venezuela are acts of war, and massive election interference. As much as the establishment media hides those truths, you can find them out if you are willing to spend some time bypassing the western media. But even if you look closely enough at western media, you find that there are times when the truth gets inadvertently revealed.
Finally, I’ll just say I hope Maduro wins on Sunday. My guess is that he will, but if he doesn’t the real winner will be Washington, not Edmundo Gonzalez and not even Maria Corina Machado. US acts of war will have succeeded, as they did in Nicaragua in1990, in producing the desired “electoral” outcome. No civilized person should want to see that.