On Venezuelan President Maduro's re-election in 2018: expect similar lies if he wins in 2024
A transcript (very pretty close to one) of a presentation I gave at the launch of VSN
Thanks to everyone for making this event happen. I’ll get right into it. As we get closer to Venezuela’s presidential election in 2024, we should anticipate the western media deploying the same general tactics they used to disparage Maduro’s electoral victory in 2018. I’m not predicting that Maduro is going to win again (as I hope he does), but, if he does win, we can anticipate that the same general propaganda tactics will be used - with some variations of course for the changed situation that exists in Venezuela and around the world since 2018.
Western media constantly imposes false history on us, so a key part of fighting back is reviewing the historical facts that they bury or lie about, but it should also involve rejecting the imperial assumptions that are sold to everyone as part of the western media’s false history. One key imperial assumption I’ll mention right off the bat is that US-backed subversives must have total impunity. The western media will not only insist that US accomplices be out of jail - no matter how openly they’ve collaborated with a foreign power to do tremendous harm to Venezuela - but that they must also have full political rights. The very first article of Venezuela’s constitution asserts its independence and its right to defend itself against foreign threats. But to western media, that part of Venezuela’s constitution can be completely disregarded. Does anyone think that Venezuela has the right to destroy the USA’s economy as part of a strategy to put the politicians it prefers into power in Washington, and (in this wildly hypothetical scenario) that any US politician who helps Venezuela do that should get away with it? Sounds nuts doesn’t it? But that’s the kind of assumption that is woven in the western media’s coverage: that US-backed subversion must come with total impunity. And that kind of assumption is reinforced by so-called dissent that one sometimes sees in western media - generally coming from politicians labeled progressive - who may criticize US sanctions on Venezuela but not reject the most toxic imperial assumptions.
I am going to speak in general terms about what the media did in 2018. If people want detailed examples taken from the media please check out the book I wrote with Justin Podur that reviews 20 years of media coverage: “Extraordinary Threat: The U.S. Empire, the Media, and Twenty Years of Coup Attempts in Venezuela”. Since at least 2002, the western media has been trying to help the US overthrow the Chavista movement that Maduro has led since the death of Hugo Chavez in 2013.
In 2019, when US President Donald Trump declared Juan Guaido to be Venezuela’s interim president, the entire western establishment, which includes a great many people who claim they hate Trump, still went along with him on that.
The key lie they were all united in repeating was that Maduro’s 2018 presidential election win was fraudulent. For years after that election, Reuters and other western media would often just repeat that the election was “widely seen as fraudulent” without explaining why. We were all supposed to accept that claim based on the presumed credibility of the same western establishment that is presently supporting an obvious genocide in Gaza. For a short time in 2019, Bernie Sanders timidly resisted the lie about the 2018 election, but he ultimately caved completely to the western Establishment’s line that Maduro was a “dictator”, and Sanders even called Maduro a “vicious tyrant”. Today, I can’t help mentioning that Sanders has exposed himself as so vicious that he can't even support a ceasefire in Gaza.
That said, while the media ultimately took to declaring Maduro’s 2018 victory fraudulent without providing arguments, that wasn’t always the case. In the months leading up to the 2018 election and, shortly afterwards, there were some justifications given by the western media for declaring the election fraudulent.
One justification was that there was no credible challenger running against Maduro
The western media played up the disqualifications of Henrique Capriles and Leopoldo Lopez as candidates. These two politicians were involved with multiple US-backed coup attempts going back to 2002, but to western media that should come with no consequences, and not even the loss of political rights. But there was another big problem with that argument.
Henri Falcon was a credible challenger according to Datanalisis. Datanalisis is an anti-Chavista pollster who was by far the most cited in western media for several years. Falcon was threatened with US sanctions for running in the election and he was aggressively attacked by other opposition parties for running.
The western media could have attacked Datanalsis and said they don’t believe their polling for Falcon, but how do you do that given how frequently you’ve claimed to believe them? How do you do that but still claim to believe Datanalisis’ low poll numbers for Maduro? The approach the media took instead was to evade those contradictions by pretending that Falcon’s candidacy didn’t exist, and also ignoring all the access Falcon was given in the state and private media to aggressively attack Maduro.
After the election, nobody tried to claim that Falcon had won. He received roughly 2 million votes while 6 million went to Maduro. Falcon and his campaign were just written out of the story. Falcon was written out the way a minor fictional character is sometimes taken out of a TV show, the writers just continue as if the character had never been in the story at all.
Another justification was that the economic situation was so bad that it simply strained credulity to think that Maduro could have retained any significant popular support.
In 2015 legislative elections, the state of the economy caused Chavismo to lose control of the National Assembly. And even before that, in 2013 when Maduro was first elected after Hugo Chavez passed away, Henrique Capriles came close to winning (in part) because of economic problems that were already eroding support for Chavismo. There were other factors that made Capriles do surprisingly well, but the economy was part of it. So by 2018 the Venezuelan economy was in vastly worse shape. How could Maduro have any support left, never mind enough to win?
What the western media ignored was how the opposition, after winning control of the National Assembly, went out of their way to make the situation worse. Two prominent opposition politicians who led the National assembly after 2015 (Julio Borges and Henry Ramos ) both openly boasted about efforts they made to scare foreigners away from doing business with Venezuela. Then in 2017, Trump drastically escalated US sanctions and even began to make military threats against Venezuela. Western media simply ignored how all of that would not only increase the number of people who would vote for Maduro but also intensify the support of his base as it rallied against obvious foreign sabotage of the economy.
Another huge thing the western media ignored in its analysis of the 2018 presidential election was the result of the governor elections of October, 2017. These elections took place only seven months before Maduro’s election victory. Datanalisis and other pollsters that the western media relied on predicted a sweeping victory for the opposition. The exact opposite happened. Chavismo swept those elections. And turnout was not low. At 61%, it would be a high turnout for a US presidential election. Maduro’s allies received 6 million votes nationwide, the total that Maduro received months later, and even Francisco Rodriguez (a Maduro opponent who would go on to be a key advisor to Henri Falcon) said that fraud could not explain the results. The explanation, according to him, was basically that the opposition supported Trump’s sanctions.
The 6 million votes Maduro received in 2018 correspond to about 30% of the electorate. A Pew Research poll, a very western Establishment source, conducted several months after the presidential election found that 33 percent of Venezuelans “trust the national government to do what is right for Venezuela”. There was no excuse for the western media to cast doubt on Maduro’s victory or the number of votes he received.
Another thing the western media lacked in its analysis of Maduro’s victory in 2018 was self-awareness about elections in countries like the USA, Canada and the UK, where election winners often receive the votes of about 30% of the electorate like Maduro did. And sometimes winners in western countries have received less than that. Barack Obama received 31 percent in 2008 and only 28 percent in 2012. Donald Trump received 26
percent in 2016, and didn’t even win the popular vote.
I’ll leave it there and just stress again that western propaganda doesn’t rely on facts or logic. It relies on repetition and intimidation. Don’t play along with it.