Media Coverage of Venezuela’s Presidential Election Normalizes US Interference

by Roger D. Harris and Peter Bolton / August 10th, 2024

Corporate media’s coverage of Venezuela’s July 28 presidential election is akin to an investigation of a homicide that is focused not with identifying the murderer but with an unpaid parking ticket of the victim. Likewise, the media has shifted the narrative into the minutia of electoral procedures, ignoring the much larger issue of US interference in the internal affairs of another sovereign county.

Nowhere in the corporate media is there even an inkling that US-imposed regime-change activities in Venezuela or elsewhere might violate some basic principles.

US is not interested in democracy

Ours is a homeland where the likes of George Clooney and Melinda Gates have the prerogative, because they are rich, to demand that a sitting president abandon his reelection bid. In this “land of the free,” corporations are considered persons, political bribery is an exercise in free speech, and no candidate for public office is competitive unless they accept bribes from corporate interests. Yet Washington considers itself to be the ultimate arbiter of what constitutes democracy in other countries.

The truth is that Washington is not interested in democracy in Venezuela, but rather is keenly concerned with Caracas’s geopolitical role as an exemplar of independent sovereignty from the empire. For that reason, Obama and every subsequent US president has declared Venezuela to be “an unusual and extraordinary threat” to US national security.

Of course, the notion that Venezuela poses a national security threat to the US is preposterous. Former US President Trump correctly identified Washington’s actual motives when he openly boasted: “When I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse. We would have taken it over; we would have gotten all that oil.” Similarly, Biden’s four-star military commander for Latin America, Laura Richardson, opined: “…the importance of the region cannot be overstated enough, the proximity, number one, but all of the resources. This hemisphere is very rich in natural resources.” Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves.

US hybrid war against Venezuela is the biggest obstacle to free and fair elections

Venezuelans went to the polls with a gun pointed at their heads. This is because a vote for the Bolivarian Revolution’s socialist project would de facto mean a continuation and likely intensification of the US hybrid war. In other words, one purpose of the coercive measures is to incentivize Venezuelan voters to vote for the US-backed opposition and disincentivize them to vote for the Chavistas.

So hell-bent has Washington’s determination been to affect the outcome of the election that Venezuela now has some 930 unilateral coercive measures imposed on it by the US, making it the second most sanctioned country in the world after Russia.

The Washington Post carps about the “overuse of sanctions” because it “risks making the tool less valuable.”  Besides, “Wall Street power brokers started to grumble about the costs of complying” with the unilateral coercive measures. Further, “sanctions make it risky to depend on dollars.” Pity the poor banker, we are told, but damn the people of Venezuela.

While correctly labeling the US efforts as “economic warfare,” neither the WaPo nor the other media inform their readers that these unilateral coercive measures – euphemistically called “sanctions” – are illegal under international law, the charters of both the United Nations and the Organization of American States, and even under US domestic law.

Take, for example, a recent program on Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! Ms. Goodman has come a long way from her humble origins as an alternative news source. She interviewed Jeff Stein with the WaPo about the efficacy of what is in effect collective punishment.

The thrust of the interview was the angst over the so-called sanctions not “working”; that is, not achieving regime change, despite the horrific toll they are taking on its victims. Goodman, for her part, was not so rude as to ask her guest whether the US should be in the business of overthrowing governments not to its liking or even query about the legality of sanctioning one third of humanity.

Throughout the interview, Stein used the term “we” to describe the actions of the US government. Any pretense of a separation between the reporter and the subject being reported is dropped by such stenographers for the State Department.

US planned to claim fraud all along

This election is far from the first time Washington has tried to interfere in Venezuela’s democratic processes. Nicolás Maduro won the Venezuelan presidency in 2013 in a constitutionally mandated “snap election” after the untimely death of his predecessor Hugo Chávez, founder of the Bolivarian Revolution. The US was the only country in the world not to recognize Maduro.

For the 2018 election, the US claimed fraud six months in advance. Washington ordered its Venezuelan collaborators to boycott the polls, going so far as threatening sanctions against a moderate opposition candidate for running anyway. Regime change could be accomplished, Washington reasoned, by the one-two punch of the impact of a collapse in international oil prices on the petro economy and US coercive measures designed to impede recovery.

But this time around conditions were different. Venezuela had reversed the economic freefall and begun to diversify the economy. GDP growth is projected to be amongst the highest in the hemisphere. Under such circumstances, boycotting was out of the question. Instead, Washington adopted a belt-and-suspenders strategy of contending in the presidential election while setting the stage to claim fraud if their preferred candidate did not prevail.

Given the pain of sanctions on the Venezuelans, Washington might have allowed a centrist opposition candidate to emerge and banked on a repeat of what happened in Nicaragua in 1990. The leftist Sandinistas were voted out of office then under the threat of a continuing US-backed contra war.

However, the US chose to promote the far-right Maria Corina Machado, who they knew had been banned since 2015 from running for office because of past misdeeds. Eventually, the completely unknown Edmundo González, who had no previous electoral experience, was chosen to run as Machado’s surrogate, given her electoral disqualification.

While the infirm González convalesced in Caracas, Machado barnstormed the country carrying his paper image. The campaign vowed to privatize the national oil company and promote a strongly Zionist foreign policy.

Foreign Affairs reported on how the opposition united around González; in fact, nine opposition candidates appeared on the ballot. You would also read that Machado “won the opposition primaries by a landslide.” You would not know that Machado circumvented the official electoral authority. Instead, she staged a private primary run by her own NGO, a recipient of US funds earmarked for regime change. Her 92% win in a field of thirteen candidates was highly suspicious. When other candidates called fraud, the ballots were destroyed.

Most significantly, Foreign Affairs admitted that the far-right coterie is largely a Yankee astroturf operation: “In the absence of this sustained [regime-change] effort over successive US administrations, the Venezuelan opposition may well have boycotted the 2024 election entirely…Washington’s approach toward Venezuela furnishes a remarkable example.”

The author of the article should know. Jose Ignacio Hernández was Venezuela’s pretend attorney general under the now disgraced Juan Guaidó “interim presidency” farce.

US-backed candidate never agreed to be bound by the election results

While weary of the Yankee hybrid war, many Venezuelans also deeply resent the far-right, which had called for even harsher measures and military intervention. The massive outmigration from Venezuela, fueled by US coercive measures, had also disproportionately eroded the opposition’s political constituency, because the affluent have better means to leave.

Tellingly, the Machado/González campaign had, weeks before the election, signaled that they would not abide by the results if they lost. Upon announcement of the official election results, rampaging opposition elements, embolden by US support, killed Venezuelan security personnel and massively destroyed public property in what Venezuelan-Canadian sociologist Maria Paez Victor called an “attempted coup.”

The wave of violence has since largely dissipated in the face of huge demonstrations supporting Maduro. The government’s civic-military union held firm. Chastened by its failure to overthrow the Bolivarian Revolution by violence or by the ballot, Washinton as of August 6 supports negotiations with Maduro and will not call González “president-elect,” according to the Miami Herald. This is a sign that regime-change advocates have downgraded their objectives…for now.

So who won?

Edison Research’s election exit poll found 65% for the US-backed candidate and 31% for Maduro. An exit poll by Hinterlaces had the opposite results: Maduro 55% and González 43%; similar to the official results of 51% for Maduro and 44% González.

Hinterlaces is a long established and respected Venezuelan polling firm, whose owner has been critical of the Maduro administration. Edison, on the other hand, works for CIA-linked US government propaganda outlets such as Voice of America, which are operated by the US Agency for Global Media, “a Washington-based organ that is used to spread disinformation against US adversaries.”

The question remains, was the Venezuelan election free and fair? However you weigh the evidence, at least some skepticism is warranted regarding sources that brought us the Iraq War based on “weapons of mass destruction.” Moreover, we must ask whether anyone should look up the US as a good arbiter of electoral integrity when it has constantly intervened in other countries’ elections. As Mexican president-elect Claudia Sheinbaum has counseled: “We should…leave self-determination to the Venezuelans.”

Roger D. Harris was an international observer for Venezuela’s 2024 presidential election. He is with the US Peace Council and the Task Force on the Americas. Peter Bolton is a New York City-based journalist, activist and scholar. Read other articles by Roger D. Harris and Peter Bolton.

The US Has No Right to Interfere in Venezuela’s Election

by Ted Snider Posted onAugust 12, 2024

On July 28, Venezuela held its national election. The most recent results released by Venezuela’s National Electoral Council say that the incumbent president, and successor to Hugo Chávez, Nicolás Maduro received 51.95% of the vote versus 43.18% for the opposition candidate, Edmundo González. The opposition has countered with the claim that Gonzales defeated Maduro by a margin of 67% to 30%. The U.S. response to the outcome has been disorganized and confused.

What the official U.S. position on Venezuela’s election is seems to depend on which official speaks for the United States. Vice-President and presumptive presidential candidate Kamala Harris appeared to quickly recognize Maduro’s victory when she said less than half an hour after the polls closed that “The United States stands with the people of Venezuela who expressed their voice in today’s historic presidential election. The will of the Venezuelan people must be respected.”

The White House was less certain about the official results. White House National Security Communications Advisor John Kirby told a press conference that “we have serious concerns that the result as announced does not reflect the will and the votes of the Venezuelan people.” He added that the White House would “hold judgement” until “the electoral authorities publish the full, detailed tabulation of votes.”

The State Department was less patient. Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared that “the announcement of results by the Maduro-controlled National Electoral Council (CNE) were deeply flawed, yielding an announced outcome that does not represent the will of the Venezuelan people.” He then concluded that González “received the most votes in this election by an insurmountable margin” and congratulated him on “his successful campaign.” Blinken then called for “respectful, peaceful transition.”

But then, four days later, a confused State Department walked back Blinken’s recognition of González. Responding to a question at a press conference for clarification on whether the U.S. was recognizing an interim president or just not recognizing Maduro, State Department Spokesperson Matthew Miller walked back the Secretary of State’s prior declaration, saying instead that “That’s not a step that we are taking today.”

The U.S. position is not only disorganized, it is overreach. Though the results of the election are of primary importance to the people of Venezuela, and though the determination of those results is an essential responsibility of the Venezuelan people, it is not the responsibility of the United States. The U.S. has not been handed the role of global election arbiter by anyone. The U.S. has no role to play in the Venezuelan people’s sovereign determination of the outcome of their election.

Nor has the U.S. earned the right to judge or comment on election interference. Not just because of their appalling record of regime changes globally, nor even because of their horrific history of coups in Latin America, but because of their long record of election interference and coups in Venezuela and, most relevantly, in the current Venezuelan election.

When Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez was briefly removed in a 2002 coup before the people of Venezuela reversed it and reinstalled him, “individuals and organizations understood to be actively involved in the brief ouster of the Chávez government” were admittedly receiving “training, institution building, and other support” from the United States. Officials in the Bush administration acknowledged that “they had discussed the removal of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez for months with military and civilian leaders from Venezuela.” And officials from the Organization of American States have revealed that “the US administration was not only aware the coup was about to take place, but had sanctioned it.”

In 2019, when Maduro easily won re-election to a second term, the U.S. side stepped the result and recognized Juan Guaidó as the leader of Venezuela.

There is a difference in judgement on whether the current Venezuelan election was conducted fairly. Some independent observers, like the U.S.-based National Lawyers Guild, have called the election a “transparent, fair voting process with scrupulous attention to legitimacy;” others, like the Carter Center, have said that the election “did not meet international standards of electoral integrity.”

Again, deciding between the two is not America’s place. But the U.S. also not an objective observer. The U.S. has been a continuous and persistent bankroller of the Venezuelan opposition and influencer of the Venezuelan media. But most importantly, the U.S. has collectively held the people of Venezuela hostage. U.S. sanctions on Venezuela have played by far the largest role in interfering in and influencing Venezuela’s election. Mark Weisbrot, the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, told me that the sanctions “prevent the country from having democratic elections, because there is overwhelming evidence that the harsh collective punishment of the sanctions will continue until Venezuela gets rid of its current government.”

Those sanctions, to be kept in place until Venezuela meets the American criterion of democracy, ousting the followers of Chávez from government, are “by far the most important cause of the depression in Venezuela,” according to Weisbrot and have led to the deaths of tens, and probably now hundreds, of thousands of people.

The blackmail of sanctions has been the largest interference in, and influencer of, the current election. How, Weisbrot asks, can fair elections “be held under a state of siege of this magnitude, with a foreign power exercising so much control over the state of the economy, and damaging it so immensely, along with threats; and therefore potentially affecting voters’ choices.”

Nicolás Maduro has asked the Venezuelan Supreme Court to review the voting data and validate the results. He has promised to provide all the voting totals they have. The court accepted the request and summoned all the candidates to appear before it. All the candidates appeared in the session except González who did not show up.

Venezuela’s National Election Council has now confirmed that the National Electoral Council has delivered all the election evidence requested by the court, including detailed voting records and totals. The court now has fifteen days to review the data and question the candidates. Then it is time for Venezuela to determine who won the election.

Ted Snider is a regular columnist on U.S. foreign policy and history at Antiwar.com and The Libertarian Institute. He is also a frequent contributor to Responsible Statecraft and The American Conservative as well as other outlets. To support his work or for media or virtual presentation requests, contact him at tedsnider@bell.net.