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Open in TheBrain

maduro pres

oddly new node 8/18

primary 12 25 invasion immanent

see extra jud kill terror 3 bs hugo chavez ghost voting machines

see erik prince blackwater

fox vulcan bizz conspiracy new axis of evil: iran?! china, russia, or course cuba (i thot new sanctions were just knee jerk anti-obama, but actually on isolating venezuela

RUBIO?

as in nicaragua, increasingly authoritarian? in reaction to RW?

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russia and iran support? applebaum

chevron?

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an 5 26 context

Government contractor Aurelio Perez-Lugones, the person accused of leaking classified information to a Washington Post reporter, has been released by the judge.

Politico reported on Monday afternoon that the judge was willing to put Perez-Lugones on home detention while he awaits charges.

U.S. District Judge Michael Maddox commented that the alleged leaks were “extremely grave,” but that he isn't a danger to society. He's simply barred from using an internet-connected device.

Perez-Lugones was accused of sharing information on military movements related to Venezuela. Indicted in January by the Justice Department, the 61-year-old Navy veteran was accused of repeatedly accessing classified reports, printing or otherwise copying the information in these classified reports and removing the printouts and information from the sensitive compartmented information facility (SCIF) where he worked, the indictment said.

“The government has no way of knowing what he has retained and what he is able to provide to others,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Patricia McLane said during a hearing. “The person he was communicating with is still employed and has a willingness to accept classified and national defense information. … The receptacle of additional national defense information is still available to the defendant.”

“This was not old information. This was current information regarding military movement in the Caribbean, in the Gulf and specifically with Venezuela,” the prosecutor said, according to Politico. “We have a man who has thrown everything away in an attempt to get back at the administration.”

Perez-Lugones's attorney, Courtney Francik, argued that there was no evidence suggesting her client has “a historical Rolodex of classified information in his head.”

“Mr. Perez-Lugones has lost his job. He’s lost his clearance. He doesn’t have any access to any classified system,” she said.

Still, the judge ruled he must remain disconnected from internet devices.

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ga ballots grabbed 1 26 kraken

  1. ### Benny Johnson said “sources” have told him Nicolás Maduro was captured partially in relation to the 2020 election

01/30/26

an 1 26

Republican U.S. Senate candidate Mike Rogers was a member of an advisory board at Telefonica, a cell phone service provider operating largely in Latin America which admitted in 2022 to collaborating with the Venezuelan government — then led by the now-deposed Nicolas Maduro — to spy on its citizens.

Rogers, a former Congressman who represented a mid-Michigan district from 2001 to 2015, sat on the company’s cybersecurity and technical innovations board for more than five years, earning nearly $100,000 in compensation as a result, according to public financial disclosures filed during his 2024 run for the U.S. Senate and his most recent bid.

When asked, Rogers’ campaign claimed that it was the first the former representative knew of the connection between Telefonica and the Maduro regime, despite the incident being widely reported by both a Spanish news outlet and The Washington Post.

Rogers’ campaign also said that his work with the board largely focused on advising Telefonica’s cybersecurity division on technical items and threats from China.

The campaign further blamed Democrats working against him for drawing a connection to him and Maduro that it claims did not exist, and chalked it up to “fake news about a former House Intelligence Chair and national security expert having ties to the very regime he has outspokenly condemned, and celebrated the downfall of.”

“Mike merely served on a technology advisory board, where he advised on how to stop the Chinese Communist Party from infecting the company’s networks,” said Rogers spokesperson Alyssa Brouillet. “This is nothing more than a flailing attempt to distract from the fact that the Michigan Democrat candidates are out-of-touch with working people and consistently trailing Mike Rogers by every barometer.”

The campaign was asked to provide Michigan Advance with a job description outlining Rogers’ role with the company showing that his work was focused solely on China.

An offer letter from Telefonica outlining Rogers’ role states that he would provide the board with “input, ideas and expert advice about Telefonica’s security decisions as requested by the company from time to time” according to the board’s specific charter.

The offer letter does not, however, specifically note that Rogers’ input and expertise was solely focused on Chinese security and network threats.

For years, there have been suspicions about the pervasiveness of tapped calls and the excessive and unjustified monitoring of other forms of communication, but this report has shed a light for the first time on the real scope of this threat to civil and digital rights across the country.

– Watchdog group Ve Sin Filtro on the handing over of data by Telefonica to the Venezuelan government.

Whether Rogers knew the extent of the company’s collaboration with the Venezuelan government while he worked for Telefonica between April 2018 and October 2024 remains an open question, but what is certain is that Rogers has not publicly denounced the collaboration between Telefonica and the former Maduro regime.

The Advance asked Rogers’ campaign if it would do so now.

Brouillet said that Rogers believes any company that conspires with a criminal regime should be held accountable.

Rogers has, in the inverse, publicly praised President Donald Trump taking military action to depose Maduro, extradite him to the U.S. and put the former dictator up on drug trafficking charges in New York.

Rogers has a history of positioning himself as a major critic of Maduro

Maduro came into power following Hugo Chavez’s death in 2013 and remained the head of state until the U.S. government, under the Trump regime, took action against Maduro earlier this month.

On the day Maduro was captured, Rogers made a public statement praising Trump’s action.

“President Trump sent a loud and clear message: don’t mess with the US. Any foreign adversary who tries to kill Americans will pay the price. Bin Laden learned that lesson when I served as House Intel Chair,” Rogers said in a statement. “Today, Maduro was held accountable for endangering our nation with deadly poison. More Americans have died from drug overdose since 2018 than in World War I, World War II, & the Vietnam War combined. The crisis has to stop. Thankfully, President Trump is taking bold action to keep our communities safe. Our borders are secure, murders in US cities are down with drug interdiction and deportation of criminal illegal aliens, and waterborne drugs running into the US are down over 90%. Now, we’re bringing narcoterrorists to justice.”

A search of Rogers’ social media pages shows that he was quick to criticize both Maduro, in 2019, and former President Joe Biden, in 2024, over crime and immigration issues.

Rogers, as a featured guest on WOOD 106.9 FM, stated his belief that the world was better off without Maduro in power.

In 2019, Rogers posted to X, then Twitter, an article from insightcrime.org detailing criminal connections between Maduro and drug traffickers — an early pretext for charging Maduro with the crimes he now faces in the U.S. The article exposes what a former head of Venezuelan military intelligence witnessed in his time working for the regime, which included top figures in Maduro’s political orbit allowing drug traffickers to move freely in and out of Venezuela.

“This is the real Venezuela,” Rogers wrote in that post.

In 2024, Rogers criticized former President Joe Biden in a series of posts on X, saying the former president should declare the Tren de Aragua criminal gang a terrorist organization. Rogers brings up Maduro again in one post, as well.

It’s past time Joe Biden declares Tren da Aragua for what it is: An international criminal organization, terrorizing Americans.

Maduro is emptying his prisons and flooding America with dangerous criminals through our wide open border. Enough is enough.

— Mike Rogers (@MikeRogersForMI) March 18, 2024

An interview with Rogers conducted by former congressman Dave Camp for the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy notes that the podcast was a vehicle to share his insider knowledge of foreign policy, federal police work and security insights.

Much of his work with the boards he served on in his post-congressional life centered around the same insider knowledge. Still, Rogers’ campaign said that it had first heard about Telefonica’s connection to Maduro, through its business in Venezuela, when the Advance had asked for a comment in the course of reporting this story.

The Telefonica-Maduro connection was widely reported in 2021

Telefonica’s security and cybersecurity advisory council was created in 2018, which the company said would reinforce its digital and comprehensive security strategy, as well as play a role in protecting its own assets and the data of its customers.

The council included Rogers, and highlighted his work with the FBI but also as a member of the U.S. House Intelligence Committee.

Public records show Rogers served on Telefonica’s Ingenieria Y Seguridad committee for six years. It was one of several boards he sat on after leaving the U.S. House of Representatives in 2015, each focused on cybersecurity and data intelligence, which falls in line with Rogers’ experience as chair of the House Intelligence Committee and as a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Multiple financial disclosure reports filed for his Senate campaigns, the first of which he narrowly lost to now-Sen. Elissa Slotkin, are accessible to the public on the Senate’s online database. They show Rogers received $94,241 as board compensation from Telefonica Ingenieria Y Seguridad.

Compensation that he received from the board between 2018 and 2022 is not publicly available.

Telefonica, based in Madrid, Spain, has business throughout Latin America, working with different subsidiaries to provide region-specific cell phone services.

One of those regions is Venezuela, operating as Telefonica Movistar. In 2022, Telefonica released a transparency report that revealed a wide swath of data interceptions into the private communications of Venezuelan Telefonica Movistar customers at the behest of Maduro’s security agencies, according to the watchdog group Ve Sin Filtro.

The report said that the company, in 2021, worked at the behest of the Maduro regime to intercept those communications against 1.5 million customers in Venezuela, more than 20% of both telephone and internet lines offered by Telefonica Movistar. Calls were tapped, text messages were monitored and the locations of customer phones were handed over to Venezuelan authorities, Ve Sin Filtro reported. The interceptions also included the capturing of customer internet traffic.

Other nations within the region that were included in the report also had data interception within their home countries, but at a much lower rate than what Venezuela had acquired.

In some cases, specific internet pages were blocked and accounts hacked, which rang true in the case of a Venezuelan human rights organization. Some of these requests came from the National Telecommunications Commission, or CONATEL, which is the Venezuelan government’s regulatory body over telecommunications within its borders.

The watchdog group noted that data interceptions performed by telecoms on orders from their regulating governments can be key ways for law enforcement to investigate serious crimes, but the wide array of interceptions performed by Maduro’s regime pointed more toward systemic abuse of human rights standards and judicial due process.

Ve Sin Filtro reported that agencies that were able to access who a user was calling, how long the calls lasted, what the subscriber’s data showed, included the military, Venezuela’s public ministry, its main criminal investigation agency, police forces, and its National Experimental Security University.

“Nowhere does it mention that the orders come from courts or come with the approval of judges, as they do in other countries, which means there isn’t evidence of the validation of courts for these interventions as it is required by Venezuelan law, with particular exceptions such as the case of emergencies and flagrant crimes, in which the CICPC can make a direct request,” the group said, referring to Telefonica’s transparency report. “But even in these cases the prosecutor must be notified and it must be included in the file.”

Spanish newspaper El Pais reported on the document, noting that the admission fell in line with what human rights organizations have called massive surveillance of the Venezuelan people over the course of the last decade. It also noted that human rights defenders in Venezuela believed the espionage targeted opposition politicians and activists.

The Washington Post also reported on the company’s report and findings, writing that the incursions included wire taps but also the censoring of content like news websites, political commentary portals, and even streaming media websites like SoundCloud. Three human rights organizations were blocked by Telefonica and the Maduro regime and two websites providing VPN, or virtual private network, services. People in restrictive nations often use private networks to access internet service or webpages that are censored in their regions, and have played a key role in pushing out social media content during times of protest or revolution.

The Post also interviewed Miguel Henrique Otero, president of El Nacional, one of Venezuela’s last remaining independent newspapers, when it wrote about the issue in 2022.

He said it was clear to him and other like-minded Venezuelans that Telefonica was complicit in following orders from the Maduro regime to violate human rights, without justification or due process.

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MMA

As Trump threatens regime change in Venezuela, right-wing media embrace opposition figure María Corina Machado

Conservative pundits have given Machado a platform to agitate in favor of Trump’s aggressive military campaign, while she’s given them fuel for discredited conspiracy theories

Written by John Knefel

Research contributions from Alex Kaplan, Sophie Lawton, Monica Rodriguez & Ben Van Bloem

Published 12/03/25

Right-wing media figures have spent the last year championing Venezuela opposition figure María Corina Machado, who has supported President Donald Trump’s threats of regime change in her home country.

The relationship between Machado and conservative media is mutually reinforcing: She provides right-wing outlets with inflammatory claims about President Nicolás Maduro — including exaggerated or false accusations of tampering in U.S. elections and running narcotics enterprises — and in return these outlets provide her with a platform to agitate for his ouster. As The New York Times reported, Machado recently endorsed the debunked conspiracy theory that Venezuela interfered in the 2020 U.S. election, further ingratiating herself to MAGA by adopting one of the movement’s core tenets. She has also claimed without evidence that Maduro is the leader of two drug cartels, one of which doesn't even exist as a discrete or coherent organization, according to many experts.

Since early September, President Donald Trump has ordered airstrikes on at least 21 boats, killing at least 83 people, in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean — part of a larger pressure campaign aimed at removing Maduro from office. In October, the administration ended diplomatic outreach to the country, though Trump and Maduro reportedly spoke over the phone in late November. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a key Machado-backer, has been pushing for Maduro’s ouster for months with what some believe is an eye toward eventually collapsing the government of Cuba as well.

Right-wing media responded to Trump’s escalation by defending the extrajudicial boat strikes and pushing for even greater incursions into Venezuela, including toppling Maduro’s government. Many in conservative media have told their audiences that regime change in Venezuela would be easy, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Right-wing coverage of Machado often relies on a blurry distinction between supporting Machado and cheering the removal of Maduro on the one hand while misleadingly claiming to oppose U.S.-led regime change on the other — arguably a distinction without a difference. Sometimes Machado employs this sleight-of-hand rhetorical device herself, seemingly to assure her audience that attacking Maduro’s government would not result in a replay of George W. Bush’s unpopular forever wars.

Fox News’ Rachel Campos-Duffy is perhaps Machado’s most significant ally in right-wing media, having interviewed her in both English- and Spanish-language media. Campos-Duffy’s colleagues at Fox have also praised Machado, as has Donald Trump Jr. on his Triggered podcast. Other conservative figures celebrated her even prior to Trump’s election in November 2024.

Machado’s rise has also given election deniers an opportunity to revive the long debunked conspiracy theory that Venezuela interfered in the 2020 U.S. election against Trump. Machado — who had recently been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize — repeated that false claim during an October 31 interview on a Bloomberg podcast. “I have no doubt that Nicolás Maduro, Jorge Rodríguez, and many others are, you know, the masterminds of a system that has rigged elections in many countries, including in the U.S.,” Machado said. “I have no doubt about that.”

Former Overstock CEO and "prominent election denier" Patrick Byrne mocked a post criticizing Machado’s interview on his Telegram channel, writing that people who say the 2020 U.S. was fair “doth protest too much.” In August, Byrne claimed that Smartmatic, which provides electronic voting systems, is “a spinoff of the Venezuelan government” and that the company “has been rigging elections for people around the world.” In October, Bryne said the United States had to “overthrow the governments of Venezuela and Cuba" because they “overthrew our republic.”

In November, Trump promoted a right-wing show on social media during which a guest said “there are at least a dozen people in Venezuela that have more money and power” than the CIA, adding: “This is the largest transnational criminal organization in the world that no one knew about, or no one wanted to talk about, until they stole our election in 2020."

For all of the right-wing media claims that Maduro interfered in the 2020 election, it’s worth underscoring that in 2002 the United States at least tacitly supported a failed coup against then-President of Venezuela Hugo Chavez. During Trump’s first term, his administration engineered an unsuccessful campaign to oust Maduro and install opposition figure Juan Guaidó.

:{Despite those failures, conservative media have embraced Machado in a way that’s reminiscent of earlier episodes in U.S. foreign policy, when media and government officials celebrated opposition figures in the early years of the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.

As The New York Times notes, Machado has been a “darling” of Washington for decades, and her people are in constant contact with Secretary Rubio, the Trump administration figure leading the charge to topple Maduro. One possible reason Washington has been enthralled with her for so long is that, according to Bloomberg, she “favors privatizing all industries in Venezuela,” including the state-owned oil company, if the United States takes out Maduro. Ian Bremmer noted that U.S. action in Venezuela “in large part about the oil.”}:

Should Trump's plan move forward, Machado is the most likely candidate for his administration to rally behind. She’s already won over right-wing outlets — but as U.S. campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan showed, sometimes an opposition figure’s charm offensive is the easiest battle of the war.

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OMG AN 12 25

President Donald Trump went on a bizarre Truth Social posting binge Monday night, as pointed out by many media experts, including Vaughn Sterling, executive producer of "The Source With Kaitlan Collins" on CNN, who wondered "what was going on last night?"

CNN political reporter Aaron Blake posted one of the president's unhinged posts, noting, "Trump last night promoted a post that guaranteed Barack Obama will face a military tribunal."

Meidas Touch co-founder Ben Meiselas posted screenshots of Trump's Truth Social, saying, "Trump has made approximately 400 posts in the past hour which include posts like this."

One of those posts included an interview Meiselas did with former Attorney General Eric Holder and Holder’s call for reforming the Supreme Court.

"Trump demanded that Republicans abolish the filibuster based on what Holder was telling me," Meiselas writes in a Tuesday morning article titled, "Trump Attacks MeidasTouch in Midnight Mental Breakdown."

"Shortly after Trump made the post about MeidasTouch, there was a brief pause, and then he began making new posts every 10 seconds for a full hour, totaling about 400 posts," Meiselas explains.

"His posts included deranged claims that Michelle Obama 'controlled Biden’s autopen' and that Biden’s executive orders were really done by Michelle Obama. Trump posted an AI video claiming Nicolás Maduro surrendered to him and that Trump was now controlling Venezuela, and that Maduro admitted Tren de Aragua confessed [former President Joe] Biden was the leader of their cartel. Trump made posts saying Canada was involved in election rigging. He made bizarre posts about Obama’s weekly 'kill list.' I can go on and on, but you get the point," he adds.

"Trump has posted hundreds of times in the past few hours. It’s a smorgasbord of propaganda e.g. 2020 election lies, blaming Pelosi for J6, calling Democrats seditionists, raging about illegals and Somalis, Biden and the autopen, the Obamas, Ilhan Omar [and] Tim Walz. Total insanity," wrote Andrew—#IAmTheResistance on X.

Liberal influencer Harry Sisson posted a few of Trump's rants on his X account, saying, "These are just some of the over 150 posts Trump put out on Truth Social last night in the span of an hour. Completely insane conspiracy theories. He was clearly having a mental decline episode and was posting whatever came to mind. It’s going to get worse."

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Right-wing media praise Trump’s made-up excuses for war against Venezuela

Trump massively inflated threat from Venezuelan “narco-terrorists” smuggling fentanyl into the US

Written by Zachary Pleat

Research contributions from Jane Lee

Published 11/24/25

President Donald Trump and right-wing media have been quick to cite fentanyl interdiction as the supposed justification for the administration’s likely illegal strikes against vessels in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, which they have blamed on so-called “narco-terrorists” tied to the regime of President Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela. But reporting has shown the Trump administration’s excuses are built on lies — with virtually no fentanyl arriving in the United States via routes currently being targeted by the military in a bombing campaign that has already claimed at least 83 lives.

This isn't the first time Trump and his media allies have used fentanyl as an excuse for his out-of-control policies, as it was used to justify his instigation of a trade war with Mexico and Canada earlier this year. The Trump administration’s military buildup also follows multiple actions that undermine efforts to combat fentanyl trafficking into the U.S.

Reporting based on government data makes clear that Venezuela is not the source of the fentanyl problem America faces

MMA //

  1. ### Fox parrots Trump's “drug war” justification for Canada/Mexico tariffs, even as he weakened fentanyl smuggling enforcement

03/05/25 2:56 PM EST

  1. ### Right-wing media outlets are claiming regime change in Venezuela would be easy. Evidence and history suggest otherwise.

10/29/25 4:26 PM EDT

  1. ### Fox praised and validated Trump's legally questionable boat strikes in the Caribbean

10/29/25 3:31 PM EDT

  1. ### Right-wing media's campaign for military intervention and regime change in Venezuela

09/05/25 6:34 PM EDT

  1. ### Right-wing media concoct their own legal justification for Trump’s extrajudicial strike on Venezuelan boat

09/05/25 10:00 AM EDT

  1. ### An intelligence report debunked MAGA media claims about Tren de Aragua and Venezuela. A Trump official is now under fire for reportedly ordering the report be redone.

05/28/25

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AN 11 25

President Donald Trump's Department of Justice has dispatched federal investigators to question "multiple people" who have been spreading conspiracy theories that Venezuela stole the 2020 election, the Guardian reports.

According to the report, the "discredited election-rigging conspiracy theory could strengthen Trump’s military action against [Venezuelan President Nicolás] Maduro."

"Two promoters of the conspiracy theory have repeatedly briefed the U.S. attorney for the district of Puerto Rico, W. Stephen Muldrow, and have shared witnesses and documents with officials," the report said, citing four sources.

Muldrow refused to comment.

Other conspiracy theorists in Tampa, Florida, have also been interviewed, the report said.

The Guardian said, "an investigation of this sort underscores how Trump’s justice department is becoming a major weapon in the president’s efforts to rewrite the history of his 2020 loss – while potentially strengthening the administration’s case for military action against Venezuela."

Among the lies spread about the 2020 elections was that deceased Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez somehow founded the electronic voting machine and software companies to change the election seven years after his death. Other conspiracy theories claimed that the impoverished regime of Venezuela was outright controlling electronic voting machines.

Read the full report here.

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MMA

Right-wing media outlets are claiming regime change in Venezuela would be easy. Evidence and history suggest otherwise.

Conservative pundits are promising a small US footprint and an easy transition should the Trump administration topple Maduro, but the reality would likely be much more complicated

Written by John Knefel

Research contributions from Sophie Lawton

Published 10/29/25

Right-wing media outlets have spent months telling their audiences that a U.S. military campaign to topple the Venezuelan government would be simple and straightforward, requiring a minimal military footprint or lasting commitments to the country. In some cases, these outlets have suggested that the transition to a new government, following the toppling of President Nicolás Maduro, would be easy and organic.

Even if the United States were able to defeat the Venezuelan military fairly quickly in a conventional war, many experts warn that regime collapse would likely lead to an extended, bloody conflict that could have lasting ramifications throughout Venezuela, the surrounding region, and potentially the entire hemisphere. To date, the United States has carried out 13 known strikes on boats the Trump administration has alleged, without evidence, were engaged in the drug trade, killing at least 57 people, and has amassed the largest show of force in the region since the Cuban missile crisis.

Right-wing media suggest U.S.-supported “indigenous regime change” in Venezuela would be simple

According to numerous media outlets, Secretary of State Marco Rubio is leading the Trump administration’s campaign to topple the Maduro government, a long-running obsession of his. Rubio nominated opposition leader María Corina Machado for the Nobel Peace Prize, which she won this year, and praised her in Time magazine’s 2025 list of 100 most influential people in the world. Machado, in turn, has been a rallying point for U.S. interests seeking Maduro’s ouster.

Right-wing media figures have frequently cited Machado’s standing as evidence that Maduro could be overthrown and replaced with few complications.

In March, Erik Prince, arguably the United States’ most prominent mercenary, appeared on Donald Trump Jr.’s Triggered podcast to make that argument. Prince said the Maduro government is “going to have to be pushed out.”

“And it doesn’t require U.S. military,” he continued. “It can be covert action from the intelligence community or covert action from Venezuelan patriots helped by outsiders.” It’s not hard to imagine Prince considering himself or his allies as the “outsiders” in question, given his reported ties to anti-Maduro forces.

“María Corina Machado is a brave woman and deserving of our help and our support,” Prince said earlier in the interview.

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From the March 17, 2025, edition of Triggered

In August, as conservative outlets began beating the drums of war, Fox News’ Rachel Campos-Duffy — a vocal opponent of Maduro — conducted an interview with Machado. Campos-Duffy asked her to persuade Americans who support Trump “taking on Nicolás Maduro” but worry that “this kind of smells like regime change.”

“This has nothing to do with regime change … because the change of the regime was already mandated by the presidential election,” Machado replied. She added: “We are ready to take power — the legitimate government, elected. Venezuela will move orderly and peacefully to the transition.”

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From the August 13, 2025, edition of Fox News' Jesse Watters Primetime

The same month, The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh pushed to escalate in Venezuela based on what he referred to as “American chauvinism."

“They're a small, weak, pathetic, puny, poor country, and so they just have to do what we say,” Walsh said. “A war with Venezuela would last about four minutes.”

On September 10, following the Trump administration’s initial boat strike, Campos-Duffy appeared in a breezy segment with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth aboard a U.S. naval ship in the region.

“I was literally in awe of what I saw. And it's not just the military equipment,” Campos-Duffy said.

“It's the soldiers. It's how well-trained they are. How fit they are,” she continued. “How well-fed they are, which I say ‘well-fed’ because Maduro, of course, is threatening with his own militia, which we know is starving over there — they don't have anything that even comes a fraction of close to what we saw here on the USS Iwo Jima.”

The more recent U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan should serve as cautionary tales of American hubris

As Trump’s extrajudicial killing spree escalated in mid-September, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board argued that “disgruntled military who want to liberate their country are living under the repressive arm of Mr. Maduro’s military counter-intelligence.”

In October, Fox News host Jesse Watters predicted that “there is going to be major action against Maduro pretty soon.” Even as he acknowledged it could go “sideways,” he stressed that it could be a “layup” to depose Maduro. Watters went on to pun on the Monroe Doctrine — referring to the “Don-roe Doctrine” — to argue that the United States has the right to interfere in Latin American countries’ internal affairs virtually at will.

On October 20, Fox News host Sean Hannity made that case directly, arguing that Machado “sounds like a pretty good leader for the people of Venezuela and the end of narco terrorism.”

A week later, The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro argued that a “full-scale ground invasion of Venezuela” would not “be a good policy for the United States.” But, he countered, “if some sort of covert CIA action were to topple the regime in Venezuela, that would be a good thing.”

Shapiro argued there is a “bizarre idea that the best available scenario is always to leave the worst dictator in power because: Saddam Hussein,” but that that analysis “is benighted.” He added: “Sometimes the analogies work and sometimes they just don’t.”

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From the October 27, 2025, edition of The Daily Wire's The Ben Shapiro Show

The same day, former Trump Deputy National Security Adviser KT McFarland said in an interview on Newsmax that she gets “really nervous” when “people start talking about regime change and implying that it's going to be the American Marines who do it.” She then reassured viewers that Trump has “always been very, very hesitant about American military force, American Marines’ boots on the ground.”

“Now, he's been very much in favor of regime change,” McFarland continued. “But how does that come about? That comes about because of the people of every country want a regime change.”

“It's an indigenous regime change,” she said.

McFarland escalated her rhetoric just two days later on Fox News. “Behind Maduro, there’s a very strong opposition leader, who, if — and that’s not with the U.S. Marines — but if there was a regime change in that country, there’s a very credible, powerful, potential Trump ally waiting in the wings as the new leader.”

What Venezuela regime collapse could look like

At a baseline level, the U.S. military could likely overwhelm the Venezuelan army in a conventional war fairly quickly, though Venezuela’s air and missile defenses are robust and could pose a threat to U.S. fighters, bombers, and ships in the area.

Even if the Trump administration opted for a “shock and awe”-style bombing campaign that decimated Maduro’s government, what comes after that is anybody’s guess. Reporting from The Guardian suggests that U.S. or aligned forces would not only come up against Venezuela’s official military, but could also face substantial informal resistance.

The history of Latin America is rife with examples of U.S. intervention leading to extended periods of civil war and brutal crackdowns on civilians

If Maduro were assassinated or forced to flee, factions within his government and outside armed forces would likely attempt to assert power over parts of the country. The history of Latin America is rife with examples of U.S. intervention leading to extended periods of civil war and brutal crackdowns on civilians. The more recent U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan should serve as cautionary tales of American hubris; in both cases elites were convinced that an opposition leader could simply be installed with few complications — assumptions that proved to be catastrophically wrong.

And while pro-war conservative pundits point to Venezuela’s 2024 election, which failed to meet free and fair standards, as proof of mass support for the opposition, those dynamics could shift if Caracas’ new government were installed on the back of U.S. tanks or as a result of a CIA-backed coup. The United States gave tacit approval, at least, for a coup attempt in 2002 that briefly removed Hugo Chavez from power, and in Trump’s first term he tried to install then-opposition leader Juan Guaidó into office in a pressure campaign. Both efforts ultimately failed.

The Monroe Doctrine and a Fox pundit’s dream of a right-wing Latin America

MAGA media figures have pushed to reinvigorate their version of the Monroe Doctrine, which conceives of the Western Hemisphere as the rightful dominion of the United States, for years. The escalation against Venezuela is a key part of this ideology, as is right-wing media’s support for Argentine President Javier Milei and its defense of former President of Brazil Jair Bolsonaro, both MAGA favorites. At the same time, Trump has waged a pressure campaign against President Gustavo Petro of Colombia, a leftist, by imposing sanctions on him and his family for alleged involvement in the drug trade. Trump has additionally threatened Colombia with increased tariffs and cutting off aid.

A recent comment from Fox’s Campos-Duffy suggests that the Rubio-led campaign against Venezuela is in fact even larger in scope than is currently appreciated.

“A lot of people saying, we’ve heard María Corina Machado say it on our show as well, if Venezuela returns to the people who won the election last July, to the opposition party, and the Marxist, you know, socialist government of Maduro goes down, so will Cuba and so will Nicaragua. It will essentially get all of the communists out of our hemisphere,” Campos-Duffy said. (Some observers believe Rubio’s campaign to remove Maduro is a precursor to his goal of overthrowing Cuba’s communist government.)

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Citation

From the October 25, 2025, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends Weekend

Campos-Duffy’s scheme, if put into practice, would not represent the first time the United States has tried to crush left-wing governments and social movements in Latin America. As journalist Vincent Bevins details in The Jakarta Method, which examines the history of U.S.-supported anticommunist efforts around the world, forces backed by the U.S. military and CIA have been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people suspected of leftist sympathies across Central and South America.

That bloody history doesn’t fit neatly within the current right-wing media fantasy of a quick and easy operation in Venezuela. So, like the many victims of U.S.-backed regimes in Latin America, that context simply gets disappeared.

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3 boats blown up? propose land war 10 25

mma

Voz Media guest says “the United States knows exactly where Nicolás Maduro is" and "could neutralize him with a missile very easily”

10/24/25

===

mma

9 25

Cada Tarde host says Trump would commit a “ridiculous act” if he withdrew troops from the Caribbean without a confrontation with Maduro

Agustin Acosta: “I don't think that Trump is going to go down in history with such a ridiculous act, because it would also set a really bad precedent for his foreign policy”

Written by Media Matters Staff

Published09/17/25

Cada Tarde host says Trump would commit a "ridiculous act" if he withdrew troops from the Caribbean without regime change in Venezuela

guk no lnx

guk

maga since forever’: mercenary mogul Erik Prince pushes to privatize Trump deportation plans

Notorious Blackwater founder is lobbying allies in White House for private contractors to assist in mass deportations

Ben Makuch

Sun 16 Mar 2025

Silicon Valley has played a sizable part in the early days of Donald Trump’s new administration, but another familiar face in the Maga-verse is beginning to emerge: businessman Erik Prince, often described by his critics as a living “Bond villain”.

Prince is the most famous mercenary of the contemporary era and the founder of the now defunct private military company Blackwater. For a time, it was a prolific privateer in the “war on terror”, racking up millions in US government contracts by providing soldiers of fortune to the CIA, Pentagon and beyond.

Now he is a central figure among a web of other contractors trying to sell Trump advisers on a $25bn deal to privatize the mass deportations of 12 million migrants.

Erik Prince and Daniel Noboa

Ecuador enlists founder of Blackwater private army as ally in ‘war’ on crime

Read more

In an appearance on NewsNation, he immediately tried to temper that his plan had any traction.

“No indications, so far,” said Prince about a federal contract materializing. “Eventually if they’re going to hit those kinds of numbers and scale, they’re going to need additional private sector.”

But the news had people wondering, how is Prince going to factor into the second Trump presidency?

Sean McFate, a professor at Georgetown University who has advised the Pentagon and the CIA, said: “Erik Prince has always been politically connected to Maga, the Maga movement, and that’s going back to 2015.”

Prince, himself a special forces veteran and ex-Navy Seal, is a known business associate of Steve Bannon, the architect of Trump’s first electoral win. Prince even appeared with him last July at a press conference before Bannon surrendered to authorities and began a short prison sentence for defying a congressional subpoena.

“He comes from a wealthy Republican family,” said McFate, who has authored books on the global mercenary industry and is familiar with Prince’s history. “His sister, Betsy DeVos, is the former education secretary, and he’s been a Maga, not just a Maga, he’s been a Steve Bannon, Maga Breitbart Republican, since forever.”

Beginning during the two Bush administrations, Blackwater was a major recipient of Pentagon money flowing into wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But a massacre in Baghdad at the hands of some of his contractors led to prison sentences, congressional inquiries and blacklistings of the firm.

Years later, Trump would come to the rescue: pardoning all of the Blackwater mercenaries involved in the massacre.

Now, with the current administration, which is doling out free advertising to Elon Musk and other Maga loyalists, Prince has a new and familiar ally in Washington.

“This is a big market time for him,” said McFate. “He’s very quiet when there’s a Democrat in the White House and gets very noisy when a Republican, especially Trump, is in the White House; I expect this to be one of many things he will try to pitch.”

Do you have tips about private military contractors or the world of Erik Prince? Tip us securely here or text Ben Makuch at BenMakuch.90 on Signal.

McFate said Prince is nothing if not an “opportunist” and an “egotist” with a penchant for getting into media cycles.

“If Trump or somebody says ‘That’s an interesting idea,’ he will pump out a PowerPoint slideshow proposing an idea, whether or not he can do it,” he said. Prince also has the ear of Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, and was a character witness for her Senate confirmation.

There’s no denying Prince is a relentless pitchman, offering world governments billion-dollar plans to privatize wars or other less expensive espionage activities. For example, he was recently named to the advisory board of the London-based private intelligence firm Vantage Intelligence, which advises “sovereign wealth funds” and other “high-net-worth individuals”.

Post-Blackwater and under new companies, he has proposed missions in Afghanistan, Ukraine, Congo, Libya and, purportedly, Venezuela – a country he often mentions as ripe for overthrow on his podcast, Off Leash. rare earth minerals?

A senior commander in an alliance of former Venezuelan soldiers who defected from the Chavista regime told the Guardian his organization has been asking Prince for help against the country’s current president, Nicolás Maduro.

“We have sent messages to Mr Erik Prince to try to see if we can meet,” said Javier Nieto Quintero, a Florida-based former captain in the Venezuelan military and leader of the Venezuelan dissident organization Carive. “If he wants, we can provide help, support in terms of information, intelligence, or any other area based on the freedom of our country.”

Nieto Quintero, who said Prince has yet to respond, and Carive was used in a failed operation against Maduro in 2020 led by a former Green Beret. In what is notoriously known as the “Bay of Piglets”, six of Nieto Quintero’s men were killed and close to 100 captured, including two former US servicemen recruited for the job who were freed two years ago from a Caracas prison.

Prince’s eye has undoubtedly been focused on Venezuela, a country with vast oil reserves that has long been in the crosshairs of Trump’s retinue. In recent months, Prince has supported a Venezuelan opposition movement called Ya Casi Venezuela, claiming to have raised more than $1m for it over the summer. The Maduro regime is now investigating Prince’s links to the campaign, which it paints as a sort of front for western governments fostering its downfall.

Venezuela has reason to fear Prince and his connections to American spies: the CIA, with a rich history of covert actions in Latin America, was at least aware of a plot to overthrow Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chávez in 2002.

“We were in contact with Ya Casi Venezuela, but a meeting never took place,” said Nieto Quintero. “We have continued to grow and strengthen our ranks and our doctrine, our plans, our institutional, military, security and defense proposals.”

Prince is officially active in the region. Last week, Ecuador announced it would be partnering with Prince in a “strategic alliance” to reinforce the country’s controversial “war on crime” with his expertise.

Prince did not respond to a request for comment sent through his encrypted cellphone company, Unplugged. Ya Casi Venezuela did not answer numerous emails about its relationship with Prince. As of now, no business deal between the Trump administration and Prince has been signed or publicly disclosed.

But across his career as both a shadowy contractor and a political figure, who just graced the stages of the latest Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) to applause and then spoke to Harvard Republicans, the public and private sides of Prince remain somewhat antithetical.

“He likes to be in the news, which makes him a very bad mercenary,” said McFate. “Frankly, most mercenaries I talk to in Africa, the big ones, despise him.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/trump-won-florida-after-running-this-false-ad-tying-biden-to-venezuelan-socialists/

In Florida, where President Donald Trump gained crucial support among Latino voters, his campaign ran aYouTube ad in Spanish making the explosive — and false — claim that Venezuela's ruling clique was backing Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

YouTube showed the ad more than 100,000 times in Florida in the eight days leading up to the election, even after The Associated Press published a fact-check debunking the Trump campaign's claim. Actually, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro expressed opposition to both presidential candidates.

The video was part of a broader Trump campaign strategy in heavily Latino South Florida that sought to tie Biden to Socialist leaders like Maduro and the late Cuban President Fidel Castro. Trump won Florida by about 375,000 votes, the largest margin in a presidential election there since 1988. He carried about 55% of the Cuban American vote, according to exit polls by NBC News.

“Latinos who live here in the U.S. have left socialist or communist regimes," said Diego Scharifker, a Venezuelan American lawyer, former city councilor in Caracas and co-founder of the pro-Biden group Venezolanos Con Biden. “There is of course a big impact or fear or scarring in the Latino community in the U.S. from communism. Trump with his false accusations and false information was fearmongering and playing on the pain to promote his agenda."

The ad illustrates gaps in the policing of misinformation by Google, which owns YouTube. While Google nominally prohibits all false claims in advertising, it rarely takes down political ads. In addition, shortcomings in its transparency tools make it harder for watchdogs and fact-checkers to scrutinize ads.

Google's political ad rules are “trying to have it both ways" with respect to fact-checking, said Bridget Barrett, a political communication researcher at the University of North Carolina. “In reality, basically everything stands." Google sees claims like the one about Maduro as being “within the public arena that should be contested by Biden's campaign or fact-checked by journalists," Barrett added.

YouTube approves ads by both human and machine review. Its policies prohibit any advertiser from making “a false claim — whether it's a claim about the price of a chair or a claim that you can vote by text message, that election day is postponed, or that a candidate has died."

Charlotte Smith, a company spokeswoman, told ProPublica in an email that “we don't make any special exceptions for politicians." Nevertheless, YouTube takes down only a “very limited" number of political ads making “demonstrably false claims that could significantly undermine trust in democratic or electoral processes," she said.

The Trump campaign ad “doesn't meet that bar," she said. “This video does not violate our policies. ... Political ads are known for being hyperbolic, and we're not going to attempt to adjudicate every claim or counterclaim."

Other platforms are at least somewhat more restrictive.While Facebook doesn't fact-check campaign ads, it banned new ones within a week of the election. (The Trump ad does not appear to have run on Facebook, according to its ad library. If it had, the ban may not have applied to it, because it began running on YouTube on Oct. 26, eight days before the Nov. 3 election.) Facebook's fact-checking partners do vet ads by political action committees and other third-party groups, some of which get removed.Twitter banned all political advertising. Although broadcast television stations aren't allowed to choose candidate ads by content, cable networks can, and sometimes do, reject ads. The Trump ad didn't appear on TV, according to Advertising Analytics, an ad-tracking firm.

The Trump campaign saw YouTube as a key to its strategy, according to a Politico report in September. It ran more than 18,000 video ads on YouTube this year. The campaign spent $106 million, including $37.2 million in the last month of the campaign, on Google's platform, including both YouTube ads and Google search ads.

The questionable video begins by describing Biden as “the candidate of Chavismo," referring to the brand of socialism associated with Hugo Chávez, the late leader of Venezuela, and Maduro's government. It then shows Diosdado Cabello, a Maduro ally and Venezuela's second-most powerful politician, saying on his television program that the “brisa Bolivariana," or the “Bolivarian breeze" of Latin American socialism, “is blowing, blowing, blowing, blowing. ... Let's see what happens. Maybe the Bolivarian breeze will reach the United States. In how much time? In 13 days until the elections." The term “Bolivarian" is an allusion to Simón Bolívar, the 19th-century revolutionary, claimed as an inspiration for many Latin American socialist movements.

Then the text on the screen reiterates that “the Chavistas" — the political party that controls Venezuela — “want Joe Biden to win." The video concludes with a statement that it was paid by the Trump campaign and Trump saying that he approved the message.

There's little doubt that the relationship between the Trump administration and the Maduro government is tense. Trump has imposed sanctions on Venezuela and on Maduro and Cabello personally. The U.S. government indicted both Maduro and Cabello on narco-terrorism and drug trafficking charges in March. Venezuelan state-run television has struck a “completely anti-Trump" tone, said Daniel Acosta-Ramos, an investigative researcher at First Draft, a nonprofit that tracks misinformation and an Electionland partner.

Yet Maduro said in late September that he didn't care who was elected. “If Trump wins the elections, we will confront him and defeat him, and if Biden wins, we'll confront him and defeat him too," he said. An AP fact-check of a video that resembles the one in the Trump campaign ad concluded that neither Biden nor Maduro “has declared that there is any kind of affinity between them or between their national projects."

In the television segment from which Cabello's “Bolivarian breeze" remark was clipped, he didn't explicitly mention Trump, Biden or the Democratic or Republican parties. While the remark could be interpreted as hoping that Biden would be elected and promote the agenda of his party's progressive wing, Cabello has a reputation for being a provocateur and saying unclear things on purpose, according to Acosta-Ramos. “That ambiguity creates an environment ripe for misinfo," he said.

The ad, Acosta-Ramos said, was “micro-targeted for people who know what the 'brisa Bolivariana' means. Not just Venezuelans, but also Cubans and Colombians."

Other YouTube ads from the Trump campaign reinforced the false message. They showed clips of Maduro referring to Biden as “Comrade Biden" in a 2015 speech. Although it was only a passing reference, and Maduro accused Biden shortly afterward of plotting to overthrow him, Donald Trump Jr. framed it as evidence that Biden was weak on socialism.

The Trump campaign's official bilingual Twitter account also claimed that Maduro's regime supported Biden. A tweet from President Trump called Biden a “PUPPET of CASTRO-CHAVISTAS." Trump ads on Facebook called Biden a “socialist" and pictured him with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders, both of whom refer to themselves as democratic socialists.

“There was a concerted effort by the Trump campaign and their allies to misrepresent Joe Biden and his values because they knew they couldn't win on Trump's disastrous record," a Biden campaign official told ProPublica.

Florida's Venezuelan population has grown to about 200,000, of whom an estimated 50,000 are registered to vote. In Doral, a city in Miami-Dade County that's home to many Americans of Venezuelan, Cuban and Colombian descent, Trump pulled in roughly 49% of voters in 2020, up from 29% in 2016. Overall, in Miami-Dade, Trump garnered nearly 200,000 more votes than he had in 2016, shaving the Democratic margin from 29% to 7%.

The Trump campaign, the White House and the Venezuelan Embassy did not respond to requests for comment.

The Trump ad may have attracted relatively little notice during the campaign because of inadequacies in the political ad report that Google established in 2018 to improve transparency. Unlike Facebook's political ad archive, Google's doesn't group identical ads together if, for instance, they were shown over different time periods. Google's transparency tools showed three different copies of the “brisa Bolivariana" ad, giving separate data for each. Google also doesn't make videos searchable or any ad content downloadable in bulk.

The design doesn't allow opponents, journalists or watchdogs to meaningfully analyze the 263,000 political video ads (and 361,000 other ads) that Google sold in 2020, Barrett said.

“You're just drowning in content and overwhelmed by these individual pieces of advertising content, and really many of them are the same, you're stuck trying to swim through this overwhelming sea of ads," Barrett said. Ads “can disappear into the depths of the ad library."

Google has said that it only allows advertisers to target political ads by users' location, age and gender, and that it discloses these targeting choices on its transparency website. The three copies of the “Bolivarian breeze" ad were targeted by location to Florida users.

Although it's not disclosed in Google's transparency tools, YouTube ads also may be targeted by language, for example to Spanish speakers, Smith said.

It's unclear exactly how much the Trump campaign spent on the ad and how many times it was shown. Google's data show that the Trump campaign spent between $1,000 and $5,000 on one copy of the ad; between $100 and $1,000 on another; and less than $100 on the third. Two of the copies were shown fewer than 10,000 times, and the third was shown between 100,000 and 1 million times. Facebook publishes more precise information.

Trump supporters amplified the campaign's message, professing to connect Biden and other Democrats to “Castro-Chavismo," a term linking Venezuelan socialism to Cuba's. False posts on social media, of undetermined origin, purported to show Jill Biden, Joe's wife, standing next to Fidel Castro. It was actually Jacqueline Beer, the wife of a Norwegian explorer.

“We saw a huge number of WhatsApp messages being shared in Venezuelan, Cuban groups, saying the governments of these countries that we escaped, [they] want Biden — so we should vote Trump," Acosta-Ramos said.

What a Biden staffer described as a flood of information put the Democrat's campaign on the defensive. The Biden campaign mounted its own fact-checking effort to push back against the claims about Biden and socialism.It invested heavily in outreach to Florida Latinos, including six-figure media buys in the last two weeks of the campaign targeting the community, a staffer said. At an early October rally in Miami, Biden said, “Maduro, who I've met, is a dictator, plain and simple, and he's causing incredible suffering among the Venezuelan people."

oddly does not connect dots on sanctions?

https://www.aljazeera.com/news**/2020/06/**venezuela-maduro-joins-hands-guaido-fight-virus-200603103335964.html

no lnx

The government of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and opposition leader Juan Guaido have reached an agreement to cooperate to raise funds for the fight against the coronavirus.

The one-page agreement was signed on June 1 between Health Minister Carlos Alvarado, Dr Julio Castro, who leads the National Assembly's commission on the coronavirus, and the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), Information Minister Jorge Rodriguez said on Tuesday.

[Venezuela confirms two coronavirus cases, suspends schools

Venezuela, already in crisis mode, struggles to fight coronavirus

Fear as coronavirus closes border with Venezuela over coronavirus]

The parties will seek funds to cover a range of responses from improving testing, acquiring more protective gear and launching public health messaging campaigns, among others, Rodriguez added.

"COVID-19 does not respect or discriminate against gender, orientation or political party," Rodriguez said on state television on Tuesday night. "So this is good news, a good start, so that we can deepen our work together to combat COVID-19."

Guaido's communications team also said a "technical cooperation plan to deal with the humanitarian coronavirus crisis" was signed.

Translation: After months of insistence and struggle, we [finally] managed to get PAHO to receive the donations approved by the National Assembly to address the pandemic in Venezuela. Our policy is focused on saving lives, attending to the emergency and getting out of the dictatorship.

The two sides have so far not confirmed the details of the plan.

In a statement, however, Guaido's team said PAHO would receive the funds approved for humanitarian aid.

Separately, Washington welcomed the coronavirus agreement.

"It is an important step, but only democratic transition will save Venezuela from catastrophe," the closed US embassy in Caracasposted on Twitter.

Translation: Interim Government of @JGuaido signed an agreement with PAHO for a coordinated association with the regime to combat #COVID19, prioritising urgent medical care needs for Venezuelans. It is an important step, but only democratic transition will save Venezuela from catastrophe.

The White House has imposed financial sanctions on the country to press for Maduro's departure.

Venezuela officially has 1,819 reported COVID-19 cases and 18 related deaths but international organisations such as Human Rights Watch believe this is an underestimate and the real toll is much higher.

The pandemic hit Venezuela when the country was already reeling from a serious economic crisis, hyperinflation and a collapse of public services.

The country has the largest oil reserves in the world, but its production is in freefall, a collapse that experts attribute to failed policies, lack of investment, and corruption.

The economic meltdown has seen about five million Venezuelans flee the country since 2015, according to the United Nations.

MORE ON VENEZUELA

UK court denies Venezuela's Maduro access to gold in bank vault

last month

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Italy's ruling Five Star denies receiving $3.9m from Venezuela

last month

Venezuela electoral board: Council rejected by opposition and US

last month

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sotu, pelosi clapped guido sotu

==

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/07/venezuela-outrage-death-detained-navy-captain-190701092427512.html

torture coup plot

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/04/world/americas/venezuela-police-abuses.html

nyt

no lnx

Venezuela Forces Killed Thousands, Then Covered It Up, U.N. Says

Venezuela’s Special Action Forces carrying out a security operation in Caracas in April.

Venezuela’s Special Action Forces carrying out a security operation in Caracas in April.Credit...Yuri Cortez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

By Nick Cumming-Bruce

July 4, 2019

GENEVA — Venezuelan special forces have carried out thousands of extrajudicial killings in the past 18 months and then manipulated crime scenes to make it look as if the victims had been resisting arrest, the United Nations said on Thursday in a report detailing wide-ranging government abuses targeting political opponents.

Special Action Forces described by witnesses as “death squads” killed 5,287 people in 2018 and another 1,569 by mid-May of this year,in what are officially termed by the Venezuelan government “Operations for the Liberation of the People,” United Nations investigators reported.

Laying out a detailed description of a lawless system of oppression, the report says the actual number of deaths could be much higher. It cites accounts by independent groups who report more than 9,000 killings for “resistance to authority” over the same period.

“There are reasonable grounds to believe that many of these killings constitute extrajudicial executions committed by the security forces,” the investigators said.

The report, which the United Nation human rights chief Michelle Bachelet will present to the Human Rights Council in Geneva on Friday, delivers a scathing critique of President Nicolás Maduro’s embattled government and its handling of Venezuela’s deepening political and economic crisis.

Since 2016, the report says, the government has pursued a strategy “aimed at neutralizing, repressing and criminalizing political opponents and people critical of the government.”

Venezuela’s Foreign Ministry rejected the findings on Thursday, saying the report offered a “distorted vision” that ignored most of the information presented by the government to United Nations researchers.

“The analysis is not objective, nor impartial,” the Foreign Ministry said in a statement, listing what it said were numerous errors. “The negative points are privileged in the extreme and the advances or measures adapted in the area of human rights are ignored or minimized.”

[Here’s a look at how Venezuela has deteriorated into crisis.]

The Special Action Forces, known locally by their Spanish acronym FAES, are nominally tasked with combating drug trafficking and crime, but United Nations human rights officials said they were concerned the government was using these and other security forces “as an instrument to instill fear in the population and to maintain social control.”

Families of 20 young men who were killed in the last year described a pattern of violence in which the FAES units arrived in pickup trucks without license plates, dressed in black and with their faces covered by balaclavas.

They broke into houses, seized belongings and molested women, forcing some to strip naked. Then “they would separate young men from other family members before shooting them,” the investigators reported.

In every case described to the investigators, attackers manipulated the crime scene. “They would plant arms and drugs and fire their weapons against the walls or in the air to suggest a confrontation and to show the victim had resisted authority,” the report says.

The investigators said they had also documented the execution of six young men carried out during one of the house raids, the killings done as a reprisal for their participation in anti-government demonstrations.

Five special forces members were convicted of attempted murder and other offenses in 2018, and another 388 members were under investigation for abuses, according to the report. But few victims, it says, have access to justice or any redress.

The report also describes routine abuse by security and intelligence services of people detained for political reasons. In most of the cases, men and women were subjected to one or more forms of torture, including electric shock, suffocation with plastic bags, water boarding, beating and sexual violence. Women were dragged by their hair and threatened with rape, the report says.

The detentions often had no legal basis, according to the report, which says that more than 2,000 people were arrested for political reasons in the first five months of the year and more than 720 were still detained at the end of May.

Human rights activists welcomed the spotlight the report is turning onto government repression and abuses. “The government’s reaction shows it hits the right points,” said Tamara Taraciuk Broner, a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch.

But Ms. Taraciuk expressed disappointment that the report stops short of urging the United Nations to set up a commission of inquiry. It calls instead for the government to set up an independent investigation, with some unspecified international participation.

“You cannot ask Venezuelan courts, which have no independence, to investigate the executive,” she said.

The report comes two weeks after Ms. Bachelet visited Venezuela. Its hard-hitting tone was especially eye-opening, given her political background. In her second term as Chile’s left-leaning president from 2014 to 2018, she was among the few South American leaders who refused to openly criticize Mr. Maduro’s growing authoritarianism.

The Venezuelan government had tried to use Ms. Bachelet’s visit to bolster Mr. Maduro’s international legitimacy. More than 50 nations, including the United States, have stopped recognizing him as Venezuela’s legitimate leader, calling his re-election last year fraudulent.

Ms. Bachelet’s team was given unusual access inside Venezuela, unlike that given to her predecessor or to other United Nations agencies. Mr. Maduro heavily publicized his meeting with Ms. Bachelet and promised to consider allowing her to open a full-time office in the country. The government also agreed to allow two United Nations human rights staff members to work in the country and said it would give them full access to detention centers.

But any hopes that her visit paved the way for a government change of course on human rights were quickly dampened by the news days later of the death in custody of a Navy captain, Rafael Acosta, who was detained the day Ms. Bachelet’s visit ended. His lawyer said he had been in good health at the time of his arrest, but he died in a military hospital a week later showing visible signs beatings.

Ms. Bachelet expressed her shock at Captain Acosta’s death and called for an investigation, but human rights groups said it showed the limited outcome from her visit.

“This case shows that the government of Venezuela is not taking her seriously,” Ms. Taraciuk said.

==

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1/17/20 pbs fluff on guido

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https://www.mintpressnews.com/how-much-of-the-venezuela-crisis-is-really-nicolas-maduro-fault/255276/

February 19th, 2019

:{:{

}:}:The recognition by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and former Vice President Joe Biden of Juan Guaidó as Venezuelan president is the latest demonstration of the consensus in Washington over the nefariousness of the Nicolás Maduro government. Not since Fidel Castro’s early years in power has a Latin American head of state been so consistently demonized. But the 1960s was the peak of the Cold War polarization that placed Cuba plainly in the enemy camp, and unlike Venezuela today, that nation had a one-party system.

The scope of that consensus was evident by the recent faceoff between two figures as far apart as President Donald Trump and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In his State of the Union address, Trump attributed Venezuela’s economic crisis to the failed system of socialism. Ocasio-Cortez responded by arguing that the Venezuelan case is “an issue of authoritarian regime versus democracy.”

Taken together, the comments by Trump and Ocasio-Cortez complement one another. According to the narrative that dominates Washington, Venezuela is a disaster from both economic and political viewpoints. The exclusive blame for the sorry state of the economy and for the country’s allegedly authoritarian rule lays with Maduro and his cohorts.

Not surprisingly, the mainstream media have refrained from questioning these assumptions. Most of their reporting puts the accent mark on state incompetence and corruption while skirting the detrimental effects of the economic sanctions implemented by the Trump administration.

In addition, many on the left point to the economic sanctions as responsible, at least in part, for the nation’s pressing economic difficulties, but few critically examine the mainstream’s characterization of the state of Venezuelan democracy. Some oppose the sanctions but join the opposition in bashing the Maduro government.

A recent article by Gabriel Hetland, for instance, posted by Jacobinand NACLA: Report on the Americasclaims that Maduro “holds onto power through authoritarian means.” The author then turns to the nation’s economic difficulties by arguing that “the primary driver is the government’s mismanagement of its oil revenue” and corruption.

During my participation in a two-month Venezuelan solidarity tour late last year in the U.S. and Canada, I often heard the statement that knowing the specifics about Venezuela’s economic and political problems is not essential because the bottom line is the illegality of Trump’s sanctions and threats of military intervention. But does international law end the discussion?

If it could be proven that Maduro is a dictator and a totally incompetent ruler, would people enthusiastically rally behind his government in opposition to foreign intervention? I don’t think so. Undoubtedly, it is necessary to take a close look at both political and economic fronts because the effectiveness of solidarity efforts hinges on the specifics. The dominant narrative about Maduro and its assumptions cannot be taken at face value, even while there are elements of truth in it.

How Far Back Do the Economic Problems Go?

The Venezuelan opposition frequently argues that neither the sanctions nor depressed international oil prices are to blame for the nation’s economic difficulties, only the mismanagement of the economy. At best, declining oil prices contributed to the problems but were not a root cause. Some opposition analysts deny or minimize the importance of oil prices as a factor by pointing out that the economies of other OPEC nations are as dependent on oil exports as that of Venezuela but have not plummeted to the same levels.

The opposition’s central argument here is that Venezuela’s dire economic problems predate Trump’s implementation of sanctions and even predate the sharp decline in international oil prices beginning mid-2014. That is, government follies with disastrous effects came first, followed by the decline in oil prices and then the sanctions. Two-time presidential candidate for theopposition Henrique Capriles claimed that the crisis began prior to the fall of oil prices but for a long time was “ignored, repressed and covered up” by the government.

There are two fallacies in this line of thinking. In the first place, the so-called economic war against Venezuela, which eventually included the Trump-imposed sanctions, preceded everything else. Washington almost from the beginning of Hugo Chávez’s presidency in 1999 did not stand by idly while he defied the neoliberal Washington consensus as well as U.S. hegemony. Washington’s hostility seriously harmed the economy in multiple ways.

[ pix A water tank is emblazoned with images of Hugo Chavez, left, and his ally Lina Ron, at the 23 de Enero neighborhood in Caracas, Venezuela, July 25, 2014. Fernando Llano | AP]

For instance, the George W. Bush administration banned the sale of spare parts for the Venezuelan Air Force’s costly F-16 fighter jets in 2006, forcing the country to turn to Russia for the purchase of 24 Sukhoi SU-30 fighter planes. Furthermore, the international sanctions did not begin with Trump, but rather Obama in 2015 which were justified by his executive order calling Venezuela a threat to U.S. national security. That order was followed by an avalanche of pull-outs from Venezuela by multinationals including Ford, Kimberly Clark, General Motors, Kellogg’s and nearly all the international airlines.

In the second place, oil prices under Maduro have not only been low since 2014 but nosedived, just the opposite of what happened under Chávez.This is particularly problematic because high prices create expectations and commitments that then get transformed into frustration and anger when they precipitously drop. Prices are currently slightly over half of what they were before the decline, in spite of their modest recovery since 2017.

Three factors explain Venezuela’s economic woes, not one: low oil prices, the “economic war” against Venezuela, and mistaken policies.Prominent in the latter category is Maduro’s lethargic response to the problem of the widening disparity between official prices set by the government on certain items in short supply and their prices on the black market. The government has encountered major problems in distributing basic commodities, forcing Venezuelans to buy those same goods on the higher-priced black market. The system is conducive to corruption and contraband as many of the products that are supposed to be retailed at reduced prices end up being sold on the black market or sent off to neighboring Colombia.

The Dictatorship Label Repeated a Thousand Times

The media are in desperate need of good fact-checkers in their reporting on Venezuela. Statements about Venezuelan democracy range from blatantly misleading to accurate with most lying between the two extremes. An example of the former is the Guardian’s claim that the Venezuelan government “controls most TV and radio stations which transmit a constant stream of pro-Maduro propaganda.” In fact, of those who tune into Venezuelan TV channels, 80 percent watch the three major private channels (Venevisión, Televén, and Globovisión) which cannot be seriously accused of being pro-government.

At the other extreme is Hetland’s assertion in his Jacobin-NACLApiece that the decision to strip Henrique Capriles of his right to run for office as a result of corruption charges was politically motivated. The statement is accurate. Actually, the move was worse than what Hetland discusses. For some time before that, Capriles, whose political positions have vacillated considerably, favored a less intransigent stance toward the government than those on the radical right, which has largely dominated the opposition of late. The move, in effect, played into the hands of the radicals and undermined efforts to bring about a much-needed national dialogue.

Those who call Maduro a dictator make two basic assertions. In the first place, the government is alleged to have brutally repressed the four-month-long peaceful demonstrations designed to bring about regime change carried out in 2014 and then 2017. In fact, the protests were hardly peaceful. Six National Guardsmen and two policemen were killed in 2014 and protestors fired into an air force base in Caracas and attacked a number of police stations in Táchira in 2017. There are different versions of the circumstances surrounding the numerous fatalities in 2014 and 2017, thus requiring an impartial analysis, which the media has hardly attempted to present. Police repression is reprehensible – and repression there was on both occasions – regardless of circumstances, but the context has to be brought into the picture.

[pix Venezuelans perform a parody involving a Venezuelan militia up against Uncle Sam in Caracas, Venezuela, Aug. 14, 2017. Ariana Cubillos | AP

In the second place, the opposition denies that Maduro’s re-election in May of last year was legitimate because the election was called for by the National Constituent Assembly (ANC), whose existence allegedly has no legal basis. One of the nation’s foremost constitutional lawyers, Hermann Escarrá, has defended the ANC’s legality, while others formulate plausible arguments to the contrary. Again, the mainstream media has failed to present both sides or to objectively analyze the issue. Nearly all the opposition parties that refused to participate in the presidential elections in 2018, however, did participate in the gubernatorial elections of the preceding year that were convened by the same ANC. The justification for Juan Guaidó’s self-proclamation as Venezuelan president on Jan. 23 was predicated on the illegitimacy of the ANC.

Violation of democratic norms and cases of police repression do not in themselves demonstrate that a government is authoritarian or dictatorial. If they did, the United States would hardly be considered democratic. The real defining issue is whether electoral fraud takes place in which votes are not correctly counted. That accusation has been largely absent in the controversy over recent elections, even among leaders of the radical opposition.

The mainstream media and Washington politicians freely call Maduro an “autocrat” a “dictator” and “authoritarian.” More than anything that is said about Venezuela’s economic difficulties, the use of these terms has had a profound effect on policymaking. A nation’s economic problems should not justify the intervention of any sort. The real issue of contention, therefore, is the state of Venezuelan democracy as depicted by the dominant narrative. Amazingly enough, there is no major actor in mainstream politics and the mainstream media willing to challenge that narrative with all its questionable claims regarding the Maduro government.

Top Photo | Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro, backdropped by a painting of independence hero Simon Bolivar, speaks during a press conference at Miraflores Presidential Palace in Caracas, Venezuela, Dec. 30, 2014. Ariana Cubillos | AP

Steve Ellner is a retired professor from Venezuela’s University of the East and is currently associate managing editor of “Latin American Perspectives.” Among his over a dozen books on Latin America is his edited “The Pink Tide Experiences: Breakthroughs and Shortcomings in Twenty-First Century Latin America” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).

==

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezeula-politics-un/venezuela-defends-cuba-ties-after-trump-calls-maduro-cuban-puppet-idUSKBN1W92P1

https://www.democracynow.org/2020/1/6/headlines/maduro_takes_control_of_venezuela_s_national_assembly

In Venezuela, President Nicolás Maduro moved to take control over the National Assembly and blocked the re-election of opposition leader Juan Guaidó as the assembly’s leader. The move comes as Maduro seeks to hold onto power amid a U.S.-backed opposition movement. He has faced criticism for consolidating control over Venezuela’s various governmental institutions, and his critics denounced the move as a “parliamentary coup d’état.”

==

omg

“Erik Prince, a major Republican donor and founder of controversial security firm Blackwater, has been referred to the U.S. Treasury Department for possible sanctions violations tied to his recent trip to Venezuela for a meeting with a top aide of President Nicolas Maduro,” according to the AP.

WaPo also reported that Rudy Giuliani was involved in a back-channel negotiation with Maduro that would “reopen resource-rich Venezuela to business.” The effort, according to the report, “provides another example of how Giuliani used his private role to insert himself into foreign diplomacy, alarming administration officials confused about whose interests he was representing.”

*****

WaPo: Giuliani Held Back-Channel Call with Maduro

Washington Post says President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani held a back-channel phone call with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in September 2018, which aimed to push Maduro out of power and open up Venezuela for business. Also on the call was then-Texas Republican Congressmember Pete Sessions. The Post reports the call was part of a shadow diplomatic effort backed by private business interests.

==

wapo no lnx

Trump’s lawyer and the Venezuelan president: How Giuliani got involved in back-channel talks with Maduro

By Rosalind S. Helderman,

Tom Hamburger,

Anthony Faiola and

Josh Dawsey

Dec. 30, 2019 at 4:38 a.m. PST

The international call came in September 2018, after months of rising tension between the United States and Venezuela, a key strategic player in South America.

On one end of the line was Venezuela’s socialist president, the pariah leader of a disintegrating economy whom President Trump’s administration was seeking to isolate.

On the other end: the U.S. president’s personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani and then-Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Tex.).

==

CNN President Donald Trump's personal lawyer held a back channel phone call with Venezuela's embattled President Nicolas Maduro in September 2018, according to The Washington Post, serving as the latest example of the scope ofRudy Giuliani's role in US foreign diplomacy.

People familiar with the effort told the Post that Giuliani and then-Rep. Pete Sessions of Texas participated in the phone call with Maduro in a diplomatic endeavor to ease him from power and reopen Venezuela to business. Sessions' spokesman Matt Mackowiak told the newspaper in an article published Sunday that the call was a followup to a meeting Sessions had with Maduro in Venezuela that spring.

Upon learning of the call, White House officials did not know why Giuliani was involved, a former senior administration official told the Post.

The former New York City mayor's call with Maduro in late 2018 ran counter to White House'sincreasingly hardline approach to Venezuela at the time.Giuliani met then-national security adviser John Bolton around the time of the call to discuss a plan to ease Maduro from power, two people familiar with the meeting told the Post, but Bolton rejected the idea.

The Post's Sunday article builds onprevious reporting from the newspaperthat Giuliani had entered an agreement to find a way to negotiate a back channel communication between Trump and Maduro.

Giuliani's foreign contacts came under considerable scrutiny throughout the House's impeachment inquiry of the President aftera whistleblower complaint alleged that US officials were concerned about Giuliani and his contacts with Ukrainian officials.

Some US officials testified before Congress in the impeachment inquiry that Giuliani was a conduit for messages between the President and officials in Kiev, and that he was at the helm of a problematic "circumvention of national security decision-making processes."

Giuliani has previously told CNN he has "no knowledge of any of that crap" in the whistleblower complaint.

==

gzero puppet Ian b

moises wb prez?

On January 2, 2015, The End of Power was selected by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg as the inaugural book for the Mark Zuckerberg book club, a public resolution to read one new book every two weeks in 2015

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-friends/fox-friends-rudy-giuliani-links-911-terrorism-venezuela

video:

On Fox & Friends, Rudy Giuliani links 9/11 terrorism to Venezuela

Giuliani: “We have to get rid of Maduro”

==

==

819 new round of extreme sanctions, rept says 4K KIA already

==

https://theconversation.com/5-reasons-why-trumps-venezuela-embargo-wont-end-the-maduro-regime-121538

U.S. has announced an economic embargo on Venezuela, intended to put an end to President Nicolás Maduro’s authoritarian regime.

In an Aug. 5 executive order, President Donald Trump said that the tough new sanctions – which target any company or individual outside of Venezuela doing business directly or indirectly with Maduro’s government – were a response to the Maduro regime’s “continued usurpation of power” and “human rights abuses.”

All Venezuelan government assets in the United States are also now frozen.

The new measures represent a significant escalation from previous sanctions, which mainly targeted government officials and some key industries such as oil and gas, gold and finance.

But my analysis of Venezuela’s political and economic crisis suggests that an embargo alone will not provoke Maduro’s ouster. Here are five reasons why.

1. Venezuela’s economy is already broken

Embargos are a foreign policy tool meant to pressure rogue governments into changing their ways by cutting off their cash flow.

It’s too late for that in Venezuela.

After years of mismanagement and corruption by the Maduro government, Venezuela’s economy is in shambles. The GDP has contracted by more than 15% every year since 2016. Hyperinflation hit 10 million percent in 2019.

Maduro’s cash-strapped government defaulted on its dollar-based bonds in 2017. This year it has failed to make payments on US$1.85 billion that Deutsche Bank and Citigroup loaned Venezuela using the regime’s gold as collateral. Venezuela’s government is nearly bankrupt.

But since this economic decline has happened gradually, beginning in 2014, wealthy Venezuelans – especially corrupt government officials – have already put their money overseas, primarily in European markets. For example, Venezuelans own some 7,000 luxury apartments in Madrid, according to The New York Times.

American sanctions just can’t hurt Venezuela’s ruling class the way they might have several years ago.

2. The embargo leaves some cash flows untouched

Trump’s harsh new sanctions on Venezuela are not a full trade embargo like the Cuba embargo, which has almost totally isolated the island from world markets since 1962.

Imports and exports with the private sector – a still sizable market despite Maduro’s socialist policies – will continue to flow freely, as will remittances from Venezuelans living abroad.

These two income sources both come in dollars, which is far more stable and valuable than the local currency. Combined, they can keep the ailing Venezuelan economy afloat for some time.

An incomplete embargo, in other words, will not provoke complete economic collapse.

The U.S. embargo is sure to be unpopular in Venezuela. A wall in Caracas reads, ‘Trump, un-embargo Venezuela.’ AP Photo/Leonardo Fernandez

3. The poor, not the regime, will be hurt the most

Venezuelans with access to dollars – through remittances or savings squirreled away before the crisis – are surviving this crisis. They can afford food, medicine and gasoline, and buy other goods to barter.

But most Venezuelans today are desperately poor. According to the United Nations, 90% of people there live in poverty. That’s double what it was in 2014.

The Venezuelan minimum wage of roughly $7 per month is not enough to cover a family’s basic needs. As a result, malnutrition is spreading. Last year, Venezuelans reported losing an average of 25 pounds, and two-thirds said they go to bed hungry.

The majority of Venezuelans rely on the government to eat. Its monthly delivery of heavily subsidized food and basic goods known as “CLAP” is a lifeline to the poor. If the government runs out of money, poor people will feel it the most – not the government officials and other Venezuelans with access to dollars.

Venezuelan National Militia members carry boxes of subsidized food for distribution across the capital of Caracas, July 5, 2019. AP Photos/Ariana Cubillos

4. China and Russia still support Venezuela

Maduro has few international allies. When the Trump administration led efforts earlier this year to recognize opposition leader Juan Guaidó as the legitimate president of Venezuela, 60 countries joined it.

But China and Russia continue to be the Venezuela’s most powerful international boosters and have bailed out Maduro by giving his government massive loans in the past. Both have vetoed every U.S. effort to pass resolutions against Maduro’s government within the United Nations.

China has exploited Venezuela’s vast natural resources for profit. Russia has made the South American nation a strategic geopolitical partner in the Western Hemisphere, a key ally in its efforts to undermine American influence.

Neither of the two countries are likely to comply with an economic embargo to Venezuela. Analysts expect them to continue buying oil, gold and other valuable commodities from Maduro’s regime, providing much-needed cash to his government.

5. Remember Cuba?

Embargoes rarely produce regime change of the sort Trump seeks in Venezuela.

Just consider Cuba, which this year celebrated the 66th anniversary of its communist revolution – 57 years after the Kennedy government imposed a trade embargo against it. The Cuba embargo didn’t end the Castro regime; it fueled anti-American sentiment, handing the Castros an easy scapegoat for all the country’s problems – thereby improving the government’s own popularity.

An embargo will almost surely do the same in Venezuela. Trump has given Maduro even more ammunition to blame the U.S. for his country’s economic woes.

Maduro has been doing that for years anyway. Now, he won’t be totally wrong.

:{

}:

suggestions but no proof chavez involved in drugs (in fact '92 coup?)

1st lady wanted 20 million to run for senate? ~ US $ in elections? ($84K NED)

note pix maduro nephews (witness DEA hire? lied]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartel_of_the_Suns

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-usa-crime-idUSKBN13D2PK

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_drug_trade

https://www.counterextremism.com/roundup/eye-extremism-january-11-2019

**Fox News: Venezuela, Iran And Hezbollah - All Hostile To The US - Forge Closer Ties**

“As Iran and Venezuela become increasingly isolated and sanctioned by the U.S and much of the international community, the two governments are said to be tightening their bond - with the help of Tehran's proxy group, Hezbollah, in the middle of the action."Training between Iran and Venezuela has increased in the past few years as part of a larger plan between the Venezuelan regime, consisting of increasing the number of Hezbollah operatives and their supporters across Latin America,”Johan Obdola, President of the Canada-based Global Organization for Intelligence (IOSI) and former counter-narcotics chief in Venezuela, told Fox News.“(Hassan) Rouhani and (Nicolas) Maduro have established a very firm and close relationship, which was of course initiated by (Hugo) Chavez.” Venezuela’s connections to Iran – and by default its proxy militia, Hezbollah – go back more than a decade. Hezbollah, which translates to “The Party of God,” is an Iran-backed, Shiite-dominant political and military group that began in Lebanon in 1982, following the Israeli occupation. It was designated a foreign terrorist organization by the U.S State Department in 1997.”

==

NEW

https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/false-flag-operation-was-the-us-wrong-to-blame-the-venezuelan-president-for-burning-aid-trucks/

no lnx twit

On February 23, a caravan of large cargo trucks was crossing a bridge from Colombia into Venezuela delivering food and other aid when they dramatically went up in flames. US officials seized upon the event as evidence of a “sick tyrant” stopping food from getting to hungry people:

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo tweeted:

Secretary Pompeo

?

@SecPompeo

The U.S. condemns the attacks on civilians in #Venezuela perpetrated by Maduro’s thugs. These attacks have resulted in deaths and injuries. Our deepest sympathies to the families of those who have died due to these criminal acts. We join their demand for justice. #EstamosUnidosVE

View image on TwitterView image on Twitter

Secretary Pompeo

?

@SecPompeo

We denounce Maduro’s refusal to let humanitarian assistance reach #Venezuela. What kind of a sick tyrant stops food from getting to hungry people? The images of burning trucks filled with aid are sickening. pic.twitter.com/bJ1Qsxkgx8

7,620

5:53 PM - Feb 23, 2019

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National Security Advisor John Bolton tweeted:

View image on Twitter

View image on Twitter

John Bolton

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@AmbJohnBolton

Masked thugs, civilians killed by live rounds, and the burning of trucks carrying badly-needed food and medicine. This has been Maduro’s response to peaceful efforts to help Venezuelans. Countries that still recognize Maduro should take note of what they are endorsing.

15.9K

1:36 PM - Feb 23, 2019

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Senator Marco Rubio tweeted:

Marco Rubio

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@marcorubio

Each of the trucks burned by Maduro carried 20 tons of food & medicine. This is a crime & if international law means anything he must pay a high price for this. #23FAyudaHumanitaria

NTN24 Venezuela

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@NTN24ve

[#VIDEO] Cada camión quemado por la PNB llevaba 20 toneladas de ayuda humanitaria. Voceros nacionales e internacionales lo califican como un crimen #23Feb

Embedded video

8,263

2:39 PM - Feb 23, 2019

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The US State Department released a propaganda video:

Embedded video

Kimberly Breier

?

@WHAAsstSecty

Now is the time to act in support of the Venezuelan people and to get vital, desperately needed humanitarian assistance to them. LET THE AID INTO #Venezuela. #EstamosUnidosVE

473

12:39 PM - Feb 24, 2019

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Vice President Mike Pence tweeted:

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Vice President Mike Pence

?

@VP

The tyrant in Caracas danced as his henchmen murdered civilians & burned food & medicine heading to Venezuelans. Saturday was tragic for the families of those killed & suffering Venezuelans. But it was just 1 more day in Venezuela’s journey from tyranny to freedom. Maduro must go

7,712

3:57 PM - Feb 25, 2019

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The New York Times is reporting Sunday that the fire was actually started by supporters of oppostion leader Juan Guiado.

“Unpublished footage obtained by The New York Times and previously released tapes — including footage released by the Colombian government, which has blamed Mr. Maduro for the fire — allowed for a reconstruction of the incident. It suggests that a Molotov cocktail thrown by an antigovernment protester was the most likely trigger for the blaze.  At one point, a homemade bomb made from a bottle is hurled toward the police, who were blocking a bridge connecting Colombia and Venezuela to prevent the aid trucks from getting through.  But the rag used to light the Molotov cocktail separates from the bottle, flying toward the aid truck instead.  Half a minute later, that truck is in flames.  The same protester can be seen 20 minutes earlier, in a different video, hitting another truck with a Molotov cocktail, without setting it on fire.”

The Times also reported:

Many of Mr. Maduro’s critics claim that he ordered medication set on fire during the border standoff — even though many of his people have died of medicine shortages in hospitals. Yet the claim about a shipment of medicine, too, appears to be unsubstantiated, according to videos and interviews.  The United States Agency for International Development, the principal supplier of the aid at the bridge, did not list medicine among its donations.

“They tried a false flag operation, that supposedly the people of Venezuela had burned a truck carrying rotten food — no, no, no — it was they themselves, it was the criminals of Iván Duque,” Mr. Maduro told a crowd, referring to Colombia’s president.

Here is the NY Times video:

President Maduro continues to call out the U.S. for its role in attempting to oust him from power. In an interview with the BBC Tuesday, Maduro said that the U.S. is ruled by white supremacists.

President Nicolás Maduro: “It’s a political war of the American empire, of the interests of the extreme right that today governs, of the Ku Klux Klan that rules over the White House, to take over Venezuela.”

==

dn

As the political crisis in Venezuela continues to mount, tens of thousands of Venezuelans took to the streets Tuesday in dueling pro-government and pro-opposition protests. Opposition leader Juan Guaidó addressed his supporters and announced a deadline for allowing aid shipments to enter the country.

Juan Guaidó: “Today we announce that February 23rd is the day for humanitarian aid to enter Venezuela. We stand by all sectors—delivery drivers, nurses, medics—to get ourselves organized.”

Military officers, who in large part have remained loyal to President Nicolás Maduro, have been blocking access to supplies at the Venezuela-Colombia border. Critics have blasted the U.S. for using aid as a political tool to undermine Maduro’s presidency while garnering support for Guaidó. The Red Cross and the U.N warned the U.S. to not send aid to Venezuela without the approval of the sitting president. The U.N. said, “Humanitarian action needs to be independent of political, military or other objectives.” On Monday, Guaidó tweeted a photo of himself surrounded by pill bottles, saying that some aid in the form of nutritional supplements made it into Venezuela, although it’s unclear where they came from.

==

==

abbie martin

https://kpfa.org/episode/project-censored-february-8-2019/

opponent on house arrest despite trying violent/ overthrow mult times?

==

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Venezuelan_presidential_election

Presidential elections were held in Venezuela on 20 May 2018,[3] with incumbent Nicolás Maduro being re-elected for a second six-year term.[4]Considered a snap election, the original electoral date was scheduled for December 2018 but was subsequently pulled ahead to 22 April before being pushed back to 20 May.[5][6][7] Some analysts described the poll as a show election,[8][9] with the elections having the lowest voter turnout in the country's democratic era.[4][10]

Several Venezuelan NGOs, such as Foro Penal Venezolano, Súmate, Voto Joven [es], the Venezuelan Electoral Observatory and the Citizen Electoral Network, expressed their concern over the irregularities of the electoral schedule, including the lack of the Constituent Assembly's competencies to summon the elections, impeding participation of opposition political parties, and the lack of time for standard electoral functions.[11]

Because of this, the European Union,[12][13] the Organization of American States, the Lima Group[14] and countries including Australia and the United States rejected the electoral process.[15][16] However, countries including China, South Africa, Cuba, Iran, Egypt, Russia, Syria, Turkeyand others recognized the election result.[17]

The two leading candidates opposing Maduro, Henri Falcón and Javier Bertucci, rejected the results, saying that the election was critically flawed by irregularities. Bertucci asked that the elections be repeated without Maduro.[18][19] However, Bertucci recognized the result afterwards, maintaining his criticism of tactics used by the government.[20] Maduro was inaugurated on 10 January 2019. In the days thereafter, Albania, Canada, Iceland, Israel, Kosova, the United States, and a number of Latin American countries recognized National Assembly Speaker Juan Guaidó as the legitimate Venezuelan President after the start of the 2019 Venezuelan presidential crisis.[21]

Background

Further information: Crisis in Venezuela (2012–present)

A man eating from garbage due toshortages in Venezuela

Following the death of President Hugo Chávez in 2013, Venezuela faced a severe socioeconomic crisis during the presidency of his successor, Nicolás Maduro. Due to the country's high levels of urban violence, inflation, and chronic shortages of basic goods attributed primarily to the devaluation of the Venezuelan bolívar and to some extent due to economic policies such as strict price controls, civil insurrection in Venezuela culminated into the 2014–18 protests. Protests occurred periodically over the years, with demonstrations occurring in various sizes depending on the events Venezuelans were facing during the crisis.

A 26 October 2016 protest that gathered an estimated 1.2 million Venezuelans following the cancellation ofrecalling President Maduro

After facing years of crisis, the Venezuelan opposition pursued a recall referendum against President Maduro, presenting a petition to the National Electoral Council (CNE) on 2 May 2016.[22]

By August 2016, the momentum to recall President Maduro appeared to be progressing, with the CNE setting a date for the second phase of collecting signatures, though it made the schedule strenuous, stretching the process into 2017 which made it impossible for the opposition to activate new presidential elections.[23]

On 21 October 2016, the CNE suspended the referendum days before preliminary signature-gatherings were to be held.[24] The CNE blamed several irregularities and alleged voter fraud as the reason for the cancellation of the referendum.[24] International observers criticized the move, stating that CNE's decision made Maduro look as if he were seeking to rule as a dictator.[25][26]

Days after the recall movement was cancelled, 1.2 million Venezuelans protested throughout the country against the move, demanding that President Maduro leave office, with Caracas protests remaining calm while protests in other states resulted in clashes between demonstrators and authorities, leaving one policeman dead, 120 injured, and 147 arrested.[27] That day the opposition gave President Maduro a deadline of 3 November 2016 to hold elections, with opposition leader Henrique Capriles stating, "Today we are giving a deadline to the government. I tell the coward who is in Miraflores ... that on 3 November the Venezuelan people are coming to Caracas because we are going to Miraflores".[27]

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Pro-governmentcolectivos shooting at voters in Catia during the 2017 Venezuelan referendum

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David Vallenilla being shot dead by Venezuelan authorities during the2017 Venezuelan protests

On 1 November 2016, then National Assembly President and opposition leader Henry Ramos Allup announced the cancellation of 3 November march to the Miraflores presidential palace, with Vatican-led dialogue between the opposition and the government beginning.[28] By 7 December 2016, dialogue halted between the two.[29] Two months later, on 13 January 2017 after talks stalled, the Vatican officially pulled out of the dialogue.[30] On 23 January 2017, Henrique Capriles, a two-time presidential candidate declared: "This will be the last conventional protest; the next one will be a surprise one".[31] The opposition then began to focus on its electoral efforts, with only sporadic protests occurring for the next few months.

Following the 2017 Venezuelan constitutional crisis, protests in Venezuela intensified in mid-2017, though the movement died down after President Maduro called for a controversial special election, which resulted with the installation of the pro-government superbody, the Constituent National Assembly. Regional elections that occurred months later further cemented the government's power after they won 18 of the 23 governorships.

Election preparations

After the government overcame mass protests and won two major disputed elections, one of which installed a constitutional superbody, the government rallied behind President Maduro, with government sources stating that elections were to be moved ahead to February or March 2018 instead of the planned late-2018 date to take advantage of their electoral momentum.[32] On 11 December 2017, President Maduro announced that many of the main opposition parties, including Justice First and Popular Will, would be banned from participating in the 2018 presidential election because of their boycott of the 2017 municipal elections.[33]

In February 2018, the government announced that elections would be held on 22 April 2018, less than three months before the date.[5] Popular Will announced on 16 February that it would boycott the elections.[34]Following weeks of controversy involving international condemnation and rejection of potential election results, the CNE delayed the election for a few additional weeks pushing for a 20 May 2018 election date.[7]

Electoral system

See also: Elections in Venezuela § Polling procedure

==

https://yyy.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/18/venezuela-election-sunday-nicolas-maduro-henri-falcon

no lnx

'Maduro would beat Jesus': Venezuelans lament rigged system as election looms

Many fear dirty tricks will keep the unpopular president in power, but the opposition is urging people not to boycott Sunday’s vote

John Otis in Caracas

@JohnOtis

Sat 19 May 2018 02.30 EDT Last modified on Sat 19 May 2018 02.31 EDT

This article is over 8 months old

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Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro is seeking another’s term, despite leading the country into an economic crisis.

Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro is seeking another’s term, despite leading the country into an economic crisis. Photograph: Ariana Cubillos/AP

After denouncing Venezuela’s food shortages and hyperinflation in a speech ahead of Sunday’s presidential election, the opposition candidate, Henrí Falcón, sat in his campaign bus, sucking a throat lozenge – and chewing over his predicament.

Falcón ought to be the favorite. He’s up against Nicolás Maduro, the deeply unpopular and increasingly authoritarian president who is seeking another six-year term despite leading this oil-rich nation into its worst economic crisis in decades.

Yet Falcón is the underdog.

He’s resigned to the usual dirty tricks from the ruling Socialist Party, including the use of state food hand-outs to lure hungry people into voting for Maduro.

But what most infuriates him is friendly fire: Venezuela’s largest opposition parties are denouncing Falcón as a stooge for participating in an election they say will be a sham – and which they have vowed to boycott.

“This makes it a lot more complicated,” Falcón admits. “But we are going to take risks and follow the democratic path. Now is not the time for politicians to go into hiding.”

Venezuela election: Maduro 'ready for battle' as voters vow to flee if he wins

Read more

Falcón has been buoyed by polls that show him either ahead or within striking distance of Maduro. He also points to research showing that even on an unfair electoral playing field, it’s almost always better to participate than to stand down.

A 2009 study by the Brookings Institution of more than 100 electoral boycotts – from Afghanistan to Iraq to Peru – found that their goal of rendering elections illegitimate in the eyes of the world was rarely achieved. Instead, they left the boycotting parties in an even weaker state.

Javier Corrales, a Venezuela expert at Amherst College, says that Sunday’s election presents an extremely rare opportunity for voters to remove an autocrat through peaceful means. Surrendering to Maduro, he says, “is the biggest mistake I’ve seen the opposition make in a decade.”

Henrí Falcón, the Venezuelan opposition presidential candidate, at a rally.

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Henrí Falcón, the Venezuelan opposition presidential candidate, at a rally. Photograph: Federico Parra/AFP/Getty Images

The leaders of the largest of the 20-some parties that make up the opposition coalition claim that electoral conditions are so grossly weighted in Maduro’s favor that voting on Sunday would be pointless.

Most electoral officials are Maduro loyalists who, in past elections, have turned a blind eye to vote tampering and the last-minute relocation of polling places in opposition strongholds.

The government controls most TV and radio stations which transmit a constant stream of of pro-Maduro propaganda. It is also fomenting the notion that the ballot is not secret and that people who vote for the opposition will lose government jobs, public housing, and vital food handouts.

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“It matters little whether this threat is real or perceived. Most people can’t afford to risk their paltry food rations to in order find out,” wrote the Caracas political blogger Emiliana Duarte. Maduro’s re-election pitch “pretty much comes down to ‘vote for me if you want food, starve if you want to make a point’”, she said.

At a campaign rally in the western city of Barquisimeto, Maduro put it this way: “The Fatherland protects you and gives you everything. And you must give the Fatherland political power.”

But just to make sure, the government has banned the two most popular opposition politicians – Leopoldo López who is under house arrest for inciting violence and Henrique Capriles who faces trumped-up corruption charges – from running.

Those allowed on the ballot are two lesser-known figures: Falcón and televangelist Javier Bertucci, who is attracting big crowds by turning his campaign events into makeshift soup kitchens.

Carlos González, an anti-government activist who heads a Venezuelan business association, says the name on the ballot doesn’t matter: “Jesus Christ could be the candidate and Maduro would still prevail because the system is set up for him to win,” he says.

The opposition has taken this argument overseas, convincing the United States, the European Union and several Latin American countries to denounce the balloting as a sham.

Venezuela on the brink: a journey through a country in crisis

Read more

“Yes, Venezuelans want to vote. But we don’t want to legitimize the Maduro regime and the misery that he has brought to the country,” said Negal Morales, an opposition lawmaker. “To vote would be to take part in a farce.”

Some critics contend that the boycott came about after the opposition was outmaneuvered by government negotiators. In discussions over electoral conditions, the opposition drew a line in the sand, demanding a neutral electoral tribunal, a postponement of the balloting until October, and the presence of international observers. After months of talks, the government conceded almost nothing.

According to one observer, that left the opposition feeling obliged to save face by making good on its threat to sit out the election.

“Maduro wants people to abstain,” Francisco Rodríguez, Falcón’s chief policy advisor, said. “He wants nobody to come out to vote because that’s the only election he can win. And the opposition fell into that trap.”

jon otis on scene?

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https://theconversation.com/odds-of-military-coup-in-venezuela-rise-every-day-maduro-stays-in-office-110865

It would be reasonable to expect the worst for Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s embattled president.

Two weeks after Maduro’s re-inauguration, opposition leader Juan Gauidó has declared himself the country’s rightful president. The power struggle follows a failed military mutinyagainst Maduro, whose easy re-election in May 2018 during an economic, political and humanitarian crisis has lead many to say Venezuela is a dictatorship.

Analysts worldwide are already debating whether a coup against Maduro – with or without U.S. backing – would be good or bad for Venezuelan democracy.

As a political risk analyst, it is my job to predict when leaders will be overthrown. Surprisingly, the coup forecaster I use, CoupCast, shows Maduro hanging on – at least for now.

Why won’t Maduro be overthrown soon?

Using historic data on the conditions behind every coup and coup attempt since 1950, CoupCast has identified six factors that can suggest a leader is at imminent risk of overthrow.

  1. Tenure of current leader – Longer reign equals higher coup risk.
  2. How long regime has been in power – Young regimes are at most risk of a coup.
  3. Time since last coup attempt – The longer a country goes without a coup, the less its risk of a leader being overthrown.
  4. Incumbent electoral defeat – Recent electoral defeats increase risk. So do long periods of incumbent victories.
  5. Relative precipitation – Extreme drought and excessive rainfall both raise coup risk because they can disrupt agricultural and market dynamics.
  6. Gross domestic product (GDP) per person – This measure of wealth distribution can provide clues into whether a leader can buy off potential rivals within the military.

Beyond Venezuela’s economic crisis, the Maduro regime does not stand out on any CoupCast factors.

:{Venezuela’s GDP per person is relatively high compared to other countries that have seen coups.:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;outline:0px;vertical-align:baseline;background:transparent"):}: :{Rulers, Elections, and Irregular Governance Dataset (REIGN):(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;outline:0px;vertical-align:baseline;background:transparent"):}:

Maduro has been in office since 2013 – not long enough to be high-risk. Likelihood of a coup begins to rise after 15 years, on average.

The current Socialist Party regime, whichbegan with Hugo Chávez in 1999, has also matured enough to avoid the initial period of vulnerability that young regimes face.

The last coup attempt in Venezuela was a failed plot against Chávez in 2002, a healthy 17-year buffer. The average lapse between coups is five years.

Venezuela’s Socialist regime has not lost a presidential election since Chávez first won, in 1998, which also bodes well for Maduro.

Finally, in 2019, Venezuela is not expected to have droughts, floods or other weather that is out of the norm.

Taken together, these factors do not suggest an imminent coup against Maduro.

Rising coup risk

However, Venezuela’s risk of coup increases the longer Maduro stays in power, as CoupCast’s trove of historic data shows.

Venezuela’s coup risk was highest following the attempted overthrow of Hugo Chávez in 2002. But it rises the longer Maduro stays in power. Rulers, Elections, and Irregular Governance Dataset (REIGN)

Maduro’s biggest vulnerability is the prospect of further economic decline. Venezuela’s oil-fueled government is going bankrupt due to declining petroleum production, U.S. and EU sanctions and seized assets. Eventually, Maduro’s strategy of paying the military brass for its loyalty will be unsustainable.

Maduro’s position becomes especially precarious over time if he continues to stand for election. Authoritarians who hold elections are at higher risk of being deposed – especially if they lose and stick around anyway. Venezuela’s coup risk increases the longer Maduro continues to “win” elections as well.

However, even the most powerful forecasting models cannot account for everything.

Venezuela’s deep economic crisis, for example, is somewhat misleading. Citizens are hurting badly, but the Maduro government still has enough funds to offer military leaders governmental appointments and economic kickbacks. That make a serious plot against him less likely.

Russia, China, and Turkey have also expressed support for the regime – potentially even military backing – likely depressing coup risk further.

Guaidó’s challenge really hurts Maduro

The recent power struggle most similar to what’s happening in Venezuela occurred in Zimbabwe in 2008.

Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai claimed to be the legitimate winner of a flawed election against long-time President Robert Mugabe. Mugabe retaliated with a campaign of violence and intimidation to secure his victory in a dubious runoff.

Juan Guaido has declared himself president of Venezuela. AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd

Tsvangirai’s power struggle didn’t unseat Mugabe, but it likely hurt his legitimacy internally. Mugabe was overthrown in a military coup in November 2017.

In my assessment, Guaidó’s challenge won’t result in Maduro’s immediate exit – but it will further weaken his base of support, both among the Venezuelan people and within the government.

The longer Maduro stays in power, the more likely he is to be removed by force.

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https://www.democracynow.org/2019/1/30/as_us_moves_to_oust_maduro

United States is continuing to ratchet up pressure on the Venezuelan government in an attempt to topple President Nicolás Maduro. On Tuesday, the State Department announced it is giving control of Venezuela’s U.S. bank accounts to opposition leader Juan Guaidó, who declared himself to be president last week. Meanwhile, the U.S. has also refused to rule out a military invasion of Venezuela. We spend the hour with prize-winning investigative journalist Allan Nairn.

AMY GOODMAN: The United States is continuing to ratchet up pressure on the Venezuelan government in an attempt to topple President Nicolás Maduro. On Tuesday, the State Department announced it’s giving control of Venezuela’s U.S. bank accounts to opposition leader Juan Guaidó, who declared himself president of Venezuela last week.

This came a day after the U.S. imposed a de facto embargo on oil from Venezuela’s state-run oil company, PDVSA. The new sanctions include exemptions for several U.S. firms, including Chevron and Halliburton, to allow them to continue working in Venezuela.

Meanwhile, the U.S. has also refused to rule out a military invasion of Venezuela. On Monday, national security adviser John Bolton was photographed holding a notepad on which he had written the words “5,000 troops to Colombia.”

Earlier today, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro tweeted, quote, “People of the U.S., I ask for your support to reject the interference of Donald Trump’s government in making My Homeland a Vietnam in Latin America. Don’t Allow It!” he tweeted. President Maduro told a Russian news network Wednesday he was open to negotiating with the opposition.

Major opposition protests are planned for today. On Tuesday, the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights criticized the Venezuelan government for cracking down on earlier protests. According to the U.N., at least 40 people have been killed and 850 detained since the recent round of anti-government protests began.

On Tuesday, Vice President Mike Pence met with members of the Venezuelan opposition at the White House. Trump’s new special envoy to Venezuela, Elliott Abrams, also took part in the meetings. Elliott Abrams is a right-wing hawk who was convicted in 1991 for lying to Congress during the Iran-Contra scandal, but he was later pardoned by President George H.W. Bush. Abrams defended Guatemalan dictator General Efraín Ríos Montt as he oversaw a campaign of mass murder and torture of indigenous people in Guatemala in the 1980s. Ríos Montt was later convicted of genocide. Abrams was also linked to the 2002 coup in Venezuela that attempted to topple Hugo Chávez.

Well, today we spend the hour looking at the crisis in Venezuela and the appointment of Elliott Abrams as special envoy. We’re joined by the award-winning investigative journalist Allan Nairn, who has closely tracked Elliott Abrams’ record for over three decades. Allan Nairn is two-time winner of the George Polk Award, a recipient of the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Award for International Reporting. Allan spoke with us earlier this week from Jakarta, Indonesia. He began by talking about the significance of the appointment of Elliott Abrams.

ALLAN NAIRN: What his appointment emphasizes, re-emphasizes—it was already obvious—was that the U.S. is trying to overthrow the government of Venezuela and that it will be willing to use violence, to use military force, if necessary. That’s what Abrams, and indeed U.S. policy, has been all about.

I think their first preference would be to have a successful covert operation. Mike Pompeo, when he was in charge of the CIA, all but stated it publicly. At one point when he was speaking in Aspen at one of those gatherings of the elite, he gave the rough outlines of an operation, in coordination with U.S. allies like Colombia, to topple the Maduro government in Venezuela. And now, just recently, the night before Guaidó declared himself as the new president of Venezuela, he was on the phone with Mike Pence directly. Pence was—The Wall Street Journal broke the story. Pence was directly talking to him, and the next day he comes out and declares himself as the president of Venezuela. And now they’re asking—they’re offering incentives to Venezuelan Army officers to come over to their side and hoping that the U.S. can re-establish control of Venezuela in that manner.

But if that fails, I think there is a chance that the U.S. would consider an invasion of Venezuela. This would not be the first or even the second or third preference of the Pentagon or the CIA or the State Department. But it might be very attractive to Donald Trump, for several reasons.

In 2016, during the campaign, speaking of Iraq, Trump said, “To the victor belong the spoils. You have to go in and take the oil.” You could call this a Trump doctrine. And Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves. Now, very often oil is used as the explanation for the motive for U.S. invasions and foreign policy, and I think its role is usually way overblown. People give it too much weight in the analysis. But in this case, it might turn out to be very relevant, given that Trump has that doctrine and is now personally in power.

Secondly, politically, Trump needs a new war. Trump has been stuck with, for him, being in the embarrassing position of just being able to continue the old W. Bush and Obama wars. There’s a consensus among U.S. mainstream historians that no president can be great unless he has a war. They say this all the time. And Trump now, of course, is in some political difficulty.

So, for him, an action where the U.S. went into Venezuela in spectacular fashion, did it quick, in the style of the U.S. invasions of Grenada or Panama, didn’t get bogged down, but just went in, say, for a few weeks, killed without restraint, which is the doctrine Trump is now applying to U.S. forces worldwide—I mean, he’s basically told the CIA and the Pentagon, “Don’t worry about any constraints on civilian casualties that may have existed before. Do what you will.” In fact, in Afghanistan, he celebrated the dropping of what was called the mother of all bombs, this massive explosive which is the closest conventional explosive that you can get to a nuclear weapon. This was dropped in a mountainous region of Afghanistan, and Trump was crowing about it afterwards. So, a quick invasion with massive force that succeeds in toppling the Maduro government, and then where the U.S. gets out quickly, is the kind of thing that could, in theory, be attractive to Trump. And it’s also the kind of thing that, I guarantee you, would be praised to the heavens on CNN and on MSNBC. And this would be a sweet political victory for Trump.

Now, whether it’s actually possible to pull off a quick successful military invasion of Venezuela is entirely a different question, because it would face major resistance even if, you know, some of the Army had already switched sides to the U.S. side. There would be a lot of people who would want to resist it.

But it is the case that the reality in Venezuela today is very different than it has been during earlier years of the Bolivarian movement in Venezuela. The U.S. has always—and this is an important point for understanding U.S. context—the U.S. doesn’t care at all about elections. They don’t care at all about the poor. Completely fake elections are fine with them. The U.S. just, you know, not long ago, finished ratifying a fraudulent election in Honduras, where Hernández imposed himself for re-election, and he did that with the assistance of Mike Pence and others. They don’t care about the poor. They targeted Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian movement from the beginning. In 2002, even though Chávez had, not long before, been re-elected in a clean vote, a completely clean vote—for years, the Carter Center, and other international monitors who went to Venezuela, was reporting that their electoral system was, in that era—they did a clean count. They were not rigged elections. Despite that, despite the fact that the Chávez administration was making great strides in raising living standards for the poor, starting to lower the levels of malnutrition, starting to raise the levels of general health—or maybe because of that—the U.S., in 2002, backed a coup against Chávez, that briefly removed him but was ultimately unsuccessful, because the population and much of the security forces rallied to Chávez’s side and they thwarted the U.S. effort to oust him.

Today it’s a different situation. The U.S. has been trying to undermine the Venezuelan government ever since the Chávez years, as has the Venezuelan oligarchy. In fact, not long after the brief failed coup, which was backed by the U.S., the rich of Venezuela, the business owners, went on a capital strike. They purposely shut down their businesses, and it had huge impact. They succeeded in shaving something like 27 percent off the gross domestic product of Venezuela, which is just astonishing, catastrophic, in a short time. But even that failed to topple Chávez.

But in the conditions we have today, where Maduro does not have near the popular support that Chávez did, where he’s really been running the country into the ground and has been using the fact that the U.S. is trying to undermine the government as a universal excuse for everything, for his own incompetence and corruption and brutality against protesters in the streets, this government, the Maduro government, is in a rather weak position. And it appears that the population is now becoming rather divided. For years, the opposition in Venezuela was kind of a classical rightist Latin American force, with the rich, the very rich, the oligarchs, the top businesspeople aligned with many sectors of the middle class. But now it seems that opposition has spread, and there are many poor people who are part of it. So, this means this Maduro government is rather weak and is vulnerable to being toppled. It is possible. It’s not impossible, as it was in previous years under Chávez.

But—and this is important to note—even though much of the U.S. news coverage and many of the U.S. analysts note the fact that a lot of poor people are now joining and going into the streets protesting against Maduro, there is absolutely no way that the U.S. will allow a poor people’s movement—let’s say, a new—imagine if such a thing came into being, a poor people’s movement in Venezuela that did want to oust Maduro but replace it with a new policy that was also pro-poor and sought to gain justice. There’s no way the U.S. would tolerate that. The U.S. will insist that a new opposition that comes to power be controlled by the far-right elements who represent the very rich and are willing to take instructions from Washington, as was clearly illustrated in the case of Pence and the newly proclaimed president of—self-proclaimed president of Venezuela. So, it’s a very dangerous situation right now.

And I think what the proper role for the U.S. at this moment is, one, to lift the sanctions, lift the stranglehold that is currently increasing the level of hunger. There’s a level of misery in Venezuela that was already caused by the incompetence of this government, but the U.S. has done everything it can to increase it. Just in the past few days, for example, the U.S. has been moving legally to block the Venezuelan government from using $1.2 billion worth of gold, which it has stored in London. And in doing this, they’re being backed by the opposition, by Guaidó. And this will mean less money available in Venezuela to buy basic provisions, basic supplies, food, medicine, etc. So, first, lift the stranglehold.

And secondly, disavow the invasion option, and then step back. You know, some people in the Democratic Party, for example, in the United States float the idea of the U.S. trying to facilitate, be the mediator, in finding a political solution for Venezuela. But that’s not appropriate. The U.S. has no standing to be a mediator, a disinterested third party. The U.S. is on one side. They’re on the side of the right and the rich in Venezuela who are trying to topple this government, and the U.S. is trying to overthrow the government. They can’t be a mediator. It’s somewhat comparable to Israel-Palestine, where, for years, the U.S. has claimed to be an honest broker between Israel and the Palestinians, when in fact, everyone knows—it’s self-proclaimed—the U.S. is on the side of the Israelis and against the aspirations of the Palestinians to have their legal rights under international law enforced and to regain their political sovereignty. And yet they claim to be a mediator. So the U.S. should not try to insert itself and claim to be a political mediator in Venezuela, either.

For that, you would need an outside party that has some credibility, maybe, you know, a figure like the pope or some outside countries who could play that role. A couple of years ago the pope was involved in such an effort, but he received no backing from the U.S. at the time, because they don’t really want a political solution that leads to a truly open political field where all options are available, where perhaps, you know, maybe a different government, but one that is pro-poor and anti-U.S., could gain power. You know, if you had a genuinely open political process in Venezuela, a political outcome like that is certainly not inconceivable. But the U.S. would never tolerate that.

So they’re now trying to engineer a way for the U.S. to regain control. And to do that, they’ll be willing to use violence as necessary, if necessary. And for that, Abrams is the perfect man for the job.

venezuela: VP Pence Calls for Overthrow of President Maduro

United States is continuing to ratchet up pressure on Venezuela in what appears to be part of a coordinated effort to remove Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro from office. On Tuesday, Vice President Mike Pence posted a video message online telling Venezuelan opposition leaders and protesters that the U.S. supports their efforts to oust Maduro.

Vice President Mike Pence: “I’m Mike Pence, the vice president of the United States. And on behalf of President Donald Trump and all the American people, let me express the unwavering support of the United States as you, the people of Venezuela, raise your voices in a call for freedom. Nicolás Maduro is a dictator with no legitimate claim to power.”

Venezuelan President Maduro responded by saying he would revise diplomatic relations with the United States, saying, “Never before has a high-level official said that the opposition should overthrow the government.” Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez also responded to the video.

Vice President Delcy Rodríguez: “Because Mr. Pence doesn’t have a job, now he wants to come and run Venezuela, handing out instructions on what should happen in Venezuela tomorrow, openly calling for a coup d’état in Venezuela. I will say it like the Venezuelan people would say it to you: 'Yankee, go home.'”

On Monday, the government of President Maduro said it suppressed a military revolt in the capital Caracas. Maduro has accused the U.S.—along with Canadaand 12 Latin American allies—of plotting a coup against his socialist government. Meanwhile, opposition groups are planning to hold major anti-Maduro protests today across Venezuela.

TOPICS:

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https://globalnews.ca/news/4436129/venezuela-maduro-coup-trump-officials/

Trump administration held a series of clandestine meetings with dissident Venezuelan military officers to discuss the overthrow of President Nicolas Maduro, before ultimately deciding not to support their coup plot, according to a *New York Times* report.

The military officials in question claimed to represent a faction of a few hundred armed forces members who were fed up with Maduro’s authoritarian tendencies.

Current and former U.S. officials confirmed to CNN that several meetings were held with the rebellious officers over the past year.

READ MORE: Venezuela’s president a no-show at rally after drone blasts he said were meant to kill him

According to the New York Times, the renegade group of officers were emboldened to reach out to President Donald Trump after he said last August that the U.S. was considering a military invasion of the crisis-stricken South American country.

Trump’s remarks attracted a wave of criticism; Venezuela’s defence minister branded the threat “an act of craziness,” while the country’s communications minister called it “an unprecedented threat to national sovereignty.”

But it came as music to the ears of the would-be military insurgents, who had previously been rebuffed in attempts to reach out to the Obama administration.

WATCH: President Trump says military option could be used for Venezuela [vid]

The Venezuelan commander told the New York Times that the group didn’t ask for American military intervention, but material support — they wanted to simultaneously detain Maduro and other senior government figures, and requested the U.S. to provide them with encrypted radios so that they could securely coordinate their plot.

Their request was denied.

READ MORE: Donald Trump reportedly asked aides if U.S. could invade Venezuela last year

The bombshell report comes amid growing reports of foiled plots to take down Maduro.

In June 2017, a Venezuelan police helicopter lobbed grenades at the country’s supreme court building amid escalating anti-Maduro protests across the country.

Military officials then hatched a plot to disrupt the May 20 presidential election, arrest Maduro and put him on trial, but the Venezuelan government got wind of the conspiracy and thwarted it, Bloomberg reported.

Last month, low-flying drones exploded near a military parade attended by Maduro, whose reaction was captured on camera. Maduro officials claimed the explosive-laden drones were sent by right-wing conspirators.

WATCH: Drone ‘assassination attempt’ targets Venezuela’s Maduro [vid] Earlier this year, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson openly raised the prospect of the Venezuelan military leadership staging a coup to overthrow Maduro.

“When things are so bad that the military leadership realizes that it just can’t serve the citizens anymore, they will manage a peaceful transition,” he said in a speech at the University of Texas.

But he added: “Whether that will be the case here [in Venezuela] or not, I do not know.”

WATCH: White House considers Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro to be a dictator [pix vid?] 

The White House didn’t confirm or deny the New York Times report, but said in a statement that it keeps its ears open to Venezuelans’ concerns.

“The United States government hears daily the concerns of Venezuelans from all walks of life — be they members of the ruling party, the security services, elements of civil society or from among the millions of citizens forced by the regime to flee abroad. They share one goal: the rebuilding of democracy in their homeland,” read the statement.

“A lasting solution to Venezuela’s worsening crisis can only arise following restoration of governance by democratic practices, the rule of law, and respect for fundamental human rights and freedoms.”

The Venezuelan government and military haven’t commented.

READ MORE: Brazil could limit number of Venezuelans entering through northern border

Venezuela has lurched from crisis to crisis since Maduro succeeded the late Hugo Chavez as president in 2013.

The socialist Maduro is increasingly seen as an authoritarian ruler responsible for destroying the country’s economy and causing extreme shortages of food and medicine.

The economic collapse has sparked concerns of a regional refugee crisis, with thousands of Venezuelans already fleeing to neighbouring Colombia, Brazil and Peru.

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https://www.democracynow.org/2018/8/6/venezuelan_pres_nicolas_maduro_targeted_in

Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro survived an apparent assassination attempt Saturday. Officials say two drones loaded with explosives detonated above Maduro as he gave a nationally televised speech at a military event in Caracas. It was the first known attempted assassination by drone strike against a sitting head of state. We get response from Alejandro Velasco, executive editor for NACLA Report on the Americas; Gabriel Hetland, assistant professor of Latin American studies at SUNY Albany; and Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and president of Just Foreign Policy.

Goodman, : ...as we turn to Venezuela, where President Nicolás Maduro has survived an apparent assassination attempt Saturday. Officials say two drones loaded with explosives detonated above Maduro as he gave a nationally televised speech at a military event in Caracas. It was the first known attempted assassination by drone against a sitting head of state. Venezuelan television showed Maduro looking up at the sky after hearing the sound of an explosion during his address. After the sound of another explosion, security rushed to surround the president, while hundreds of other soldiers ran for cover. Seven people were injured. Officials say neither drone reached its intended target area before detonating. Two videos posted on Twitter show drones at the scene. One shows a drone crashing into a building. The other shows a drone exploding in midair.

In a televised speech hours after his address was cut short by the assassination attempt, Maduro blamed Colombia for the attack.

PRESIDENT NICOLÁS MADURO: [translated] There has been an attempt to assassinate me. I have no doubt that this all points to the extreme right in Venezuela, in alliance with the right in Colombia, and that Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos is behind this attempt. I have no doubt. Preliminary investigations have indicated to us that there are various financial backers of this attempt on my life. They live in the United States in the state of Florida. Hopefully President Donald Trump’s government is willing to fight these terrorist groups, which are attempting great attacks against countries on this continent, in this case Venezuela.

AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile on Sunday, the Bolivian president, Evo Morales, tweeted, “Within the last 12 months, US Vicepresident Mike Pence made 3 trips to Latin America to meet at least 8 presidents from whom he demanded support for a military intervention against our brother president of Venezuela Nicolás Maduro. Those are the Empire’s coup attempts,” the Bolivian President Evo Morales tweeted.

Speaking on Fox News Sunday, National Security Adviser John Bolton denied the U.S. was behind the apparent drone strike assassination attempt in Caracas.

JOHN BOLTON: Well, I can say unequivocally, there is no U.S. government involvement in this at all. Now, with respect to what happened last afternoon, look, it could be a lot of things, from a pretext set up by the Maduro regime itself to something else.

AMY GOODMAN: A group of Venezuelan soldiers calling itself Operation Phoenix has claimed responsibility for the explosions in a communiqué posted on Twitter. The group’s former leader, Óscar Pérez, was killed in a shootout with the government in January after he hijacked a helicopter last year and fired at government buildings. Venezuelan authorities say they’ve arrested six people over Saturday’s incident.

Maduro replaced longtime President Hugo Chávez after Chávez died of cancer in 2013. He was elected to a new 6-year term in May.

Well, for more, we’re joined by three guests. Via Democracy Now! video stream, Alejandro Velasco is with us, associate professor at New York University, where he’s a historian of modern Latin America. He is the executive director of—the executive editor for NACLA Report on the Americas and the author of the book Barrio Rising: Urban Popular Politics and the Making of Modern Venezuela. He was born and raised in Caracas. Also with us here in studio, Gabriel Hetland, assistant professor of Latin American studies at the State University of New York in Albany. And in Washington, D.C., we’re joined by Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, president of Just Foreign Policy.

We welcome you all to Democracy Now! Let’s begin with Alejandro Velasco. Can you talk about what happened this weekend in Caracas—first time an assassination attempt has been made against a head of state using drones?

ALEJANDRO VELASCO: Yeah, it was a very confusing situation. Maduro and most of the high command, military high command, as well as officers of the United Socialist Party that he presides over, were gathered to celebrate the 81st anniversary of the National Guard, which has become very prominent in the security apparatus in Venezuela. And as he was laying out some of the reforms that he just recently announced to try to right the ship of Venezuela’s economy, what the video showed was—or what you heard from the video was a very loud explosion, and his wife, first lady Cilia Flores, reacting, quite surprised, and another general behind him seemingly fainting, and then followed, a couple—a few minutes after—a few seconds after that, by another very loud explosion. And then cameras turned to the assembled soldiers below, who began to scatter. And at that point, the feed closed.

So, from then, you know, what we heard was that there were two separate drones filled with C-4 explosives that detonated near a—you also have to understand, this is right in the downtown, very densely packed area of Caracas, detonated outside of an apartment building. And since then, even though there had been initial reports that perhaps it had been instead a gas explosion in one of the apartments, subsequent reports have disproven that theory. And it’s quite clear now that there were actually C-4-equipped drones that exploded.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to turn right now to April, when Vice President Mike Pence, speaking at a Latin American summit in Lima, Peru, said more must be done to isolate Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

VICE PRESIDENT MIKE PENCE: We must all stand with our brothers and sisters suffering in Venezuela. And I can promise you, the United States will not rest, we will not relent, until democracy is restored in Venezuela, and the Venezuelan people reclaim their birthright of libertad.

AMY GOODMAN: In June, the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, called Pence a “viper” and vowed to defeat what he called Washington’s attempts to force him from power.

PRESIDENT NICOLÁS MADURO: [translated] Every time the poisonous viper of Mike Pence opens his mouth, I feel stronger, clearer of what the road is. The road is ours. It is Venezuelan. It is not the one Mike Pence points out to us, not 20 poisonous snakes, not 20 vipers like Mike Pence.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to bring in Mark Weisbrot into the conversation, head of Just Foreign Policy, with the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Can you talk about, well, what Evo Morales, the president of Bolivia, tweeted about, saying Pence has made several visits to Latin America pushing for, he said, military intervention in Venezuela, and if you think there’s any relationship between that and what happened this weekend, the first assassination attempt by drone against a head of state anywhere in the world?

MARK WEISBROT: Yes, well, I don’t have any evidence that the U.S. was behind the attack. It is kind of unusual the State Department was asked to comment, and they said they had no comment on the attack, which, normally, you know, given what the United States has done in Venezuela for the past 20 years, they would at least—you would expect them to say, “We’re against any kind of assassination or any kind of violence like that,” and they didn’t say that.

But, I mean, they’ve been trying to get rid of the Chavistas for 20 years now. And the difference between the Trump administration and the two previous administrations is that they’re more explicit. As you noted, they’ve called for a military coup in Venezuela, which is something I don’t think they’ve done for 50 years. They didn’t even do that in Chile in '73 before the coup happened. They tried to—in the last presidential election in Venezuela, they tried to force—they threatened the opposition candidate who ran in the election, Henri Falcón—they threatened him for running in the election. They threatened him with individual financial sanctions against him, if he ran in that race, because they didn't want an election. So, they’re very committed to a regime change strategy, and it’s explicit, and it’s open. That’s the real difference between, you know, what they did in the past, like the 2002 coup, for example, which the Bush administration was involved in, but they denied that. And now it’s very open and explicit.

And the media here kind of ignores it. They treat the United States as primarily a bystander and occasionally report when, you know, something comes out, like Trump asked his advisers if they could have a military intervention. That was reported in the press. And then they just go on as though the United States has nothing to do with any of this. So, that’s something I think that’s really important that you’re not getting in the news at all.

And then you have, you know, the whole narrative that this has something to do with human rights. So, when Marco Rubio, who’s basically in charge of policy here for the Trump administration, and his Florida crony, who’s the U.S. ambassador to the Organization of American States, and he’s—you know, he goes around to countries there and threatens them and tells them to vote with the U.S. And all this is treated as though they’re trying to promote human rights in Venezuela. And again, the media accepts this narrative. And then you look at the U.S. allies in Latin America, you look at Mexico, where over a hundred journalists have been killed, and in most of those cases there’s government involvement implicated. And you don’t have a single case in Venezuela in the last 20 years of a journalist killed, where the government is implicated. And you look at Guatemala, where most—where, you know, you talk to a human rights defender there, and they don’t expect to be alive a year from now. Again, you don’t have anything near that violent in Venezuela. In Colombia, human rights defenders and activists are being killed every week, as you’ve reported on this show. And again, it’s nowhere near. So, that’s not defending the Venezuelan government; that’s just saying that anyone who states publicly that this intervention by the United States, which is constant, which includes a financial embargo that’s explicitly intended to prevent the economy from recovering—anybody who says that this has something to do with human rights has to be dishonest.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go back to National Security Adviser John Bolton speaking on Fox News Sunday, denying the U.S. was behind the drone blast in Venezuela on Saturday.

JOHN BOLTON: These are things he’s said before, and you have to take them for what they’re worth. If the government of Venezuela has hard information that they want to present to us that would show a potential violation of U.S. criminal law, we’ll take a serious look at it. But in the meantime, I think what we really should focus on is the corruption and the oppression of the Maduro regime in Venezuela.

AMY GOODMAN: Alejandro Velasco, can you respond to what he said? Not only talk about the U.S., but also President Maduro talking about the outgoing president of Colombia being behind this, Santos, who will leave office tomorrow. Tomorrow is Inauguration Day in Colombia.

ALEJANDRO VELASCO: Yeah, I mean, interestingly,Colombia, even as the rest of Latin America over the last 20 years, during the so-called left turn or pink tide, most countries in Latin America were electing left-wing governments,Colombia sort of bucked that trend. And so, first with the presidency of Álvaro Uribe, who was Santos’s mentor, and then with Santos to some extent continuing that policy, Colombia really positioned itself as very much against not only Venezuela’s Bolivarian government, but, more broadly, sort of the left in the region. Of course, that relationship has become even more soured of late, since many Venezuelans have flocked to Colombia over the last year, year and a half, as economic conditions have deteriorated there. And not only that, but I think, importantly, it’s worth mentioning that many opposition leaders, including a group that fashions itself the national “Supreme Court in Exile,” actually conducts its business in Colombia, with the support of the Colombian government.And so, there’s sort of a parallel government that’s housed in Colombia. And so, all of this sort of suggests that Colombia really is positioning itself as very much against the Venezuelan government.

On the other hand, you know, it’s true that Venezuela and Maduro have consistently sort of blamed Colombia, and Santos in particular, for some of these interventionist moves, and then tying it to the United States and the close relationship between Colombia and the United States. My own sense is that, at least in this case, the very kind of amateurish features of the attack, even though there was sort of the high-tech drone component to it, really suggests that it’s more of a rogue element that’s taken advantage of the sort of wink-and-nod, classic, “Yes, we will publicly condemn or even not say anything against interventionist efforts, but we’re not going to be sad if the Maduro government leaves,” right? And so, my sense is that that’s the nature of the support right now, that it’s sort of cover rather than any technical or material assistance. But, yeah, that’s certainly been the case in the past.

AMY GOODMAN: And the timing of this, Professor Gabriel Hetland, the timing of this attack on Nicolás Maduro? And do you think it’s clear that it was an assassination attempt?

GABRIEL HETLAND: I think nothing is entirely clear at the moment, but it seems to be an attempted assassination against Maduro. And the timing of it is disturbing, mostly because Maduro has finally done some things that need to be done in Venezuela: accepted some responsibility for the economic crisis, which has really been devastating the country, and taken some actions—not entirely adequate, but some actions—to actually move Venezuela in the right direction, specifically starting to discuss the much-needed currency reform, which Mark has written about widely for years and talked about, which is the number one factor behind the economic crisis. And so, about a week and a half ago, Maduro was making some changes. He was also sort of meeting with grassroots sectors, talking about moving Venezuela in a different direction. And all out of the blue, we get this drone attack, which could really sort of charge things up in Venezuela, move the country back to a crisis scenario and make the possibility of economic reform and dialogue with the grassroots sort of Chavista sectors much more difficult. So, it’s a sort of tragic timing, and it may not be coincidental at all.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to come back to this discussion in 30 seconds. Our guests are Gabriel Hetland of the University of Albany, the State University of New York at Albany; Alejandro Velasco, who is executive editor of NACLA and also a professor at New York University; and Mark Weisbrot, Center for Economic and Policy Research, joining us from D.C. Stay with us.

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AMY GOODMAN: Alí Primera, here on Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman. We’re talking about Venezuela, where President Nicolás Maduro survived an apparent assassination attempt on Saturday. Officials say two drones loaded with explosives detonated above Maduro as he gave a nationally televised speech at a military event in Caracas—again, the first known attempted assassination by drone against a sitting head of state. Our guests, Alejandro Velasco, executive editor of NACLAReport on the Americas; also with us, Gabriel Hetland, associate professor of Latin American studies at State University of New York in Albany; and Mark Weisbrot in Washington, D.C., of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Alejandro, can you talk about the popular sector and what’s happening now in Venezuela and the response to what took place on Saturday?

ALEJANDRO VELASCO: Yeah. So, the response actually has been pretty muted. On Sunday, Maduro called for a rally in solidarity and support, and it was not very well attended. He has called for another rally in support today on Monday, which, especially because it’s a weekday, many government officials turn out for those rallies, so we expect more support to be shown there.

But I think in terms of popular sectors and what they’re going through, of course, is they’re bearing the brunt of the economic crisis, to which Gabe just alluded. Mostly, daily life is a struggle to try to just get basic access to foods, to medicines, to cash, which is in short supply as hyperinflation is exploding. And so most of the day is really spent in the grind of trying to get by from one day to the next. That, of course, has led to a significant amount of discontent, some of which was expressed, for instance, again, as Gabe just mentioned, a recent very large peasants’ march that saw hundreds of people, hundreds of peasants from the interior of the country, where the economic conditions are most acutely felt, walking to Caracas to make demands upon the president. He met with them there. So, you know, there is a lot of discontent, certainly, among popular sectors, but that’s of course muted by the fact that there isn’t really a credible opposition that they might latch onto as an alternative. So, as far as popular sectors are concerned, they’re really sort of stuck between a rock and a hard place. And to some extent, that’s expressed in the lack of direct support that Maduro received on Sunday when he called for a rally.

AMY GOODMAN: Mark, I wanted to ask you about this opposition group Frente Amplio, or Broad Front, issuing a statement accusing the Venezuelan government of leaping to the assumption the explosions were an assassination attempt and of making irresponsible accusations without any proof, saying, “We warn that the government is taking advantage of this incident … to criminalize those who legitimately and democratically oppose it and deepen the repression and systematic human rights violations.” And yet you have this group that, by Twitter, has taken responsibility for the attack. Mark Weisbrot?

MARK WEISBROT: Yes. Well, I mean, that was part of the media narrative. In fact, El País for a while had a headline up saying, “Opposition accuses the government of staging the attack,” and other headlines calling it a supposed attack. And so, you had the—and El País usually leads a lot of the reporting in Latin America. El País is in Spain. And so, you do have a lot of that out there and a lot of confusion over it. You know, again, I don’t know any more details than what you see in the press.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, let me ask Gabe Hetland. You have this group Operation Phoenix claiming responsibility, a group of Venezuelan soldiers, their former leader Óscar Pérez killed in a shootout with the government in January after he hijacked a helicopter last year, firing at government buildings.

GABRIEL HETLAND: Yeah, I mean, I think that what the crisis—what the attack shows is sort of the crisis of the opposition. The opposition, by and large, boycotted the election in May. There’s a lot we can criticize about the election, but there’s a lot to criticize about the opposition and their lack of a sort of strategy for engaging with the economic crisis, for engaging with the popular sectors, which Alejandro was talking about. And so I think that this is an expression of the crisis of the opposition and their inability to come up with any sort of strategy. And the more the U.S. pressures the government of Venezuela, the more it opens up elements on the fringe to do things like this.

AMY GOODMAN: And finally, Mark Weisbrot, The Atlantic's Peter Beinart wrote, “Before becoming national-security adviser, John Bolton declared, ’We once had a capacity for clandestine efforts to overthrow governments. I wish we could get those back.'” Do you think he’s gotten those back, Mark?

MARK WEISBROT: Well, I don’t think it ever left. I mean, I think they’ve been—you know, we know they’ve been involved. You know, it’s part of our budget, the funding to USAID, National Endowment for Democracy. They’ve stepped that up after the coup in 2002, and they’ve been continuing to pour millions of dollars in there. And so, yeah, I mean, again, the real difference between the Trump administration and the previous administrations is now it’s very explicit they’re trying to overthrow the government of Venezuela.

AMY GOODMAN: We have to leave it there, but I want to thank you all for being with us, Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research; Alejandro Velasco teaches at NYU and is executive editor of NACLA Report on the Americas; and Gabriel Hetland of SUNY Albany, State University of New York.

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