Name: US Congress and corporate media deploy massive lie, claiming Venezuela's gov't threatened to starve non-voters - The Grayzone
Brand: thegrayzone.com
SKU: thegrayzone-com-37
Availability: OnlineOnly

critic

US Congress and corporate media deploy massive lie, claiming Venezuela's gov't threatened to starve non-voters - The Grayzone

preview

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and US corporate media Venezuela’s legislative elections a “sham” before results were even announced, opening a new front in the propaganda war on the besieged country and its leftist government.Among the most blatant distortions deployed against President Nicolas Maduro’s United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) was a claim first advanced by Leopoldo López, the far-right, US-backed opposition leader who recently fled to Spain.On Twitter, López tweeted a deceptively edited clip of Constituent Assembly President Diosdado Cabello addressing an election rally, and accused Cabello of “blackmailing the hungry people with food to force them” to vote for his governing party.Los culpables de la catástrofe humanitaria que vive Venezuela, son tan miserables que en su desesperación por validar el FRAUDE del 6D, chantajean al pueblo hambriento con comida para obligarlos a ir al engaño— Leopoldo López (@leopoldolopez)López’s assertion was &nbsp;by the Wall Street Journal’s Ryan Dube, who claimed in an article about Venezuela’s “sham” election that Cabello “threatened to withhold food handouts in a country where millions are going hungry.”A bipartisan US congressional letter Venezuela’s election as a “sham” also echoed the opposition leader’s dubious interpretation, stating, “the regime has threatened to withhold food from Venezuelans who do not vote in the sham elections.”In their haste to shape a narrative delegitimizing Venezuela’s legislative elections, the US government and its loyal pack of corporate media stenographers have relied on López, a lead participant in at least and a series of , as their house interpreter.But the full statement by Cabello in its actual context tells an entirely different story. The complete speech, which López conveniently omitted, can be seen .Below is an English translation of the relevant section of Cabello’s speech, which followed a competition between men and women over who could shout the loudest:The women won. Women always win, women always win and women are going to be at the forefront of this battle. I know that it is so. I know that it is the woman who is going to get up early and say at home, ‘Hey, get up and go to the [Carabobo voting center] because you have to go vote!’Of course, and those who do not vote, do not eat. For those who do not vote, there is no food. Whoever does not vote, does not eat, a quarantine is applied there without eating. But the woman is going to be there because the woman is going to say to the son: ‘Look son, you did not live what I experienced. You have not suffered what I suffered when I was young.’Here, the youth and workers, and the working brothers, correct me if it is true or a lie: Here they had no life at all, they were persecuted. More than 11,000 dead, there are still 3,000 disappeared (…) there was no peace with misery, there was no peace with men, with women.A close review of Cabello’s comments reveals both the devious nature of López and the cluelessness of Washington.In addition to serving as the president of Venezuela’s Constituent Assembly, Diosdado Cabello is the host of Con El Mazo Dando, a popular Chavista broadcast variety show that serves as a platform for his unique brand of off-color humor.With his story about Chavista women warning men that if they do not vote, they will not “eat,” Cabello was making a sexual double entendre that would be familiar to most Venezuelans. In Venezuelan culture, “comer” not only means “to eat,” but is also slang for having sex.Thus Cabello was not threatening to withhold food to anyone; he was conjuring up a humorous and hypothetical scenario about revolutionary women denying sex to their husbands and boyfriends if they refused to vote.His appeal was a Chavista-style blend of the Aristophanes play Lysistrada and the cringeworthy ad campaign Democratic Party supporters rolled out during the 2020 presidential election.“This is a classic Diosdado [Cabello] provocation,” explained Diego Sequera, a Venezuelan journalist and political analyst who has contributed to The Grayzone. “His joke about those who don’t vote not eating has a double sense, because ‘no comer’ also means to not have sex with your partner. Diosdado always talks in these terms, so it’s funny to see it getting spun all week.”Cabello’s rhetoric about the politics of food contained multiple layers of meaning. In his reference to mothers admonishing their sons to vote by reminding them of their country’s history – “Look son, you did not live what I experienced. You have not suffered what I suffered when I was young” –&nbsp;the Chavista leader was invoking the pre-Chavez era of neoliberalism when Venezuela’s poor and working class experienced abject misery, exclusion, and repression.Cabello’s comments also represented a clear warning to his party’s base about the right-wing opposition’s plans for a program of massive economic privatization that would deprive the country’s most vulnerable sectors of basic provisions in the midst of a pandemic.Indeed, nearly all of the opposition parties have campaigned to end the government’s CLAP program, which provides millions of Venezuelans with heavily subsidized food and sanitary supplies for little to no cost.The US State Department has on CLAP, and has and allegedly one of its key architects, Alex Saab.The meaning of Cabello’s actual remarks therefore represented the precise opposite of the deceptive interpretation put forward by López, the US government, and its corporate media mouthpieces. Beyond the humorous double meaning of his yarn, he was warning poor and working class Venezuelans that the opposition – not his government – would impose policies of economic deprivation if they achieved power.For Venezuelans old enough to remember the 1989 massacre that the Venezuelan military carried out to crush the poor people’s uprising known as , the fear of a return to neoliberal governance is very real. This painful event was the culmination of a period of brutal repression that Cabello invoked when he recalled “more than 11,000 dead” and “still 3,000 disappeared.”Throughout the pandemic and its periodic quarantines, Venezuela’s government has continued to supply its population with food and sanitary supplies through the CLAP program. The Grayzone has published several about the , including with a visit to food fairs that municipal governments hold on a regular basis across the country.The idea that the Venezuelan government could halt the CLAP program in the middle of a pandemic and crushing US economic blockade is simply unfathomable, and would likely lead to the kind of social unrest that the US government has tried and failed to provoke.Did you know that in Venezuela,the government of The President has ordered the home by home deployment of the (a social program of subsidized food distribution) to serve the population during the by ?.— ConsVEHongKongRAE (@ConsulRBVzlaHK)To complement the information war waged against Venezuela’s legislative election, Washington has worked to intimidate opposition politicians into boycotting the race. So far, the US State Department has , a right-wing opposition leader and former ally of Guaidó, along with including leading members of the traditional social democratic party, Democratic Action.Their crime? According to Mike Pompeo’s State Department, by simply participating in the election, these opposition figures were guilty of “rob[bing] the people of Venezuela of their right to choose their leaders.”The State Department has simultaneously praised and the US-funded extremist factions for boycotting the elections, branding them “Venezuela’s champions for democracy.”On election day, Guaidó urged Venezuelans to “Stay at home,” exploiting a Covid-19 safety hashtag to enact a naked campaign of voter suppression.Hoy será la mejor forma de rechazar el fraude— Juan Guaidó (@jguaido)Washington has worked to undermine Venezuela’s election while President Donald Trump and his allies are still painting recent US election results as fraudulent.The Congress, for its part, has &nbsp;for US citizens going hungry during a runaway pandemic.And as lines for food assistance and Trump increasingly retreats from public view, President-elect Joseph Biden has condemned what he called government for desperate American citizens.Watch Max Blumenthal’s report from the closing rally of the PSUV party in Caracas:&nbsp;&nbsp;

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and US corporate media Venezuela’s legislative elections a “sham” before results were even announced, opening a new front in the propaganda war on the besieged country and its leftist government.Among the most blatant distortions deployed against President Nicolas Maduro’s United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) was a claim first advanced by Leopoldo López, the far-right, US-backed opposition leader who recently fled to Spain.On Twitter, López tweeted a deceptively edited clip of Constituent Assembly President Diosdado Cabello addressing an election rally,...

public

Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books, including best-selling Republican Gomorrah, Goliath, The Fifty One Day War, and The Management of Savagery. He has produced print articles for an array of publications, many video reports, and several documentaries, including Killing Gaza. Blumenthal founded The Grayzone in 2015 to shine a journalistic light on America's state of perpetual war and its dangerous domestic repercussions.

https://thegrayzone.com/author/max-blumenthal/

Max Blumenthal

Independent news and investigative journalism on empire || En español:  @GrayzoneES  || Videos: https://youtube.com/channel/UCEXR8pRTkE2vFeJePNe9UcQ

US Congress and corporate media deploy massive lie, claiming Venezuela's gov't threatened to starve non-voters - The Grayzone

No article scores yet.

CRITIC REVIEWS

PUBLIC REVIEWS