Heard this about 8 times today on BBC
"Last year’s Venezuelan election is widely said to have been rigged "
This was widely said by the BBC, on no occasion citing as much as a source.
No mention of long term crippling US sanctions aimed at the Venezuelan population
Not to mention Trumps just murdered 11 of the same Venezuela people the BBC are feigning teary-eyed over. .
Peace be with him! And them.
And isn’t the UK govt trying to steal a billion pounds of their gold from the bank?
Joe Emersberger, who used to post on Media Lens, has published widely on Venezuela.
Here a piece he wrote last year.
He’s likely written more since the election but I understand he ran into health problems in the past year.
He’s joint authored a very apposite book on Venezuela:
‘Extraordinary Threat: The U.S. Empire, the Media, and Twenty Years of Coup Attempts in Venezuela’
Article below
ED
Webinar Presentation: Venezuela Lets the Carter Center Observe Its 2024 Presidential Election
By Joe Emersberger – Jul 8, 2024
This past Sunday (July 7) Orinoco Tribune hosted the first in a series of two webinars organized to highlight the relevance as well as the regional and international implications of the July 28 Venezuelan presidential elections. Joe Emersberger was among a wide range of expert commentators analyzing the challenges of this decisive moment in Venezuela’s history.
We should realize what a huge concession that is.
Thanks to all the organizers of this webinar. I’m very honored to have been invited to speak. Since we have several speakers I decided to focus in some detail about a topic I might not otherwise have addressed: the track record of the Carter Center in Venezuela. Much of this material is covered in the book I wrote with Justin Podur, but I’ll also put the outline of this talk on my Substack page and include citations there.
The Carter Center will be observing the upcoming Presidential election in Venezuela. I am going to explain why Venezuela’s government allowing the Carter Center to observe its elections on July 28 is a huge concession, and that Venezuela would have been more than justified in telling the Carter Center to stay away.
Why am I doing that? The Carter Center is not an organization whose track record stands out as bad compared to other US-based NGOs, think tanks and corporate media outlets. In 2004, when Hugo Chavez won a recall referendum by a twenty point margin, the Carter Center refuted statistical arguments that were put forward by the likes of Venezuelan economist Ricardo Hausmann to claim that the election had been stolen. The Carter Center actually went to the trouble of hiring statisticians to refute Hausmann’s arguments. But please bear in mind, this was a twenty point victory that Chavez achieved in 2004. The level of fraud required to pull that off would have left a mountain of evidence, so we should not get carried away praising the Carter Center for refuting Hausmann’s arguments. If you can’t defend a twenty point victory with a ballot counting system as good as Venezuela’s, then, really, what good are you? Defending that victory was the bare minimum to do if you had any integrity or competence at all. But defending a twenty point victory in 2004 is not all there is to the Carter Center’s track record.
In 2002, only four days after a military coup had briefly ousted Hugo Chavez, an op-ed by Jennifer McCoy, who was then the Carter Center’s director for the Americas, appeared in the New York Times. She referred to the Chavez government as a “regime” that had been “threatening the country’s democratic system of checks and balances and freedom of expression of its citizens.” She also said that Pedro Carmona, the dictator who presided over the deaths of about sixty protesters in the two days he was in power, “seemed to demonstrate autocratic instincts as strong as those driving Mr. Chávez.” She had the gall to compare Chavez to Carmona.
Her piece also downplayed the US role in the 2002 coup by saying that Washington had sent “mixed signals” about it. There was nothing mixed about Washington’s support for the coup. Aside from US officials parroting Carmona’s justification for the coup, the IMF, whose Latin America policy is run by Washington, immediately stepped forward to publicly offer Carmona’s dictatorship loans. In fact the IMF official who did that was a former US State Department official (Thomas Dawson).
In the US, and I’d say in the West in general, we come under a lot of pressure to let things like this pass: to support politicians or groups who offer very limited dissent against western imperialism and ignore that they reinforce very toxic imperial assumptions the way Jennifer McCoy did in that op-ed.
Consider a widely cited remark by former US president Jimmy Carter, who of course founded the Carter Center. He said in 2012 that Venezuela’s ballot counting system was the “best in the world”. In 2012, Venezuela’s economy under Chavez was in the best shape it had ever been if you consider a wide range of development indicators. And even if you consider real GDP per capita alone, it was very close to its historic peak. So it’s not surprising that , under the conditions that existed in 2012, the liberal end of the US establishment represented by people like Carter would not be in full attack mode against Chavismo.
But in February of 2019 things were drastically different. The US under Trump pulled an “aid” stunt at the Colombia border that had many of us very concerned that the US might possibly invade Venezuela. By that time, Venezuela’s economy had been devastated by a deep and sustained drop in oil prices combined with the impact of crippling US sanctions. What was Carter saying then, in February of 2019?
The Carter Center put out a statement attacking Maduro’s government. The statement accused Maduro of having “misused” Carter’s praise for Venezuela’s ballot counting system in 2012. Carter’s statement did not utter a word criticizing US efforts to overthrow Maduro even as it looked Trump might possibly invade, not a word criticizing US sanctions that became undeniably murderous since 2017. In that statement, the Carter Center very bizarrely accused Maduro’s government of illegitimate “interference” in Venezuela’s elections. That part was so absurd I had to read it over a few times to make sure I hadn’t missed something. To liberals like Carter, foreign governments are obliged to sit back and let themselves be overthrown by US-backed subversives. https://orinocotribune.com/webinar-presentation-venezuela-lets-the-carter-center-observe-its-2024-presidential-election/