Antony Blinken and the NY Times on Venezuela's Sunday Election: The Art of Deception

Anybody reading Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s statements and NY Times headlines would think that the Sunday elections in Venezuela were fraudulent. But if you read the articles carefully, you’ll see that this was not the case. Blinken is basically making two highly deceptive assertions which are shared by the corporate media.

First, they say that it wasn’t a level playing field, that the governing PSUV party had advantages over the opposition parties. When they accuse the government of (in Blinken’s words) “restricting Venezuelans’ access to accurate information” what they mention the most is that the PSUV got more TV time than the opposition, in violation of the electoral rules. An additional accusation is that on the day of the elections, PSUV tables in some places were located closer to the polling centers than stipulated by the nation’s electoral council. Does that make the elections fraudulent? If you believe the Republicans, there was massive fraud in the U.S. elections last year. And if you believe the Democrats (which I do in this case), voter suppression and gerrymandering, which could be considered examples of electoral fraud, have become the new normal in U.S. politics. Furthermore, hasn’t the NY Times heard of the Koch brothers? Haven’t they heard of dark money in U.S. elections? How level is the playing field in U.S. politics?

Blinken also accuses the Venezuelan government of “arbitrarily imprisoning reportedly more than 250 individuals on political grounds,” and “arbitrary arrests and harassment of political and civil society actors, etc.” This statement is also misleading. The arrests took place mainly prior to the electoral process after which all the major parties of the opposition accepted participation in the elections. Indeed, some “political” prisoners such as Freddy Guevara, one of the main leaders of the Voluntad Popular party of Juan Guaidó, was released from prison. What Blinken doesn’t acknowledge is that these arrests occurred in the context of numerous attempts on President Maduro’s life (including a drone attack at a public gathering) and several coup attempts engineered by Voluntad Popular politicians and others. A similar number of arrests (or more) would have taken place in any country in the world in the face of similar circumstances.

Progressive U.S. politicians such as Bernie Sanders should speak out about these half-truths whose truth content doesn’t reach 5%. What happens throughout the world is as important (undoubtedly more important) for the causes that progressives like Sanders cherish as are the issues related to economic equality within the U.S. that Sanders most focuses his attention on.