August 2, 2024
Venezuelan far-right politician María Corina Machado at a press conference on January 29, 2024. Photo: Ariana Cubillos/AP/Picture alliance.
Far-right Venezuelan politician María Corina Machado has announced that she intends to minimize her public appearances and “go underground,” following the revelation of details of the violent plans she promoted as part of her refusal to recognize the results of last Sunday’s presidential election, which resulted in the re-election of Nicolás Maduro as the president of Venezuela for the 2025-2031 term.
Machado’s decision was made public in an op-ed entitled “I Can Prove Maduro Got Trounced,” published this Thursday, August 1, by US mainstream news outlet The Wall Street Journal. She claims that she wrote the letter while in “hiding” and “fearing for her life,” and cries out once again for support from the so-called “international community,” a not-so-secret code for US imperial intervention.
The announcement by the extremist politician comes after the capture of Freddy Superlano, a politician from the Popular Will party and former opposition deputy, who was discovered to be one of the main promoters and organizers of the violent riots against public and private property reported in Caracas and other parts of Venezuela last Monday.
This Thursday, the attorney general of Venezuela, Tarek William Saab, said that following the arrest of Superlano, new elements are being discovered that could lead to new arrests of people involved in the violent acts.
At the moment of his apprehension, Superlano threw away two cellphones in his possession, which law enforcement agents later recovered from the scene. United Socialist Party of Venezuela Deputy Diosdado Cabello stated that those phones hold key information connecting far-right politicians with the riots reported on Monday. These riots were the only protest option envisioned by these politicians to stir up unrest, since they lack popular support willing to repeat the violence they inflicted on Venezuela in 2014 and 2017.
Saab mentioned that Superlano “is providing important elements to identify larger groups of extreme right politicians, aside from Lester Toledo, who participated in the attack on the data transmission system of the National Electoral Council (CNE).”
He reported that Superlano has been interrogated by prosecutors attached to the General Directorate of Human Rights, and is protected in his place of confinement, providing important details that will be revealed in due process.
Machado, who ordered her followers to protest and take to the streets “with their children and their elderly,” said in the op-ed sent to The Wall Street Journal that most of her team “is in hiding.”
She also insisted in her op-ed that she won the presidential elections with 67% of the votes while President Maduro was only able to receive 30%, with a correlation of vote statistics that has been put into question even by opposition-leaning poll experts like Luis Vicente Leon, who, just one day after the elections, noted in an interview that the figures provided by the CNE were accurate to his estimations.
Machado also mentioned in her writing that all the exit poll firms pointed at her victory, hiding the fact that one of these polling firms, a New Jersey-based company called Edison Research, is a firm that is closely linked to the US government and does work for US state propaganda outlets that were founded by the CIA, as denounced by US journalist Ben Norton. She also neglected to mention that the most prestigious and respected polling firm in Venezuela, Hinterlaces, released an exit poll result showing estimates that were very similar to the results announced by the CNE.
https://orinocotribune.com/maria-corina ... os-phones/
US Gov’t-Linked Firm Source of Exit Poll Claiming Venezuelan Opposition Won Election
August 1, 2024
Photo composition showing Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and far-right Venezuelan politician Maria Corina Machado next to Edmundo Gonzalez her subrogate candidate. Photo: Geopolitical Economy.
Venezuela’s opposition and US media outlets claim there was fraud in the July 28 election based on an exit poll done by US government-linked firm Edison Research, which works with CIA-linked US state propaganda organs and was active in Ukraine, Georgia, and Iraq.
Venezuela’s opposition has claimed that it won the July 28 election, accusing President Nicolás Maduro of “fraud”.
The supposed evidence that Venezuelan opposition leaders and their allies have cited to justify this claim is an exit poll produced by a firm that is closely linked to the US government and does work for US state propaganda outlets that were founded by the CIA.
A New Jersey-based company called Edison Research published an exit poll on the day of the election projecting that right-wing candidate Edmundo González Urrutia would win with 65% of the vote, compared to just 31% for Maduro.
This poll was cited by Venezuela’s far-right, US-backed opposition leader Leopoldo López, as well as by billionaire oligarch Elon Musk and Western media outlets like the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and Reuters.
Many polling firms inside Venezuela are run by opposition figures and are notorious for their political bias. The most respectable independent firm in the country is the pollster Hinterlaces, which estimated in its exit poll that Maduro got 54.6% of the vote, compared to 42.8% for González.
Venezuela’s National Electoral Council (CNE) ultimately reported that Maduro won the election with 51.2% of the vote, whereas González received 44.2%, and eight other opposition candidates got 4.6% combined. These results were close to what Hinterlaces projected, but very far off from what Edison Research claimed.
The US State Department, which has backed numerous coup attempts in Venezuela, refused to recognize Maduro’s victory. Secretary of State Antony Blinken called the results into question.
On the other hand, independent electoral observers said the vote was free and fair. Monitors from the US National Lawyers Guild wrote that their delegation in Venezuela “observed a transparent, fair voting process with scrupulous attention to legitimacy, access to the polls, and pluralism”. They strongly condemned the opposition’s “attacks on the electoral system as well as the role of the US in undermining the democratic process”.
Although Edison Research’s exit poll has been widely cited by the US media to cast doubt upon Venezuela’s electoral results, it is by no means an impartial observer. In fact, Edison’s top clients include CIA-linked US government propaganda outlets Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks, all of which are operated by the US Agency for Global Media, a Washington-based organ that is used to spread disinformation against US adversaries.
Edison Research has likewise worked with UK state media outlet the BBC.
In addition to Venezuela, Edison has previously conducted suspicious polling in Ukraine, Georgia, and Iraq – areas of the world that have been deemed highly strategic by the US State Department and targeted by Washington’s relentless meddling.
Edison’s international research is managed by the company’s Executive Vice President Rob Farbman. He was also cited in the press release on the Venezuela exit poll, and was listed as the contact for the study.
The US firm’s website notes that “Farbman manages Edison’s international research with a specialization in the Middle East and Africa for clients including BBC, the Voice of America, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks, and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty”.
These US state media outlets are a key part of what the New York Times described in 1977 as a “Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by the C.I.A.”
The Times identified Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (as well as Radio Free Asia and Free Cuba Radio) as “C.I.A. broadcasting ventures”.
In fact, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) states on its own website: “Initially, RFE and RL were funded principally by the U.S. Congress through the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)”.
When it started, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty was called “Radio Liberation from Bolshevism”, before changing its name to Radio Liberation in 1956 and Radio Liberty in 1963.
This US state propaganda outlet was a key tool of information warfare during the first cold war against the Soviet Union and its allies. Today, it has continued disseminating disinformation about countries like Venezuela, Cuba, China, Russia, and Iran.
On his LinkedIn profile, Edison Research’s executive vice president, Rob Farbman, wrote that he has overseen “election polling for international clients, most recently in Venezuela, Iraq, Ukraine and the Republic of Georgia”.
Farbman added that he “manages Edison’s work with international broadcasting organizations such as the BBC, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and Voice of America”.
On LinkedIn, Farbman also states that “Edison works with a broad array of commercial clients, governments, and NGOs”, although he did not disclose what those governments are.
Edison’s corporate clients include Big Tech monopolies like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Oracle, which have billions of dollars of contracts with the CIA, Pentagon, and other US government agencies.
Washington’s state propaganda outlets are overseen by the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM). USAGM’s parent is the United States Information Agency (USIA).
USAGM is funded through Congress. For fiscal year 2025, President Joe Biden’s budget requested $950 million for the US propaganda agency.
USAGM boasted in its Congressional Budget Justification that its audience has more than doubled in the past decade. According to the US propaganda agency, Washington’s disinformation operations are “reaching 420 million people weekly in 63 languages and over 100 countries”.
On its website, USAGM emphasizes that it serves the “long-range interests of the United States”.
In 1994, Congress passed the International Broadcasting Act, which maintained US government funding for these propaganda organs following the end of the first cold war.
This legislation, the text of which USAGM has on its website, states that the work of these US propaganda outlets must “be consistent with the broad foreign policy objectives of the United States”, and that they are “advancing the goals of United States foreign policy”.
Venezuelan opposition and Elon Musk misrepresent TeleSUR charts to claim “fraud”
To claim there was supposed electoral fraud in the July 28 election, Venezuela’s US-backed opposition used another deceptive tactic, distorting charts that were published by the Latin American media outlet TeleSUR.
In their disinformation campaign, Venezuela’s right-wing opposition got a big helping hand from Elon Musk, the billionaire oligarch and owner of Twitter (now known as X.com).
Musk has received billions of dollars of subsidies from the US government, while providing assistance to Ukraine’s military and aiding US destabilization operations in Iran. He also is actively supporting Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign.
The billionaire Tesla CEO backed a far-right coup in 2019 against Bolivia’s democratically elected socialist President Evo Morales. Following the putsch, a critic on Twitter accused “the U.S. government [of] organizing a coup against Evo Morales in Bolivia so [Musk] could obtain the lithium there”. The oligarch responded writing, “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it”.
The day before the 2024 election in Venezuela, Elon Musk tweeted an enthusiastic endorsement for the South American nation’s far-right opposition leader María Corina Machado, who has repeatedly called for a US military intervention to overthrow Venezuela’s government.
After the vote, Musk echoed the unsubstantiated claims of the opposition, claiming there was “major election fraud by Maduro”. As purported proof, Musk shared the suspicious exit poll from the US government-linked Edison Research.
In another deception, Musk and Venezuelan opposition figures pointed to a chart from TeleSUR, a left-wing broadcaster that has been funded by numerous governments in Latin America and is headquartered in Caracas.
A graphic designer at TeleSUR made a mistake and created a misleading graph that showed the other opposition candidates with 4.6% of the vote each. In reality, there were 10 candidates in Venezuela’s presidential election, and the other eight minor opposition figures only received 4.6% combined.
Part of this confusion was due to the language used in the announcement by Venezuela’s National Electoral Council (CNE). In a press conference late on the night of the election, CNE President Elvis Amoroso reported that Maduro won 51.2% of the vote, with Edmundo González at 44.2%, and he added that “other candidates obtained 462,704 [votes], 4.6%”. (In Spanish, his exact words were: “otros candidatos obtuvieron 462.704 [votos], un 4,6%“.)
In this press conference and in its written statement, the CNE lumped the eight other candidates together. TeleSUR’s graphic designer failed to communicate that this 4.6% was shared among the eight candidates.
While this error was clearly a serious problem in TeleSUR’s broadcast, it was not proof of supposed electoral fraud.
On the contrary, international observers, such as those from the US National Lawyers Guild, said they monitored an electoral process in Venezuela that was free and fair.
US government support for Venezuela’s opposition and coup attempts
This is by no means the first time Venezuela’s opposition has cried fraud, without any concrete evidence. In response to every recent presidential election, they have made similar claims, going back to Maduro’s first successful presidential race in 2013.
Like Edison Research, Venezuela’s right-wing opposition is closely linked to the US government.
US soft-power organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and US Agency for International Development (USAID) have spent many millions of dollars funding and training opposition groups in Venezuela, including political parties, media outlets, and so-called NGOs.
Washington has sponsored numerous coup attempts in Venezuela, including one in 2002 in which US-backed Venezuelan military officers briefly overthrew democratically elected President Hugo Chávez, before the people rose up, filled the streets, and restored Chávez to power.
In another coup attempt in 2019, the Donald Trump administration recognized little-known right-wing opposition politician Juan Guaidó as supposed “interim president” of Venezuela, despite the fact that he had never participated in a presidential election.
Washington proceeded to seize billions of dollars worth of Venezuelan foreign assets, in violation of international law, while imposing illegal unilateral sanctions and an embargo that sought to crush the country’s economy.
A Trump administration official bragged that the sanctions were like Darth Vader’s death grip on the throat of the Venezuelan economy.
The US Energy Information Administration gloated in 2019 that, due to the devastating US economic war, Venezuela’s oil production crashed to the lowest level in decades, starving the state of revenue it needed to fund social programs.
According to the top UN expert on sanctions, Special Rapporteur Alena Douhan, “unilateral sanctions increasingly imposed by the United States, the European Union and other countries have exacerbated the” economic crisis in Venezuela, and the “government’s revenue was reported to shrink by 99% with the country currently living on 1% of its pre-sanctions income”.
In a research paper published by the US think tank the Center for Economic and Policy Research, economists Mark Weisbrot and Jeffrey Sachs estimated that US sanctions caused 40,000 deaths in Venezuela from 2017 to 2018.
Trump’s neoconservative National Security Advisor John Bolton admitted in a CNN interview that the operation he oversaw in Venezuela was a coup attempt.
During the coup, one of Guaidó’s allies was the far-right Venezuelan opposition figure María Corina Machado. But when Guaidó failed to even come close to power in Caracas, despite Washington’s staunch support, the extremist Machado rose to become the de facto leader of Venezuela’s opposition.
Machado was prohibited from running in the 2024 election due to the many crimes she has committed, including participating in numerous violent coup attempts; calling for the US military to invade Venezuela; and lobbying Washington for, in her words, “more sanctions”, to bring about the “total financial asphyxiation” of her country.
For years, Machado has run opposition organizations funded by the US government. She is so close to Washington that she was personally invited to the White House for a one-on-one meeting with President George W. Bush in 2005. (The Bush administration had supported the briefly successful military coup against Chávez in 2002, which Machado also backed.)
Machado was largely the power behind the main opposition candidate who ran against Maduro in the 2024 race, Edmundo González Urrutia. Machado campaigned for him, and on the night of July 28, she held a press conference in which she claimed, without any evidence, that they had won the election, declaring, “Venezuela has a new president-elect, and he is Edmundo González.”
Edison Research’s meddling in Georgia
Edison Research’s Executive Vice President Rob Farbman is not the only employee at the firm who has worked extensively with US government propaganda outlets.
Edison Senior Advisor Nino Japaridze likewise did work for the US Broadcasting Board of Governors, RFE/RL, and Voice of America, as well as London’s BBC.
The Broadcasting Board of Governors is the US government propaganda organ that was renamed the US Agency for Global Media in 2018.
In 2019, Japaridze sat down for a friendly interview with US propaganda outlet Voice of America, to discuss “the importance of media independence for Georgia’s democracy”.
Washington has targeted Georgia in recent years, seeking to bring the former Soviet country into the US imperial sphere of influence. Since 2008, the US government has insisted that Georgia and Ukraine will become members of NATO, despite opposition not only by Russia but also by Germany and France.
Washington’s pressure on Georgia greatly accelerated in 2024, when the country’s democratically elected parliament voted for a bill that required organizations that receive more than 20% of their funding from outside the country to register as foreign agents.
US soft-power organizations like the NED, along with other Western governments, bankroll many pro-EU “civil society” groups and pro-NATO media outlets in Georgia, which would be forced to register as foreign agents under this law.
The US State Department lobbied heavily against the bill, and even imposed sanctions on Georgian officials who supported it.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given its US government ties, Edison Research published a poll in December 2023 that claimed that a staggering 90% of people in Georgia want close ties with the European Union, 80% want close ties with the USA, and just 43% want close ties with Russia. This confirmed Washington’s narrative right at the moment when it was escalating its interventionist pressure campaign against the country.
https://orinocotribune.com/us-govt-link ... -election/
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U.S. Government Selects New President For Venezuela
The clown show continues:
U.S. says Maduro lost Venezuelan election, calls for talks, transition - Washington Post
CARACAS, Venezuela — The United States on Thursday said opposition candidate Edmundo González defeated President Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela’s presidential election and called for negotiations to ensure a peaceful transition of power.
Maduro claims that he won Sunday’s vote. The opposition, meanwhile, says that the government’s own records, as well as independent exit polls, indicate that González won twice as many as votes.
“Given the overwhelming evidence, it is clear to the United States and, most importantly, to the Venezuelan people that Edmundo González Urrutia won the most votes in Venezuela’s July 28 presidential election,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement Thursday evening.
Did anyone inform "President" Juan Guaido?
Posted by b on August 2, 2024 at 7:03 UTC | Permalink
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2024/08/u ... l#comments
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The Carter Center's (planned) inconsistencies on June 28
Aug 1, 2024 , 12:15 pm .
The deliberate nature of the Carter Center Foundation's statement is in line with an international campaign to delegitimize the elections, even against its principles and with indications of orchestration (Photo: X.com)
The Carter Center Foundation (CC), a non-governmental organization founded in 1982 by former Democratic President Jimmy Carter, issued a statement on Tuesday evening, July 30, regarding the results of the presidential elections in Venezuela on July 28.
The statement said the event "did not conform to international parameters and standards of electoral integrity and cannot be considered democratic," an opinion more inclined towards the political spectrum than the technical one, since the entity did not complete its monitoring process and left the country before the deadlines stipulated in the electoral schedule were fully met.
The CC's statement could be considered deliberate and inconsistent, aimed at strengthening the ongoing campaign of political and communication orchestration whose fundamental objective is the delegitimization of the June 28th election and the results issued by the National Electoral Center (CNE) in the international arena. In this way, it contributes to the acceleration of conditions to intensify the scenario of regime change in Venezuela.
Point by point, these are the most relevant weaknesses of the mentioned text:
1.In principle, the statement would seek to re-enact in Venezuela the method applied in the presidential elections of Bolivia in 2019 by the Organization of American States (OAS), headed by the former Uruguayan foreign minister and current secretary, Luis Almagro. Its content provides elements of confusion and delegitimization to sharpen the coup agenda.
2.The organization did not complete its "observation" process in Venezuela. It rushed its exit from the country without completing the pending phases of the post-electoral stage, according to the schedule stipulated and agreed upon between the CNE, international companions and all parties. The CC criticizes some steps of the elections and makes accusations without going into detail about the facts it highlights.
3.Although the CNE and the Venezuelan government have reported on the attacks on the governing body's platform, the CC's statement does not mention it. They did not record this element as part of their considerations. Such an omission contributes to the invisibility of this serious circumstance surrounding the June 28 electoral process.
4.The haste and incompleteness of the "observations" of the entity make the statement a partial record of the election. Even though it deployed 17 experts and observers starting on June 29, as the statement says, the declaration has neither an objective nor technical character.
5.The CC, for example, does not classify the publication of the results by the opposition as an electoral fault. Through this tactic, and in line with the decision not to sign the Agreement of Recognition of Results proposed by the CNE at the beginning of the campaign, the Democratic Unitary Platform (PUD) seeks to generate parallel conclusions and increase the pressure necessary to disrupt the process. In this sense, the CC seeks to stimulate the crisis by issuing the declaration simultaneously with said parallel counting structure controlled by María Corina Machado.
6.The CC has among its principles the recognition that "solving difficult problems requires careful analysis," however, in Venezuela they encourage this through a biased reading of reality. Instead of waiting, gathering more data and establishing channels of communication with institutional entities, they opted to inject fuel into the conflict in favor of the opposition factors.
7.This organization relies on its "prestige" since it has helped to bring about political stability in Venezuela in the past . On this occasion, it points to "incidents of tension or violence reported in some localities" without specifying which political faction was on the side of the party. The interruption of its observation of the process should mean the end of its credibility in electoral matters in any country that considers inviting them.
8.After stating that "the observation is based on the utmost respect for the sovereignty of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and only aims to contribute to peace and the improvement of its electoral processes," the CC is participating in actions that, in other countries, have led to situations of prolonged conflict. The omission of the plan to ignore the results that was being prepared during the electoral campaign, in which international media participated, cannot be considered spontaneous.
President Nicolás Maduro, in an international press conference after attending the Supreme Court of Justice, asked the CC how many statements they published after the United States elections in November 2020, when the then president and candidate for reelection, Donald Trump, denounced fraud against him, carried out by the Democratic Party and its candidate, the current president Joe Biden.
The answer to that question is more than obvious. The CC has responded with its silence.
https://misionverdad.com/venezuela/las- ... bre-el-28j
Google Translator
(By hook or crook the spooks have seen to it that the CC didn't contradict them again. )
The Cayapo
