The United States is attempting to seize control of another sovereign nation, Venezuela. Having no speck of standing within Venezuela or in international law, the U.S. is resorting to regime change by edict. The Trump administration has simply proclaimed that the President of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, recently re-elected with over 6 million votes (68%), is now replaced by Juan Guaidó, who had not even run for the office and therefore received zero votes (0%), and whom 81% of Venezuelans had never heard of. But, like a good bench-warmer, Guaidó got the dreamed-for call from the coach—literally, a phone call from the offensive coordinatorU.S. Vice President—and the next day swore himself in as President of Venezuela, under the authority granted to him by the government of the United States. All The Right Moves.
Somehow these electoral results add up to the fact that Maduro is a “dictator.” Somehow the electoral system that, in 2012, the notorious socialist rag Forbescalled “A Model For The World” and Jimmy Carter called: “the best in the world”–thesame one that was A-OK in 2015, when it produced an opposition winin the National Assembly elections—was “illegitimate” and a “sham” in 2018.
We know this because the hardline Venezuelan opposition faction said so. That’s the faction that refused to participate along with the other sixteen parties in the early election the opposition parties called for, and which asked international institutions notto send observers (a demand request most of those institutions, for some reason surely unrelated to U.S. bribes and threats, obeyed). We know this because the U.S. government, which threatened the government of Venezuela with further sanctions for holding the elections, and threatened the main opposition candidate (Henri Falcón) with individual sanctions for participating—said so. We know this because a whole bunch of Serious People who didn’t set foot in the country said so.
We know the election was a “sham” despite the fact that over 300 international election observers who were actually present in Venezuela found, as the EU delegation said, that the elections were “fraud-proof [and] were conducted fairly.” Reasonable, since an outstanding 54% of voting machines were audited against hand-counted paper ballots, in front of representatives of all parties and open access to citizens, with results posted locally. Which is perhaps why “no evidence or concrete reports of fraud have been presented.” (Please do judge for yourself here,and here, and here.)
We know this because the U.S. government and its Serious Sycophants are the arbiters of what’s “democracy” and what’s ”dictatorship” and what’s good for Venezuela, and if they declare that the guy who won a couple of elections by millions of votes is a “dictator,” and the guy who did not even run is the “legitimate” President—well, that’s one of those new proclamations that becomes an established fact because all the Right People keep saying it. What it’s not, what you can never suggest it may be, is a crock of excuses for the U.S. and its Venezuelan compradors who didn’t want to participate in an election that they knew they could not win.
(You might notice the new rule, which we’ve seen in Palestine, with EU-treaties, and now Venezuela: elections don’t count unless you get the result the Serious People want.)
