Hello dear listener, welcome to another episode of the

Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove.

This one, a special episode.

It's just me, Solo, ranting about Venezuela and the recent election and

the media treatment of that election.

Those of you who have listened to this podcast for many years would recognize

that every so often I get a Venezuelan itch that I have to scratch and I've

reached that point on this occasion again.

I've um, I've done lots of stories about Venezuela in the past and

I think what people may say or be curious and think, why Trevor, why

are you so obsessed with Venezuela?

And the answer is when I was 19 I I spent, um, three months in the

States and Canada, three months in Central America backpacking, and three

months in, in parts of South America.

I never got to Venezuela, but I did, you know, obviously gain an interest and an

affinity with Latin American culture.

And so, that would partly explain my interest in Venezuela, and over the

years we've done different stories.

I'm pretty sure I did a whole episode with Hugh Harris, and I was trying to find out

which number it was, but uh, I couldn't find it, but um, I'm going to get the

archives of this podcast better organized.

Anyway.

Um, I was going to do a story on Venezuela and then Hugh Harris actually sent me a

Guardian article and asked whether, the article of course was anti Maduro and he

sort of asked whether I had changed my opinion on Venezuela and uh, so I thought

well, I'll respond to that article and to Venezuelan affairs in general and

I think it's going to be a long one.

So, settle in.

Anyway.

Look, um, at the end of the day, it's very hazy as to exactly what goes on in

Venezuela, but there are lots of good reasons and lots of evidence as to why

we shouldn't accept the mainstream view.

If you don't want to listen to two or three hours of this episode and just want

to get the TLDR, too long, didn't read, summation of what I'm about to say, it's

going to go something like this, that everybody knows that the USA is trying

to conduct regime change in Venezuela.

The USA admits that and everybody knows it.

Everybody also knows that the standard program of regime change

is to, to create disinformation and to cause havoc in a country.

And that means that a lot of what we hear in relation to what's

going on, can't be trusted.

And we know that's the case from, from so much experience about what's previously

happened in Venezuela and what's previously happened in other countries.

So, so we know they want to do regime change.

We know that a key component of that is manufacturing disinformation and mistrust,

and even the most rabid opponents of the Maduro government basically

admit that the actual voting process of people going to polls and voting.

is a legitimate process, and that's backed up by the observations of

over 900 international observers.

So the creation of, of voting ballots is not really disputed.

So the, the allegations that it hasn't been a democratic process in this

particular election revolve around a couple of The first is that key

opposition members were banned from participating as candidates, and the

second aspect revolves around the delay in the release of the counts.

The Maduro government claims, and this is not disputed by the opposition,

that the website for the Venezuelan Electoral Commission was hit with a

cyber attack, which meant that it had to be shut down, and they're trying to

work their way through restoring the website to publish the data, and it's

now reached the stage where The sort of auditing and verification process is

being handed over to the Supreme Court.

The opposition claims that they've got their own unofficial count, which

shows that the opposition clearly won.

But as we go through this, I think you may agree with me that

that's complete BS on their part.

So that's, uh, where we're headed and there's lots of details to fill in.

And so I'm going to start with looking at, um, a bit of history

of US intervention in Venezuela.

And then we're going to look at some of the players involved, in

particular the opposition leaders.

We're going to look at international reaction to the election, who

is happy with it and who's not.

We're going to look at who was observing the election and what

did they think of the process.

Then we're going to move into the most important part, which will be an article

in The Guardian where a journalist is quite scathing of Maduro's claims

to have won the election, and we're really going to examine whether that

was a good piece of journalism or not.

Spoiler alert, it was not.

And then There is an interview with Alan McLeod, who was one of the

observers, he'll talk about the process.

And right at the end of that interview, and right at the end of that interview,

we'll get to the key takeaway of this entire matter, which is, how is it that

so many Western media outlets are prepared to, to publish what is a very one sided

and misleading view of what's going on.

It turns out to be a classic example of manufacturing consent, um, a Noam

Chomsky concept, which is probably also going to annoy Hugh Harris

when he listens to this episode.

But anyway, that's where we're heading.

Lots of details to fill in.

I hope you enjoy the ride.

Okay.

USA involvement in regime change throughout the world.

Please, if you doubt that the USA is conducting coups all over the world,

and has been conducting them, if you doubt that, then just stop listening.

Because you've got a lot of homework to do.

Anyway, I believe the USA when it says it's trying to conduct

regime change in Venezuela.

I've got a few clips.

Here's one of Donald Trump.

When I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse.

We would have taken it over.

We would have gotten all that oil.

It would have been right next door.

Trump had a National Security Advisor from 2018 to

2019 called John Robert Bolton.

Here's what he had to say in an interview.

I don't know that I agree with you, to be, to be, uh,

fair, with all due respect, uh, one doesn't have to be brilliant to attempt

a coup.

Uh, I disagree with that, as somebody who has helped plan coup d'etat, not here,

but, you know, other places, uh, it takes a lot of work, and that's not what he did.

When we were

talking about what is capable, what you need to

do to be able to plan a coup.

And you, you cited your expertise having planned coups.

I'm not going

to get into the specifics, but, uh, Successful coups?

Well, I wrote about Venezuela in, uh, in the book and, uh, it, it

turned out not to be successful.

Not that we had all that much to do with it, but I saw what it took for

an opposition to try and overturn an illegally elected president.

I don't know.

Are

you going to, listener?

I mean, if you want to conduct a coup, it's, it's not as easy as it looks.

Let's look at the playbook for one.

For the USA when it wants to, uh, conduct a coup.

First off, would be to impose trading and financial sanctions

on the subject country.

That will create economic stress on the local population, and they'll

be angry, and a lot of the time, will blame their government, and

not necessarily the government.

the USA.

But in any event, they get stressed, they get unhappy,

and they want things to change.

And they start thinking a government change would be good.

So sanctions are great because they cause economic stress and hardship.

The next thing the US needs to do is find a local US friendly puppet who

they can support and maneuver into the position to claim control of the country.

The USA then funnels money to that opposition entity and helps

transmit propaganda through media, think tanks and NGOs.

The propaganda of course will be critical of the government, blame it

for all of the economic problems and promote the alternative opposition.

One of the final steps is to employ and encourage goon squads

to riot and revolt in the streets.

If the opposition puppet is part of the military, then

you're almost home and hosed.

And if any elections are conducted in the meantime, before you can

physically gain control of government buildings, then those elections will be

denounced as undemocratic and corrupt.

If you doubt any of that, I invite you to read All the Shah's Men,

which describes how Kermit Roosevelt, working for the CIA, engineered

a coup in Iran against Mossadegh.

He more or less created a blueprint which the USA copied all around the world.

And in particular in Latin America, where under the Monroe Doctrine, the USA

has declared that no other superpower has any business in its hemisphere.

And in fact, left wing governments have no business in that hemisphere, and it's

up to the USA to do whatever it likes.

And so it's engineered coups in a few countries in Latin America, namely

Cuba, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Haiti, Peru,

Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Bolivia, Paraguay, Brazil, Chile, Argentina,

and Uruguay, just to name a few.

Let's turn to their most recent attempts in Venezuela.

A previously obscure figure, Juan Guaido, shocked the world in 2019 when he declared

himself the rightful ruler of Venezuela, despite never standing for president.

The US and Israel quickly recognised him.

It's now known that the stunt was planned in the US, Guaido had previously

met with Mike Pence, and assured him that he had the support over, of

over half the Venezuelan military.

Yet, when the US repeated Guaido's calls for the army to rebel and for

the people to flood the streets, the response was disbelief and amusement.

Guaido tried three coups in 2019, each less convincing than the last.

And despite its failures, the following year, the United States

attempted something even more desperate, an amphibious invasion of

Venezuela, led by ex Green Berets.

The plan was for ex special force members to lead an army of some 300

pro Guaido troops and shoot their way into the presidential palace.

And at this point, according to the plan, the Venezuelan army would desert

or surrender, the government would fall, and Guaido would be proclaimed dictator.

The scheme, however, fell apart at the first sign of resistance, as

the Americans Missions leaders were overpowered by members of a local fishing

collective armed with nothing more than antiquated revolvers and fishing knives.

Defense Secretary, U.

S.

Defense Secretary, Mark Esper, later revealed that the Trump

administration was intimately involved in the planning of the operation.

In Esper's memoir, he claimed that Trump was fixated on the idea of an

Iraq style invasion of Venezuela.

He quotes Trump is saying, what if the US military went down

there and got rid of Maduro?

John Bolton, who we heard from in an earlier clip, also claimed that

Trump had told him it would be really cool to take Venezuela because it

is really part of the United States.

So that was the most recent overt coup attempt.

Of course, there's a current covert attempt occurring as we speak.

But for the sake of completeness, just looking at some older history, of course

the coup attempts began earlier than Trump, and almost from the moment that

Chavez was elected in 1998, Washington started to plan for his removal.

There is an organisation called NED, standing for National Endowment for

Democracy, I can assure you, its aims are anything but democratic.

And through the NED, the US began funding and training groups that would lead

to the April 2002 coup against Chavez.

And the US was flying its leaders back and forth from Washington DC in

the weeks leading up to the event.

The coup eventually failed, thanks to an enormous counter protest.

surrounding the presidential palace and that spurred loyal military

units into retaking the building.

There was another significant attempt in 2014.

The U.

S.

was the only country in the world that did not recognize Maduro's 2013

electoral victory and instead the U.

S.

aligned itself with far right fractions in Venezuela which includes the

current opposition leader Machado.

And those far right faction groups implored people to take to the streets to

vent their anger over the 2013 election.

Which resulted in carnage and terrorised the nation and led to an

estimated 15 billion worth of damage.

What you find, dear listener, with these coups that are organised by

the US in Latin America and other countries, is when they replace the

leader, the leftist socialist leader in whatever country we happen to be

talking about, they invariably back the most despicable right wing characters,

and Venezuela is no exception.

Anyway, WikiLeaks cables show that the U.

S.

was bankrolling many of the movement's leaders, and the cables also show

that Washington knew the calibre of the people they were employing.

They note, for example, that Nixon Moreno had led a crowd to lynch the

Governor of Merritt Estate during the 2002 coup, and was accused of murder

and the rape of a police officer.

Eventually, that 2014 coup attempt uprising petered out.

So that was basically the opposition in 2014 imploring people to get out and

vent their anger at the election result.

And that is being repeated on this occasion, where Edmundo Gonzalez has

called on his supporters to go out on the streets and defend their victory.

And what that has meant in practice is tens of thousands of people going

out at night and setting fires to things, attacking police and burning

down pharmacies and buildings.

But Edmundo Gonzalez is an old man and he's really just the front

man for Maria Carina Machado.

She was banned from running for president, and so they had

to put up Edmundo Gonzalez.

But everybody understood that voting for Edmundo Gonzalez was

voting for Maria Carina Machado.

Now, one of the reasons for alleging corruption and unfairness in the

Venezuelan election is the complaint that Machado wasn't allowed to run.

But we need to have a bit of a look at Machado and see what she's been up to.

In a leaked recording, Machado admitted that the US government told her it wants

to collaborate to overthrow elected President Maduro, and Machado called

for more sanctions demanding total financial asphyxiation of Venezuela.

Also, a letter was released Machado sent to the leader of Argentina,

Mauricio Macri, and the leader of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, asking

for them to intervene in Venezuelan affairs by promoting before the United

Nations Security Council the adoption of effective protection measures for

Venezuela by promoting a change of regime.

The letter asks Israel and Argentina to contribute their expertise and influence

to move towards accurate and urgent decision making in the Security Council.

And in her letter, she alleged the criminal nature of the current

regime, the current Venezuelan regime, represented a real threat to

other countries, especially Israel.

And later in the text, um, stated, Without a regime change

in our country, Hemispheric and global security are at risk.

That all just sounds like treason to me.

And is it any wonder that she was banned from standing for office?

There are also some other allegations against her.

I mean, to me, it's hard to believe she's actually still running around in the

country free and not behind bars, given what we already know about her calling for

violence in 2014 and then calling for US intervention and regime change and calling

on Argentina and Israel to help out.

Just some personal details.

She was born into one of Venezuela's most elite and well connected families.

She attended Yale University.

As did President George W.

Bush, who welcomed her into the Oval Office in 2005 for an official visit.

And unlike others in the Venezuelan opposition, Machado has openly received

money from the NED, the National Endowment for Democracy, and her election monitoring

organisation, Sumate, has for many years been bankrolled by the CIA Front Group.

End.

WikiLeaks cables reveal that the US ambassador for Caracas, or in Caracas,

considered this a serious drawback to the credibility of that organisation.

So if I stopped right now, you would have enough information to be extremely

doubtful of any anti Maduro news that you would be subjected to, as

you'd be worried that it's propaganda generated by the United States.

Unless, of course, you trust Western media to filter out any propaganda.

In which case, I've got a bridge to sell you, and also, uh, stay tuned till the

very end of this episode, in terms of the media and its ability to filter out

or not filter out propaganda, and why organisations that seemingly are liberal,

like the Guardian, are falling into line.

Anyway, just a brief.

tangent into the connection with Israel.

So, um, Maria Carina Machado is a Zionist and she has said if we win

we will move the Venezuelan embassy to Jerusalem to support Israel.

It seems that every US backed Latin American politician tends

to be fanatically pro Israel.

On the other hand, Maduro has proven to be one of the staunchest

international critics of Israel.

And he's a big supporter of Palestine.

He's quoted as saying Israel is committing massacres in the Gaza

Strip in front of the world's eyes without anyone deterring it.

And he claims that Israel's actions constitute some of the worst barbarity

seen since the days of Adolf Hitler.

He's actually following a tradition back in 2016 Chavez expelled the Israeli

ambassador over its attacks on Lebanon.

Three years later, amid a fresh Israeli attack, must have been 2009, Venezuela

cut all diplomatic ties and recognized the state of Palestine and Chavez in

a famous speech bellowed, Damn you state of Israel, and he denounced

it as a terrorist state entity.

Meanwhile, of course, Israel is shot back and it was one of the

first nations to recognise Juan Guaido when he popped his head up.

So there's no love lost between the, um, Maduro government and Israel,

and there's a lot of love between the Machado opposition and Israel.

Some of Machado's allies have been arrested for

conspiring to ferment violence.

There's So, the Attorney General has accused, um, Guillermo Lopez, Luis

Camacaro and Juan Fraites, who belong to Machado's party, of forming part of

a group of at least 11 people, who the Attorney General claims, tried to rob a

military weapons arsenal before a planned assault on a pro Maduro state governor.

Given the history of the opposition's efforts to promote violence after

failed elections, and given just the shitty people that the USA

tries to install as part of its coups, none of that surprises me.

Who knows if it's true, but it seems plausible.

On the other hand, maybe Maduro's just locking up political opponents

so that he can win an election.

I don't know, but if you're going to tell this story, in the Western

media, you should be providing these other sides to the story.

So how are other countries reacting to the election result?

It's pretty much a split between Western countries and these sort

of Global South BRICS countries.

Over 40 countries have recognised and endorsed the Maduro government,

including For example, Algeria, Angola, Antigua, Belarus, Bolivia, China.

The USA has not gone so far as to recognise Gonzalez, but they're

obviously not recognising Maduro.

What are the papers saying?

Well, the New York Times would be a fairly typical example.

I'll read a fair number of excerpts from a New York Times article And the

issues they talk about will be dealt with eventually, but this is to give

you the sort of flavour of typical coverage of the election result.

Protests erupt in Venezuela as nations denounce election result.

I wasn't going to, but protests erupt, well, because the opposition called for

it, and nations denounce election result?

It'll turn out that actually ten times as many confirm the

result as denounce the result.

Ah, it goes on.

Protests broke out Monday in Caracas, Venezuela's capital, with hundreds of

young people marching through the streets, furious over a presidential election,

in which the incumbent, Nicolas Maduro, declared victory despite widespread

accusations of fraud, and Officially proclaiming the election decided

without releasing the full vote counts.

Oh, I can't help myself.

Hundreds of young people marching through the streets.

You know, it might be fair to point out that three days prior to the election,

there was hundreds of thousands of people at Maduro rallies in support of Maduro.

That paragraph talked about widespread accusations of fraud.

Yeah, accusations by the opposition invite people with a vested

interest in conducting a coup.

And yes, they haven't released the full vote counts because their website has

been under a denial of service attack, so they can't actually put it up and

they're figuring out how to do it.

But you know, don't tell people that's the reason.

It goes on, the United States and countries around the world announced

the official results of Sunday's vote, which did not appear to match

statistical estimates based on partial counts and other data that showed the

President losing by a wide margin.

We'll get to this later, but part of the coup playbook is to conduct

your own polling, showing that.

The opposition is well in front, so when they lose the election,

you can claim, well, it must have been a fraudulent election.

And if the New York Times wanted to, they could have found plenty

of polls that were suggesting that Maduro would win by the margin that

Maduro is claiming to have won by.

By Monday afternoon, the Venezuelan government announced it had kicked out

the diplomatic missions of seven Latin American countries that had condemned

the official electoral results.

Well, if people are saying that you are there fraudulently and they don't

recognise the election You probably would kick them out of your country.

It goes on.

The opposition leader, Maria Carina Machado, announced on Monday evening

that her movement had received paper tallies from 73 percent of

the country's voting stations and refuted the government's claims.

Those tallies showed that Maduro's opponent, Gonzalez, had received 3.

5 million more votes than the president.

Dear listener, as will be revealed later, Machado's basically relying on

her own people in the counting rooms, just phoning through to her head

office what they say the count is.

And, of course, it's open for these people to either make mistakes.

Or, just lie.

It goes on, The move by the Electoral Authority to declare victory but

not release detailed voting results, which it had routinely done in

past elections, intensified the sense among many Venezuelans and

international observers that the election had essentially been stolen.

Dear listener, over 900 international observers present at the election,

and to my knowledge, none of them has complained about the process.

The complaints from international observers were not from the official

observers who were visiting the polling booths, and in most cases, are observers

who weren't even in the country.

And if you were trying to be genuine in your journalism, you would have

made the point That, that claim is contradicted by hundreds of other

independent observers who say that the election was conducted properly.

We'll get to that.

Further on, it says, the disputed election put renewed attention on the Biden's

administrations, blah, blah, blah.

The disputed election, well, it's disputed because the opposition were

always going to dispute the election.

Anyway, what we'll move on to now is the actual voting process

in the Venezuelan election.

And here is a clip from Jimmy Carter back in 2012 talking about the process.

They have a very wonderful voting system where you go in and you

touch the screen and vote the way you want to and instantly that touchscreen result

is recorded and can be transmitted to you.

Electronically into the central counting headquarters, but it also prints out a

paper ballot and when you get through voting, you can not only have voted

electronically, but you can look at the paper ballot and make sure that's

the way that you wanted to vote.

Then you put the paper ballot in a box and you can go back and check the results

later on if there's any doubt about it.

As a matter 92 elections that we've monitored, I would say

that the election process in Venezuela is the best in the world.

So to expand upon this voting process, I'm now going to play a clip

from Alan McLeod, who was one of the observers, and he will confirm and provide

a bit more detail about how it works.

In order to vote, Venezuelans need to produce their

national ID card, and then that is, uh, the picture on that is then checked

against them from a voting official.

If that passes, they then go to a fingerprint machine, where they

have to give their thumbprint onto a machine that should match

the one that's on the records.

And if both of those things match, they're allowed to vote on an electronic voting

system, which resembles a computer.

Once they've voted on that machine, the computer spits out a paper ballot,

the voter must check the paper ballot, the paper ballot's got a barcode on

it, some numbers, and the candidate.

If that is correct, they then proceed to put that piece of paper in the box.

Not only that, once they have voted, they also have to sign an electoral

register to say they have voted, and they also have to, uh, put their

thumb in an inkwell and then put their thumbprint on a piece of paper.

So there are many, many checks and balances there to make sure

there's no vote of fraud or any kind of, um, impersonation going on.

At the end of the day, all the, the, uh, electronic results which

have been sent to head office in Caracas are then, um, checked against

the paper ballots that are there.

The paper ballots are counted in front of representatives of

the community and of Caracas.

different political parties, those paper ballots have to match 100 percent to

the electronic results that the CNE, the National Electoral Council, has.

If there is even a discrepancy of even one vote, that triggers a massive

audit and all hell breaks loose.

The 2013 election, which is the one I know best apart from this

2024 election, the electronic vote was correct to a percentage of 99.

98 percent and that was because 22 people across Venezuela.

and voted on the machines but not put their paper ballot in the box.

Fascinating, I think you'll agree.

An electronic vote that allows for a quick count and then generating a paper vote

that can be manually counted to double check the electronic one and massive

sort of identification checks so that you can't have somebody voting twice.

Now, to give you the full picture, the Carter Center has put out a

statement saying that the 2024 Venezuelan presidential election

did not meet international standards of electoral integrity

and cannot be considered democratic.

Their main complaints were in relation to the lead up to the election in terms

of Opposition members not allowed to participate, and not having access to

funding, and the government being at an advantage in that respect, in that the

government had overwhelmingly positive coverage on television and radio.

But when it comes to the actual voting at voting booths on the day, They

pretty much conceded it was okay.

I'll read the relevant paragraph which was, Still, Venezuelan citizens turned

out peacefully and in large numbers to express their will on election day.

Despite reports of restrictions on access to many polling centres for

domestic observers and opposition party witnesses, potential pressure on the

voters such as ruling party checkpoints in the vicinity of voting centres, and

incidents of tension or violence reported in some localities, voting appeared to

take place in a generally civil manner.

Now those claims of intimidation will be dealt with by other observers.

And we really have to ask, well, who is the Kennedy,

sorry, who is the Carter Center?

And how does that fit with what Jimmy Carter was saying?

And I think we've really reached the point where, um, the Center is no longer

under the influence of Jimmy Carter.

It's in fact, um, funded by the U.

S.

State Department, CIA front, U.

S.

aid, uh, the U.

K.

and the E.

U.

which have backed coup attempts in Venezuela.

So it's probably not surprising that the Carter Center, funded by the US State

Department, who's trying to conduct a coup, uh, wasn't happy with the election.

But you can take all that into account.

At least I'm giving you both sides of the story.

Let's have a listen to what some other international observers had to say.

We're going to get comment from Nina Farnia, legal

historian at Albany Law School.

You're just back from Venezuela.

You were an observer with the National Lawyers Guild.

If you can talk about what you saw and respond to, um, uh, Edgardo Lander.

Well, we thank you for having me on, Amy.

What we witnessed, by and large, was a free and fair election process, which

explains why former President Jimmy Carter once called this system the

best electoral system in the world.

We were part of a large international delegation of election monitors that

included members of the African Union and the Latin American Election experts.

And we were quarantined with the rest of our delegation in

a hotel that was separate from all the political activities.

We attended days of trainings about the Venezuelan electoral system,

about the laws that protect it.

And then we were taken, prior to the elections, we were taken to polling

stations around the country where we saw the touchscreen voting machines.

We saw the ballot boxes for the paper ballots.

We met the directors of each voting center on the day of the election,

our NLG delegation had the privilege of interviewing voters as they were

going in and out of the voting room.

And we also interviewed members of each of the parties that were there to monitor

the elections, the polling stations.

We also interviewed opposition voters.

We didn't hear.

Any concerns from any voters or observers.

Every single person that we spoke with said that this is a free and fair process.

They had faith in the system.

And, in fact, what we saw was a ton of energy around each of

the stations that we visited.

People were proud to vote.

They take that, They take, they view voting as a pillar

of the Venezuelan democracy and of the Bolivarian revolution.

So I've mentioned a couple of times that a key complaint by

Maduro's opponents is that the vote that Maduro claims doesn't match the

polling that was done and therefore it must have been fraudulent, meaning

the election, not the polling.

And Nina Fania has something to say about that.

Yeah, so, um, exit polling is illegal in Venezuela because it has

the effect of, um, altering votes.

Um, and also a lot of the polling results that were, um, used in the U.

S.

media, the polling predictions that were used in the U.

S.

media, uh, were discredited by Venezuela Analysis, a trusted

news source in Venezuela that has also been Maduro government.

We actually are very concerned by the claim that Gonzalez has won.

Gonzalez was a diplomat in Venezuela, a Venezuelan diplomat in El Salvador

during the Salvadoran death squads.

He was number two stationed there.

He has blood on his hands.

He has Salvadoran blood on his hands.

And so the idea that the Venezuelans would support a government that

would support a government A president who, uh, executed U.

S.

foreign policy in El Salvador decades ago, uh, is shocking to us.

Uh, it's up ultimately to the Supreme Court to decide.

The Venezuelan government, according to the laws that we learned about while we

were there, has 30 days to release the tallies from the day of the election.

We're not even at 10 days yet.

Yeah, I mentioned, um, the US and the CIA have a habit of picking

nasty characters for their coup attempts.

And, um, yeah, during the years in which Edmundo Gonzalez was collaborating with

the CIA out of the Venezuelan embassy in San Salvador, The Salvadoran army

and far right paramilitaries tortured and massacred over 13, 000 civilians.

Uh, she concludes,

The Venezuelan people, it looks like, based on our perceptions

of the process, of the election process, chose President Maduro.

But to the extent that there's Disagreement about what actually

happened, the Supreme Court should be allowed to decide.

South Africa had a delegation and I'll just read parts of their statement.

Over 15 South African election observers are currently in Caracas.

As part of a total of 910 observers from more than 95 countries.

The observers condemn and dispel allegations of fraud by the Reuters

media group reporting on the elections taking place in Venezuela

without actually being present.

Claims or allegations of fraud have been found to be baseless and mischievous.

With Venezuela's electoral system considered one of the best in the world.

The fact is that international election observers, that include South Africans,

have witnessed a free and fair process.

The presidential elections in Venezuela started smoothly and were

incident free throughout the day.

Observers from 100 countries, including Several African nations have been spending

the day at various polling stations in all 23 states across the country.

South African observers have noted the efficiency, transparency and

fairness of Venezuela's elections.

There are 16, 025 voting stations across the country that use state of

the art biometric voting machines.

The voting machines have a paper ballot backup system that runs

concurrently with an audit that takes place immediately after the elections.

The audit is done publicly and takes place on 54 percent of all voting machines.

All parties witness the sign off on results at voting centres and each

party has to enter its unique encrypted key to validate the final tally.

We with other international observers await the official results.

Here again is Alan MacLeod who was one of the observers.

We spoke to dozens of people, opposition supporters who told

us that they hated Maduro, government supporters who said that they loved

Maduro, government supporters that said that they didn't like Maduro but they

were voting for him anyway because he was better than the opposition candidate.

So there's a very wide range of people we talked to.

We even in one central Caracas voting station talked to the lady who was

in charge of the entire operation in that centre and she told us openly.

To me and election observers from Zambia, South Africa, and the United

States who were with me at the time, she told us openly that she was a member

of the opposition, that she hated the government, that she thought the economy

was in shambles, and she was only doing this because she needed the money.

Nevertheless, she said that the voting system, she had complete confidence in

it, and we spoke to lots of election officials that day, and the two words

that came up constantly were tranquillo, which means calm, and fluido, which could

mean smooth or fluid in that process.

And finally, uh, Roger D.

Harris, an observer from Task Force on the Americas.

Spent the day observing electoral centres in Miranda State.

He and others told Mint Press that opposition supporters were perfectly

happy to publicly announce their allegiances and express their

grievances with the government.

Despite their opposition to socialism, most retained

confidence in the electoral system.

Okay, so now, knowing that the voting system is fair and transparent, and

assuming the public understands that Machado is a traitor who welcomed US

intervention in the country and regime change, and knowing that Gonzalez

is involved, or was involved, in CIA assassinations, You'd surely have to

accept that it's more than plausible that perhaps more than 50 percent

of the population did actually vote for Maduro in the election, without

any interference being necessary.

Anyway, the possibility is still open that while the votes were Cast in a

solid system that somewhere in the counting of that, the Maduro government

has done a dodgy count of some sort.

But what we've got is we've got an electronic count that gets sent almost

immediately to a central counting house.

What they would normally do is say, from this particular

district, we got these votes.

And they can then do a physical count of the paper votes at that

district house and confirm that it matches what the electronic count is.

And the opposition is involved in that physical count of the paper ballots.

So it sounds like a system that's hard to rig, What's happened at this point is

that the government has not published the individual counts for these small, um, you

know, sort of voting booths, if you like.

And the reason they say is that their website has been hit by, uh,

attack, which has denied service.

And the opposition doesn't deny that because they've actually cheered

the fact that it happened on.

So I'll probably just try and deal now with how the opposition is claiming

it's done its own count and is three and a half million votes ahead.

Here again is Alan MacLeod.

So, uh, over here, the opposition has been claiming fraud.

They claim that their candidate, Edmundo Gonzalez, actually received more than 70

percent of the vote, and they've basically got two sources of information for that.

Number one is a, an American, uh, polling firm.

This polling firm has, um, got extensive links with the U.

S.

government and even the CIA, so we have to take some of their

results with a grain of salt.

Edmundo Gonzalez, as I said earlier, called on his supporters to go out on

the streets and defend their victory, and what that has meant in practice

has meant Tens of thousands of people going out at night and setting fires

to things, attacking police, burning down pharmacies, burning buildings.

Even we saw in one city that a hospital was, a hospital was set on fire.

These, as I said, are political targets.

They're not going after businesses or whatever.

They are going after Very politicized targets like hospitals and schools.

And so they, they hate the fact that they have to walk past these things every day,

especially when they're called things like the Hugo Chavez maternity clinic.

But I think one of the interesting things this time around

is that the opposition says they actually have the voting rolls.

Uh, and that they've started to, to publish some of those online.

Yeah.

So the way the opposition's methodology works was they sent their supporters to

every polling station in the country, uh, to watch the election, uh, results and

to count the ballots themselves, or at least watch the ballots being counted.

And what they did was they had representatives looking at every

single table in the country.

And those representatives would then send WhatsApp messages.

On a group chat, which had all the, um, the, the information about the voters and

how many people voted for each candidate, and then that would be tabulated by

some sort of central opposition, uh, organization in Caracas, and then they

would have their own figures to publish.

As you said, this happened at exactly the same time that the CNA

and the National Electoral Council.

Uh, their website got hacked and was taken down.

So, frankly, I think the opposition's methodology, you know, um, it, it, it

lacks quite a lot, you know, because this is based on Humans reporting

exactly what they saw, and if any of them get their, their figures wrong,

or are just frankly being, uh, you know, are frankly lying, then the

entire process, you know, goes to pot.

So, the opposition's, um, numbers are basically based on their own supporters

self reporting what each voting table, um, what each voting machine spits out.

And, of course, we're going to have a situation that, as I said, if any of

them get are not being entirely truthful, then the whole process, uh, falls apart.

Okay, so time now to look at the media treatment of all of this.

And first up is a Guardian article that Hugh Harris sent to me.

And fortunately enough, Alan MacLeod had already done a response to the article.

So I'll just Rely on Alan's words here.

This is an article in The Guardian entitled, Evidence shows

Venezuela's election was stolen.

But will Maduro budge?

Written by Tiago Ruggiero, South American correspondent.

And the first few paragraphs are, It is not new for Maduro

to be accused of attempting to steal a presidential election.

But the evidence for such allegations has never been quite so overwhelming.

Analysis carried out by the opposition, academics and media organisations have

offered strong evidence to suggest that Venezuelan president, uh, that

the Venezuelan president lost by a landslide, as Alan McLeod says.

What is the evidence?

Oh, it's analysis carried out by the opposition itself.

As well as hearsay from sympathetic academics.

He makes the point.

Let's also not inform readers that there were actually nine opposition

candidates running against Maduro, and that only Gonzalez refused to

say he would accept the results.

The article goes on.

A number of countries Gonzalez's victory.

Alan McLeod points out that number is four countries, all of them

right wing Latin American nations.

Even the United States has walked back its Gonzalez claims, and the Biden

administration clarified it has not recognised Gonzalez as the victor.

Last time McLeod checked, more than 40 countries had endorsed

Maduro, over 10 times as many that have recognised Gonzalez.

Yet, through this verbal sleight of hand, um, the Guardian's presenting

Mizzouro as isolated, and the extremist denialist position as mainstream.

The article goes on, For now at least, the incumbent clings to power,

having pulled off what one expert has described as the largest electoral

fraud in Latin America's history.

I love this response from Alan McLeod.

I checked this quote, and it's not from an expert at all, but from another

Guardian journalist, Tom Phillips.

Tom Phillips is notorious among Latin Americans for being perhaps the most

clueless gringo on the continent.

One example of this was his shock that Lula did not endorse Juan Guaido, as he

thought they shared the same ideology.

He also spent years promoting Guaido.

Parroted CIA talking points, whitewashing the far right coup in Bolivia in 2019

and supporting the law fair campaign against Lula and Dilma in Brazil.

That's the expert that this clown has relied on.

The article goes on.

Independent observers agree that this election was never

going to be fair and free.

From the start, the electoral process was plagued by irregularities,

according to the Venezuelan NGO Transparencia Electoral.

Alan McLeod points out that that NGO, Transparencia Electoral,

is presented as an independent observer, but it's anything but that.

The chief, Delgado, who sits on the company's board, is simultaneously

the national communication and media coordinator of CIMATE.

And ATE is opposition Leader, Machado's phony election monitoring Organization.

And ATE is funded by the CAA through the National Endowment for Democracy, ned.

So he's represented that organization as an independent observer and as

McLeod says, not telling readers this.

and presenting it merely as an independent observer is active

disinformation and propaganda and constitutes a crime against journalism.

The article goes on.

The list ranges from blocking candidates from running, such as the opposition

leader Machado, who was then replaced by Gonzalez, to making it virtually

Venezuelans living abroad to vote.

And McLeod's response is that corporate media loves to constantly tell readers

that she's been banned from standing.

Because it feeds into the sort of dictator holding onto power narrative.

But they never tell you why she was barred.

She was blocked from running because for years, she toured the world attempting to

organise a US led invasion of Venezuela.

She supported the 2002 coup against Chavez, led waves of terrorist violence

against Venezuela that targeted schools, hospitals, universities, and, um, that

violence killed huge numbers of people, cost billions of dollars of damage,

and in any other country, she would have spent the rest of her life in

prison, if not having been executed.

But in Venezuela, her primary punishment is that she can't hold

office for a certain time period.

The article goes on, Dozens of opposition members were arrested

during the campaign, and international observers were either blocked or

disinvited from monitoring the vote.

McLeod responds, There were over 900 international observers

from 100 plus countries.

And that votes in Venezuela are among the most intensely

monitored in the entire world.

He says, As for being banned, I assume the Guardian is talking about the

European Union, who were disinvited.

But the EU is actively trying to topple the Maduro government

and is clearly a bad actor.

Why would any government invite groups it knows are trying to undermine and

topple it to monitor proceedings?

The article goes on, After years of economic decline, an

unprecedented humanitarian crisis that has spurred about 8 million

Venezuelans to leave the country.

Opinion polls indicated a strong lead for Gonzalez, and MacLeod

responds, What opinion polls?

Many opposition aligned pollsters, like Machado's Samate, are directly

funded and supported by the CIA, and are therefore extremely dubious.

In fact, these US funded pollsters exist to present the government as collapsing

in order to give Western media supposedly credible polls to cite, showing the

government's about to fall, so when it does win the election, they can cry fraud.

Some of these polling organisations have been off up to 60 points.

in previous elections.

Yet they continue to be cited as credible experts.

There were plenty of polls from Venezuela showing Maduro would win

comfortably, or even by a landslide.

Why do western media never cite them?

It's obvious, because that would run contrary to their

regime change narratives.

And so they are ignored.

Now, I just um, gave you the clip that demonstrated how the opposition

relied on WhatsApp messaging to tabulate their own figures.

And in the Guardian article, it says, US officials concurred that

it would have been nearly impossible for the opposition to falsify

the voting tallies it published.

As McLeod says, presenting the opinion of the State Department

uncritically is laughable.

When it comes to Venezuela, they've spent a quarter of a century

trying to overthrow the government.

They've constantly lied.

No self respecting journalist would present their claims at face value.

And the idea that it would be impossible for the opposition to falsify the voting

tallies via its WhatsApp messaging?

I mean, it would be funny if it wasn't so serious.

Further on, further on in the article, Meanwhile, diplomatic

pressure from countries such as the U.

S., which has recognized Gonzalez as the winner, actually,

no it didn't, is important.

So, as Alan MacLeod sums it up, this article, A masterclass in

misdirection, selective sourcing, lying by omission, and misleading factoids.

So there you go, Hugh Harris, that article did not convince me to change my mind.

But I know that, despite all of this, I probably haven't

changed yours, but that's okay.

I remember I used to argue with the 12th Man about journalists having

to succumb to the ideology of the newspaper they were working for.

And, The Twelfth Man just would not accept that and, um, no matter

how hard I tried to convince him.

Anyway, if you're wondering how we get articles like this one from The Guardian,

then here is a lengthy excerpt from an interview with Alan MacLeod, but it's

incredibly instructive as the final point to this whole episode with Venezuela.

So I did my PhD about the media coverage of Venezuela,

and then I produced a book and five peer reviewed academic articles

on the subject of Venezuela.

And what I found, uh, was, number one, I found an extraordinary slant and

bias against the country and towards presenting it as a dictatorship, ignoring

any progressive changes that were going on and constantly demonizing it.

That was overwhelming from both conservative and liberal media, and

both American and British media.

So that's the first thing I found, but perhaps the more interesting

story is why this was going on.

And in order to explain that and understand that question, I actually

talked to the majority of journalists who were producing content on

Venezuela for the Western audience.

That actually wasn't very hard because there's quite a small number of Western

journalists that produce pretty much all the news you hear out of this country.

Nowadays there's only one newspaper with a full time correspondent

in Venezuela, that's the New York Times with Anatoly Kremlinaev.

I interviewed Kermanayev many years ago now, and he was completely

open about what he was doing.

So, uh, I have him on record saying that he describes himself as a mercenary for

hire, and he and his colleagues, and that he intentionally plants false or grossly

exaggerated stories about Venezuela into Western media because he has an agenda.

He called this tactic Sexy Tricks, and he gave me one example of this.

He printed a story, he got a story published that condoms

in Venezuela cost 750.

Now, he accepted that this was completely nonsense.

But he said that this was, you know, this story went viral across

the world and it played into this.

Venezuela is a ludicrous failed state, tin pop dictatorship, hyperinflation, etc.

But yeah, he said that this wasn't the case and indeed it wasn't.

Actually, when I looked into a box of condoms in Venezuela, it cost

8, which I actually think that's slightly cheaper than in the US.

So there was no real enormous.

You know, uh, Shortage or, uh, Mad Pricing.

But people would do that deliberately, uh, in fact journalists,

because they had an agenda.

And I also spoke to other journalists that said that inside their newsroom they

called themselves, quote, the resistance, end quote, to Chavez and now Maduro.

That's how they talk about them.

Another journalist said that other, uh, People in his newsroom said

that we have to quote, get rid of this guy, meaning Chavez, end quote.

Um, so journalists were completely open about, uh, what their, their position was.

They were the ideological tip of the spear trying to destroy socialism in its cradle.

Other journalists who were quite critical of the coverage, and once

they were out, started blowing the whistle, told me that, um, they felt

that they had to self censor constantly.

So, one journalist who worked for the Financial Times told me that

the stuff that he wrote in his book, he knew, would never, ever get

published in the Financial Times.

And so he didn't even bother pitching it after a while.

He just constantly got knocked back, and he stopped pitching,

and he just started complying.

He said it was complete self censorship.

That's what he said.

And, uh, yeah, other journalists said that they had to temper what they wrote because

they knew their editors didn't like that.

And there were people who were allied to the opposition, local Venezuelans,

that they worked with in the newsroom.

So, uh, There was this extremely partisan sense in, uh, sense in the newsroom.

Western journalists overwhelmingly live in the east side of Caracas, they

live in gated communities, they have armed guards, they have servants, uh,

a lot of them don't speak Spanish.

And very few of them venture into the dilapidated slums of, uh, Caracas, which,

uh, are bastions of government support.

And so everyone they interact with on a daily basis, uh, hates the

government and loves the opposition.

And so they start to imbibe that, and that's the content they produce.

And so, yeah, ultimately It really is a story of Venezuela being the ground

zero for journalism in the sense that it is a fantastic case study that shows

that journalists job, if you work in corporate media, is not to present

the truth, but it is to Push the agenda of the owners and advertisers

of big, uh, corporate media outlets.

So that is the billionaire class.

And so truth goes out the window when you're fighting an information war.

And Venezuela is the perfect example of that.

Truth has just completely escaped, just been totally defenestrated

when it comes to this country and propaganda reigns supreme.

And Alan MacLeod finishes off that interview talking about Critical

thinking, he says, ultimately we need to develop critical media literacy skills.

We always have to be constantly analysing everything we read,

asking, where does it come from?

Who is writing it?

What is their agenda?

Who is funding this organisation?

All sorts of questions like that.

Why are they saying it like this?

Why are they choosing those words?

What is the point of this article?

What are they trying to get me to believe here?

So, I'm not saying Maduro is a saint, or even a good guy, and it may well

turn out at some point that there's some corruption or something funny

goes on in the counting of the votes.

I don't know, but it's also quite possible that just a majority

of Venezuelans voted for him.

And hopefully, next time you read an article or hear something that just gives

one side of the story without alerting people to the possibility of the other

side of the story, then discount heavily that news source when it comes to other

matters that you might hear from them.

Anyway, that's enough of a rant.

I've got that off my chest.

Probably won't have to address Venezuela until the next election.

I don't know.

Anyway, I'll be back with the usual crew next week.

And we'll rant about other things.

Uh, talk to you then.

Bye.