Venezuela: An Attempted Coup by Any Other Name
by Maria Paez Victor
“We will give a coup to whoever we want! Deal with it.”
Elon Musk, July 25, 2020, Twitter
Venezuela has once again been the victim of a combined diplomatic and media coup, this time with the added element of organized crime and cyber attacks.
Millions of eligible voters cast their electronic ballots in the presence of more than 635 international witnesses, including UN election specialists, African Union officials, and electoral officials from 65 countries. How many international witnesses are allowed for elections in the US or Canada? None.
Nicolás Maduro was re-elected with 51.2% of the votes (5,150,092 votes), and extreme-right candidate Edmundo González lost with 44.2% of the votes (4,445,978 votes). The other 8 opposition leaders received 4.6% of the total votes cast. These are the statistically irreversible results given by the Constitutional Electoral Authority (CNE) on election day, July 28, 2024, after examining and auditing 80% of the votes. These results were audited 16 times.
However, the remaining 20% of the votes have not been released (as of the time this article was written) due to a massive cyber attack. The electronic system components that transmit the results to the central point were hacked over 100 times in a very sophisticated manner traced back to North Macedonia.
The Attorney General, Tarek William Saab, named Lester Toledo, Leopoldo López, and M. Corina Machado as responsible for this cyber attack. Additionally, President Maduro implicated Elon Musk, considering him an extreme-right fanatic who has the technology to carry out such an attack and has often defamed Venezuela. It is alleged that Musk supported the supposed “humanitarian” invasion of Venezuela through Colombia in 2019. He said the famous phrase “We will give a coup to whoever we want! Deal with it.” Musk must want Venezuela’s lithium, in addition to its oil and gold.
Ironic, as in the US, there is no constitutional or other law that requires election results to be declared on Election Day. In fact, in that supposed beacon of democracy, it often took days, if not weeks, for the winner to be declared.
Many of us who analyzed the Venezuelan situation predicted this: the extreme-right fascist group led by M. Corina Machado and her puppet candidate Edmundo Gonzalez had no intention of holding a legitimate election. Clue: unlike other opposition candidates, they refused to sign the agreement between candidates to respect the results and reject any violence after the results were announced. Because that was exactly what they planned. Even before the results were announced, Machado was saying on her formidable social media networks that Gonzalez had won the election in a landslide.
We wonder why Machado insisted on traveling the country to campaign. Now, the Attorney General has discovered why: under the guise of campaigning, she was paying gangs of common criminals that she had gathered under what she called “comanditos” (small commands). These were common criminals trained in Colombia, with the help of former Colombian presidents Álvaro Uribe and Duque, and organized crime groups, who received up to $150 per day to riot on the day after the elections. There was a clear plan with defined targets for each “comandito”.
How do we know all this? First, because the terrorists are being caught alive, without killing any of them, and they are talking. The terrorists are not fighting for any ideology or democracy; they are cowards who attack defenseless people, but when caught, they fall to their knees crying and telling everything they know to the authorities. And because today:
* There are security cameras everywhere, and it seems that everyone has a cell phone camera to record their actions.
* There is a real Attorney General, not a traitorous villain like before.
* There are anti-terrorism laws that did not exist before to allow such violence to be treated by the courts.
The President said: we’ve seen this movie before. The Bolivarian government under Chávez and Maduro, since 1999, has had 31 elections, and the extreme-right opposition has always cried fraud. That is, they recognize elections when they win seats in the National Assembly, state governments, and municipalities. Very convenient: if they win, the elections are legitimate; if they lose, they are a fraud. This has happened repeatedly, but the international media never seems to notice or doesn’t want to notice.
We are facing an attempted coup by the international extreme-right fascist group and the CIA to overthrow the Venezuelan government with a massive disinformation and defamation campaign to justify illegal sanctions and foreign intervention in the country.
The past dubious and criminal record of Machado, the girl-propaganda of the extreme-right, is never mentioned; her involvement in coups, her promotion of violence in the streets in the past, her request to the US for sanctions and military invasion against Venezuela, and now her collaboration with gangs of common criminals and organized crime groups is never mentioned. Her puppet, Edmundo González, was involved in logistics and financing of death squads in El Salvador. Her hands are stained with blood.
But this is another universe from 2015 and 2017. Venezuela is strong and prepared. Its economy has diversified and grown, despite sanctions. It no longer depends exclusively on the US oil market – the whole world wants its oil. Even the US needs Venezuelan oil to keep gas prices low in a crucial presidential election year.
The specter that emerges for the West is that its chickens have come home to roost: after decades of defaming and harming Venezuela with a cruel hybrid war, Venezuela has turned to the East in search of friends and allies. Russia and China supported Venezuela and its electoral process; Turkey, Iran, India, OPEC, and soon non-aligned nations will join its side, as it becomes clear that the extreme-right’s purpose was not to win an election, but to provoke a coup. And the “pièce de résistance” is that the BRIC, considering Venezuela a strategic partner, is ready to welcome it as a full member. This will open up many more opportunities for Venezuelan development than Europe, the US, and Canada have done and have treated Venezuela so poorly for so long.
Let us rejoice in the triumph of the Venezuelan people and that they live in peace, secure in their own sovereignty.
NOTES
1. CNN, “Why delayed election results prove the system is working properly”, November 4, 2020
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_election
Maria Páez Victor, Ph.D. is a Venezuelan sociologist living in Canada.
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