To falsify the facts and manipulate information is the strategy to sustain the dictatorship in Venezuela

(Interamerican Institute for Democracy) Seven weeks after the 28-J elections, in which the peoples from Venezuela defeated the dictatorship, the falsification of electoral results perpetrated by Nicolas Maduro and his criminal entourage, has failed. The international backing and recognition given to Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia as winner of the elections and as President-Elect increases, the civic peaceful resistance led by Maria Corina Machado beats State-terrorism and the transnational intervention. Facing the unavoidable, and over time the undisputed evidence against it, 21st Century Socialism applies its strategy of falsifying the facts and manipulating information.

To alter the facts to present crime as something legal, or organized crime as a revolution, or misery as independence, or fraud as a triumph, or the henchmen as judges and the victims as culprits, are only a part of the vast array of institutionalized mystifications that -for decades- 21st Century Socialism, under the command of Cuba, applies in the Americas.

The simulation and deliberate supplanting of facts to make reality confusing, and taint facts, documents, and results produced with the objective of presenting these to others as true is the method with which dictatorships have destroyed republics, economies, societies, and peoples’ lives in Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua. These are premeditated and institutionalized criminal acts aimed at enabling transnational organized criminal groups to indefinitely wield power with impunity by establishing narco-States with financial and all types of benefits.

The process of holding elections under a dictatorship, that Venezuela is now submerged in, is the most recent proof of how 21st Century Socialism or Castrochavism falsifies the facts, the information, and manipulates to present their criminal acts as legal. Elections conducted on 28-J and the electoral fraud committed by Maduro and his criminal entourage are the repetition of similar events perpetrated in Bolivia in 2019 and 2020, in Venezuela in 2018, in Nicaragua in 2021 and others before. This is the method to impose results by force or violence upon defenseless victims and all with the silence and/or acquiescence of next victims that happen to be the democratic governments.

What has changed in Venezuela on 28-J is that, after almost 25 years, a real opposition has emerged with the leadership of Maria Corina Machado whose strategy of playing along the same game as the dictatorship to defeat it in its own turf and with its own rules, and by revealing its crimes and mobilizing the nation, works.

The globalized world undergoing a technological and communicational revolution allows for 21st Century Socialism’s crimes in Venezuela to be proven in flagrantly. It enables for all to see the on-going use of State-terrorism, persecution, repression, counterfeiting, detentions, torture, the existence of a criminal organization, Cuba’s intervention directing its satellite, the shameful complicity of Para-Dictatorial governments; Lula from Brazil, Petro from Colombia, and Lopez Obrador from Mexico, the conspiracies of Zapatero and clients of the Forum of Sao Paolo, the scheming and jostling of important lobbyists, and the perverse economic interests at the expense of peoples’ lives, and crimes against humanity.

The fight for Venezuela’s freedom and democracy, which is the fight of Americas’ peoples for -at least- the next 25 years is taking place in the internal battlefront in Venezuela as well as in the international battlefront. Internally, 21st Century Socialism’s only weapons are; the use of State-terrorism, counterfeiting of facts, and manipulation of information, confronted against a peaceful civil resistance of a nation that knows that it is now or never, a nation that does not give up. Internationally, it has been clearly seen the involvement of “the league of organized crime’s dictatorships” comprised by Russia, China, Iran, North Korea and Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua in the Americas, along with some African satellites; is so evident that democratic governments do not have any options but to take them seriously.

The main objective of dictatorships, to sustain their regime in Venezuela with Maduro, is to disrupt, by discouraging, the internal civil resistance and therefore weaken the increasing international recognition. Towards this objective they create and disseminate fake news and acts such as alleged conspiracies or attacks against the dictatorship, detaining tourists whom they accuse of being terrorists, focusing on citizens from the United States, Spain, and elsewhere, as typical evidence of organized crime (you attack me and I will kidnap you), seeking to shift the focus of the dictatorship’s crimes to a position of becoming the false victims. Since they were not able to arrest the President-Elect Gonzalez Urrutia to use him as a token for negotiations, they now take hostage citizens from democratic countries who denounce their crime as tokens with the objective of negotiating. Outright crime.

They manipulate the information and broadcast fake news with hundreds of “false sources,” “skeptic analyses,” reappearance of “functional opposition members,” “defenders of the revolution,” “consultants with indirect contracts,” and a long litany of convenient actors with the purpose of seeding doubt, weakening civil resistance, and discrediting Maria Corina Machado and Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia. But they have time running against them.

*Attorney & Political Scientist. Director of the Interamerican Institute for Democracy.

Translation from Spanish by Edgar L. Terrazas