Western Media Fall In Lockstep For Cheap Trump/Rubio Venezuela Aid PR Stunt
By Adam Johnson, Fair.org
February 11, 2019
The Trump administration’s now completely overt effort to overthrow Venezuelan
President Nicolás Maduro had a very successful public relations effort this
week, as major Western media outlets uniformly echoed its simplistic,
pre-packaged claim that the Venezuelan government was heartlessly withholding
foreign aid:
•Tensions Rise as Venezuela Blocks Border Bridge in Standoff Over Aid (CNN,
2/7/19)
•Maduro Blocks Critical Aid Sent to Venezuela (CNN, 2/7/19)
•Aid Arrives at Venezuela Border as US Demands Maduro Let It In(ABC News,
2/7/19)
•Venezuela Crisis: Pompeo Demands Aid Corridor Opened (BBC, 2/7/19)
•The US Says Maduro Is Blocking Aid to Starving People. The Venezuelan Says His
People Aren’t Beggars. (Washington Post, 2/8/19)
•Humanitarian Aid Arrives for Venezuela — But Maduro Blocks It(NPR, 2/8/19)
All of the above articles—and scores more like it—repeated the same script:
Maduro was blocking aid from the US “out of refusal to relinquish power,”
preferring to starve “his own people” rather than feed them. It’s a simple case
of good and evil—of a tyrannical, paranoid dictator not letting in aid to feed
a starving population.
Except three pieces of key context are missing. Context that, when presented to
a neutral observer, would severely undermine the cartoonish narrative being
advanced by US media.
1.Both the Red Cross and UN warned the US not to engage in this aid PR stunt.
2.The bridge in question is a visual metaphor contrived by the Trump
administration of little practical relevance.
3.The person in charge of US operations in Venezuela has a history of using aid
as a cover to deliver weapons to right-wing mercenaries.
(1) Not only has the international aid community not asked for the “aid,”
earlier this week, both the International Red Cross and United Nations warned
the US to explicitly not engage in these types of PR stunts. As Washington Post
contributor Vincent Bevins pointed out, the transparent cynicism of these
efforts was preemptively warned about by the groups actually charged with
keeping starving people fed:
Red Cross Warns US About Risks of Sending Aid to Venezuela (PBS NewsHour,
2/1/19):
The International Committee of the Red Cross has warned the United States about
the risks of delivering humanitarian aid to Venezuela without the approval of
security forces loyal to President Nicolas Maduro.
***
UN Warns Against Politicizing Humanitarian Aid in Venezuela(Reuters, 2/6/19):
UNITED NATIONS — The United Nations warned on Wednesday against using aid as a
pawn in Venezuela after the United States sent food and medicine to the
country’s border and accused President Nicolas Maduro of blocking its delivery
with trucks and shipping containers.
Indeed, as Bevins also noted, the Red Cross has long been working with local
authorities inside Venezuela to deliver relief, and just last week doubled its
budget to do so. We have ample evidence the Maduro government is more than
willing to work with international aid when it’s offered in good faith, not
when it’s a thinly veiled mechanism to spur civil war and contrive PR victories
for those seeking to overthrow the government. It’s not just Maduro—as the
Western media are presenting it—who opposes the US aid convoy; it’s the UN and
Red Cross. Why do none of the above reports note this rather key piece of
information, instead giving the reader the impression it’s only the stance of a
sadistic, power-hungry madman?NPR (2/8/19)
(2) Despite dozens of media outlets giving the impression (and sometimes
explicitly saying) that the Venezuelan government shut down an otherwise
functioning pathway into the country, the bridge in question hasn’t been open
for years.
It’s true the Venezuelan government appears to have placed an oil tanker and
cargo containers on the bridge to prevent incursion from the Colombian side,
but the other barriers, as writer and software developer Jason Emery noted,
have been in place since at least 2016. According to La Opinion (2/5/16), after
its initial construction in 2015, the bridge has never been open to traffic.
How can Maduro, as the BBC suggested, “reopen” a bridge that was never open?
The reality is BBC and other Western media were just going along with the
narrative pushed by Sen. Marco Rubio and Trump Secretary of State Mike Pompeo,
not bothering to check if their primary visual narrative was based on a bad
faith, context-free PR stunt.
This point is a relatively superficial one, but in a long term PR battle to win
over Western liberals for further military escalation, the superficial matters
a lot. Rubio and the Trump administration cooked up a gimmicky visual metaphor,
and almost every outlet uncritically passed it along, often making factually
inaccurate assumptions along the way—assumptions the Trump State Department and
CIA coordinating the effort knew very well they would make.
(3) The Venezuelan government has an entirely rational reason to suspect the US
would use humanitarian aid as a cover to smuggle in weapons to foment armed
conflict: The person running quarterback for Trump on the current Venezuela
operation, Elliot Abrams, literally did just that 30 years ago.
From the first two paragraphs (emphasis added) of a 1987 AP/New York Times
article on Elliott Abrams, “Abrams Denies Wrongdoing in Shipping Arms to
Contras” (8/17/87—h/t Kevin Gosztola):
Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams has defended his role in
authorizing the shipment of weapons on a humanitarian aid flight to Nicaraguan
rebels, saying the operation was ”strictly by the book.”
Mr. Abrams spoke at a news conference Saturday in response to statements by
Robert Duemling, former head of the State Department’s Nicaraguan humanitarian
assistance office, who said he had twice ordered planes to shuttle weapons for
the Contras on aid planes at Mr. Abrams’ direction in early 1986.
It’s literally the same person. It’s not that Maduro is vaguely paranoid the
US, in general, would dust off its 1980s’ Contra-backing Cold War playbook, or
some unspecified assumption about a higher-up or two at State. It’s literally
the exact same person in charge of the operation who we know—with 100 percent
certainty, because he admitted to it—has a history of using aid convoys as a
cover to smuggle in arms to right-wing militias.
It’s all playing out right now, in real time. The same actors, the same tricks,
the same patently disingenuous concern for the starving poor. And the US media
is stripping it of all this essential context, presenting these radical
regime-change operators as bleeding heart humanitarians.
The same US media outlets that have expressly fundraised and run ad campaigns
on their image as anti-Trump truth-tellers have mysteriously taken at face
value everything the Trump White House and its neoconservative allies have said
in their campaign to overthrow the government of Venezuela. The
self-aggrandizing “factchecking” brigade that emerged to confront the Trump
administration is suddenly nonexistent as it rolls out a transparent, cynical
PR strategy to delegitimize a Latin American government it’s trying to overthro
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