What Corporate Media Aren't Telling You About Venezuela
<https://www.truthdig.com/articles/what-corporate-media-arent-telling-you-ab
out-venezuela/>
Anyul Rivas /
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The US media chorus supporting a US overthrow of the Venezuelan government
has for years pointed to the countrys economic crisis as a justification
for regime change, while whitewashing the ways in which the US has strangled
the Venezuelan economy (FAIR.org,
<https://fair.org/home/exonerating-the-empire-in-venezuela/> 3/22/18).
Sister Eugenia Russian, president of
<https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/11424> Fundalatin, a Venezuelan human
rights NGO that was established in 1978 and has special consultative status
at the UN, told the Independent (
<https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/venezuela-us-sanctions-un
ited-nations-oil-pdvsa-a8748201.html> 1/26/19):
In contact with the popular communities, we consider that one of the
fundamental causes of the economic crisis in the country is the effect [of]
the unilateral coercive sanctions that are applied in the economy,
especially by the government of the United States.
While internal errors also contributed to the nations problems, Russian
said its likely that few countries in the world have ever suffered an
economic siege like the one Venezuelans are living under.
While the New York Times and the Washington Post have lately professed
profound (and definitely 100 percent sincere) concern for the welfare of
Venezuelans, neither publication has ever referred to Fundalatin.
Alfred de Zayas, the first UN special rapporteur to visit Venezuela in 21
years, told the Independent (
<https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/venezuela-us-sanctions-un
ited-nations-oil-pdvsa-a8748201.html> 1/26/19) that US, Canadian and
European Union economic warfare has killed Venezuelans, noting that the
sanctions fall most heavily on the poorest people and demonstrably cause
death through food and medicine shortages, lead to violations of human
rights and are aimed at coercing economic change in a sister democracy.
De Zayas UN
<https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G18/239/31/pdf/G1823931.pdf?O
penElement> report noted that sanctions hind[er] the imports necessary to
produce generic medicines and seeds to increase agricultural production. De
Zayas also cited Venezuelan economist Pasqualina Curcio, who reports that
the most effective strategy to disrupt the Venezuelan economy has been the
manipulation of the exchange rate. The rapporteur went on to suggest that
the International Criminal Court investigate economic sanctions against
Venezuela as possible crimes against humanity.
Given that de Zayas is the first UN special rapporteur to report on
Venezuela in more than two decades, one might expect the media to regard his
findings as an important part of the Venezuela narrative, but his name does
not appear in a single article ever published in the Post; the Times has
mentioned him once, but not in relation to Venezuela.
The economist Francisco Rodríguez
<https://venezuelablog.org/crude-realities-understanding-venezuelas-economic
-collapse/> points out that the sanctions the Trump administration issued in
August 2017 prohibited US banks from providing new financing to the
Venezuelan government, a key part of the toxification of financial
dealings with Venezuela. Rodríguez notes that, in August 2017, the US
Financial Crimes Enforcement Network warned financial institutions that all
Venezuelan government agencies and bodies
appear vulnerable to public
corruption and money laundering, and recommended that some transactions
originating from Venezuela be flagged as potentially criminal. Many
financial institutions then closed Venezuelan accounts, concerned about the
risk of being accused of participating in money laundering.
Rodríguez says that this handcuffed Venezuelas oil industry, the sector
most crucial to its economy, with lost access to credit preventing the
country from obtaining financial resources that could have been devoted to
investment or maintenance. And whereas previously the Venezuelan government
would raise production by signing joint venture agreements with foreign
partners who would finance investment, Trumps sanctions effectively put an
end to these loans.
Mark Weisbrot (The Nation,
<https://www.thenation.com/article/trumps-sanctions-make-economic-recovery-i
n-venezuela-nearly-impossible/> 9/7/17) , also an economist, raised a
related issue:
If we step back and look at Venezuela from a birds-eye view, how does a
country with 500 billion barrels of oil and hundreds of billions of dollars
worth of minerals in the ground go broke? The only way that can happen is if
the country is cut off from the international financial system. Otherwise,
Venezuela could sell or even collateralize some of its resources in order to
get the necessary dollars. The $7.7 billion in
<https://www.bloombergquint.com/markets/2017/04/18/venezuela-lawmakers-ask-w
all-street-to-stop-aiding-maduro> gold held in Central Bank reserves could
be quickly collateralized for a loan; in past years, the US Treasury
department used its clout to make sure that banks who wanted to finance a
swap, such as JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America, did not do so.
Sanctions have kept the Venezuelan government from accessing financing and
dealing with its debt while hamstringing its most important industry. Given
that US media are writing for a principally US audience, the damage done by
Washington and its partners sanctions should be front and center in their
coverage. Exactly the opposite is the case.
Virginia Lopez-Glass of the New York Times (
<https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/opinion/venezuela-interim-president-juan
-guaido-maduro.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article>
1/25/19) uses 920 words to describe the challenges facing Venezuelans, but
sanctions isnt one of them, even as she writes about matters to which, as
Ive shown above, sanctions are directly relevant: Food and medicine
shortages are widespread. Hundreds have died from malnutrition and illnesses
that are easily curable with the appropriate treatment.
Weaponizing hunger in Venezuela in this manner is dishonest and misleading.
Christina M. Schiavoni, a doctoral researcher at the International Institute
of Social Studies in The Hague, and Ana Felicien and Liccia Romero, both of
whom are Venezuelan scholars, wrote in Monthly Review (
<https://monthlyreview.org/2018/06/01/the-politics-of-food-in-venezuela/>
6/1/18) on overt US aggression toward Venezuela in the form of
the intensifying economic sanctions imposed by the Obama and Trump
administrations, as well as an all-out economic blockade that has made it
extremely difficult for the government to make payments on food imports and
manage its debt.
Bret Stephens column in the Times (
<https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/opinion/venezuela-maduro-socialism-gover
nment.html> 1/28/19) only mentions the word sanctions to complain that the
media supposedly isnt blaming socialism for the crisis in Venezuela,
alleging that
what youre likelier to read is that the crisis is the product of
corruption, cronyism, populism, authoritarianism, resource-dependency, US
sanctions and trickery, even the residues of capitalism itself.
After dismissing the idea that the sanctions are a key part of the problems
in Venezuela, Stephens went on to advocate using them to bring about regime
change in the country, writing that the Trump administration
should enhance [Guaidó]s political standing by providing access to funds
that can help him establish an alternative government and entice wavering
figures in the Maduro camp to switch sides. It can put Venezuela on the list
of state sponsors of terrorism.
These funds presumably refer the money that the US has seized from
Venezuela, and adding the country to list of state sponsors of terrorism
automatically entails hitting it with further sanctions.
The editorial board of the Washington Post (
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/is-the-end-to-venez
uelas-nightmare-in-sight/2019/01/24/f8526b66-1ff1-11e9-8e21-59a09ff1e2a1_sto
ry.html?utm_term=.fdbbac2e645c> 1/24/19) alleged that Venezuelas government
has subject[ed] the countrys 32 million people to a humanitarian
catastrophe, without referring to what scholars whose research and writing
focuses on Latin Americasuch as Laura Carlsen, Sujatha Fernandes, Greg
Grandin, Francisco Dominguez, Noam Chomsky, Aviva Chomsky, Gabriel Hetland
and Venezuelan-born historian Miguel Tinker Salasdescribe (Common Dreams,
<https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/01/24/open-letter-over-70-scholars-a
nd-experts-condemns-us-backed-coup-attempt-venezuela> 1/24/19) as sanctions
cut[ting] off the means by which the Venezuelan government could escape from
its economic recession, while causing a dramatic falloff in oil production
and worsening the economic crisis, and causing many people to die because
they cant get access to life-saving medicines.
Later, the editorial said that a US boycott of Venezuelan oil could
endanger ordinary Venezuelans already coping with critical shortages of
food, power and medicine, an absurd remark given that the sanctions they
are occluding have had precisely these effects.
Henry Olsen in the Post (
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/01/24/trumps-america-first-pol
icy-could-work-venezuela/?utm_term=.ad1223754c66> 1/24/19) wrote as if
sanctions are a benign tool that can be used to usher in a brighter future
for Venezuelans, rather than a key reason that so many of them find
themselves in such a grim condition:
Trump has many levers to pull short of military intervention to topple
Maduro. He could use US pressure on the global financial system to cut off
regime access to international banks, freezing access to any secret accounts
that the regime and, probably, its highest-ranking leaders established
offshore. He can, as Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has suggested, work with
American oil companies that purchase Venezuelan oil to provide the profits
from those purchases to accounts controlled by Guaidós National Assembly.
He can also pressure China, which has a far more valuable relationship with
the United States than it does with Venezuela, to withdraw its support. Any
or all of these measures would ratchet up pressure directly on the regime,
decreasing its ability to finance itself and buy support from security and
military figures
.
Odds are that increasing financial pressure on the regime will finally bring
about its collapse.
Even if one momentarily sets aside that the sanctions are
<http://www.un-documents.net/a25r2625.htm> illegal under international law
and
<http://www.oas.org/en/sla/dil/inter_american_treaties_A-41_charter_OAS.asp>
violate the charter of the Organization of American States, and that the US
has no right whatsoever to decide who governs Venezuela, these measures
dont just ratchet up pressure on
<https://fair.org/home/a-regime-is-a-government-at-odds-with-the-us-empire/>
the regime, they also kill and immiserate ordinary Venezuelans.
The Posts Charles Lane (
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-made-the-right-call-on-venezu
ela-so-what-if-hes-a-hypocrite/2019/01/28/65e26268-231b-11e9-ad53-8244862803
11_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.5ca5e6a37f26> 1/28/19) wrote:
Apologists for the regime blame US sanctions and destabilization for
Venezuelas problems. The truth is that, with the exception of the George W.
Bush administrations brief, halfhearted support for a
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/apr/21/usa.venezuela> coup attempt
in 2002, Washingtonlearning the lessons of ill-fated Cold War
interventionshas shown restraint in dealing with the Caracas regime.
He went on to write that, until the Trump administration announced
limitations on imports of Venezuelan oil that day, the United States had
traded with Venezuela and focused economic pressure on regime leaders and
key institutions, which suggests that the sanctions exclusively harm the
regimeagain, even if that were true, it would still be illegaland
amounts to a lie, given the evidence that the sanctions are crushing the
Venezuelan masses.
Unlike Lane and the rest of the medias regime change choir, the US
government has acknowledged what its doing to Venezuela. Schiavoni,
Felicien and Romero point to a telling
<https://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2018/01/277739.htm> remark that a senior
State Department official made last year:
The financial sanctions we have placed on the Venezuelan Government has
forced it to begin becoming in default, both on sovereign and PDVSA, its oil
companys debt. And what we are seeing because of the bad choices of the
Maduro regime is a total economic collapse in Venezuela. So our policy is
working, our strategy is working and were going to keep it on the
Venezuelans.
Thus, the US government acknowledges that it is knowingly, consciously
driving the Venezuelan economy into the ground, but US media make no such
acknowledgment, which sends the message that the problems in Venezuela are
entirely the fault of the government, and that the US is a neutral arbiter
that wants to help Venezuelans.
Call this elision what it is: war propaganda.
Gregory Shupak /
<https://fair.org/home/us-media-ignore-and-applaud-economic-war-on-venezuela
/> FAIR
In this article:
<https://www.truthdig.com/tag/bret-stephens> bret stephens
<https://www.truthdig.com/tag/donald-trump> donald trump
<https://www.truthdig.com/tag/juan-guaido> juan guaido
<https://www.truthdig.com/tag/new-york-times> new york times
<https://www.truthdig.com/tag/nicolas-maduro> nicolas maduro
<https://www.truthdig.com/tag/noam-chomsky> noam chomsky
<https://www.truthdig.com/tag/venezuela> venezuela
<https://www.truthdig.com/tag/washington-post> washington post
<https://www.truthdig.com/articles/what-corporate-media-arent-telling-you-ab
out-venezuela/>
<https://www.truthdig.com/articles/what-corporate-media-arent-telling-you-ab
out-venezuela/> comments
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