• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • Home
  • TP について/About
  • Topics/トピクス
    • Gender/ジェンダー
    • Globalisation/グローバリゼーション
    • Japan and Asia/日本とアジア
    • Japanese/日本語
    • Media/メディア
    • News/ニュース
    • Social Justice/社会正義
    • War and Empire/戦争&支配権力
    • Environment/環境
    • Other Stories/他の記事
  • Links/リンク
  • Contact

TokyoProgressive

Linking Progressives East and West Since 1997

東西のプログレッシブをつなぐ − 1997年設立  |  Linking Progressives East and West Since 1997

The U.S. Wages a Dangerous Campaign in Venezuela Elections

December 7, 2015 by tokyoprogressive Leave a Comment

Related:  See the election results here:
http://tokyoprogressive-news.blogspot.jp/2015/12/opposition-landslide-in-venezuela.html

The U.S. Wages a Dangerous Campaign in Venezuela Elections 

Mark Weisbrot
December 1, 2015
Huffington Post
The U.S. campaign to delegitimize Venezuela’s December 6th parliamentary elections can only encourage violence by a right-wing opposition that has repeatedly refused to peacefully accept the results of Venezuela’s democratic process. The U.S. government, which initially refused to recognize the results of Venezuela’s 2013 Presidential elections, is seeking to discredit Sunday’s vote if the conservative opposition fails to win a two-thirds parliamentary majority. 

Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. The U.S. government that refused to recognize his election and supported the failed coup against his predecessor, Hugo Chavez, is lecturing Venezuela on the sanctity of elections., UN Photo/Jess Hoffman,
The campaign for Venezuela’s Dec. 6 National Assembly election is only three weeks long, but in the United States it started about six months ago with leaksby anonymous U.S. officials making unsubstantiated allegations that Venezuelan officials were running a “cartel.” More recently, relatives of Venezuela’s first lady Cilia Flores were arrested and taken (not extradited) to the U.S. after being lured by DEA agents to Haiti. Then last week, when an opposition politician was shot and killed, the secretary general of the Organization of American States, Luis Almagro, immediately joined Washington in trying to make it look like a political murder. Within a day, evidence from investigations appeared to show that the victim was likely a gang member killed by a rival gang.

To understand the strategy of the U.S. government and its allies — including Almagro and now the president-elect of Argentina — we have to look at what happened in the 2013 Venezuelan presidential election. In 2013, President Maduro won by 1.5 percentage points, but there was absolutely no doubt about the result. Because of the extensive safeguards in the voting process — including an immediate audit, with witnesses, of a random sample of 54 percent of voting stations — former U.S. president and election expert Jimmy Carter called Venezuela’s election system “the best in the world.”

But the Venezuelan opposition, not for the first time, rejected the result and claimed fraud, taking to the streets with violent demonstrations. The U.S. government, with almost no allies, backed the protestors by refusing to recognize the election results. The stage was set for increasingly violent conflict, but South American governments stepped in and publicly pressuredWashington to join the rest of the world in accepting the results.
Now you can see where this is going, and possibly even predict the near future. The Venezuelan opposition is currently leading the government by a sizable margin in most national polls — although this appears to be narrowing in the past week or so — and this is what the U.S. and international media have been reporting. But these polls do not necessarily indicate who is going to win the National Assembly, or by how much. The margin of victory is very important because, for example, a two-thirds majority will give the legislature much more power.

The government party (the United Socialist Part of Venezuela, or PSUV) has millions of members and has for years demonstrated an ability to mobilize its voters. The opposition has no comparable organization or campaign, and this is a non-presidential election. Also, sparsely populated (mostly rural) states have more representation per voter than those with higher populations. In the U.S., 584,000 people or so in Wyoming get the same number of senators as almost 39 million Californians. In Venezuela, there is only one legislative chamber, so the small states’ disproportional power is not as great as in the U.S. system. But it is significant, and unlike in the U.S., where the rural vote tends to be right wing, in Venezuela it leans more toward the Chavistas.

The result is that, win or lose, the opposition is very unlikely to do as well as the national polls indicate. So when the opposition is “surprised” by the results, we can expect claims of fraud. If the last 14 years of extralegal efforts (supported by Washington) to topple the government are any guide, the rejection of election results could turn violent. Last weekend, the head of Venezuela’s leading opposition newspaper, Miguel Henrique Otero of El Nacional, declaredthat the opposition will take to the streets if they do not like the results.
From the U.S. Congress, the Obama administration, allied non-governmental organizations and Almagro, there have been demands that the OAS be allowed to monitor Venezuela’s elections. But it is very clear after what the OAS has done repeatedly in Haiti — including the 2011 reversal of presidential election results without a recount or even a statistical test — that OAS monitors cannot be considered neutral.
Washington’s current campaign is targeted at the Latin American and hemispheric media, in order to increase political pressure on governments to not do what they did in 2013: publicly shame the U.S. into accepting the results of democratic elections. There will be international campaign events, including U.S. newspaper editorials, Senate hearings and more, every day in the next week and following the elections.

It is bad enough that all of these foreign actors are campaigning in another country’s elections. But by attempting to delegitimize — with no evidence of possible fraud — the actual election results, they are promoting instability and possible violence.
[Mark Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, Washington, D.C. Follow him on twitter at http://www.twitter.com/MarkWeisbrot.]

Filed Under: Social Justice/社会正義, War and Empire/戦争&支配権力

Join the Discussion

Comment on this article or respond to others' comments.

You can post below or send to the mailing list at discuss@list.tokyoprogressive.org.

a) Please sign you name at the bottom of your comment, so that we know who wrote it.

b) To prevent spam, comments need to be manually approved.

c) Comments which are insulting, racist, homophobic or submitted in bad faith will not be published.

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Primary Sidebar

Search the site

Archives

Main Categories (old and most recent)

Alternative News Contributors/投稿者 creative Democracy Now Environment/環境 Featured Gender/ジェンダー Globalisation/グローバリゼーション Jacobin Japan/日本 Japan and Asia/日本とアジア Japanese/日本語 Japan Focus Japan News Korea/韓国 latest latest-j links Media/メディア Mp3 National Security Archive neoliberalism new News/ニュース Other Stories/他の記事 Social Justice/社会正義 Topics Uncategorized Video War and Empire/戦争&支配権力

Search deeper

Abe activities, protests, films, events Afghanistan alternative news Bush class issues and homelessness Environmental research fukushima gaza health care Henoko human rights Iraq Iraq, Afganistan and the War on Terror Iraq and Afghanistan, opposing the wars Israel Japan Korea labor issues Latin America Middle East military North Korea nuclear nuclear waste Obama Okinawa Okinawa Palestine peace protest protest and resistance racism/human rights radiation state crimes Syria Takae Tepco Trump U.S. War world news English ニュース/社会問題 人権 平和、憲法9条

Design and Hosting for Progressives

Donate/寄付

Please support our work. This includes costs involved in producing this news site as well as our free hosting service for activists, teachers and students. Donations/寄付 can be sent to us via PayPal or Donately. You can also click on the buttons below to make a one-time donation.




Work with us

TokyoProgressive
supports and participates in projects of like-minded people and groups directly (technical, editing, design) and not-so directly (financial or moral support). Likewise, we also welcome contributions by readers that are consistent with promoting social justice. If you have a project you would like help with, or if you would like to submit an article, link, or report on a protest activity, please contact us here.

Footer

All opinions are those of the original authors and may not reflect the views of TokyoProgressive. This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for by copyright law in several countries. The material on this site is distributed without profit.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Copyleft 1997-present: tokyoprogressive dot org

TokyoProgressive supports and participates in projects of like-minded people and groups directly (technical, editing, design) and not-so directly (financial or moral support). Likewise, we also welcome contributions by readers that are consistent with promoting social justice. If you have a project you would like help with, or if you would like to submit an article, link, or report on a protest activity, please contact us here.

Copyright © 2025 · Magazine Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in