US Congress and corporate media deploy massive lie, claiming Venezuela’s gov’t threatened to starve non-voters
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and US corporate media declared Venezuela’s legislative elections a “sham” before results were even announced, opening a new front in the propaganda war on the besieged country and its leftist government.
Among the most blatant distortions deployed against President Nicolas Maduro’s United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) was a claim first advanced by Leopoldo López, the far-right, US-backed opposition leader who recently fled to Spain.
On Twitter, López tweeted a deceptively edited clip of Constituent Assembly President Diosdado Cabello addressing an election rally, and accused Cabello of “blackmailing the hungry people with food to force them” to vote for his governing party.
López’s assertion was propagated by the Wall Street Journal’s Ryan Dube, who claimed in an article about Venezuela’s “sham” election that Cabello “threatened to withhold food handouts in a country where millions are going hungry.”
A bipartisan US congressional letter condemning Venezuela’s election as a “sham” also echoed the opposition leader’s dubious interpretation, stating, “the regime has threatened to withhold food from Venezuelans who do not vote in the sham elections.”
In their haste to shape a narrative delegitimizing Venezuela’s legislative elections, the US government and its loyal pack of corporate media stenographers have relied on López, a lead participant in at least two military coup attempts and a series of violent right-wing riots, as their house interpreter.
But the full statement by Cabello in its actual context tells an entirely different story.
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