Venezuela’s ongoing wave of civil unrest is the result of President Joe Biden, through his top diplomat, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, putting pressure on the country’s anti-socialist opposition for years to accept fraudulent elections, despite being well aware of the socialist regime’s history of rampant fraud.
The socialist dictatorship declared its leader, Nicolás Maduro, the “winner” of a violent and highly fraudulent presidential “election” early on Monday. Later that day, the opposition released election data it claimed to have obtained from local polling stations, but which anti-Maduro leaders said was evidence of a decisive victory for opposition rival Edmundo Gonzalez.
Sunday’s election was Maduro’s third fraudulent election victory, after 2013 and 2018, and at least his sixth nationwide election victory since succeeding the late socialist dictator Hugo Chavez. Previous elections have seen low voter turnout due to a confluence of factors, most notably a decline in popular support. escape Some 8 million Venezuelans live under socialism, there is a near-universal recognition among Venezuelans that they no longer live in a free society, and a refusal to go along with the farce of an “election.”
This disillusionment has been around for years: The 2018 presidential “elections” saw the lowest voter turnout in Venezuela’s history, according to a government tally, and a 2019 poll found that 90 percent of Venezuelans support foreign military intervention to oust Maduro.
But in this election, the suppressed opposition parties participated more enthusiastically and voter turnout increased, according to both the opposition and the Maduro government. The public’s disgust with socialism has been channeled from calls for the end of the regime to a meaningless vote, resulting in the toppling of a statue of Hugo Chavez and already deadly unrest just 48 hours later.
The “Bolivarian Socialist” regime bears primary responsibility for decades of murder, rape as a weapon of repression, political imprisonment, torture, and other atrocities it commits on a daily basis, but the growing disillusionment, the few shreds of hope remaining in Venezuela’s social fabric, and the resentment that Maduro can openly do the same things he has done for over a decade to stay in power are the responsibility of the White House.
President Joe Biden has implemented policies that have aggressively empowered the Maduro regime, boosting its legitimacy and filling government coffers with ill-gotten oil revenues. He dispatched his top diplomat, Antony Blinken, to force opposition leaders, who had been ineffectual for years in the face of Maduro’s atrocities and were already in the grip of a major credibility crisis, to accept a deal with the devil. Blinken prioritized brokering the holding of “free and fair elections” over any protocol to actually ensure that the elections were free and fair, resulting in the removal of the country’s most popular politicians from the ballot and replacing them with 13 photos of Maduro’s face.
This is an official ballot for Venezuela’s presidential election on July 28, featuring 13 photos of Maduro. pic.twitter.com/4IqQTkq1s1
— Crazy Moments in Latin American Politics (@AssLatam) May 9, 2024
Maduro’s attempt to stage so-called domestic elections on Sunday was shameful by any reasonable standard. He handpicked a host of left-wing stooges to put on the ballot, leaving only Gonzalez, an elderly former diplomat, as the only real opposition candidate. The opposition held a primary in October that was won by a former lawmaker, Maria Corina Machado, but Maduro used the pro-socialist Supreme Court to invalidate the primary and bar her from running.
Gonzalez was allowed to appear on the ballot, but he could not campaign meaningfully without the daily threat of violence. Maduro’s thugs regularly attacked Gonzalez’s campaign volunteers, arrested Dozens of dissidents. According to a UN investigation, many of the government’s opponents disappeared before the election. Socialist rioters I was blocked They blocked some highways and completely destroyed others to prevent interested Venezuelans from taking part in Gonzalez’s election campaign.
A week before the election, President Maduro threatened “bloodshed” if Venezuelans did not vote his way.
Early Monday morning, Maduro’s National Electoral Center (CNE) announced that the dictator had “won” 51 percent to 44 percent. Machado, a supporter of Gonzalez, quickly denied the results and has since claimed to have in her possession verification of local polling station results that proved Gonzalez had won in a landslide. Her claims sparked a series of protests that saw hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Venezuelans take to the streets and topple some of the statues of Chavez that litter the post-socialist country’s landscape.
The spectacle that Venezuela’s socialist regime unfolded this weekend was abhorrent but by no means unexpected. By 2018, Maduro had orchestrated five similarly themed sham elections over a six-year period. That year’s presidential “elections” were widely seen as fraudulent, facilitating a failed attempt by the legitimate but ineffectual former president Juan Guaidó to wrest power from the socialist iron fist.
In Venezuela, rising revenues and growing international support for the Bolivarian Revolution, most notably under the administrations of both former Presidents Barack Obama and Biden, were quickly followed by wanton violence against dissidents, the starvation (often literally) of political opponents, and a rise in terrorism in Venezuela, including affiliates of jihadist groups such as Hezbollah.Similarly, targeted sanctions implemented under former President Donald Trump limited Maduro’s financial flexibility, making it harder for his elite to buy luxury real estate in Miami or visit Salt Bae restaurants, and curbing his reign of terror.
Biden and his administration — including Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee who will also be in charge of Latin American affairs — should have taken this precedent and interpreted it as a sign of tightening the screws on the Maduro regime, empowering legitimate opposition leaders like Machado and limiting Maduro’s resources to brutalize them. Instead, Biden tasked Blinken with forcing the Venezuelan people to accept a fraudulent electoral process under Maduro’s total control.
Blinken toured Latin America in the summer of 2022 with the aim of galvanizing regional support for holding “free and fair” presidential elections in Venezuela, but the conditions there to make that happen are simply not there.Opposition leaders made it clear that Biden was also persuading them to send their own representatives to join in another round of fraud.
“Our strong hope for Venezuela is that the Maduro regime and the unity platform will [the socialist opposition] “We can pursue a dialogue that will ultimately lead to the conditions necessary to have free and fair elections,” Blinken said. Said Mr Blinken visited Colombia, where he met with President Gustavo Petro, a socialist and former guerrilla terrorist, and also stopped in Chile and Peru during the trip to seek support for his election plans.
A gift from Blinken. pic.twitter.com/BTRjuI3pF9
— Gustavo Petro (@petrogustavo) October 4, 2022
“We are hopeful that dialogue and negotiations will resume and that, ultimately, Venezuela will return to its democratic path through free and fair elections,” Blinken said.
Shortly after the visit, Biden released Maduro’s nephews, Efraín Antonio Campo Flores and Francisco Flores de Freitas, from a U.S. prison, despite them being convicted in a New York court of attempting to smuggle 800 kilos of cocaine into the U.S. Biden then also released Alex Saab, a Maduro financier facing charges of money laundering and other misdeeds, allegedly in an effort to stem the flow of migrants to the U.S. southern border.
It took a year, but under pressure from the United States, talks were finally held a year later in October 2023, and the “Barbados Agreement” was signed. The agreement, brokered by the Caribbean island nation of Barbados, Involved In exchange for extraordinarily generous sanctions relief that will allow huge inflows of Venezuelan oil into international markets, Maduro has promised to hold “free and fair elections” in 2024. Venezuela is the country with the world’s largest oil reserves, and its state-run oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), is essential to funding the lavish lifestyles of its socialist elite and the brutal crackdown on dissent, which is why former President Donald Trump sanctioned the company in 2019.
“The United States welcomes the conclusion of the Electoral Roadmap Agreement between the Unity Platform and representatives of Nicolas Maduro,” Blinken said. Celebrated Following the signing of the Barbados Agreement, Venezuela’s Afghanistan donors said, “This is a concrete step towards resolving Venezuela’s political, economic and humanitarian crisis.”
The Maduro regime quickly took advantage of the lifting of sanctions to increase oil production with the help of Iran, the world’s largest sponsor of terrorism, and to negotiate a joint oil project between Iran and neighboring Syria.
By the end of the month, Maduro’s Supreme Court invalidated the opposition primary elections and barred Machado from holding public office. Two months later, Maduro declared the Barbados Accord had suffered a “death blow” and alleged fraud in Sunday’s elections.
The Biden administration was slow to admit defeat, only reinstating sanctions on PDVSA in April, long after the damage had been done.
As with the bloodthirsty Houthi terrorists in Yemen, their patrons in Tehran, the corrupt and uncaring Nigerian government, the colonial Russian regime, and Hindu nationalist India, Biden has implemented in Venezuela the longstanding Democratic foreign policy of encouraging and enriching evil political forces in the hope that they will be flattered, enriched, and gracious. Venezuelans, like the Yemenis, Iranians, Nigerians, Russians, Ukrainians, and Indian Christians before them, must now suffer the consequences of the Democrats doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
