A
detailed breakdown from the Attorney General's Office, which has
recently been increasingly at odds with the government of President
Maduro, shows that of the 73 people that died, 11 were the
responsibility of state security forces, 21 of them has been
attributed to the opposition, 13 due to looting, and two due to
government civilian protests, and 26 are still under investigation.
One of the victims of the protests was Orlando Figuera, who was
burned alive last month when opposition demonstrators accused him of
being a thief or a Chavista. He died from his wounds last Monday.
Empire
Files host Abby Martin just returned from
Venezuela where she saw first hand how violent opposition protesters
attempt to intimidate reporters and thereby give a false impression
of what is happening. Martin spoke to Sharmini Peries and The
Real News about her experience.
Martin
described the brutality of the right-wing protesters against
journalists who want only to transfer an objective picture of what's
going on in the country. She describes the unprecedented violence by
these protesters against Chavistas and journalists, even from
Reuters.
She also
describes how these anti-government protesters are painted as
peaceful, democracy-loving freedom fighters, something that we saw in
Ukraine, Syria, and elsewhere by the same US-funded organizations
with the assistance of the Western mainstream media propaganda.
Martin also
referred to Orlando Figuera, another Afro-Venezuelan who was burned
alive last month when opposition demonstrators accused him of being a
thief or a Chavista. He died from his wounds last Monday.
The Western
media mouthpieces are doing their job, which is propaganda as usual.
The recipe is known. You present the half truth, with a big overdose
of exaggeration. The
establishment parrots are demonizing Socialism,
but they won't ever tell you about the money that the US is spending,
feeding the Right-Wing groups and opposition to proceed in
provocative operations, in order to create instability. They won't
tell you about the financial war conducted through the oil prices,
manipulated by the Saudis, the close US ally.
Martin's key
points:
I was going
there as a fiercely independent, investigative journalist with the
show produced completely independently from teleSUR, to tell exactly
the reality that I was seeing, and I even told teleSUR management
that I was going to report exactly what the truth was that I
uncovered. So when we went there, I was very surprised to see that
the reality was vastly different than what we are being told. I
mean, you hear all these horrific stories from on the ground, amidst
these protests, and you keep hearing 60 dead, Maduro kills 60
protestors, Maduro's forces. And what you realize when you get there
is, the country is pretty much split in two. It's heavily divided
between Chavistas and the opposition, and of course, amidst such
economic, such a horrible economic crisis, people are going to have
really strong opinions, but there are certainly huge marches on the
ground on both sides.
Tens of
thousands of people marching for the government, for the opposition,
and these are peaceful marches, jubilant atmosphere. Things are very
calm, and then what you realize is, when you see these violent
statistics and casualties and the death toll that's rising, and the
harsh quote unquote "repression" from government forces,
it's not happening at these marches. It's happening at something
called guarimbas. It's a sustained blockade that a small contingent
of protestors create to provoke a response from government officials,
so we actually followed one of these guarimbas one night. We were
almost attacked just simply for being there. We got accosted by a
hyped-up group of protestors who were saying, "What are you?
Who are you with?", demanding to see our press credentials,
and I was scared for my life, knowing that if we admitted that we
were from teleSUR, we could have gotten lynched, burned alive, beaten
to death by the mobs that you see happening all too often, so we, of
course, said that we were independent journalists, that we were from
America, and then they immediately said, "Okay, great.
We can use you, essentially, for propaganda." They
said, "Do not film anything that we do. Just film what
the government does to us."
It's not as
easy as that when you have hundreds of death threats coming and you
have to take it seriously, especially when these people do act on it
there, and there are teleSUR journalists risking their lives to still
be on the ground at these protests, and now have a target on their
back. It started off on Twitter, of course, Instagram, Facebook,
which are all manageable until it translates into real life. So you
see this actually being translated into real life, where now we're
getting harassed in person by the same people who are inciting people
to lynch us, so we have to have security now.
We're
talking about these protestors that have attacked hospitals, burned
down government buildings. They burned down the Housing Ministry,
which has provided 1.6 million homes for poor people over the last
decade. Political assassinations, directly assassinating
Chavistas, attacking communes. We visited one building that was, all
the windows were broken. It was just simply an art commune that gave
out free dance lessons and music lessons to local kids. It's kind of
sick when you see on the front lines what is being attacked and why,
what is the political motivation behind these lynch mobs.
Before I
get into the story that happened to us and what's going on to
journalists, you mentioned that young man, Orlando Figuera, that was
burned alive. This is the third Afro-Venezuelan who has been lynched,
attacked by a mob during these protests, black, and the clip with his
family being interviewed, and even him before he tragically died from
his severe burns. He said that they said, "Hey, black
guy, are you a Chavista?" And they threw a Molotov
cocktail on him.
They have
pulled bus drivers out of the buses and torched the buses. They,
throwing explosives at people, so it is just quite astounding not
only is that happening, but then when you look at what happens to
journalists there. Before we went, of course, we heard even Reuters
journalists had been attacked by these people, but we know how
dangerous it is to be a state-run journalist there, which is why we
didn't say that we were openly with teleSUR.
But we
didn't know how bad it was until after we were there on the ground
reporting, because once the photos came out that we were there and
started circulating and tying us back to teleSUR, then things got
really, really bad. A complete fake propaganda campaign, we basically
became the center of a fake news viral campaign in Venezuela started
and fomented by major opposition leaders, and the media, major
academics there, that were propagating a theory that Mike and I were
actually spies infiltrating the protest to collect intelligence for
the GNB, the Venezuelan intelligence services, based on absolutely
nothing, based on me doing my job as a journalist going there and
actually trying to get the truth, to cover all sides. I mean, I put
my life on the line. We all put our lives on the line to get this
story from these people creating these barricades, and the peaceful
marches on all sides, average Venezuelan from the streets.
The clear
assault on the press is from the opposition who doesn't want you to
report the truth. They put up free press as this beacon, but they
don't want you to report anything that contradicts their narrative,
even when it's completely proven by the Attorney General herself, who
was even at odds with Maduro, as you mentioned.
So when
we dare to bring up the fact that the opposition was responsible for
half the deaths, because half of the story's been omitted by the
Western media and these human rights watch organizations, we became
subjected to a lynch mob. Not only was this fake news perpetrated
around about us, but it incited hundreds of death threats, actual
lynch threats. I've never been subjected to actual lynch threats
before, and it was just all the same thing. "Lynch them.
Lynch them. Burn them. Throw Molotov cocktails on them. We know what
to do to infiltrators. Do to them what we've done to the other
infiltrators," saying like, "Burn them alive."
If we were still there, we would have a target on our back, and we've
seen that play out in the wake of us leaving, where a teleSUR
journalist actually just got attacked with Molotov cocktails, nails,
and shot in the back by opposition protestors when she was clearly
marked press and standing with cameramen. This is not the first time
journalists have been attacked. Someone else from Globovisión was
doused with gasoline and luckily escaped before they were burned
alive.
If this was
happening to journalists in any other part of the world, there would
be a huge outcry from international watchdogs, but unfortunately,
because it's Venezuela, and because the U.S. empire wants regime
change there, this is completely obfuscated, and in fact, these
people are painted as peaceful, democracy-loving freedom fighters,
and it makes me sick, because I see the same thing played out in
Ukraine, Syria, time and again, and I was there. We risked our lives
and were getting a lynch mob incited against us, and there's not a
peep from these people. Instead, you see Ken Roth from Human Rights
Watch actually calling for a violent coup and has the audacity to
just completely marginalize the real situation.
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