by
Adam Johnson
The
Trump administration’s now completely overt effort to overthrow
Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro had a very successful public
relations effort this week, as major Western media outlets uniformly
echoed its simplistic, pre-packaged claim that the Venezuelan
government was heartlessly withholding foreign aid:
- The
US Says Maduro Is Blocking Aid to Starving People. The Venezuelan
Says His People Aren’t Beggars
(Washington Post,
2/8/19)
All
of the above articles—and scores more like it—repeated the same
script: Maduro was blocking aid from the US “out
of refusal to relinquish power,”
preferring to starve “his
own people”
rather than feed them. It’s a simple case of good and evil—of a
tyrannical, paranoid dictator not letting in aid to feed a starving
population.
Except
three pieces of key context are missing. Context that, when presented
to a neutral observer, would severely undermine the cartoonish
narrative being advanced by US media.
1)
Both the Red Cross and
UN warned the US not to engage in this aid PR stunt.
2)
The bridge in question
is a visual metaphor contrived by the Trump administration of little
practical relevance.
3)
The person in charge of
US operations in Venezuela has a history of using aid as a cover to
deliver weapons to right-wing mercenaries.
(1)
Not only has the international aid community not asked for the “aid,”
earlier this week, both the International Red Cross and United
Nations warned the US to explicitly not engage in these types of PR
stunts. As Washington Post contributor Vincent Bevins pointed out,
the transparent cynicism of these efforts was preemptively warned
about by the groups actually charged with keeping starving people
fed:
Red Cross Warns US About Risks of Sending Aid to Venezuela (PBS NewsHour, 2/1/19):
The International Committee of the Red Cross has warned the United States about the risks of delivering humanitarian aid to Venezuela without the approval of security forces loyal to President Nicolas Maduro.
***
UN Warns Against Politicizing Humanitarian Aid in Venezuela (Reuters, 2/6/19):
UNITED NATIONS — The United Nations warned on Wednesday against using aid as a pawn in Venezuela after the United States sent food and medicine to the country’s border and accused President Nicolas Maduro of blocking its delivery with trucks and shipping containers.
Indeed,
as Bevins also noted, the Red Cross has long been working with local
authorities inside Venezuela to deliver relief, and just last week
doubled its budget to do so. We
have ample evidence the Maduro government is more than willing to
work with international aid when it’s offered in good faith, not
when it’s a thinly veiled mechanism to spur civil war and contrive
PR victories for those seeking to overthrow the government. It’s
not just Maduro—as the Western media are presenting it—who
opposes the US aid convoy; it’s the UN and Red Cross. Why do none
of the above reports note this rather key piece of information,
instead giving the reader the impression it’s only the stance of a
sadistic, power-hungry madman?
(2)
Despite dozens of
media outlets giving the impression (and sometimes explicitly saying)
that the Venezuelan government shut down an otherwise functioning
pathway into the country, the bridge in question hasn’t been open
for years.
It’s
true the Venezuelan government appears to have placed an oil tanker
and cargo containers on the bridge to prevent incursion from the
Colombian side, but the other barriers, as writer and software
developer Jason Emery noted, have been in place since at least 2016.
According to La Opinion (2/5/16), after
its initial construction in 2015, the bridge has never been open to
traffic. How can Maduro, as the BBC suggested, “reopen” a bridge
that was never open?
The
reality is BBC and other Western media were just going along with the
narrative pushed by Sen. Marco Rubio and Trump Secretary of State
Mike Pompeo, not bothering to check if their primary visual narrative
was based on a bad faith, context-free PR stunt.
This
point is a relatively superficial one, but in a long term PR battle
to win over Western liberals for further military escalation, the
superficial matters a lot. Rubio and the Trump administration cooked
up a gimmicky visual metaphor, and almost every outlet uncritically
passed it along, often making factually inaccurate assumptions along
the way—assumptions the Trump State Department and CIA coordinating
the effort knew very well they would make.
(3)
The Venezuelan
government has an entirely rational reason to suspect the US would
use humanitarian aid as a cover to smuggle in weapons to foment armed
conflict: The person running quarterback for Trump on the current
Venezuela operation, Elliot Abrams, literally did just that 30 years
ago.
From
the first two paragraphs (emphasis added) of a 1987 AP/New
York Times article
on Elliott Abrams, “Abrams
Denies Wrongdoing in Shipping Arms to Contras”
(8/17/87—h/t Kevin Gosztola):
Assistant
Secretary of State Elliott Abrams has defended his role in
authorizing the shipment of weapons on a humanitarian aid flight to
Nicaraguan rebels, saying the operation was ”strictly by the book.”
Mr.
Abrams spoke at a news conference Saturday in response to statements
by Robert Duemling, former head of the State Department’s
Nicaraguan humanitarian assistance office, who said he had twice
ordered planes to shuttle weapons for the Contras on aid planes at
Mr. Abrams’ direction in early 1986.
It’s
literally the same person. It’s not that Maduro is vaguely paranoid
the US, in general, would dust off its 1980s’ Contra-backing Cold
War playbook, or some unspecified assumption about a higher-up or two
at State. It’s literally the exact same person in charge of the
operation who we know—with 100 percent certainty, because he
admitted to it—has a history of using aid convoys as a cover to
smuggle in arms to right-wing militias.
It’s
all playing out right now, in real time. The same actors, the same
tricks, the same patently disingenuous concern for the starving poor.
And the US media is stripping it of all this essential context,
presenting these radical regime-change operators as bleeding heart
humanitarians.
The
same US media outlets that have expressly fundraised and run ad
campaigns on their image as anti-Trump truth-tellers have
mysteriously taken at face value everything the Trump White House and
its neoconservative allies have said in their campaign to overthrow
the government of Venezuela. The self-aggrandizing “factchecking”
brigade that emerged to confront the Trump administration is suddenly
nonexistent as it rolls out a transparent, cynical PR strategy to
delegitimize a Latin American government it’s trying to overthrow.
Source,
links:
WOW: the #Tienditas Bridge in #Venezuela that Maduro has supposedly blocked to "keep US aid from starving people" has actually never been opened. Ask yourself: why is mass media spreading fake news to help Trump manufacture an excuse to invade Venezuela? https://t.co/0NZM8Nmk6k— Dr. Jill Stein🌻 (@DrJillStein) February 9, 2019
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