In 2014, violence broke out on the streets of Venezuela. Streets and buildings were on fire. Wires were rigged across roads, causing auto accidents and knocking motorcyclists off their bikes, decapitating some. 43 people were killed. Who instigated it? Why? How did Venezuela’s government and people respond?
If you heard anything about this in the U.S. or world media outlets, you may have a very different understanding of what happened than what the people of Venezuela have. As it turns out, there was a “Committee of Victims of Violent Protests” formed to demand justice. They investigated, made their report to the government and trials ensued.
A few weeks ago, I went to a showing of a documentary made by the committee. Today, we present it to you, with commentary, for consideration.
It begins by describing the political context. Hugo Chavez died in March 2013. The VP, Nicholas Maduro, was named interim President. Elections were called for April 2013. Results were announced that night: Maduro won by approximately 230,000 votes. The right-wing opposition candidate, Henrique Capriles Radonski, does not concede. Instead, he claims that he won and he calls for violence. (his statement begins at about 2:40 in the documentary.)
“According to our count, we have a different result from the one expressed tonight. I want to tell the government candidate, “the one who lost today is you.”” Then, “unleash all of your rage!”
(author’s note: polls prior to the election had Maduro winning by double-digits. Every pollster, from all political stripes. I recall when this election happened and Western media were suggesting that the election had been rigged. If the populous was shown to be supporting Maduro by double-digits and a rigged election led to a very narrow win, in which direction was it manipulated?)
On March 15, 2013, opposition violence broke out. Nine people were killed and 103 were wounded. Among those who died: Henri Rangel LaRosa, a PSUV (Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela) leader was shot when he responded to a call that a fellow PSUV’s house was being burned down. In all 6 people were shot. Three were run over by an opposition supporter while celebrating the election of Maduro. The violence was clearly related to political leanings. It was not violence by the government, but violence against the government. At the end of the year, municipal elections were held. Maduro’s political position was strengthened, but there was clearly a solid oppositional force. After the election, he called for a national dialogue for peaceful coexistence amongst those of different political ideologies (5:13):
“I will convene a nationwide social dialogue for all the mayors elected by the people of Venzuela, without any sort of distinction, on December 8.”
In response, the opposition called for an insurrection. They called it “La Salida” (The Exit.) “La Salida” was stated as a movement that would have people violently in the streets until the constitutionally elected government stepped down. Protests broke out. They were portrayed as protests against crime, poverty and resource shortages. However, here are the statements from opposition leaders (6:49):
Leopoldo Lopez: “We can’t wait six years for a change in Venezuela.” Maria Corina Mechado: “Some say we should wait. Wait for elections in a few years. Lopez: The people have to rise up! Nicolas Maduro should know that we are going to throw him out of Miraflores! (The presidential palace)”
At 7:39 you see the protests beginning. They were called “Guarimbas” (barricades). People are breaking down gates to government buildings. Tossing cars. Setting fires. Calling out “this government is going to fall!” At 8:12, protesters are firing off what look like homemade rockets. There is a significant amount of property damage occurring and it is all aimed at government facilities. They are firing at moving vehicles. That is, they are aiming at people. This is not the government making things violent. This is a party that lost an election and doesn’t believe in democracy. They couldn’t convince enough people to vote for them, so they attempted a violent overthrow of the government. When journalists interview people in the street, they are clear, “our mission is to overthrow the government.” This went on for months. Enter the international media. The context of what is going on in Venezueala is clear. It is documented on film. We see the opposition leaders calling for violent overthrow and we see the protesters wreaking devastating damage in the streets. Still, the international media portray it as government suppression of peaceful protesters. The government was accused of crimes against humanity. It was a campaign of outright lies and distortion. At 9:20, we can see how they tampered images, took them out of context and even used images from Egypt and Syria, claiming they were from Venezuela. The people of Venezuela were traumatized. The destruction was massive. Two reporters from Telesur were on the ground the entire time. They delivered a thorough report here. What I want to note is their statement about the costs and how media were only interested in looking at the impact on one group: the wealthy, whiter, far-right. I’m pasting that whole long paragraph here because reading through it helps the reality sink in:
5. The psychological effects of constant fear and destruction
(Tamara) Chavistas, non-political people, and even the peaceful opposition suffered the psychological effects of the constant violence, insecurity, and fear, but the media were more interested in the far-right, whiter, upper-class sectors, and didn't cover this. It didn't suit their message. I remember walking in the street, being scared, when people on motorbikes holding long things drove past, or there were groups of young men talking in the street – because they resembled barricaders. We were scared to take photos, to meet or march too, since snipers had killed people at a march in Bolivar – of course, we did anyway. A doctor friend would walk three hours through barricades to get to the hospital, and be scared every time she crossed one, because they would yell out sexual abuse, beat up people, or demand large bribes to be able to cross. Once we tried to leave our barrio late at night to work, and because we weren't participating in the caceroles – weren't banging pots, neighbors we didn't know yelled at us, “Go to hell, Chavistas, die!”. Chavista effigies were hung off bridges. Another friend had a heart attack because his son had been stuck at home for weeks due to death threats. It became an act of courage to wear a red t-shirt in the street. A lot of public institutions were attacked, burnt, had windows smashed. An explosive was thrown at a Mercal food store in San Cristobal, the governors' residencies in San Cristobal and Merida were attacked, Chavista ULA students were attacked, ambulances trying to take people injured at the barricades were attacked, a man was half striped and tied to a tree and humiliated, a gas truck was burnt, as were many buses and private vehicles including food delivery trucks, various of Merida's new free tram stops were destroyed, some of the Bolivarian universities were ransacked, burnt, or wrecked, the housing ministry in Caracas was burnt, Merida's water was poisoned, a national park was set on fire, 5,000 trees were chopped down for the barricades, metro bus stations were wrecked. In Lara, they tried to burn Cuban doctors alive, and all up, there were 162 attacks registered on Cuban doctors.
In early April, before the guarimbas were over, Maduro calculated total damages at US$15 billion. But how do you calculate the long term damage on human beings caused by constant fear and loss?
It wasn’t just the media. Politicos from around the world got involved. Here in the U.S., John Kerry used the manipulated media to support sanctions against Venezuela, validating the idea that the government had been repressive and committed crimes against humanity, when all the evidence shows quite the opposite. The reporters from Telesur reported that “Despite constant harassment and attacks, the national guard were peaceful.” They noted that while there were a few cases of abuse, those officers were arrested. (Imagine!) The government readily admitted that there were these cases and they took action and made the perpetrators accountable. The Telesur reporters learned that the protesters understood the value of goading the guards and getting it on video:
In an article published online he said he regularly saw guarimberos in Caracas using a time tested tactic of goading GNB troops for hours on end, filming their targets in a “coordinated effort.”
“If the guard makes a mistake and represses someone who is insulting him, in just minutes the video is doing the rounds of Youtube, it will be seen by millions of people and will form part of multimedia material that arrives at international chains such as CNN, NTN24 Caracol and others,” he explained.
The protesters knew that if they goaded the guards into action, it was social media gold to get any footage of it. Still, over a course of months, they only managed to provoke a few and got very little video. Meanwhile, thousands of encounters were responded to with peaceful means.
In the documentary they list the 5 myths propagated by international media:
1. The protesters were youth,
2. They were peacefully protesting,
3. They were defending democracy,
4. The protesters were murdered by the state,
5. Everything was part of a systematic and structural policy of violating human rights.
As we can see from the footage in the documentary, the protest was violent. The guarimbas were a form of deliberate violent protest with a mission of overthrowing a democratically elected government. How do you defend democracy by violently overthrowing what the people had voted for? As one of the commenters in the video states, “now, we know what their democracy looks like.” While some of the people in the street might have been youth, we can see from the political speeches and social media records that the protests were instigated and directed by experienced political operatives and military leaders.
Nine of the people murdered during the guarimbas were security officers. Do we believe the government killed them? The victims’ families formed a committee to tell the stories of how their loved ones died and to seek justice. All but 5 of the people who died were killed by civilians. the protesters killed 38 people. Many of them were not even politically active. They were simply caught by the booby traps in the street. Or shot by the protesters if they tried to clear a street or do anything to restore order. To reiterate, the government did acknowledge 5 cases of illegal killings by security personnel. The offenders were all jailed. The government did not hesitate to hold them accountable. (Not something we see here in the United States.)
Also, this was not a working- or poor- people’s protest. The actions were all in middle- or high-class neighborhoods governed by the opposition. They relied on their local police to condone or tolerate the violence in support of ousting the ruling party. (Mayors who refused to comply with court orders to break down the barricades were later found guilty of conspiring to commit violence.) The way the guarimbas worked was that protesters would block the streets with trash and furniture, including beds. Then, the piles were set on fire. Do we believe that the working class or the poor were tossing their furnishings out to be burned?
Beyond the dangerous road blocks, booby traps were set in the roads. Oil was spilled to cause vehicles to get out of control. Wires were strung across streets to knock people off of motorcycles. Some were decapitated. Sewer pipes were torn up out of the ground, leaving gaping holes that led to fatal accidents.
They were killing regular citizens who were simply trying to get work or school or run their errands. They were instructed to so by leaders in the opposition. It wasn’t clandestine. Instructions were sent out via Twitter, for instance:
Para neutralizar hordas criminales motorizadas se deben atravesar cuerdas de nylon o ALAMBRE GALVANIZADO a 1:20mts altura en las bocas calles.
My rough translation: “To neutralize the hordes of criminal motorists we must cross cords of nylon or metal wire at a height of 1.20 meters across the mouths of the roads.”
Who are these criminal motorists? The protesters claim they are overthrowing a tyrannical government, but they are targeting anyone who drives on the roads?
Here’s how tyrannical the Maduro government is. They treated General Vivas with such terror.
Although he initially resisted detention, entering into an armed standoff with authorities, Vivas was eventually placed under house arrest for four months. Since his release, he has made a string of anti-government videos with ever more explicit messages.
Are you feeling the tyranny? Ready to run down there and join the resistance?!
The protesters and international media would have you believe that the 43 people killed were all peaceful protesters killed by government forces suppressing their freedom of expression. The families of those who were murdered, however, got tired of having their real stories ignored. They formed a committee to tell the stories of their loved ones, to get the truth on record, and to see justice.
In these stories, we do not hear about anyone who was protesting the government and getting killed by them. We hear about apolitical citizens, some of whom were shot simply for trying to clear roads. We hear about security personnel who were doing the same. One woman speaks (14:19) of her husband’s death. He was working with a crew to clear a barricade when gunfire started. They ran to their vehicle. When they got there, they realized someone was missing. They heard a man screaming. Her husband saw that he had been shot and couldn’t leave him behind. He jumped out of the vehicle and basically provided cover for the injured man while the others carried that man back to the vehicle. He was killed by the shots he took protecting the other man.
The families are rightfully angry that their loved ones are being posthumously claimed by the guarimbistas for the sake of political rhetoric. Imagine killing your fellow citizens who voted for a governing body, then blaming that elected body for their murders in hopes that you can gain power.
At about 16:50, the documentary starts discussing other kinds of acts the protesters undertook. They attacked public transportation vehicles. Buses full of people. In one of the more disturbing instances, they attacked a Housing Ministry building with a nursery inside.
In the socialist government, workplaces provide childcare. There were 82 children of employees in the building when protesters threw Molotov cocktails followed by jars of oil for accelerant. Who calls themselves the defenders of democracy when they are attacking a nursery full of children? Why would the working class attack the Housing Ministry, of all the government buildings?
The Housing Ministry has a mission of making sure that all Venezuelans have homes. It is considered part of the debt the state owes the people after years of inequity.
Homes are given for free or for a very low price, if the family can afford it. Over 500,000 houses have been built for poor people since 2011. They prioritized homes for people made homeless by a flooding catastrophe.
The Great Housing Mission also seeks to provide housing for all those made homeless by the heavy rains of 2010. Further, low income families receive heavy subsidies from the government to help them pay for their houses, and those living on less than the minimum wage receive their new homes for free.
Can you even imagine that happening here, in the U.S.? People here lose their homes to flooding, tornados and other natural disaster, all the time. We don’t see it as our social obligation to make sure they are housed. Too bad if they don’t have for-profit insurance! We criminalize and demonize the homeless. We make laws to criminalize feeding them. When we do allow that the government should help with housing, we make them pay rent. We subject them to dismal upkeep. We treat them like bad children who need to be constantly supervised. We don’t empower them at all. Yet, this tyrannical government is giving its people houses. It is creating social stability by using national income to provide permanent homes.
Why would the poor and working class want to unseat this government? Why would a grassroots movement want to attack the Housing Ministry?
In light of what was actually happening at these protests , would anyone claim that the government should not have taken action? If a single protester breaks a window here, we’re outraged and expect a heavy police response. We’re ready to rescind the right to protest because it’s just too disruptive and we’re so concerned about property damage. Don’t even think about blocking a highway for a few hours! We would claim that the police were not doing their duty if they didn’t step in. These protesters were blocking road, burning buildings and vehicles with people in them and killing people who tried to clear the mess. For five months!
Clearly, the government was the agency which had the resources to end the violence and chaos of the guarimbas protests. Given that the violence went on for months, one can conclude that government didn’t just run in with their armed forces, guns ablaze, kill a bunch of people and shut down the protests via terror and intimidation. Over the course of five months of violence, the security forces killed 5 people.
The protesters were killing people. It would have been a human rights violation to let it continue.
In the United States, police have killed 630 people as of July 16. Many of those who were killed were unarmed. We see videos of police brutality every day.
As a nation, we claim to be the example and staunch defender of democracy. Democracy requires active participation of its citizens. Part of our responsibility is to disrupt the normal course of daily life, if our government is not responding to our need to have them serve our will. We do this via strikes and marches and blocking streets. Yet, here, when we do this non-violently, we are met by tanks and tear gas and guns. It took the Venezuelan government five months to quell violent protests because they did not opt for a full-press military response.
So, which country is more authoritarian or tyrannical?
The Venezuelan people want justice. They want those responsible to be held accountable. They recognize Leopold Lopez, one of the political operatives quoted above, as the architect of the protests. They don’t see him as some democratic hero. They saw him on TV and social media. They know what he did. In September of 2015, he was found guilty of inciting violence. Though the international press has claimed that his trial was a farce (based on the word of a prosecutor who claims to have fled persecution in broad daylight on a commercial flight from the main airport in the country), Lopez’ actions and all the evidence were so public that it’s laughable to believe that he is an innocent political prisoner. Being wealthy, he had the most expensive defense lawyers available. Being Harvard educated and a lawyer, Leopoldo participated in his own defense.
Leopoldo Lopez Mendoza, who is a lawyer, actively participated in his own defence. He interrogated, hectored and even intimidated expert witnesses and those present on the 12th of February 2014. Lopez used techniques such as psychological exhaustion against several witnesses, putting forward hypothetical situations in which he would be President of the Republic and, in that scenario, the witnesses could be subject to counter-suits and legal actions for having participated in a case against him. According to Lopez, these witnesses had taken advantage of the nature of his profession in order to smear his good name through a trial. Basically, Lopez and his lawyers tried to hinder the testimonies of many witnesses.
Unlike capitalist states where the rich are untouchable, the Venezuelan government actually prosecuted one of the most elite members of society. They did it in a public trial, with public defenders. There was international pressure against them. The prosecutors themselves were subject to harassment. Still, they prevailed.
There is an understanding that when you are used to having a certain privilege, you (and others) can see it as an injustice to be forced to be equal. This phenomenon has been noted in gender studies, for instance, when looking at perceptions about whether women talk too much.
Another study reported that a male science teacher who managed to create an atmosphere in which girls and boys contributed more equally to discussion felt that he was devoting 90 per cent of his attention to the girls. And so did his male pupils. They complained vociferously that the girls were getting too much talking time.
In other public contexts, too, such as seminars and debates, when women and men are deliberately given an equal amount of the highly valued talking time, there is often a perception that they are getting more than their fair share. Dale Spender explains this as follows:
The talkativeness of women has been gauged in comparison not with men but with silence. Women have not been judged on the grounds of whether they talk more than men, but of whether they talk more than silent women.
In other words, if women talk at all, this may be perceived as ‘too much’ by men who expect them to provide a silent, decorative background in many social contexts.
With this in mind, we might understand why those who are used to being immune from accountability would perceive themselves as victims when they are held accountable. This doesn’t excuse the international media from playing into this perception, though. Nor should it influence how we perceive the evidence in front of us.
If you needed any evidence to be sure of the crimes committed by the opposition party, you only have to look at the amnesty bill they tried to enact, immediately upon gaining a majority in the congress. It’s a laundry list of all the acts they committed that they believe they are being persecuted for if convicted. It’s a stunning confession. The list is so long, I won’t paste it all in here. Here is one section:
Amnesty shall be granted to acts regarded as crimes or misdemeanours when such acts have been or might have been committed for participating, organizing or calling demonstrations, protests, or meetings for political purposes, expressing ideas or spreading information for political motives, or making or promoting actions, proclamations, political agreements or statements deemed to be aimed at changing the constitutional order or the official government, whether or not accompanied by conspiracy actions. In such cases, amnesty shall be granted to the following criminal acts:
a) Incitement to disobey the law, incitement to hatred and crime apology; b. Incitement to crime; c. Assault and battery;
d. Violence or resistance to authority, and disobedience to authority;
e. Causing panic in the community or keeping it under distress by the dissemination of false information;
f. Conspiracy;
g. Obstruction of public roads with the aim to set up fire and other attacks against passing vehicles;
h. Damaging transportation systems as well as public IT and communication;
i. Destruction or damaging of roads and related infrastructure for public communication;
j. Property damage;
k. Conspiracy and terrorism;
l. Importation, manufacture, possession, supply or concealment of explosives or incendiary devices;
m. Disturbance of public peace;
n. Insulting a civil servant, in its various forms;
o. Use of minors to commit crimes;
p. Arson and other crimes involving danger for the public in general, in various forms;
q. Treason and other crimes against the Nation;
r. Rebellion and other related offences;
s. Mutiny, civil rebellion, treason, military rebellion, incitement to military rebellion, uprising, false alarm, attack and insult to the sentry, disclosure of military secrets, offense to military decorum, misuse of badges medals and military ranks, and theft of items belonging to the Armed Force;
t. Denial of legally due services;
u. Concealment;
v. Illegal possession and misuse of firearms, and the felony of illegal possession of firearms, illegal possession of a firearm and possession of firearms in public places; w. Damage to facilities of the National Electric System; and x. "Other related offences or those that appear closely related to any of the above." (Amnesty and National Reconciliation Bill, pp. 9-10)
No, seriously. That’s just part of the list. Here’s another:
Additionally, the 'amnesty' includes offences to: Art.37 of the Law Against Organized Crime and Financing of Terrorism; Art.264 on offences against the Law for the Protection of Children and Adolescents; Arts.111, 112 and 113 of the Disarmament and Arms and Ammunitions Law dealing with offences regarding the illicit and illegal use and bearing of firearms; Art.107 of the Law of the Electricity Service identifying deliberate damages to the electricity service; and Arts. 412, 464, 476, 481, 486, 497, 500, 501, 502, 550, 565, 566 and 570 of the Military Justice Code that deals with offences such as military rebellion and instigation to military rebellion.
An interesting part of the overall story of political tension in Venezuela is contained in this section of the bill:
The plot thickens even further with the inclusion in the Amnesty Bill of offences such as drug trafficking, kidnapping, embezzlement (Art.16 & Art.30), corruption, hoarding, black market speculation, economic boycott, fraudulent product adulteration, selling of items off expire day (Art.19), financing of terrorism, illicit enrichment (Art.20), fraud and usury in the selling and construction of private housing, and not paying of taxes (Art.35).
In short, not only there is provision in the Bill for every offence committed by their supporters mainly as a result of violent and destabilizing political activities, but the amnesty is extended to include all manner of economic crimes committed by bankers, entrepreneurs, and financiers most of whom have avoided Venezuela's justice system by absconding in Miami, Peru, Panama, etc., claiming to be 'political refugees'.
As the country has suffered from food shortages due to drought and economics losses from low oil prices (90% of the national income is derived from sales of oil), the free-market advocates of the opposition have been hoarding food and illegally transporting it out of the country to sell at higher prices, while their fellow citizens starve. This is just one type of economic crime they’ve committed in the name of “defending democracy!”
Another law they tried to pass upon getting control of congress: converting all those state-built housing to private property. While the public houses are owned by the people who live in them and they can never be forced to move out, under current law, they are still technically public. This protects them from being mortgaged, so that homeowners can’t be coerced out of their housing and lose control over it by transferring ownership to a bank. The financial industry is not happy about this. So, they tried to put the housing back into “the market.”
The Supreme Court overturned both of these laws, as they are not constitutional. The Venezuelan’s Bolivarian Constitution was drafted in 1999 by a constitutional committee created by popular referendum. It’s going to take more than slightly majority congress to get that changed. The opposition knows this, so it’s willing to use violence, which it continues to threaten to this day, to achieve their ends.
It should also be noted that the opposition party within Venezuela was not the sole source of the violent protests. One of the leaders, Josef Perez Sale, confessed that they received support from international actors, including advice and funding from the United States.
In a taped video released earlier this month, Perez Venta, primary suspect in the brutal murder of a woman found raped and dismembered, revealed an network of contacts between far-right politicians in the United States, Colombia, opposition Venezuelan activists, and paramilitary groups. The opposition activist spoke in detail regarding training that he and other activists received from paramilitaries in the Colombian border town of Cucuta.
Perez also specifically named right-wing U.S. lawmaker Marco Rubio and the charge d'affaires of the U.S. Embassy in Caracas, Phil Laidlaw, as being involved. WATCH PEREZ’S CLAIMS IN FULL: (video can be seen at link.)
So, here we have evidence that the U.S. is backing the violent overthrow of a democratically elected government which is serving it’s people by implementing policies which favor the economically deprived. (For a look at the complex economic and political realities of the Bolivarian experiment in Venezuela, this is a good read.) When the violent protests broke out in Venezuela, the U.S. government was quick to condemn Maduro’s government. They contributed to the dissemination of misinformation which led to cries from international non-profits about human rights abuses. There is no evidence of these abuses. Just the cries of the previously privileged who are upset about not being privileged any longer*. People who are doing everything in their power to disrupt governance and the economy, even if it means harming or killing the people of Venezuela.
Yet, in Turkey, where the government is waging a devastating war against it’s Kurdish people (whole towns decimated) and curtailing secular laws in favor of religious ones and jailing journalists, a far more autocratic government than that of Venezuela, the moment there is an attempt at a coup, the U.S. is quick to condemn the attempts to challenge a democratically elected government. Whether one thinks the coup attempt in Turkey is a good thing or not, is not the point here. Why does the U.S. support a violent overthrow in Venezuela, but not in Turkey?
After watching the documentary from the Committee of Victims of Violence and reading about the Venezuelan processes afterward, do we really believe that peaceful protests were violently repressed by a tyrannical government? How do we trust what the international media is telling us when we can see blatant propagation of misinformation? How long will we continue to accept that those with wealth and an interest in protecting their mechanism of maintaining and obtaining wealth are serving us?
Why did the United States use this misinformation to impose sanctions against a country that was already hurting from a weakened oil market? Why is the U.S. government claiming that Venezuela is a threat to the United States? Have you ever heard of a Venezuelan military incursion into another country? Do you believe that they have anywhere near the power to harm the United States?
This author has her own thoughts about that. Leave yours in the comments!
* Author’s anecdote: I was at a brunch with a man from Venezuela. It was just prior to the first election of Maduro, in 2013. It was at a friend’s house, here in the U.S. and he was their guest. When I learned he was Venezuelan, I asked him what he thought of the upcoming election. He replied, “I think we’re going to have a bus driver as president!” His voice was full of disdain for Maduro. It had that tone of “how dare he try to get above his station.” When I pointed out that Maduro had been Vice President for quite a while and that he enjoyed very good relations with leaders of other countries and has been hailed as a good politician, he was taken aback. He bluntly told me that he wasn’t used to people in the U.S. having any knowledge of Venezuela. Meaning, he wasn’t used to his propaganda not working. Know, dear reader, that they expect us to be uninformed and malleable to their perceptions.
Later in the conversation, I realized that this man wasn’t living in Venezuela, any longer. When I asked him why, he tried to claim that it was a lawless place. He couldn’t go back because “my gardener would murder me.” To which I responded, “why? how did you treat your gardener?” It turned out that he has moved to Mexico City. Bastion of peace and safety. Well, for him it probably is, because he’s rich and lives in a gated, security-laden compound. Moreover, his wealth affords him influence with authorities. It doesn’t buy him that privilege in Venezuela, any longer.
Always remember that most of the Venezuelans we meet here, in the U.S., are people who have the resources to relocate when the politics don’t suit them. They have a particular lens through which they are showing you their country. The lens of privilege. While the socialist project there has had it’s mistakes along the way, the defining feature is one of attempting to reset the economic inequalities by providing education, housing, food and other subsidies to the poor, while rebuilding an economy based on cooperative businesses where the workers own the means of production and distribution. Those who were in the owner class are going to feel that they’ve been persecuted by not being allowed to be so privileged. Take what they say about Venezuela with a grain of salt. They are more than willing to lie and cheat. That’s often a feature of success in capitalism. Know that these are the voices influencing international media and politics. If you really want to know what’s happening in Venezuela, talk to the working class.
