Washington: The Silent Protagonist of the Venezuelan Election
The American campaign to destabilize post-Chavez Venezuela will continue long after this Sunday’s election. With a number of bellicose tactics, this has been the case ever since President Hugo Chávez arrived at the Palacio de Miraflores; it will continue to be so after the victory of the socialist candidate, Nicolás Maduro.
The White House’s current inhabitant, Barack Obama, knows that a victory for the ruling party’s candidate will only cement Venezuela’s socialist status. At the end of March, both the U.S. Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, and the Commander of the U.S. Southern Command, John Kelly, predicted that opposition candidate Henrique Capriles, of the corporate far-right, would be defeated. Hence Washington will continue to channel millions of dollars to help along secret operations and all branches of full-spectrum warfare — “soft” coups, low-intensity conflict and asymmetric, informational or fourth-generation warfare — against Venezuela’s Bolivarianism.
In the short term, it is probable that the White House and its allies will try to cast doubt on the transparency of the electoral process. It doesn’t matter whether they cry “fraud,” call on a civil “uprising” or intensify their efforts to weave a climate of anarchy, social destabilization and ungovernability. It’d be nothing new. Ever since his first electoral campaign in 1998, when they saw that his victory was inevitable, Washington’s media “dirty war machine” managed to plant a set of preconceived ideas about Chávez on CNN and in U.S., European and Latin American corporate private press outlets, painting him as a “coup leader,” “traitor to his country,” “demagogue,” “leftist fundamentalist,” “communist,” “radical populist” and a “dictator.” This was all in the name of manufacturing a “black legend” about the ex-paratrooper commander who, upon leaving prison, would take control of government the legal, constitutional and peaceful way.
Together with the Department of State’s bellicose diplomacy and the covert actions of the Pentagon and the CIA, these labels and others — used as ammunition by the media for the construction of fear in society, for the psychological manipulation of the people, for the generation of political hatred and incitement to violent and fratricidal warfare between Venezuelans — paved the way for April 2002’s coup d’état.
From a Media Strike to an Insurrectionary Lockout
The coup on April 12 was a classic example of an oligarchic, civic-military coup from the extreme right with American backing. It was a coup that stunk of oil and continental geopolitical realignments. The next objective was Cuba. It was not difficult to make out Otto Reich’s hand directing the rabble. The ex-U.S. ambassador in Caracas, an old “falcon” with links to the CIA and the Cuban-American terrorist mafia in Florida, hatched the plan together with his boss at the White House, John Maisto, undersecretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs and ex-proconsul in Panama. As the magazine Newsweek would subsequently reveal, Reich maintained personal contact with Gustavo Cisneros, Venezuelan TV magnate, in whose Venevisión office the conspiracy was conceived, and also personally gave guidance over the telephone to Pedro Carmona once he was sworn in as president before “almighty God” and with the blessing of Baltasar Porras, president of the Episcopal Conference. That old holy alliance: the sword and the power of money, together with the private media outlets that Chávez called “the four horsemen of the apocalypse”: Venevisión, Radio Caracas Televisión (RCTV), Globovisión and Televen, who cast journalism aside to put all of their persuasive powers toward becoming the co-stars of the first media coup d’état of the 21st century and win a war that was being waged for oil.
After the failure of Washington’s remote-controlled conspiracy and Chávez’s reinstatement by the people and Miraflores’ loyal military, the powers that be and the “free press” continued to push the buttons of a middle class bombarded by messages of classist hate in the media. And by December 2002, a new timeline for a coup was being drawn up: Operation “Black September,” after four months of delay, would follow a master-plan based around a rebellious strike by the heads of industry, large estate owners, ranchers and the so-called “nomenclature” of the upper echelons of Petróleos de Venezuela, PDVSA, to be reported with political and ideological bias by the main media outlets of Venezuela and the Americas.
The subversive strategy of these big businesses was outlined in “Confidential Dossier No. 5,” a document created by Coordinadora Democrática — the umbrella term for the oligarchic groups brought together by the Venezuelan Federation of Chambers of Commerce — their allies in the corrupt Confederation of Venezuelan Workers, and members of the conspiratorial right, who were unsettled and agitated following the exile of Carlos Andrés Pérez, the ex-president. Their tactics included a “citizens’ strike” of “quasi-insurrectional” proportions, which was to be combined with a strike by the elder statesmen of PDVSA, impairment of vital parts of the Venezuelan economy, self-sabotage, terrorist acts and agitation in the streets. All of the above was to be aided and abetted in the media by the Pentagon and CIA’s strategies of psychological warfare — dissemination of black propaganda, rumor and falsehood — in order to exploit the emotional desires of the people through persuasion, compulsive suggestion and engineered class-hatred.
Nonetheless, once again Chávez managed to save the country from the brink of civil war and defeated this racist oligarchic class and its allies without firing a single shot.
Feb. 15 and Washington’s Asymmetric War
On Feb. 15, 2009, a constitutional amendment was passed allowing all elected officials to be nominated for additional terms. This again validated Chávez’s leadership at the ballot and legitimized his project of a new socialism for the 21st century. This was bad news for Washington and its intellectual lapdogs, who, according to a vision shared by then-recently-elected President Obama, considered Chávez to be a negative force for harmony in the Western Hemisphere.
What would come next was easy to predict: Given Venezuela’s inclusion on the list of “global threats” to the United States, Obama would continue to wage asymmetric warfare against Chávez. In January of that year, at his confirmation hearing in the Capitol, the brand-new Department of State number two, James Steinberg, said that Washington had let Chávez have his way for too long. According to the former White House National Security Assessor and ex-analyst at the RAND Corporation, a think tank servicing the Pentagon, neither Chávez’s actions nor his vision were in the interests of the Venezuelan people or the population of Latin America at large. This was the very same diagnosis meted out to Allende’s Chile by Henry Kissinger in 1973. In Orwellian language, that should read that Chávez was a threat to the American empire’s geopolitical interests and their industrial and military obsessions. Hence, Washington would press on with its undercover war, without rules or limits, which some experts have defined as a fourth generation conflict.
Unlike traditional military combat, blitzkrieg and attrition warfare, fourth generation warfare — which may acquire psychological and physical dimensions, using techniques of psychoanalysis, marketing and what Foucault called “biopouvoir” — takes advantage of the strategic asymmetry between the two sides to gain an advantage. This had been Washington’s modus operandi for dealing with Venezuela since before 2002’s failed coup d’état, and has been continued ever since, with sabotage in the oil industry and demands for recall referenda.
In the circumstances surrounding Feb. 15, 2009, U.S. intelligence agencies put into place Operation Jaque, a conspiracy that was plotted in Puerto Rico the previous January. There, in the presence of head of Globovisión Alberto Federico Ravell, head of the center-right Justice First Party Julio Borges and other Venezuelan conspirators with the participation of Eduardo Frei and the top brass of Chile’s Christian Democratic Party, American strategists came up with new plans to destabilize the Chavist regime. They knew that, were Chávez to be re-elected in 2012, it would mean the consolidation of transitional processes and regional alliances in a number of Andean countries to the detriment of the economic and class interests of the White House, big business and their native allies.
The reaction of the Venezuelan plutocracy and those big media outlets engaged in the U.S.’ burgeoning war gave a glimpse of the conflict’s next phase. In an attempt to position itself in this new political landscape, this right-wing cell acting on Washington’s advice claimed that it had achieved a partial victory by bettering its previous high of 5 million votes against Chávez. Upon this base and with the support of U.S. and European conservative organizations (the Cato Institute, Heritage, Konrad Adenauer and the Spanish Foundation for Analysis and Social Studies), conservative politicians (Madeleine Albright, José María Áznar, Eduardo Frei, Václav Havel and Lech Walesa) and counter-revolutionary intellectual messiahs like Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Alberto Montaner, Enrique Krauze, Jorge G. Castañeda and others, they would now attempt to influence public opinion by singing that tired and well-worn tune: Chávez the totalitarian against a right wing disguised as the left.
This united conservative front used resources like the International Committee for Democracy in Cuba, part of Bush’s plan for Cuba, alongside the Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba and the Christian Democrat Organization of America. They were all supporters of “color revolutions” and soft coups in the ex-Soviet Republics, and were actively encouraging revolutions in Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador. It was clear, then, that the Obama administration would intensify its efforts in the fields of intelligence and counterintelligence, and that it would ramp up efforts to create financial barriers in Venezuela while destabilizing it politically with orchestrated street protests and planned chaos. Nonetheless, against the backdrop of the February referendum, Chávez won this battle too.
Chávez Defeats US Public Diplomacy
On Oct. 7, 2012, Chávez would face opposition candidate Henrique Capriles Radonski in another election. And once again, one of the great losers at the polls was that old snake in the grass, Washington’s so-called Office of Public Diplomacy. Having fueled media terrorism ever since the Cold War, this office, which had devoted itself to interrupting the area’s democratic process, engaged in a cowardly campaign between the end of July and election day to impose a set of ideas that, once disseminated and broadcast by media outlets in the United States, Latin America, Madrid and London, sought to claim that Capriles had won, despite the fact that exit polls showed Chávez to be the clear winner.
The governing principle of the campaign was that Capriles was not competing against Chávez alone; rather, he was fighting a group composed of drug lords, nepotistic politicians and Cubans who planned to use the election as a means to control the country once Chávez was no longer able to perform his duties because of his terminal illness. Thus they were attempting to maintain a sort of “Chavism without Chávez” through intimidation, violence and electoral fraud.
Following the orders of Shlomo Ben Ami and Alon Pinkas, Israeli diplomats and experts in propaganda, the campaign tried to conjure the image of Capriles as a serious, trustworthy man who offered stability, economic predictability and a tangible improvement in Venezuela’s relations with the outside world. Under him, the country would become a vibrant, open democracy, instead of an authoritarian military oligarchy. A timeline of 84 days was drawn up based on the burgeoning belief that Henrique Capriles Radonski was up against the axis of Cuba and the drug lords, whose potential authoritarian regime after Chávez’s death was a dangerous prospect for Venezuela.
In the 10 days leading up to Oct. 7, the campaign stepped up efforts of intelligence and reportage regarding Hugo Chávez’s health, supposed power struggles and disturbances at the heart of the Venezuelan military, conflicts between drug lords, and Cuba’s interference and direct involvement, as well as potential tampering, irregularity and fraud in the elections, based on the plan’s governing principle: questioning whether Venezuela would become a democracy or remain under the tyranny of Cuba and a narcojunta.
April 14 and the War of Symbols
But Chávez and the Venezuelan people again won this round. The technical stalemate turned out to be a scam from those quasi-journalists of Madrid’s El País and other related myth-peddling meddlers. But the war would continue, regardless. Just before Chávez’s death on March 5, 2013, the media war switched its focus toward his heir, Nicolás Maduro, with an emphasis on the use of images. Against this backdrop, smear campaign and electoral “dirty war” specialist Juan José Rendón and U.S. specialists in manipulation of the masses tried to reappropriate Chavist symbolism to set him at odds with Simón Bolivar. In another tactic of distraction and conscious ideological confusion when faced with their impossibility of electoral victory, the very same right wing who vilified and bastardized the thought of Bolivar and transformed it into an empty husk tried to take this same philosophy in order to use it against the man who gave it human character and popularized its political meaning.
On March 5, Venezuela expelled David del Mónaco, air force attaché of the U.S. Embassy in Caracas, and his number two, Devlin Costal, for illegal activity and proposing official destabilizing plans from within the Bolivarian National Armed Forces. Sabotage plots by Salvadorian mercenaries and American officials, intended to destabilize the country, were also discovered. Investigations pointed to Sharon Vanderbeele, a CIA agent in Caracas who was working under the façade of the Office of Regional Affairs.
On April 5, WikiLeaks would only confirm what many already knew: During his time as the face of the diplomatic mission in Caracas (2004-2007), U.S. Ambassador William Brownfield used $15 million from the U.S. Agency for International Development to train and equip more than 300 Venezuelan nongovernmental organizations, with the aim that they would carry out destabilizing missions during Washington’s reiterated attempts to overthrow Chávez.
The focus of this five-point strategy was to strengthen democratic institutions, infiltrate Chávez’s political bases, divide Chavists, protect vital American business interests and isolate Chávez on the international stage. Part of the funds served to finance meetings of right-wing political leaders, lecturers and university professors in Venezuela and across the region.
Functions like last week’s in Rosario and Buenos Aires were attended by — among others — Mario Vargas Llosa, José María Aznar, Luis Alberto Lacalle and Carlos Alberto Montaner, and had the aim of discrediting populism and Chávez’s “semi-dictatorship.” Imagine the scene: The heirs and propagandists of Franco, Videla, Gregorio Álvarez and Batista, campaigning against Nicolás Maduro on Washington’s behalf to destabilize Venezuela.
The White House’s current inhabitant, Barack Obama, knows that a victory for the ruling party’s candidate will only cement Venezuela’s socialist status. At the end of March, both the U.S. Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, and the Commander of the U.S. Southern Command, John Kelly, predicted that opposition candidate Henrique Capriles, of the corporate far-right, would be defeated. Hence Washington will continue to channel millions of dollars to help along secret operations and all branches of full-spectrum warfare — “soft” coups, low-intensity conflict and asymmetric, informational or fourth-generation warfare — against Venezuela’s Bolivarianism.
In the short term, it is probable that the White House and its allies will try to cast doubt on the transparency of the electoral process. It doesn’t matter whether they cry “fraud,” call on a civil “uprising” or intensify their efforts to weave a climate of anarchy, social destabilization and ungovernability. It’d be nothing new. Ever since his first electoral campaign in 1998, when they saw that his victory was inevitable, Washington’s media “dirty war machine” managed to plant a set of preconceived ideas about Chávez on CNN and in U.S., European and Latin American corporate private press outlets, painting him as a “coup leader,” “traitor to his country,” “demagogue,” “leftist fundamentalist,” “communist,” “radical populist” and a “dictator.” This was all in the name of manufacturing a “black legend” about the ex-paratrooper commander who, upon leaving prison, would take control of government the legal, constitutional and peaceful way.
Together with the Department of State’s bellicose diplomacy and the covert actions of the Pentagon and the CIA, these labels and others — used as ammunition by the media for the construction of fear in society, for the psychological manipulation of the people, for the generation of political hatred and incitement to violent and fratricidal warfare between Venezuelans — paved the way for April 2002’s coup d’état.
From a Media Strike to an Insurrectionary Lockout
The coup on April 12 was a classic example of an oligarchic, civic-military coup from the extreme right with American backing. It was a coup that stunk of oil and continental geopolitical realignments. The next objective was Cuba. It was not difficult to make out Otto Reich’s hand directing the rabble. The ex-U.S. ambassador in Caracas, an old “falcon” with links to the CIA and the Cuban-American terrorist mafia in Florida, hatched the plan together with his boss at the White House, John Maisto, undersecretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs and ex-proconsul in Panama. As the magazine Newsweek would subsequently reveal, Reich maintained personal contact with Gustavo Cisneros, Venezuelan TV magnate, in whose Venevisión office the conspiracy was conceived, and also personally gave guidance over the telephone to Pedro Carmona once he was sworn in as president before “almighty God” and with the blessing of Baltasar Porras, president of the Episcopal Conference. That old holy alliance: the sword and the power of money, together with the private media outlets that Chávez called “the four horsemen of the apocalypse”: Venevisión, Radio Caracas Televisión (RCTV), Globovisión and Televen, who cast journalism aside to put all of their persuasive powers toward becoming the co-stars of the first media coup d’état of the 21st century and win a war that was being waged for oil.
After the failure of Washington’s remote-controlled conspiracy and Chávez’s reinstatement by the people and Miraflores’ loyal military, the powers that be and the “free press” continued to push the buttons of a middle class bombarded by messages of classist hate in the media. And by December 2002, a new timeline for a coup was being drawn up: Operation “Black September,” after four months of delay, would follow a master-plan based around a rebellious strike by the heads of industry, large estate owners, ranchers and the so-called “nomenclature” of the upper echelons of Petróleos de Venezuela, PDVSA, to be reported with political and ideological bias by the main media outlets of Venezuela and the Americas.
The subversive strategy of these big businesses was outlined in “Confidential Dossier No. 5,” a document created by Coordinadora Democrática — the umbrella term for the oligarchic groups brought together by the Venezuelan Federation of Chambers of Commerce — their allies in the corrupt Confederation of Venezuelan Workers, and members of the conspiratorial right, who were unsettled and agitated following the exile of Carlos Andrés Pérez, the ex-president. Their tactics included a “citizens’ strike” of “quasi-insurrectional” proportions, which was to be combined with a strike by the elder statesmen of PDVSA, impairment of vital parts of the Venezuelan economy, self-sabotage, terrorist acts and agitation in the streets. All of the above was to be aided and abetted in the media by the Pentagon and CIA’s strategies of psychological warfare — dissemination of black propaganda, rumor and falsehood — in order to exploit the emotional desires of the people through persuasion, compulsive suggestion and engineered class-hatred.
Nonetheless, once again Chávez managed to save the country from the brink of civil war and defeated this racist oligarchic class and its allies without firing a single shot.
Feb. 15 and Washington’s Asymmetric War
On Feb. 15, 2009, a constitutional amendment was passed allowing all elected officials to be nominated for additional terms. This again validated Chávez’s leadership at the ballot and legitimized his project of a new socialism for the 21st century. This was bad news for Washington and its intellectual lapdogs, who, according to a vision shared by then-recently-elected President Obama, considered Chávez to be a negative force for harmony in the Western Hemisphere.
What would come next was easy to predict: Given Venezuela’s inclusion on the list of “global threats” to the United States, Obama would continue to wage asymmetric warfare against Chávez. In January of that year, at his confirmation hearing in the Capitol, the brand-new Department of State number two, James Steinberg, said that Washington had let Chávez have his way for too long. According to the former White House National Security Assessor and ex-analyst at the RAND Corporation, a think tank servicing the Pentagon, neither Chávez’s actions nor his vision were in the interests of the Venezuelan people or the population of Latin America at large. This was the very same diagnosis meted out to Allende’s Chile by Henry Kissinger in 1973. In Orwellian language, that should read that Chávez was a threat to the American empire’s geopolitical interests and their industrial and military obsessions. Hence, Washington would press on with its undercover war, without rules or limits, which some experts have defined as a fourth generation conflict.
Unlike traditional military combat, blitzkrieg and attrition warfare, fourth generation warfare — which may acquire psychological and physical dimensions, using techniques of psychoanalysis, marketing and what Foucault called “biopouvoir” — takes advantage of the strategic asymmetry between the two sides to gain an advantage. This had been Washington’s modus operandi for dealing with Venezuela since before 2002’s failed coup d’état, and has been continued ever since, with sabotage in the oil industry and demands for recall referenda.
In the circumstances surrounding Feb. 15, 2009, U.S. intelligence agencies put into place Operation Jaque, a conspiracy that was plotted in Puerto Rico the previous January. There, in the presence of head of Globovisión Alberto Federico Ravell, head of the center-right Justice First Party Julio Borges and other Venezuelan conspirators with the participation of Eduardo Frei and the top brass of Chile’s Christian Democratic Party, American strategists came up with new plans to destabilize the Chavist regime. They knew that, were Chávez to be re-elected in 2012, it would mean the consolidation of transitional processes and regional alliances in a number of Andean countries to the detriment of the economic and class interests of the White House, big business and their native allies.
The reaction of the Venezuelan plutocracy and those big media outlets engaged in the U.S.’ burgeoning war gave a glimpse of the conflict’s next phase. In an attempt to position itself in this new political landscape, this right-wing cell acting on Washington’s advice claimed that it had achieved a partial victory by bettering its previous high of 5 million votes against Chávez. Upon this base and with the support of U.S. and European conservative organizations (the Cato Institute, Heritage, Konrad Adenauer and the Spanish Foundation for Analysis and Social Studies), conservative politicians (Madeleine Albright, José María Áznar, Eduardo Frei, Václav Havel and Lech Walesa) and counter-revolutionary intellectual messiahs like Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Alberto Montaner, Enrique Krauze, Jorge G. Castañeda and others, they would now attempt to influence public opinion by singing that tired and well-worn tune: Chávez the totalitarian against a right wing disguised as the left.
This united conservative front used resources like the International Committee for Democracy in Cuba, part of Bush’s plan for Cuba, alongside the Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba and the Christian Democrat Organization of America. They were all supporters of “color revolutions” and soft coups in the ex-Soviet Republics, and were actively encouraging revolutions in Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador. It was clear, then, that the Obama administration would intensify its efforts in the fields of intelligence and counterintelligence, and that it would ramp up efforts to create financial barriers in Venezuela while destabilizing it politically with orchestrated street protests and planned chaos. Nonetheless, against the backdrop of the February referendum, Chávez won this battle too.
Chávez Defeats US Public Diplomacy
On Oct. 7, 2012, Chávez would face opposition candidate Henrique Capriles Radonski in another election. And once again, one of the great losers at the polls was that old snake in the grass, Washington’s so-called Office of Public Diplomacy. Having fueled media terrorism ever since the Cold War, this office, which had devoted itself to interrupting the area’s democratic process, engaged in a cowardly campaign between the end of July and election day to impose a set of ideas that, once disseminated and broadcast by media outlets in the United States, Latin America, Madrid and London, sought to claim that Capriles had won, despite the fact that exit polls showed Chávez to be the clear winner.
The governing principle of the campaign was that Capriles was not competing against Chávez alone; rather, he was fighting a group composed of drug lords, nepotistic politicians and Cubans who planned to use the election as a means to control the country once Chávez was no longer able to perform his duties because of his terminal illness. Thus they were attempting to maintain a sort of “Chavism without Chávez” through intimidation, violence and electoral fraud.
Following the orders of Shlomo Ben Ami and Alon Pinkas, Israeli diplomats and experts in propaganda, the campaign tried to conjure the image of Capriles as a serious, trustworthy man who offered stability, economic predictability and a tangible improvement in Venezuela’s relations with the outside world. Under him, the country would become a vibrant, open democracy, instead of an authoritarian military oligarchy. A timeline of 84 days was drawn up based on the burgeoning belief that Henrique Capriles Radonski was up against the axis of Cuba and the drug lords, whose potential authoritarian regime after Chávez’s death was a dangerous prospect for Venezuela.
In the 10 days leading up to Oct. 7, the campaign stepped up efforts of intelligence and reportage regarding Hugo Chávez’s health, supposed power struggles and disturbances at the heart of the Venezuelan military, conflicts between drug lords, and Cuba’s interference and direct involvement, as well as potential tampering, irregularity and fraud in the elections, based on the plan’s governing principle: questioning whether Venezuela would become a democracy or remain under the tyranny of Cuba and a narcojunta.
April 14 and the War of Symbols
But Chávez and the Venezuelan people again won this round. The technical stalemate turned out to be a scam from those quasi-journalists of Madrid’s El País and other related myth-peddling meddlers. But the war would continue, regardless. Just before Chávez’s death on March 5, 2013, the media war switched its focus toward his heir, Nicolás Maduro, with an emphasis on the use of images. Against this backdrop, smear campaign and electoral “dirty war” specialist Juan José Rendón and U.S. specialists in manipulation of the masses tried to reappropriate Chavist symbolism to set him at odds with Simón Bolivar. In another tactic of distraction and conscious ideological confusion when faced with their impossibility of electoral victory, the very same right wing who vilified and bastardized the thought of Bolivar and transformed it into an empty husk tried to take this same philosophy in order to use it against the man who gave it human character and popularized its political meaning.
On March 5, Venezuela expelled David del Mónaco, air force attaché of the U.S. Embassy in Caracas, and his number two, Devlin Costal, for illegal activity and proposing official destabilizing plans from within the Bolivarian National Armed Forces. Sabotage plots by Salvadorian mercenaries and American officials, intended to destabilize the country, were also discovered. Investigations pointed to Sharon Vanderbeele, a CIA agent in Caracas who was working under the façade of the Office of Regional Affairs.
On April 5, WikiLeaks would only confirm what many already knew: During his time as the face of the diplomatic mission in Caracas (2004-2007), U.S. Ambassador William Brownfield used $15 million from the U.S. Agency for International Development to train and equip more than 300 Venezuelan nongovernmental organizations, with the aim that they would carry out destabilizing missions during Washington’s reiterated attempts to overthrow Chávez.
The focus of this five-point strategy was to strengthen democratic institutions, infiltrate Chávez’s political bases, divide Chavists, protect vital American business interests and isolate Chávez on the international stage. Part of the funds served to finance meetings of right-wing political leaders, lecturers and university professors in Venezuela and across the region.
Functions like last week’s in Rosario and Buenos Aires were attended by — among others — Mario Vargas Llosa, José María Aznar, Luis Alberto Lacalle and Carlos Alberto Montaner, and had the aim of discrediting populism and Chávez’s “semi-dictatorship.” Imagine the scene: The heirs and propagandists of Franco, Videla, Gregorio Álvarez and Batista, campaigning against Nicolás Maduro on Washington’s behalf to destabilize Venezuela.
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