True to form, in the run-up to Venezuela’s 28 July presidential election, the bourgeois media in Britain ramped up its attacks on the government of President Nicolas Maduro. Most pernicious were the articles churned out, both before and after the election, by The Guardian, which has consistently used its supposedly ‘left of centre’ credentials to perform a hatchet job on the Bolivarian Revolution in the service of imperialism.
Following the election, the paper’s Latin American correspondent Tom Phillips, whose links are with the pro-opposition Venezuelan press, went into overdrive, producing 30 anti-government articles in a month that railed incessantly against ‘one of the world’s most unyielding authoritarian regimes’. Phillips makes no bones about his allegiances, writing on 11 September ‘Against all the odds, [the opposition] pulled off a once-inconceivable democratic victory against one of the world’s most unyielding authoritarian regimes.’ Articles authored or co-authored by Phillips trumpeted the views of the enemies of the Bolivarian Revolution: ‘Anti-Maduro campaign “stronger than ever”, says Machado’ (9 September 2024); ‘González “best hope for democracy”’ says Biden as leader vows to fight on’ (11 September 2024 – despite González having rather embarrassingly high-tailed it to Madrid at this point). Claims by opposition figures are left largely unchallenged. The Guardian has given prominent interviews to key leaders of the opposition, while denigrating comments made by government officials. Anti-Maduro critiques from hostile Western officials, think tanks and NGOs are given extensive space, with their political agendas deliberately glossed over; for example when Phillips disingenuously quotes Phil Gunson of the International Crisis Group as an ‘expert’ – somehow failing to mention that Gunson is a former Guardian journalist notorious for propagating opposition lies about the anti-Chávez coup in 2002. Maduro is frequently described as ‘clinging to power’, the outpourings of popular pro-government sympathies on the streets of Caracas ignored. Sympathetic coverage is afforded to the purported ‘fierce repression’ of opposition supporters, who are portrayed as a kind of Venezuelan rainbow coalition movement where ‘caraqueños of all ages and from all walks of life hit the streets to demand an end to Maduro’s 11-year presidency’. However, scant attention is paid to government supporters and civilians who have been attacked in the streets by violent gangs with deep ties to the opposition and a penchant for racist lynchings.
The Guardian’s distortions are necessary to fulfil its role of publishing imperialist propaganda from a superficially radical perspective. As pointed out by the academic Justin Podur, who has written extensively on the media war on Venezuela, The Guardian has a long history of being ‘overwhelmingly hostile and dishonest – usually through lies of omission’ about Venezuela’s socialist government, particularly former President Hugo Chávez and current leader Nicolas Maduro. It deliberately ignores the social movements that comprise the bulk of support for the ruling PSUV and Chavismo, the political movement started by Chávez and emphasising more equal redistribution of the nation’s oil wealth and support for grassroots political control. The Guardian regularly ignores the achievements of the Bolivarian Revolution in poverty reduction, housebuilding, literacy, healthcare, developing communal political formations and more, while emphasising any setbacks, real or imagined. The Guardian routinely insists that the economic struggles are largely a result of ‘Maduro’s policy mistakes and corruption’, despite US sanctions having reduced national income to just 1% of its pre-sanctions size by 2021, according to the UN High Commission for Human Rights, and caused the deaths of 100,000 Venezuelans between 2017 and 2020.
The legitimate and historically- grounded concerns of the Venezuelan government about sabotage, assassination plots and coup attempts are dismissed or ridiculed by The Guardian. This is to deliberately gloss over Western governments’ open support for foreign military intervention, as well as ignoring multiple US-backed coup attempts in Venezuela (and the ruinous history of US interference in Latin America as a whole, with the US carrying out more than 40 coups there within a century). This intervention is an open secret: former US National Security Advisor John Bolton famously admitted that – ‘as somebody who has helped plan coups d’état’ – the US had planned a coup against Venezuela in 2019, while another senior US official compared sanctions to ‘when Darth Vader constricts somebody’s throat, that’s what we are doing to the regime economically’. Meanwhile, The Guardian plays directly into the hands of imperialist interventionists.
In the same way that The Guardian leapt to support the discreditable – and now thoroughly discredited – imperialist stooge president Juan Guaido in 2019, Venezuela’s new batch of far-right would-be leaders have featured prominently and positively in its coverage. Maria Corina Machado was described as ‘charismatic’ and the Venezuelan people’s ‘last hope’. What is never mentioned is her fervent support for the illegal Western sanctions imposed on Venezuela or her backing of previous coup attempts.
Meanwhile, the opposition presidential candidate González – a man dismissed by Venezuelan interior minister Diosdado Cabello as ‘a coup-mongering rat’ – is described as a ‘soft-spoken septuagenarian’ who ‘has promised to build a country of prosperity, democracy and peace’. Elsewhere, the paper referred to González as ‘a bird-loving granddad… [and] a good-natured moderate without any personal political ambitions’. Omitted from this record are González’s actual politics: his neoliberal pro-privatisation platform, his role as a stand-in for the US-backed Machado, or his work in supporting anti-communist death squads in El Salvador as part of the US-run Plan Cóndor counterinsurgency programme. When González and Machado called for the military to abandon Maduro – essentially a call for a coup – The Guardian uncritically presented this merely as urging ‘the police and armed forces to abandon the strongman leader and his “despicable interests”’ (5 August 2024).
But in the real world, the consistent drip-feed of imperialist propaganda by newspapers like The Guardian is belied by the unwavering commitment of the Venezuelan working class to defend the Bolivarian Revolution, and international solidarity with Venezuela – as reflected in the delegates from 95 countries who attended an international anti-fascism congress in Caracas at the end of September. No mention of that in The Guardian.
David Bloomfield
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 302 October/November 2024
