Vice-president Istúriz blames a conspiracy policy for low oil prices

Venezuelan Vice-president Aristóbilo Isturiz presented yesterday his annual report (Memoria y Cuenta) to the opposition dominated National Assembly.

Isturiz told the assembly that the recent collapse of oil prices is no accident, but part of a “conspiracy policy” of the United States against oil producing countries.

He also said that last year Venezuela had suffered from an “induced scarcity” of basic products, for which he blamed smuggling, the hoarding of subsidized products, an attack against the Venezuelan currency, and industrial sabotage.  

Venezuelan Birthers active again

Opposition leaders claiming that Nicolás Maduro was really born in Colombia and not in Venezuela, and therefore is unfit for the post of President, have been again active in recent months.

The claims include suggestions that the Venezuelan government has been conspiring to erase the evidence of the president’s alleged real birth place.

In March 2015, the National Assembly deputy Walter Márquez reported the findings of his investigations in Colombia. Márquez said that Maduro’s birth certificate in Venezuela was a forged document, and that the president had also lied about the birth place of his mother, claiming that she was born in Rubio (Venezuela), when she was really born in Cúcuta (Colombia).

This week, opposition leader Pablo Medina declared that the death certificate of Maduro’s mother is also a forgery. He also claimed that registration book, where he claims should be the “real” birth certificate of the president showing that he was born in Colombia, has mysteriously disappeared from its archive in La Candelaria, Caracas. 

The Ungrateful Victims of Conspiracy Theories

The Agencia Venezolana de Noticias (AVN) has published an opinion piece by Hermán Mena Cifuentes titled “Lilian, la desagradecida.” Lilian Tintori is the wife of jailed opposition leader Leopoldo López.

According to Mena Cifuentes, Tintori and López are not the victims of a judicial process marred by irregularities, but instead are the conspiring victims of the “demon of ingratitude.” Tintori, says Mena Cifuentes, “has forgotten the favor Nicolas Maduro did to her by saving the life of her husband, and has become the protagonist of a smear campaign, which in the name of the Empire and its lackeys, has been put forth as part of a Fourth Generation War unleashed against the Bolivarian Revolution.”

In August 2015, president Maduro himself first proposed the idea that he had really saved Leopoldo López’s life by imprisoning him, because other opposition leaders such as Maria Corina Machado, Antonio Ledezma, and Henrique Capirles, were plotting with Colombian ex-president Álvaro Uribe to bring into the country “paramilitary operatives” to murder López. The aim of that conspiracy, according to Maduro, was to “stir chaos in the country.”

“Why did they want to kill Leopoldo López? To blame the Bolivarian Revolution,” Maduro said.

Tintori, for her part, recently declared that the government has been using drones to spy on her. “Last night a drone overflew my home and filmed through my windows. Violating my intimacy and my family’s,” wrote Tintori on Twitter on February 8.      

Zika virus is an imperialist conspiracy

Epidemics are one of the favorite themes of conspiracy theories. Sometimes these theories become dangerous and can even hamper medial relief efforts. Several conspiracy theories about the origin and transmission of the Zika virus can be now found in the internet.

Here is a recent piece published in the web site Apporrea.org titled “Zika: a bomb against the South.” The main argument of the author is that the Zika virus is part of a plot to destroy the south’s coming “demographic bonus,” and thus to keep it as a dependent territory.

Because the link between the Zika virus and microcephalia has not been conclusively proven, and the symptoms from the virus rarely become more serious than those of a normal flu, the author concludes that the emergency around Zika is a scam created by the Empire. The author recommends “patriotic governments and sovereign people to not recognize the Zika humanitarian crisis that the imperialists want to impose.”

Aporrea however is an independent chavista web portal and not an official media of the Venezuelan government. No Venezuelan government official is known to have publically subscribed to this theory.