Maduro’s Magnicidio

President Maduro does not claim there is a plot to assassinate him as often as his predecessor did. This week however, Maduro directly accused opposition leader and president of the National Assembly, Julio Borges, of being “implicated” in an assassination plot against him.

“An order has been issued to assassinate the president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, and that order comes from the Oval Office, and Julio Borges is implicated in this outrage with all his unlimited cynicism, with his unlimited immorality,” said Maduro.

The president provided no evidence for his claims, but he had declared on August 19 that US president Trump’s declarations about Venezuela implied a direct threat to his life. According to Maduro:

“The threats made today by Trump, I know how to exactly interpret them: Donald Trump has threatened to kill the President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, (…) but I tell him that if something happened to me, they would regret it for a hundred years, because the people would rise against imperialism.”

“Evidence” of Borge’s part in the plot is provided by the Agencia Venezolana de Noticias (AVN). According to AVN, the position leader is “one of the main promoters of an interventionist campaign against Venezuela. In the last weeks he has met several US government high officials to ask for an assault (arremetida) against the fatherland.”

AVN also cites a previous two coup magnicidio plot claims made by the government as evidence for the current plot: The Carpeta Amarilla (2014), and the Blue Coup plots (2015, also known as the Jericho Operation). No evidence has ever surfaced for those two previous plots.

9/11, again…

For several years on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Venezuelan government sponsored Telesur has published a piece explaining the “many questions that still linger about the attack.” (See here my post of previous years.)

This year’s article by Telesur is mainly about Scholars for 9/11 Truth, (From its webpage: “Scholars for 9/11 Truth is a non-partisan association of faculty, students, and scholars, in fields as diverse as history, science, military affairs, psychology, and philosophy, dedicated to exposing falsehoods and to revealing truths behind 9/11.” A spin-off of the group publishes the Journal of 9/11 studies. In the next months Aposta, Revista de Ciencias Sociales will publish a piece by me, in Spanish, featuring a detailed analysis of back issues of the journal up to 2014.)

The Agencia Venezolana de Noticas also carries this year an article by Hermán Mena Cifuentes, often featured in this blog. The tittle of Mena Cifuentes article: Is Nature punishing the United States for its aggressions against Venezuela and for the genocide of September 11?

The author writes that the United States “seems destined by nature to be plagued with misery by nature acting in the name of justice with devastating hurricanes that are drowning its economy, as punishment for the immoral and illegal sanctions with which they [The US] hope to drown the Venezuelan economy.”

Mena Cifuentes also argues that the punishment the United States is currently receiving is connected to the 9/11 attacks. According to the author: “Noted scientists, experts in accidents and explosives, and journalists, several of whom have died in “strange” accidents, others in exchanges with the police, have attributed the genocide [of 9/11] to the Yankee government, who used it as a pretext to fight against terrorism and to unleash against Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, and Syria, wars to take over their oil, like they are doing today against Venezuela.”