Counterpunch: Hybrid Conspiracy Theories

This excellent article by María Páez Victor, neatly packs into one most of the sometimes disperse conspiracy theories the Venezuelan government has been deploying in recent years.

Páez Victor breaks what she calls “the cacophony of misinformation about Venezuela,” by mostly repeating the cacophonic themes of the government’s media apparatus (Unfortunately, the links to the many endnotes in her article do not seem to be working.)

As Greg Weeks noted (@GregWeeks), not many writers claim today that Maduro’s is the “legitimate, democratically elected Venezuelan government that represents the hitherto marginalized, impoverished, traditionally abandoned popular classes,” as Páez Victor bravely states in her opening lines.

Hybrid War is the all-encompassing name Páez Victor uses for the “second generation” warfare the Venezuelan government claims its enemies are waging. Explains the author: “Hybrid warfare, or war of the second generation, is ‘a military strategy, which employs political warfare and blends conventional warfare, irregular warfare and cyber-warfare with other influencing methods, such as fake news, diplomacy, lawfare and foreign electoral intervention’.” (quoting an unknown source as the endnotes are broken.)

Páez unfortunately only glosses one of chavista’s favorite conspiracy themes “The untimely and mysterious death of Hugo Chávez.” She does, however, pay special attention to the “Cyberattack on the electricity system” as an explanation for the most recent electricity blackouts. Despite the immense disruption the blackouts have produced, Páez finds “however remarkable beyond any expectation that no riots, no social unrest occurred: the people were calm, knowing they were under attack and that this was not the inefficiency of their government.”

Follows a long reconstruction of Venezuelan history as a class-racial-antiimperialist struggle, leading up to Hugo Chávez hierophany and the creation of a new popular state, now at war with a “fascist force backed by the USA.”