Diagnosing the political opposition

Questions by the opposition about the mental health of president Chávez were common before his death. His successor Nicolás Maduro has also been “psychologically diagnosed” by critics. Venezuelan government agencies and officials are increasingly also using a rhetoric taken from the field of psychology with political intent: opposition to the government, or even “critical chavismo”, is regularly now labeled in government media as a mental disorder. Opposition discourse is also analyzed as part of a “psychological war” aimed at the Venezuelan people.

The trend was originally set by PSUV leader Jorge Rodríguez, a psychiatrist and mayor of the Libertador Municipality of Caracas. Rodriguez has hosted a public television show called Politica desde el Divan since 2015 (watch the first episode here.) According to its web page description, in the show “political subjectivities, discourses, classical tensions, and the forces that produce the social scene are analyzed, arguing that politics, no matter its nature, is constituted by measurable and scientifically verifiable (facts).” In practice, Rodríguez regularly analyses opposition figures and questions their mental sanity. He explains the opposition discourse as a whole as a part of a “psychological war” waged by the Empire and its local allies against the Bolivarian revolution.

Psychological diagnoses have also been waged against internal government critics. Most recently PSUV leader and National Assembly deputy Pedro Carreño formally asked the Supreme Justice Tribunal to name a medical board to evaluate the mental health of Attorney General Luisa Ortega Díaz, who has criticized the Constitutive Assembly called by president Maduro. “The attorney is showing signs of mental insanity, and her appointment should therefore be revised,” diagnosed Carreño.

In order to better draw from the tools of psychology to understand the current crisis, the Venezuelan government sponsored the “First International Forum on Psychology, Violence, and Psychological Operations,” from 12 to 24 June in Caracas.

Information Minister Ernesto Villegas was the keynote speaker for the inauguration of the event. He encouraged the 11 international psychologists participating in the forum to discuss the “manipulation of information mechanisms used in the spiral of fascist violence now lived by the country. (…) Do not leave outside the range of your radar the extent and severity of the fascist phenomenon in the country,” asked Villegas in his speech.

During the academic sessions, according to government media, international experts devoted most of their attention to the analysis of the “main psychological operations used by the right-wing against the revolution in Venezuela.” For example, research by Argentinian psychologist Mario Colussi has led him to conclude that “under a systematic and progressive attack scheme, a plan of economic strangling, that has also created the conditions for a psychological war, has been stablished in Venezuela.”

The Venezuelan psychologist Fernando Giuliani, also a participant in the forum, pointed out that “the right-wing is trying to create stereotypes and prejudices in order to diminish critical capacity (capacidad reflexiva) of the populace, so that the populace itself will generate the conditions for the overthrow (of the government).”

The idea that the enemies of the revolution are waging a “psychological war” has also been argued by pro-government pollster Hynterlaces since 2015. In its reports Hynterlaces has regularly accused the opposition of “inducing neurotic responses” in the Venezuelan people (In this blog here, here, and here.) 

  

Conspiracy against Constituent Assembly

President Maduro is launching a preemptive conspiracy theory against what he says is a future plot against the Constituent Assembly he is convening. He is calling for “civic-military union” against this plot.

“If one of these days Venezuela wakes up to news of a conspiracy, of a plot, to stop the popular constituent process, which has been constitutionally set for July 30, I call upon the civic military union to defeat, on the streets, the conspiracy, the plot, the coup d’état, that could be staged against the call for a Constitutive (Assembly),” the President said yesterday.

Apparently referring to the Attorney General, Luisa Ortega Díaz, who has filed a petition to the Supreme Court of Justice to halt the Constitutive Assembly process, Maduro warned against “traitors and treasons.”

The Nutella plot

#Nutella has been the Twitter top trending topic for Venezuela all morning today.

Yesterday Venezuela government media reported that the pro-government “Fundación para Niños, Niñas y Adolescentes de Caracas” handed the public prosecutor’s office a document with more than “one hundred individual and collective complains” about minors being used by the opposition in “terrorist actions” in the context of this month’s protests.

In one of the testimonial videos shown by Telesur, a woman tells of her son being “involuntarily induced” to participate in the protests. The woman directly accuses Lilian Tintori, wife of imprisoned opposition leader Leopoldo López, of offering the popular hazelnut spread Nutella to the child if he was willing to “cause terrorism in the country.”

“Tintori asked my son what he liked the most. He answered Nutella. She told him that if he hit the guard [National Guard] with a bottle she was handing him, which was full of fuel and had a piece of cloth, she would give him Nutella,” says the woman in the video.

News according to public media

Here is a selection of “infographics” produced by Venezuelan news outlet Telesur this week and posted in social networks.

In this image Telesur explains how “fake news” is fabricated against the Venezuelan government. The objective of these fabrications is “To reach a climatic point, as planned in manuals prepared by the Pentagon: in order to induce the turning of the population against its own government.” Possible discontent of the populations with its own government is, of course, out of the question.

Comparisons of the Venezuelan case with Chile’s 1973 coup have been part of the official rhetoric for a long time. Here is Telesur’s version. It includes the opposition funded by the US, economic attacks, and a “psychological warfare” by the media.

Finally here is Telesur explaining OAS meddling (injerencista) agenda against Venezuela, in cahoots with the local opposition. 

False positives and intervention

Minister of Foreign Relations, Delcy Rodríguez, met yesterday the international press correspondents in Venezuela to tell them that “media corporations have a historic responsibility in the configuration of facts that have justified interventions, such as in Iraq, Libya, and Syria, and this is also a manual they are trying to impose in Venezuela.”

“All imperial wars, in the history of humanity, have always been preceded by media campaigns validating their actions,” further explained Rodríguez. She also asked the international press to verify their sources and to truthfully inform what is happening in Venezuela.

The prime example of this international media disinformation campaign against Venezuela, presented by Rodríguez and the government’s media apparatus, is the death of the young opposition protester Juan Pernalete on April 26.

Witnesses and media have alleged that Pernalete died of wounds caused by a teargas bomb directly fired at close range to his chest by the security forces.

Rodríguez says however, that “the elements shown today totally undermine that version and this is why we are calling for news to be presented in the most objective way possible.”

Those elements undermining the media version were presented by Communication and Information Minister, Ernesto Villegas. He showed a video taken during the confusing seconds after Pernalete went down and other protestors were carrying him away.

Villegas explained that this video is part of “a police approximation that shows with a high degree of certainty the possibility that this young man was murdered with a weapon called captive bolt gun [pistola de perno], a type of gun used in livestock farming, to finish off cattle, and we have found elements of criminalistics and news worthy interest that point to this direction.”

The video shown by Villegas had been originally posted by pro-opposition newspaper El Nacional. The Information Minister however invited the international press to more closely watch the video for “criminalistics elements.”

For example, said the Minister, one of the protestors in the video screams “Was he hit?” to which the answer from another from a second is “No!” A close up of the moment two protestors are aiding Pernalete out of the protest line seems to show, according to Villegas, one of them pulling his hand from out under Pernalete’s t-shirt. This is a “suspicious attitude” which has led police investigators to conclude that the captive bolt gun could have been used to kill Pernalete.

“It’s all part of a strategy of a construction of false positives. The similarities in the construction of facts that do not exist and that justify violations of international rights, this is our concern,” concluded Delcy Rodríguez.