Economic war justifies incumbent’s advantage

The CNE has still to give an exact date for the parliamentary elections scheduled for this year, but the PSUV’s primaries to be held in June 28 provides a glimpse into the discourse the government will use from now until the end of year campaign.

Not shy to use the government’s media advantage, Maduro “ceded” yesterday his weekly television show in public television “En Contacto con Maduro”, to the PSUV’s 1,162 primary candidates so that they can “go to the streets, under equal conditions, to create awareness, to mobilize the people, with unity, to prepare the victory for the 2015 Assembly [elections].”

Such advantage for the ruling PSUV party is justified, according to the Agencia Venezolana de Noticias (AVN), because the campaign by “the right” will be “predictable, clear, and direct: they seek nothing else but to attack the people with the economic war, which has been characterized by hoarding, usury, boycott, and the unlimited increase of prices, especially of basic products.”

Maduro further explained that “it is not a secret that the great capitalists, owners of the distribution and commerce chains in the country, are allied with the Venezuelan ultra-right in waging an economic war.”

AVN adds this paragraph of factual information to its press note in order to help the reader contextualize the news:

“To this [economic] war it is necessary to add other destabilization strategies of the right, such as the ‘Jericho Operation’, dismantled in the beginning of this year: the plan was to co-opt military officers with the aim of generating subversive actions in the country such as the bombing of ‘tactic objectives’ such as the Miraflores Palace, the Ministry of Defense, the Supreme Court, the White Palace, the Military Intelligence building, and the TV channel TELESUR.”

A link between the opposition primaries and the “media infamy” against Diosdado Cabello

The Agencia Venezolana de Noticias (AVN) sees a link between what it calls “the failure of the opposition primaries” to elect its candidates for this year’s parliamentary elections, and the recent revelations made by several international news outlets that Diosdado Cabello is under investigation by the United States of being the leader of a drug cartel.

In its note entitled “After the failure of its primaries the right intensifies its moral intervention against Venezuela,” AVN suggests that “to demoralize the people is a strategy used by the right against sobering nations. A strategy of which Venezuela has been a constant victim for the past 15 years, and which has intensified in recent days after the failure of the opposition in its primaries held on Sunday, May 17.”

The plan seems to be, according to AVN, to attack a very special symbol of the “moral strength of the people.” That symbol is Diosdado Cabello: “For this new assault [arremetida], which has been put into motion as a form of imperial intervention against Venezuela, aiming at the moral strength of the people, the selected target has been Diosdado Cabello, vice-president of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela and president of the National Assembly.”

The “weakness of the opposition” seems to be the motive behind this recent attack against the revolutionary moral symbol: “In the face of the weakness and demobilization of the opposition, as evidenced in the primaries, the media infamy against Cabello has been reactivated,” explains AVN.

Common crime as a conspiracy by the opposition

As commented in the previous post, the government has been recently trying to link Venezuela’s high crime rates to a plot by the opposition to supposedly destabilize the country. The government claims that common crime should not be understood as “common” at all, but as the result of paramilitaries acting in cahoots with the local opposition and its foreign allies with the aim of destabilizing the country. Interior Minister Gustavo González López calls this the “political use of criminal gangs.”

Yesterday President Nicolas Maduro also announced that he has “evidence of the articulation of the main leaders of the Venezuelan and Colombian far-right with criminal gangs, which they hire and pay with drugs and dollars to selectively murder citizens in the streets, and thus sow chaos in the country.”

Maduro did not give details about the evidence supporting his or González López’s claims, but called this plot a “second front of attack”, closely linked to the “first front” which is the economic war he claims is being waged against the country:

“The second front of attack is organized crime, paid with the drugs and the money of the Colombian right and ultra-right. I thus denounce it here!” further explained Maduro. 

Paramilitary language games

In Venezuela the term paramilitary commonly used to refer to Colombian right wing criminal organizations formed during that country’s internal conflict.

In its conspiracy rhetoric the Venezuelan government often claims that groups it denominates as “paramilitary” are in the country and in cahoots with the local Venezuelan opposition engaged in “destabilizing” activities.

By explaining common crimes in Venezuela as an expression of infiltrated paramilitaries, the government also tries to blame the local opposition for the countries high levels of criminality.

Yesterday for example, the Minister of Interior, Peace and Justice, Gustavo González López, announced that intelligence officers of the Servicio Bolivariano de Inteligencia Nacional (SEBIN) have “disarticulated” a “criminal paramilitary band” which acted under the name Gamma and operated in the Sucre Municipality of Miranda. Opposition leader Capriles Radonski is governor of Miranda and government officials often claim that he is protecting military groups in his state.

González Lopez informed that several arrests had been made, but that the authorities were still searching for the “financiers” of the group. He further assured that those arrested “have links with the political use of criminal gangs.”

The minister also gave his explanation of what exactly should be understood by the term paramilitary: “it is basically an answer by the structure of the economic elite, the financial elite, the political elite, which seeks to sustain itself in power, in a blunt an persistent form [de manera grosera y persistente], one way or another.”

He also again linked paramilitaries to the murder of PSUV deputy Robert Serra last year and added: “they have mutated in a perverse way, they are trying to confuse [the population] by making us believe we are facing a simple problem [problemita] of common crime. I want to warn that this is not a problem of common crime but the use of common crime by the paramilitaries.”

Victory over economic war near

Victory is in sight, announced president Maduro yesterday: “With the maximum military-civic union and the mobilization of the People, rooted in socialism, the basis will be consolidated for the defeat within the next four month of the economic war waged by the right wing with the aim of destabilizing the country, through hoarding, speculation, and smuggling of basic products,” he announced according to the Agencia Venezolana de Noticias.

“The oligarchy is betting on breaking our fatherland by way of the economic war, by disillusioning the people, demoralizing it,” explained Maduro.

The new offensive will include a propaganda push because, said Maduro, “we need an educated people, cultivated, with a high degree of consciousness, [with] a new human spirituality.”

On a more concrete level, Maduro announced that final victory in the economic war will be achieved by strengthening State controls over the economy, specifically by more closely controlling the fixed prices of basic products. Maduro complained that his enemies are now using the SIMADI dollar, one of the several exchange rates fixed by the government, as a benchmark for stablishing prices, instead of the lowest official rate: “they twisted [the currency controls] with their evilness, as the scammers they actually are. They are taking the people’s money from their pockets. Parasite capitalism is taking the money from the Venezuelan people’s pockets.”

Maduro will therefore stablish a new “scheme which will allow us to consolidate new modalities for the establishment of just prices and for the fixing, control and compliance of compulsory just prices in the country.”