Who believes in paramilitaries?

According to a recent survey by the NGO Paz Activa about organized crime, 19.7% of Venezuelans believe the official version by the government that paramilitaries are to blame for the country’s organized crime. Almost the same percentage of those surveyed (18.9%) blamed guerillas.  

It was an inside job!

TeleSUR is the Venezuela government’s answer to what it considers a biased and imperialist centered international media landscape. It regularly republishes conspiracy theories about Venezuelan politics published originally by the Agencia Venezolana de Noticias.

However, being TeleSUR a global news outlet, it also gives space to international conspiracy theories. Here is a long article published in the TeleSur web page summarizing the most famous conspiracy theories around the 9/11 events of 2001. The theory favored by the author of the piece is that the events were an inside job by the Bush administration in order to start wars and get a lot of oil. A very similar piece was published by TeleSUR last year September.

The channel’s conspiracy theorist in residence, Miguel Pérez Pirela, known in Venezuela for claiming in 2012 that the opposition was sending encrypted subversive messages via newspaper crossword puzzles (here and here), has this video clip produced by TeleSur explaining what really happened in 9/11.

Our conspiracy theories are true because we have said many times that they are true

The article “Characterizing paramilitarism” by PSUV leader Freddy Bernal, published in Aporrea.org, is a good example of a typical rhetorical devise used in conspiracy theories: the conspiracy theory is true because we repeatedly said it is true and because we relatedly warned of the consequences of the conspiracy.

It matters little if the events can also be explained as the consequence of many other causes, for example: government incompetence. Such explanations will be dismissed as being also part of the conspiracy, part of a “smoke screen” or “media campaign” to cover up the conspiracy and blame the government.

According to Bernal, “the facts, and the actions of the security forces, are gradually proving the importation of the paramilitary culture in our country. This is a grim [nefasto] phenomenon about which we have warned time and again, pointing to the relation this plague [paramilitarism] has with a sector of the Venezuelan right-wing. The repeated denunciations made by the bolivarians about the issue have been disqualified by the opposition with the argument that they are but a ‘smoke screen’ to cover security deficiencies.”

The important premises of Bernal’s argument are: that the actions of the government are evidence of the truth of its own conspiracy theories, that the links between paramilitaries and the “right-wing” exit because the government has repeated often that they exist, and that there is no such a thing as “security deficiencies” in Venezuela.

Follows Bernal´s own explanation of recent events: “I believe that in Venezuela the right-wing, having been defeated several times in their traditional conspiratorial formulas (military coups, magnicidio, street insurrections, foreign interventions, etc.), has opted for plans to launch paramilitarism in order to overthrow the Venezuelan government. (…) The capture of the, no longer supposed but confessed, murderers of Liana Hergueta is evidence without any doubt of a diabolical cocktail made of opposition parties + paramilitarism + trafficking of dollars + guarimbas [street protests] + crime. The story told by the murderers confirms the denunciations we, the bolivarians, have been making…”

Magnicidio is back!

The last time president Maduro claimed to have evidence of a plot to assassinate him was December 14, 2014. From Ecuador, where he was attending UNASUR meeting, Maduro said that a sicario had been sent form Central America to kill him. No evidence was ever shown of the magnicidio attempt supposedly foiled by Venezuela’s secret services.

Today from Vietnam, where he is signing several agreements, Maduro said this: “We are being attacked from Bogotá. I have the evidence, and I will show how from Bogotá there is a campaign to kill me, [a campaign] of hatred, such as we had not faced in 15 or 16 years of Bolivarian Revolution (…). Unfortunately the Colombian government is giving its consent [anuencia] and turning a blind eye [to this campaign],” he added.    

Confessions as evidence and paramilitaries

This week Maduro’s government and official media have insisted on presenting the confessions of José Pérez Venta and Carlos Trejo, the main suspects in the murder case of Liana Hergueta, as evidence, the only presented so far, that there is a broad conspiracy by Colombian paramilitaries and the local opposition to destabilize the country.

The Agencia Venezolana de Noticias (AVN) is refuting the claim made by “national and international media that the [Hergueta] case was a police [sic] case, apparently isolated, of a murder of a women for money, when in truth it is the evidence of a direct relationship between right-wing groups in Venezuela and Colombian paramilitarism and its criminal practices.”

For AVN Pérez Venta’s confessions have “clearly stablished this criminal relation of antichavista sectors with paramilitary groups of Colombia.”

The PSUV governor of Aragua Tareck El Aissami also revealed in a news conference this week that Pérez Venta had confessed to being part of a plan to murder Daniela Cabello, the daughter of the president of the National Assembly Diosdado Cabello.

El Aissami said that this newly revealed part of Pérez Venta’s confession is evidence that “the opposition is engaged in the most disgusting violent plans against the country.”

However the pro-government news portal La Tabla (here reposted by Aporrea) reports that Andrea González and Dany Abreu, the two organizers of the plan to murder Daniela Cabello according to Pérez Venta, are a pastry cook and a student of electrical engineering with no links to the case, apart from Pérez Venta having named them.