{"id":311473,"date":"2026-01-12T12:00:52","date_gmt":"2026-01-12T12:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=311473"},"modified":"2026-01-06T19:59:16","modified_gmt":"2026-01-06T19:59:16","slug":"venezuela-and-truth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2026\/01\/venezuela-and-truth\/","title":{"rendered":"Venezuela and Truth"},"content":{"rendered":"

4\u00a0 Jan 2026\u00a0<\/em>–\u00a0The mainstream media covered Venezuela non-stop yesterday. They many times mentioned Delcy Rodr\u00edguez, Vice President, because Trump stated she is now in charge. They never mentioned that 2026 marks the 50th anniversary of the torture to death of her father, socialist activist Jorge Rodr\u00edguez, by the CIA-backed security services of the US-aligned P\u00e9rez regime in Venezuela.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

That would of course spoil the evil communists versus nice democrats narrative that is being forced down everybody\u2019s throats.<\/p>\n

Nor did they mention that the elected governments of Hugo Ch\u00e1vez reduced extreme poverty by over 70%, reduced poverty by 50%, halved unemployment, quadrupled the number receiving a state pension and achieved 100% literacy. Ch\u00e1vez took Venezuela from the most unequal society for wealth distribution in Latin America to the most equal.<\/p>\n

Nor have they mentioned that Mar\u00eda Corina Machado is from one of Venezuela\u2019s wealthiest families, which dominated the electricity and steel industries before nationalisation, and that her backers are the very families that were behind those CIA-controlled murderous regimes.<\/p>\n

Economic sanctions imposed by the West \u2013 and another thing they have not mentioned is that the UK has confiscated over \u00a32 billion of the Venezuelan government\u2019s assets \u2013 have made it difficult for the Maduro government to do much more than shore up the gains of the Ch\u00e1vez years.<\/p>\n

But that Venezuela is a major production or trafficking point for narcotics entering the USA is simply a nonsense. Nicol\u00e1s Maduro has his faults, but he is not a drug trafficking kingpin. The claim is utter garbage.<\/p>\n

The willingness of the West to accept the opposition\u2019s dodgy vote tallies from the 2024 Presidential elections does not legitimise invasion and kidnap.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Yesterday almost every Western government came up with a statement that managed to endorse Trump\u2019s bombing and kidnap \u2013 plainly grossly illegal in international law \u2013 and simultaneously claim to support international law. The hypocrisy is truly off the scale. It is also precisely the Western powers that support the genocide in Gaza that support the attack on Venezuela.<\/p>\n

The genocide in Gaza demonstrated the end of hopes \u2013 which were extremely important to my own worldview \u2013 for the rule of international law to outweigh the brutal use of force in international relations. The kidnap of Maduro, the rush of Western powers to accept it, and the inability of the rest of the world to do anything about it, have underlined that international law is simply dead.<\/p>\n

In the long list of appalling awards of the Nobel peace prize, none can be worse than the latest to the Venezuelan traitor Mar\u00eda Corina Machado, intended actively to promote and bring forward the imperialist attack on Venezuela by the United States.<\/p>\n

It takes a great deal of effort to come up with a worse decision than to award Kissinger immediately after the massive bombing of Laos and Cambodia. It was a dreadful award, but it was intended to recognise the putative Paris peace deal and prod the United States towards honouring the peace process. Initially it was a joint award with Vietnamese negotiator L\u00ea \u0110\u1ee9c Th\u1ecd (who sensibly declined).<\/p>\n

The Kissinger award was a terrible mistake, but the Committee were seeking to end a war, starting from a willingness to cooperate with unprincipled realpolitik. In the award to Machado, they are deliberately seeking to endorse and promote the start of a war. That is a very different thing.<\/p>\n

Similarly the award to Obama was a crazed moment of hope after the despair of the invasion of Iraq. It was a combined mistaken belief that Obama would be better, with a mistaken idea it would encourage him to be so.<\/p>\n

I accept that the line I am drawing is a thin one; rewarding the perpetrators of Western aggression is only a short step away from actually encouraging Western aggression. But nevertheless a line has been crossed.<\/p>\n

The gross hypocrisy of the morally bankrupt Committee chairman, J\u00f8rgen Watne Frydnes, in claiming that the prize is for non-violent action on Venezuela, at the very moment that Trump gathered the largest invasion force since Iraq off Venezuela makes me feel thoughts towards Frydnes that ought not qualify me for any peace prize at all. I feel similarly towards Guterres and all those others abandoning their supposed international role to lick Trump\u2019s boot today.<\/p>\n

So what now for Venezuela? Well, on the most optimistic reading Trump\u2019s action was performative. He had to do something to avoid the Grand Old Duke of York jibes after that immense concentration of forces off Venezuela, and he has produced a spectacular that actually changes little.<\/p>\n

On this reading, the Americans may be making the same mistake they made in Iran, in believing that decapitation strategy and bombing will spark internal revolution. In Iran, they actually strengthened support for the Government.<\/p>\n

As of yesterday afternoon, the Bolivarian government in Caracas genuinely did not yet know what had happened, how far there was collusion in the armed forces in Maduro\u2019s kidnap, and whether they still had the control of the army.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s plain signal that the US views Rodr\u00edguez as in charge, and Trump\u2019s contemptuous dismissal of Machado \u2013 the only bright point in an appalling day \u2013 might give pause to any in Venezuela expecting active US support for a coup.<\/p>\n

To those who claim Maduro was a tyrant, I refer you to the comic opera Guaid\u00f3 coup of 30 April 2019. Guaid\u00f3 had been declared President of Venezuela by the western powers despite never even having been a candidate. He attempted a coup and wandered around Caracas with heavily armed henchmen, declaring himself President but just being laughed at by the army, police and population.<\/p>\n

In any country in the world Guaid\u00f3 would have been jailed for life for attempting an armed coup, and I expect in the majority he would have been executed. Maduro just patted him on the head and put him back on a plane.<\/p>\n

So much for the evil dictatorship.<\/p>\n

By pure chance, on Friday I had texted Delcy Rodr\u00edguez about arrangements for travel and accreditation so I could go and report from Venezuela and bring you more of the truth from that country that the media is hiding from you. I made plain I was not asking for financial support. Things are obviously fluid at the moment, but it is still my intention to get there.<\/p>\n

___________________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Craig John Murray <\/i>(born 17 Oct 1958)<\/i><\/span> is a Scottish author, human rights campaigner, journalist, and former diplomat for the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Between 2002 and 2004, he was the British ambassador to Uzbekistan during which time he exposed the violations of human rights by the Karimov administration. He was <\/i>Rector of the University of Dundee from 2007 to 2010 and was <\/em>jailed for eight months for contempt of court in 2021.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 craigmurray.org.uk<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

4 Jan 2026 – The mainstream media covered Venezuela non-stop yesterday. They did not mention that the elected governments of Hugo Ch\u00e1vez reduced extreme poverty by over 70%, reduced poverty by 50%, halved unemployment, quadrupled the number receiving a state pension and achieved 100% literacy. Ch\u00e1vez took Venezuela from the most unequal society for wealth distribution in Latin America to the most equal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":170094,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[225],"tags":[867,1441,417,3614,1126,1050,950,541,559,3530,86,2571,1190,329,2137,880,249,124,1888,70,557],"class_list":["post-311473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-spotlight","tag-anglo-america","tag-big-oil","tag-bullying","tag-disaster-capitalism","tag-hegemony","tag-imperialism","tag-invasion","tag-latin-america-caribbean","tag-maduro","tag-military-capitalism","tag-occupation","tag-official-lies-and-narratives","tag-regime-change","tag-resources","tag-south-america","tag-state-terrorism","tag-trump","tag-united-nations","tag-unsc","tag-usa","tag-venezuela"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311473"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311473\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":311474,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311473\/revisions\/311474"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/170094"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}