News reports from various media outlets of the Spanish-speaking world have stated that the government of Brazil will not accept the ruling of the Venezuelan Election Chamber of the Supreme Court in the dispute over the election results. The governments of Colombia and Mexico are roughly in a similar position and, with a more belligerent stance, there is Chile.
What does this attitude reveal? It is simple: the enormous effectiveness of the blackmailing power of the empire, which through an unprecedented media, diplomatic and economic offensive (even worse than the one suffered by President Salvador Allende in Chile because at that time the media had much less firepower and social networks had not yet been born) has managed to install as an irrefutable certainty the idea that the election of Nicolás Maduro was fraudulent.
Such a hoax is nothing more than another example of the power of the propaganda elaborated by the US-based lie and fake news mills, which for months have been announcing that there would be fraud in the Venezuelan elections. And they announced it with the same irresponsibility and impunity with which they used to say that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Unfortunately, Latin American governments seem unable to neutralize the extortion designed in Washington and carried out by hundreds of media outlets and pounded by thousands of spokepersons who shout in chorus the same melody: “there was fraud, show the tallies!”
But it turns out that when last Wednesday the major right wing party had the opportunity to show the tally sheets proving its triumph before the Electoral Chamber of the Superior Constitutional Court, its spokespersons showed absolutely nothing. Moreover, they said, and I quote, that they “do not have tally sheets from the witnesses at the tables, nor lists of witnesses,” alleging furthermore that they did not participate in the process of transferring and safeguarding any of the electoral material. Likewise, they pointed out that the SUMATE (a supposedly independent) organization is part of the technical advisory team of the Alianza Plataforma Unitaria Democrática, and at the same time they did not know who uploaded the information of the alleged tally sheets in the web page of that organization that granted the victory to Edmundo González Urrutia.
Despite such an emphatic confession, the government of President Lula da Silva continues to demand that “the tallies be shown”, an attitude that is not only unusual and disrespectful of the internal affairs of another state, but also paradoxical because where are the tallies that prove that Lula won the 2022 elections? Did he ever show them? No, despite the denunciations of the Bolsonaristas and Steve Bannon. Neither did Joe Biden, and several other governors, because there are none. What happens is that in the Brazilian electoral system, less reliable and transparent than the Venezuelan one, those tallies do not exist; there are no paper receipts to confirm the electoral result shown by the voting machines. There is only the blind and suicidal trust that these cannot be hacked and the electoral result provided by the computer device is the faithful transcription of the will of the citizens. A reckless belief at least, if not absurd or laughable. Precisely because of this lack of transparency, since it is not possible to compare the electronic result with the ballot papers, countries such as the United Kingdom, Germany, Finland, Holland, Ireland, Kazakhstan and Norway have banned electronic voting. I repeat: where are your tallies, President Lula? Why are you now demanding them from the Bolivarian government?
The Brazilian president and his advisors should be very clear that what is at stake in Venezuela is not the electoral verdict but the stealing by the United States of the immense oil reserves of that country. It is naïve to think that all this shrapnel of the media is because of a few voting tallies or a percentage of votes. “It’s the oil, stupid”, we can say paraphrasing Bill Clinton. And Washington’s will to plunder is not going to be appeased by stealing Venezuelan oil alone. Take note, President Lula: they are also coming for the Brazilian “Pre-Salt”, which with its almost 14,000 million barrels -very little compared to the more than 300,000 million that Venezuela possesses- is still a morsel that excites the insatiable appetite of the empire and you will see how sooner than later Washington will also try to seize this wealth that belongs to all Brazilians.
Does it seem coincidental to you that the US 4th Fleet, deactivated since 1950, was reactivated in 2008 a few months after you announced the discovery of the “Pre-Salt,” hailing it as “the second independence for Brazil”? There are no random coincidences in the world of geopolitics, President. But in order to seize Brazilian oil and gas, Washington must first break up the South American bloc and foment enmity between Brazil and Venezuela, preventing these two great nations from acting in concert and thus remaining defenseless before the empire. They are on the verge of doing so. I hope you can free yourself from the extortion to which the empire is subjecting you with its army of operators, pseudo-journalists, hired diplomats and venal politicians who attack you day and night and recognize, once and for all, that Nicolás Maduro is the legitimate president of Venezuela and that the allegations of the opposition are totally unfounded, as has been proven in court. And, furthermore, that a joint project be drawn up without further delay within the framework of UNASUR, in order to defend the enormous wealth of South America. Otherwise, these will pass into the hands of the United States via initiatives of the IVth Fleet and the Southern Command.
Atilio Boron is a renowned Argentine sociologist and political scientist and author of dozens of books including Venezuela: Urgent Readings from the South, Reinventing the Left in the 21st Century, and Latin America in the Geopolitics of Imperialism.
