COMMENTARY A lame Venezuelan regime claim that investigative journalists featured in a Frontline documentary were part of an epic corruption scheme likely portends plans to steal the July 28 election.
Dictator-President Nicolás Maduro has been called a lot of things since he took over Venezuela 11 years ago and turned the once prosperous democracy into the basket case of the Americas.
Incompetent clown. Criminal kleptocrat. Election fraudster. Brutish ideologue.
But here’s the description the socialist despot has hung onto that actually matters:
In control.
That is, it appears, until now.
Since his 2013 election — which he just barely won thanks to Venezuelans’ fears that he’d be, well, an incompetent clown and a brutish ideologue — Maduro has rarely if ever looked so not in control of his situation or that of the rancid revolution he lords over.
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The tables turned unexpectedly and dramatically for Maduro three weeks ago.
After barring the candidacy of popular opposition challenger María Corina Machado, he thought he was all set to steal the upcoming July 28 presidential contest as quickly and smoothly as putting down a troublesome dog — the way most autocrats handle elections and other things that bark too much.
He was sure Venezuela’s usually feckless opposition would never coalesce around an equally formidable replacement candidate.
Until it did.
The substitute challenger — former ambassador Edmundo González, who has Machado’s potent backing — leads Maduro by as many as 40 points in voter polls. That means Maduro now faces the seemingly uncontrollable prospect of either 1) letting González run and almost surely obliterate Maduro, or 2) nixing González’s candidacy, or otherwise rigging the election, and face the censure of even loyal and coddling fellow lefties like Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva — who himself has applauded González’s nomination as a positive turn for Venezuela.
Maduro hoped to steal the presidential contest as if putting a troublesome dog down — the way autocrats handle things like elections that bark too much.
If you think Maduro will accept what Monty’s offering behind Door Number 1, I’ve got some worthless Venezuelan bolívares I’d like to sell you. The only real question at this point may be how Maduro goes after the Door Number 2 prize.
And this week we probably got a taste of what's coming, in the form of a ludicrous accusation Maduro’s regime hurled at the Venezuelan journalists who’ve exposed its epic larceny.
The regime has now asserted that the respected investigative site Armando.info colluded in a scandal involving hundreds of millions of dollars allegedly looted from Venezuela’s state-run oil monopoly, via crypto-currency schemes, by a cabal led by sinister former petro-czar Tareck El Aissami.
Cataclysmic corruption
The absurd Armando.info claim is simply Maduro’s lame, preemptive response to a Frontline documentary debuting next Tuesday on PBS, titled A Dangerous Assignment: Uncovering Corruption in Maduro’s Venezuela. It follows the work of Armando.info’s reporters, many of whom went into exile years ago, as they uncovered the even more cataclysmic corruption plots of Maduro’s embezzlement-and-laundering czar, Colombian businessman Alex Saab.
Before the Biden Administration swapped Saab last December for U.S. prisoners held in Venezuela’s kangaroo judicial system, he was sitting in a Miami jail cell awaiting trial for international financial crimes after being arrested in Cape Verde. He is allegedly the monstrous mastermind behind the theft of probably billions of dollars from Venezuela’s coffers — food subsidy, public housing, oil production and currency exchange programs, to name a few — epochal criminality that’s largely responsible for the country’s crippling humanitarian crisis.
As Armando.info journalist Roberto Deniz told me from exile in Colombia: “Alex Saab is the symbol of the Venezuelan kleptocracy.”
Deniz, who figures prominently in “A Dangerous Assignment,” is one of the lead investigators who discovered Saab’s alleged abominations — which included hundreds of millions of purloined anti-poverty program dollars laundered through countries as far flung as Bulgaria.
Saab denies those charges; Maduro calls the Colombian a hero to Venezuela. Which of course is why Deniz is one of the Armando.info journos Maduro’s regime is suddenly and laughably fingering, in a sorry attempt to deflect Venezuelan and global attention from the Saab story.
And we’re likely to see many more sorry Maduro moves between now and July 28 to link Edmundo González to corruption — or treason, or "fascism" — in order to erase his name from the ballot. Or if not that, we’ll see a sorry plot on July 28 itself to erase votes for González from the official count — enough to erase that 40-point poll advantage he’ll carry into the election.
Enough to put that barking dog of democracy down.
Before it bites.
