[News] Media Continue to Push Misinformation About Venezuela and Drug Trafficking

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/14669


  Media Continue to Push Misinformation About Venezuela and Drug Trafficking

By Lucas Koerner and Ricardo Vaz - September 26, 2019
------------------------------------------------------------------------

In recent years, Western corporate journalists have turned to 
systematically citing unnamed sources and secret documents from the US 
national security state. Indeed, one would be forgiven for thinking it 
was standard operating procedure.

The *Wall Street Journal* (9/15/19 
<https://www.wsj.com/articles/venezuelas-hugo-chavez-worked-to-flood-u-s-with-cocaine-u-s-prosecutors-say-11568557780>) 
takes this “deep state” fan fiction genre to new heights with its latest 
on Venezuela, titled “Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez Worked to Flood US with 
Cocaine, US Prosecutors Say.”

As advertised, the *Journal*’s Juan Forero 
<https://fair.org/?s=Juan+Forero> echoes allegations against the 
Venezuelan government by US officials, which are contained in 
undisclosed “documents obtained by the *Wall Street Journal*.”

There is only one slight problem with this news: It’s not new, and is 
based entirely on the word of US prosecutors and defector-turned-witness 
testimony.


      *A stale, evidence-free tale*

Like the conspiracy theory of Hezbollah 
<https://fair.org/home/nyt-parrots-us-propaganda-on-hezbollah-in-venezuela/> activity 
in Venezuela, which Nicholas Casey recently dusted off for the *New York 
Times *(5/2/19 
<https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/02/world/americas/venezuela-maduro-hezbollah-drugs.html>), 
allegations of Chavista drug trafficking count among the corporate 
media’s favorite Venezuela soundbites.

Back in 2008, President Bush’s Treasury Department accused 
<https://www.treasury.gov/press-center/press-releases/Pages/hp1132.aspx> top 
Venezuelan officials of “materially assisting the narcotics trafficking 
activities of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).”

At the time, the *New York Times* (9/12/08 
<https://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/12/world/americas/12iht-13venez.16104234.html>) 
and other outlets repeated the allegations, while ignoring then–OAS 
Secretary General Miguel Insulza’s testimony 
<https://www.commondreams.org/news/2008/04/11/oas-chief-us-congress-no-venezuela-terrorist-link?amp> before 
the US Congress that there is “no evidence” tying Venezuela to the FARC.

The *Guardian *(2/12/08 
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/feb/03/venezuela.colombia>), 
ever willing to serve Washington’s foreign policy interests, also 
debuted its own bombshell “investigation” in 2008, headlined “Revealed: 
Chávez Role in Cocaine Trail to Europe.” All these spectacular claims 
rely on the testimony of anonymous intelligence officials and alleged 
FARC deserters, to whom readers are expected to give the benefit of the 
doubt.

Fast forward to 2015, the *Journal*’s Forero and Jose de Cordoba 
(5/18/15 
<https://www.wsj.com/articles/venezuelan-officials-suspected-of-turning-country-into-global-cocaine-hub-1431977784>) 
quoted unnamed Justice Department officials accusing Venezuela’s ruling 
Socialist Party’s No. 2, Diosdado Cabello, of heading a drug cartel. No 
evidence was presented to support the claims, and the Justice Department 
has, four years later, yet to unseal an indictment against Cabello.

Forero’s latest article rehashes the same allegations regarding the 
mythical “Cartel of the Suns,” but extends them to taint late President 
Hugo Chávez, who is purported to have “wielded cocaine trafficking as a 
weapon.”


      *Relying on traitors’ testimony*

Most of Forero’s report is an uncritical recitation of the claims 
contained in the “documents.” Unsurprisingly, all of the sources 
mentioned are Venezuelan government defectors, who have a clear 
incentive to fabricate information in order to secure their status in 
the United States and protect themselves against possible prosecution.

Since 2015, the *Journal* has reported the Justice Department’s “star 
witness” to be former Chávez bodyguard Leamsy Salazar, who defected to 
the US in 2014. Over the subsequent years, Salazar has proven himself a 
steady source of wild, unsubstantiated allegations 
<https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/11385> involving Cabello and other 
top Bolivarian officials that have been repeated by corporate journalists.

On this occasion, we are expected to take at face value Salazar’s claims 
of having seen “what appeared to be cocaine” shipped on Venezuelan speed 
boats, overhearing Chávez order weapons for the FARC over the phone, and 
witnessing the late president promise to divert funds from state oil 
company PDVSA to the guerrilla group.

Forero does not cite additional, independently verifiable evidence that 
might support these allegations, which suggests that the Justice 
Department doesn’t have any.

This procedure is repeated with other state witnesses, including former 
Venezuelan Supreme Court Justice Eladio Aponte, who “fled to the US in 
2012 and has been a witness on drug cases, said a person familiar with 
his role in the investigations.”

Here Forero commits a particularly glaring omission. Aponte only fled 
Venezuela with DEA help after he was identified 
<https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-judge-idUSBRE83O1ET20120425> as 
the business partner of Venezuelan drug lord Walid Makled. As we 
examined 
<https://fair.org/home/nyt-parrots-us-propaganda-on-hezbollah-in-venezuela/> in 
the case of the drug-trafficking accusations against current Industry 
Minister Tareck El Aissami, US officials and corporate journalists have 
frequently drawn unproven links between Makled and high-ranking Caracas 
officials, despite the former being handed a 14-year sentence by a 
Venezuelan court in 2015.

In lieu of incorporating other perspectives that might challenge the US 
prosecutors’ claims, Forero opts to consult “experts” more than willing 
to echo them. He quotes Zair Mundaray 
<https://twitter.com/MundarayZair>, a former prosecutor who fled to 
Colombia in 2017. Mundaray served as No. 2 in the public prosecutor’s 
office under former Attorney General Luisa Ortega Diaz.

Forero again suppresses crucial details, namely that Ortega was herself 
accused <https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/13314> of running an 
extortion ring from her office, prompting her successor to open various 
high-profile graft probes <https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/13326> in 
2017–18. Nor does Forero mention that Mundaray is currently serving as 
“legal advisor” to self-proclaimed “Interim President” Juan Guaidó’s 
“embassy” in Colombia, giving him all the more motivation to proffer 
damning “information” about Chávez and Chavistas to US prosecutors and 
journalists.

In another case, the *Journal* correspondent cites an anonymous US 
ex-official to confirm what other unnamed US officials have alleged in 
an undisclosed “document”:

    A former senior US official who was shown the documents filed in
    Spain said it was the first time he had seen American authorities
    alleging that Mr. Chávez’s sponsorship of drug trafficking
    constituted a formal strategy to debilitate the US “That said, it
    makes sense for a regime that has long seen itself in an asymmetric
    war with us,” said the former official.

Very far from “speaking truth to power,” corporate media have almost 
completely surrendered the floor to anonymous US officials, allowing the 
official narrative to go unchallenged.


      *Poisoning the well*

The *Journal* report, while not original in content, has the novelty of 
patching together half-baked claims into a Machiavellian plan hatched by 
Chávez himself. With Washington and Western media previously going after 
high-ranking figures such as Cabello and El Aissami, this time the 
target is the legendary leader of the Bolivarian Revolution. The story 
reads as a substitute script for the new season of *Amazon*’s *Jack 
Ryan* 
<https://fair.org/home/reuters-cant-find-us-critics-to-question-amazons-anti-venezuela-propaganda/>, 
which came under fire for its fantastical plot premise of Venezuela 
requiring US intervention after acquiring a nuclear weapon—no doubt the 
fantasy of recently fired National Security Advisor John Bolton.

Crucially missing is the historic fact that it was the CIA, not Chávez, 
that flooded US inner cities with crack cocaine in the 1980s as part of 
the Iran/Contra 
<https://www.thenation.com/article/iran-contra-was-the-prototype-for-post-vietnam-imperial-adventure/> operation, 
of which current US special envoy to Venezuela Elliott Abrams 
<https://theintercept.com/2019/01/30/elliott-abrams-venezuela-coup/> is 
a veteran. The only thing Venezuela’s former president shipped to poor 
urban communities was free heating oil 
<https://www.foxnews.com/world/free-venezuelan-oil-keeping-thousands-of-poor-u-s-families-warm-is-back-after-hiatus> every 
winter.

Reading Forero, one almost loses sight of US authorities’ active 
complicity, both at home and abroad, in the drug trade. Cocaine is 
consumed first and foremost in the United States, and its profits have 
been laundered 
<https://www.huffpost.com/entry/megabanks-are-laundering_b_645885> by 
the US-dominated financial system. Meanwhile, the DEA’s ever-growing 
multi-billion dollar budget has done nothing to fight the booming drug 
trade (assuming that is the goal). In fact, US-allied Colombia is the 
world’s largest cocaine producer and the source of 90 percent of the 
cocaine seized in the US, according to the State Department 
<https://www.state.gov/u-s-colombia-relations-new-opportunities-to-reinforce-and-strengthen-our-bilateral-relationship/>. 
Furthermore, the drugs are transported to the US mainly through Central 
America and Mexico, all countries with a heavy presence of US agencies.

The “Communist narco-terrorist” conspiracy theory invented by the US 
national security state and its far-right Colombian allies serves to 
conflate Colombia’s drug and guerrilla problems, with the FARC a 
convenient scapegoat. For one thing, the FARC was involved in the drug 
trade only at its lowest levels, levying taxes 
<https://www.dw.com/es/las-farc-admiten-cobrar-tributos-por-el-cultivo-de-coca/a-17262114-0> on 
coca sales. Moreover, since the 2016 peace accords and FARC 
demobilization, coca crops in Colombia have reached record levels 
<https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-45578492> year after year, 
confirming that the guerrillas played no major role in the illicit trade.

“The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the 
wonders of the Western world,” Gore Vidal remarked 
<https://www.latimes.com/la-bk-gore-vidal-1989-08-04-story.html>. “No 
First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its 
media all objectivity—much less dissent.”

Even Forero outdoes himself by this standard, producing what is for all 
intents and purposes a press release for the US Justice Department.

The goal is never to prove anything or present substantive debate, but 
to further poison the well of US public opinion against Venezuela, 
legitimating regime change as US state policy. Rather than victims of 
murderous US sanctions <https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/14446>, 
Venezuelans are depicted as the purveyors of an anti-American drug war. 
In fact, the most egregious dealers of death and deceit in the 
hemisphere are, as always, US policymakers and their stenographers in 
the corporate media.

-- 
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863.9977 https://freedomarchives.org/
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