VenEconomy: The Curtain Falls, Lies Are Exposed
 From the Editors of VenEconomy
Latin American Herald Tribune
July 3, 2014

Abraham Lincoln wisely warned that “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”

But, Hugo Chávez, and most recently Nicolás Maduro, seem not to have understood what Lincoln meant by that.

The leitmotif of these two dictator wannabes has been to think that it is possible to repeat their lies a thousand times so these become a reality for the people, as once assured by Adolf Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, a long time ago.

This way, all kinds of fallacies to discredit democrats who oppose the so-called Socialism of the 21st century have been made up over the past 15 years, thus emulating a method the Castro dictatorship has been using in Cuba for many years now.

One of them has been continued allegations of attempted coups d’états, treason to the homeland and assassinations plots. Some 70 complaints of assassination plots (according to people who keep track of these statistics) over the past 15 years have been filed without the presentation of striking evidence against the accused.

The latest came from the voice of Jorge Rodríguez, the Mayor of Caracas’ Libertador municipality representing the Government’s High Political Authority, in June of this year. This character, in a vaudeville performance and taking the National Theater of Caracas as a backdrop, accused several members of the opposition coalition such as Diego Arria, María Corina Machado, Pedro Mario Burelli, Ricardo Koesling, Henrique Salas Römer, and student leader Gabriela Arellano, among others, of planning a coup d’état and an assassination attempt against Maduro having as hard evidence several emails allegedly sent by this group of people. Some of them have been called to testify before the Public Prosecutor’s Office and the SEBIN (Venezuela’s political police force), while some others have been prohibited from leaving the country or requested their capture to Interpol. What’s more, the Public Prosecutor said on Tuesday more summons and indictments are under way.

All of this aimed at excusing the police and the judiciary from the violence against students and civil society demanding the State through peaceful demonstrations to ensure citizen security and guarantee the economic rights and a better quality of life for all Venezuelans.

But this time accusations crashed against a retainment wall: leaders of proven democratic trajectory who did not back down despite facing a dictatorial regime. This way, one of them (Burelli) presented the evidence of the emails before a federal court in the state of California and requested an independent investigation to confirm the veracity of the content.

And since the sun cannot be covered with a single finger, and much less the origin and destination of emails within today’s globalized world, Fernando del Rincón reported in his show Conclusiones (conclusions) broadcast by Spanish-language news network CNN en Español that Google had confirmed these emails to be fake after the tech behemoth stated that “the emails presented as evidence by the Venezuelan government as part of an assassination plot are not hosted in our Gmail servers.” And, in addition, an expert in computer forensics jumped to the conclusion that emails related to Burelli had actually been forged.

The drama of institutionalized lies as a form of government is having hundreds of Venezuelans thrown into prisons, or prosecuted with reporting regimes, or deprived of their freedom of transit or forced into exile.

Indeed a negative balance for a country that had been an example of freedom and democracy to many countries of the world for many years.

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