Nobody in the world, aside from Venezuelan government officials, thinks that U.S. prosecutors are engaged in politically motivated targeting of Venezuela’s government. At least that’s the message conveyed in this lengthy New York Times article that ran with the headline “Drug Charges for Nephews of Venezuela’s First Lady Could Add to Public Distrust”.
The only skepticism expressed about the motives of US prosecutors is reported as coming from the Venezuelan president:
“For almost two decades Venezuela has been hounded incessantly by the imperialist powers of the United States,” he said.
Maduro’s statement is completely accurate but to most NYT readers this will read as a crazy and desperate outburst by the former protégé of a “dead communist dictator” as Bernie Sanders dishonestly labeled the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez (with no negative political consequences to Sanders thanks to the US media’s hopelessly one sided output over many years).
In April of this year, the Obama administration ludicrously declared the situation in Venezuela to be an “extraordinary threat to the national security” of the United States so that it could sanction Venezuelan officials. The U.S. press dismissed the lunacy of Obama’s executive order as a “formality” and sometimes tepidly criticized it as a strategic mistake. What is actually showed is how cynically the Obama government is willing violate the law and isolate itself in the Western Hemisphere to target Venezuela. That’s the same thing the Bush administration did. In other words, U.S. efforts to oust the Venezuelan government have been ongoing for nearly twenty years – exactly as Maduro said.
The Bush administration backed a coup that ousted Hugo Chavez for two days in 2002. Its hostility to the Chavez government went into overdrive after Chavez denounced the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. US government cables released by Wikileaks also showed that the policy of financially backing and closely coordinating with the Venezuelan opposition continued when Obama took over from Bush.
US prosecutors are not independent of the federal government. As Brian Concannon, a US lawyer explained to me in May after another time US prosecutors went after Venezuelan officials
“The U.S. Attorneys for each judicial district are appointed by the President, and can be removed by the President for almost any non-discriminatory reason. It is true that the prosecutors have wide leeway, but it is equally true that they take direction from the Attorney General and President. The Bush Administration got in trouble in 2006 for firing seven U.S. Attorneys who either investigated Republican candidates for election malfeasance or failed to adequately pursue Democrats. There was a scandal and some DOJ people were forced to resign, but no one was prosecuted and I believe that none of the fired Attorneys got their jobs back. “
During the 1990s, Concannon prosecuted human rights trials in Haiti on behalf of its first democratically elected President, Jean Bertrand Aristide. In 2004, US troops kidnapped Aristide and installed a dictatorship that murdered thousands of his supporters. For a few years before the coup, U.S. prosecutors hounded Aristide’s government by going after the people around him. That contributed to the vilification of Aristide in the international media which was crucial to allowing the U.S. government to pull off the coup. It’s an incredibly ugly story that illustrates how eagerly U.S. prosecutors and the corporate media pursue the foreign policy objectives of the federal government. Those objectives do not change whether a Democrat or a Republican is in the White House. It takes a really well disciplined media to miss that.
ZNetwork is funded solely through the generosity of its readers.
Donate