That was the response of Venezuelan Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza to an earlier Tweet from US Secretary Mike Pompeo concerning the elections to the National Congress of Venezuela which took place on Sunday, 6th December:
Venezuela's electoral fraud has already been committed. The results announced by the illegitimate Maduro regime will not reflect the will of the Venezuelan people. What's happening today is a fraud and a sham, not an election.
— Secretary Pompeo (@SecPompeo) December 6, 2020
Mike Pompeo characterised as a “zombie” by the Foreign Minister of a country subjected to years of brutal, lethal, and illegal economic sanctions imposed by the US. They have crippled the Venezuelan economy, led to at least 40,000 premature deaths, and seriously hampered their ability to fight the COVID-19 pandemic!
It was a sublime verbal annihilation for a Trump bag-man who has travelled the globe trampling on the sovereignty of any nation that has dared to reject the neo-liberal US agenda of privatisation, deregulation and obscene inequality of the type which pollutes the United States and its acolyte states across the world.
Pompeo and Trump Lost in Venezuela and Bolivia
With a satisfied tongue placed firmly in his cheek, Jorge Arreaza can highlight how spent and broken Pompeo is with his fraudulent election claims in Venezuela exposed as just as farcical as his fraudulent election claims in America. Pompeo was on the losing side in the US election and he is on the losing side in Venezuela.
He was also on the losing side in Bolivia six weeks ago when the election of the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) candidate Luis Arce stormed to victory with 55% of the votes cast by over 88% of the Bolivian population, making an utter mockery of Pompeo’s claims from October 2019 that the re-election of socialist President Evo Morales was fraudulent. With US encouragement, military forces in Bolivia engineered a coup and Morales was forced to flee the country into political asylum in Mexico.
However, Morales returned to Bolivia in October to a hero’s welcome and congratulated his comrade and friend Arce on his stunning electoral victory. The Pompeo, US, and Organisation of American States’ claims that the Bolivian election of October 2019 was rigged have been exposed as dishonest and diabolical lies designed as a cover for an illegal coup to unseat Morales and his socialist movement.
Years of Trying to Overthrow Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela Without Success
Similarly, in Venezuela despite years of concerted and illegal interference in the internal affairs of that socialist country, including recognising as President a sponsored puppet called Juan Guaido who didn’t even stand for Presidential election in 2018, the people of Venezuela, exhausted and angry after years of food shortages and sanctions imposed economic chaos, have elected a new National Assembly with a clear majority for President Nicola Maduro’s left alliance.
A number of US-backed right-wing opposition parties, urged on by self-proclaimed “interim president’’ Guaido, had boycotted the elections.
However, a host of other opposition parties had urged Venezuelans to vote. Of the 107 organisations putting up candidates, 98 were from opposition political parties.
This reflected the outcome of a lengthy dialogue between the government and the centrist opposition political parties. Key agreements resulted in a number of changes being made for the elections to the assembly.
Accepting the opposition’s request for more seats elected by proportional representation, the number of National Assembly deputies that were elected by that system was increased from 167 to 277, with more seats being elected by the party-list system.
Venezuela National Assembly Elections Were Free and Fair
Improvements were also made to strengthen the electoral process’s transparency and integrity, under a reconstituted National Electoral Council.
You wouldn’t know it from the US’s hypocritical demand for “free and fair elections”, but Venezuela has an automated system that is the most audited in the region and, probably, the world. What makes elections in Venezuela ‘unfair’ is the outside and illegal interference by the US, a well-documented fact which the European Union shamefully ignores while parroting US criticisms of the Maduro Presidency, a position he secured with 6.2 million votes in 2018 against two opposition candidates, neither of whom was Guaido.
In all, 16 audits of the process were conducted from beginning to end, in the presence of representatives from participating political parties. The Council of Electoral Experts of Latin America (CEELA) monitored the preparations and had noted that participating political parties had expressed their “extreme confidence” in the arrangements.
Venezuela had invited and hosted a number of international teams of observers for the election. The EU had turned down the invitation, claiming three months’ notice was insufficient time to organise the mission. The EU has no right to judge elections it chose not to monitor from within the country.
Election of New Assembly in Venezuela Legitimate According to Observers
Over 14,000 candidates from all political tendencies stood for election and the Great Patriotic Pole, an alliance of leftist parties won almost 68% of the votes cast. The turnout was a respectable 31% amid the Covid-19 pandemic and compares favourably with similar elections in other countries including within the EU.
Venezuelan Parliamentary elections turnout same as the turnout of the Presidencial elections in Rumania: 31%. I wonder what’s the EU going to say. 🥸🥸🥸In the pic a voter being helped yest in #VenezuelaDecideEl6D #Venezuela @JeremyJJFox @AhmedKaballo @BenjaminNorton @pablonav1 pic.twitter.com/QMFCxX7YPb
— Carolina Graterol (@Moncaro) December 7, 2020
The US can choose to condemn the election from afar but countries that actually bothered to send observers report a fair, free and legitimate process including the head of the Russian delegation of electoral observers Igor Ananskikh:
"The most important result of these elections is that Venezuela now has a legitimate National Assembly," Ananskikh said.
Over one hundred and twenty nations have recognised Maduro as the legitimately elected President of Venezuela, a fact the mainstream media consistently withholds from the public in the US and UK.
Progressives in Latin America Continue to Resist US Neo-Liberalism
Latin America has caught the world’s attention as it has become the electoral battleground between progressive movements and the neo-colonial aspirations of the Washington Consensus. In Bolivia, the election of Luis Arce from Evo Morales’s Movement Towards Socialism dealt a blow to the US sponsors of a bloody coup. A week later, neoliberalism’s birthplace became its burial ground, as Chileans voted to change the Constitution left in place by Augusto Pinochet’s military regime. On December 6th it was Venezuelan’s turn to challenge US hegemony by holding elections that the White House had been attempting to block for months.
Venezuela may be battered and bruised after years of illegal sanctions but unlike Trump and Pompeo it still stands after a democratic election and remains a socialist pole of attraction opposed to the rotten and corrupt neo-liberal capitalist consensus that promotes profits before people at all costs and believes breaching international laws, trampling on human rights and ignoring the sovereignty of nations is all acceptable in pursuit of US imperialist rule and maximising the profits of multi-national corporations. Well done Venezuela for resisting. Please support their resistance by supporting the Venezuela Solidarity Campaign.
The Venezuela Solidarity Campaign is supporting three petitions, against sanctions and the Bank of England’s withholding of Venezuela’s gold, and for the EU to respect the Venezuelan election outcome — more info at www.venezuelasolidarity.co.uk and join at www.venezuelasolidarity.co.uk/join.
