Nury Vittachi: If Machado has no support in the country, as Trump says, who really won the democratic election to be president?

WHAT A MESS! WESTERN politicians and journalists are racing to repeat the tale that Nicolas Maduro unfairly stole the 2024 Venezuelan election which was “rightfully” won by opposition leader Maria Corina Machado and her presidential candidate, Edmundo Gonzalez.

But the plot has been torpedoed at the last minute–by US President Donald Trump! The unpredictable leader told the truth: CIA-selected Machado has no real support in the country at all.

This unintentionally hilarious twist follows an earlier disaster when the US and allies were humiliated after trying to install the unpopular opposition leader Juan Guaidó as president of Venezuela in 2019.

Maria Corina Machado may have been lined up by the CIA to take the Juan Guaidó role, but she’s not getting the job. “I think it would be very tough for her to be the leader. She doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country,” Trump said.

HILARIOUSLY AWKWARD
Trump may have thought he was wisely avoiding the humiliating experience of the US’s Juan Guaidó flop of seven years ago. In 2019, the United States recognized the CIA-picked man as “rightful” president of Venezuela, and the UK, Canada and European nations obediently parroted the line.

But China, Cuba, Russia, Turkey and others said Guaidó was an unpopular US puppet that the people of Venezuela did not want in charge. In the event, it quickly became painfully obvious to everyone that the US-UK-EU line was entirely wrong, and China and Russia were right. Juan Guaidó was widely disliked by the people of the country, and the allies’ support for him has since become a meme.

Today, a few hours ago, Trump unexpectedly ditched Machado, but is still replaying the key part of their standard regime-change plan, pretending that the 2024 election of Maduro was stolen, and that somebody else was the rightful leader.

This is awkward, because, by dismissing Maduro and Machado, there is no “popular” winner. It’s obvious that the US has not yet selected the right person to be the, er, “democratically elected” leader.

ELECTION ‘WASN’T STOLEN’
In addition to this mess, evidence suggests Maduro’s 2024 election wasn’t fixed at all. Why would we think that? Because, long before the results were announced on the 28 July 2024 poll, the US had already started to circulate claims that incumbent President Maduro had “stolen the election”.

This could not have been true at the time the story was launched. “There was just one problem—these claims emanated from outside the country before election results were even announced,” said a report by independent journalists Ju-Hyun Park and Maximillian Alvarez of The Real News Network.

Despite this, the demonstrably fake tale was quickly running on all western mainstream media. “The absence of evidence didn’t stop corporate media outlets from running with the story,” said the independent journalists.

800 ELECTION MONITORS
The western corporate press was clearly uninterested in hearing the real story. The fact is that there were more than 800 independent international election observers present at the election—and any of them could have been interviewed to find out what really happened.

In an echo of 2019 US statements about Juan Guaido, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in 2024 released a statement referring to “overwhelming evidence that opposition leader Maria Corina Machado and her handpicked presidential candidate, Edmundo Gonzalez, were the victor”.

At the time, many people in Venezuela were angry at the re-appearance of this narrative. They had heard it before.

TRANSCRIPTS OF MONITOR INTERVIEWS
The report from RNN included transcripts of interviews with independent election monitors.

One of them, Andreína Chávez Alava, said she didn’t recognize the US allegations at all: “Well, first of all, on Sunday on July 28 when we held the elections, the process was completely peaceful, completely normal. I was going to electoral centers all across Caracas. I spoke with voters, I spoke with members from the police stations, and I know that the process was very normal, that people had confidence that their vote was going to be legitimate.”

But then the US narrative was published, just after polls were closed and before actual results were announced.

Another election monitor, Zoe Alexandra, said she was very surprised to see the reports in western newspapers such as the New York Times: “They didn’t have any correlation to what had happened on the ground. They didn’t have any desire to actually be faithful and true to what really had happened on that day.”

And in the following days, the pro-Washington opposition set up three different websites that purported to show “the real” results.

“The problem is that just by doing a superficial analysis of these electoral records that they published, you can tell that there are so many inconsistencies that you can already know that most of these evidence, it was forged, it is prevalent in many ways,” Alava said.

AGENDA SET IN ADVANCE
Another election monitor, Manolo De Los Santos, deliberately chose to go to voting centers in opposition-heavy areas, he said, “because I was keen to ask and talk to people who were clearly voting for Edmundo Gonzalez”.

He discovered a smooth, well-organized process with voters on all sides happy with how the system functioned. So he was very surprised at what he read in the international press. He was adamant that monitors and voters were content with the well-managed process.

“But clearly that was not the agenda that had been set. Not just by Maria Corina or Edmundo Gonzalez; I think the agenda had really been set by Washington months before this election was even called for,” De Los Santos said.

So that explains Trump’s latest statement. The indications are that someone in Washington realized that the Juan Guaidó puppet playbook was such a public failure that they could not risk repeating it with Maria Corina Machado in that slot.