Thursday evening, Venezuela's Bolivarian Socialist government arbitrarily suspended the recall effort against "President" Nicolas Maduro, demonstrating beyond any doubt that the South American country now functions as a dictatorship.
Given its gravity, this news, described in coverage at the Wall Street Journal as "a crisis of democracy," is not getting the visibility it should be receiving.
Actions by the establishment press's gatekeepers at the Associated Press and the New York Times appear to betray an interest in keeping the news downplayed at least until after Friday's morning network news and cable shows.
At 10 p.m. Friday evening, the Associated Press had no story in its "World Top 10" about developments in that country. The AP broke the ice sometime Saturday morning. As of 8:26 a.m. Eastern Time (as saved here), its story about the country was ninth on the list, below one concerning the Nobel Prize committee's inability to contact literature prize winner Bob Dylan.
The AP's first move at 8:06 p.m. Thursday evening was to post a one-sentence headline communicating very little, with the full text simply repeating the headline: "Venezuela's electoral authority suspends recall campaign against Maduro over court rulings." . Jorge Rueda posted a lengthy story two hours later.
But the wire service's "10 Things to Know for Friday" post early Friday morning only said that "The government-stacked electoral council said that process will be postponed after state courts found that an earlier stage of the petition drive was marred by fraud." This blurb failed to communicate the fact that the country's electoral council was in effect reversing its own validation of the petition's signatures two months ago.
News from Venezuela did not appear in the Friday print edition of the New York Times, and only made Page A6 of Saturday morning's print edition. No form of the word "socialist" is present in the related Times story. As of 8:45 a.m. Saturday, no story about Venezuela was present on the front page of the paper's web site.
The fact that the business-oriented Bloomberg News was able to get a full story posted at 10:10 p.m. Thursday makes the slow movement seen at the Times much harder to justify.
Unlike the Times, when the AP prepared full stories, it did a fairly good job, as exemplified in a late Friday afternoon story by Hannah Dreier, where references to the "socialist" government and its left-wing nature were frequent:
Opposition cries dictatorship after Venezuela blocks recall
The Venezuelan opposition's campaign to oust President Nicolas Maduro has been thrown into disarray with elections officials' decision to suspend a recall drive against the socialist leader a week before it was to start.
In a related move, a court appeared to issue a ruling Friday blocking key opposition leaders from leaving the country. (Note: The opposition believes that this move has occurred because the government plans to arrest these leaders. — Ed.)
With the latest actions, the government has effectively halted the effort to stage a recall effort that polls suggest Maduro would have lost by a wide margin. The ruling is particularly dramatic because it comes just days before critics of the socialist administration were to start gathering the one-fifth of voters' signatures needed to place the issue on the ballot.
... A successful vote to oust Maduro this year would have triggered a presidential election and given the opposition a good shot at winning power. If Maduro is voted out in 2017, though, his vice president will finish the presidential term, leaving the socialists in charge.
The electoral council's decision Thursday was in response to rulings earlier in the day by courts in four Venezuelan states that found there was fraud in the initial stage of the petition drive. During that stage the opposition had collected signatures from 1 percent of electorate.
But in standing by those low-court rulings, it appeared to be ignoring its own decision in August validating the signatures and allowing the process to move forward. It gave no indication if and when the process would be resumed.
... Although the government-stacked electoral board had already thrown a number of obstacles in the way of Maduro's opponents, many had hoped that the next stage of the complex process would have drawn onto the streets millions of Venezuelans who polls show overwhelmingly favor firing Maduro, who they blame for triple-digit inflation and long food lines.
The ruling comes on the heels of another decision by the electoral council this week to delay by about six months gubernatorial elections that were slated for year-end which the opposition was heavily favored to win.
Polls say a majority of Venezuelans want Maduro gone. The opposition charges that in the face of overwhelming voter discontent, the socialist party has simply decided to put off elections indefinitely.
After an overwhelming defeat in last December's congressional elections, the Chavistas controlling the lame-duck congressional session packed the Venezuelan courts with rubber-stamp sympathizers. That move has made the nation's now opposition-controlled legislative branch functionally irrelevant, to the point where the country's "Supreme Court ruled Maduro could bypass congress" a week ago and impose the federal government budget he desired.
The press's relative inattention appears to be a worldwide phenomenon. At the BBC's home page Saturday morning, there was also no story about Venezuela, only a Spanish language headline link at the very bottom of that page to a story at the site's Spanish version — as if no one who speaks English should care.
Left-leaning websites are predictably ignoring news from Venezuela. As of 10 a.m., the Huffington Post naturally had nothing on its front page, and couldn't even find room to cover developments in that country at its main world coverage page.
Two weeks ago, despite obvious signs that the country was heading into official dictatorship, U.S. actor Jamie Foxx (estimated net worth: $85 million) visited Venezuela:
... Foxx ... visited Maduro in the presidential palace in Caracas. State media said Foxx was there to support the country's socialist revolution and attend the signing of an agreement between Venezuela and its allies for the construction of houses for the poor.
World chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov has charged that the visit by Foxx and actor Lukas Haas was really "motivated by financial interests."
Meanwhile, from cradle to grave, Venezuela, once a reasonably prosperous country, continues to come apart at the seams:
- "Venezuelan hospitals are keeping newborns in cardboard boxes due to supply shortages."
- "One in three people admitted to public hospitals last year died, the government reports." (Imagine how much worse it must really be.)
- "There are people dying for lack of medicine, children dying of malnutrition and others dying because there are no medical personnel."
- Despite widespread starvation, "The Venezuelan government has denied food and humanitarian aid from international organizations like Amnesty International and the United Nations." The Maduro government has apparently calculated that a starving populace will have a harder time revolting.
- Caracas, the nation's capital, "remains the world’s most violent city, according to an annual study released in January."
- "Decomposing bodies are exploding in morgues."
- Cardboard also comes in handy now when people die. The dead are now buried in cardboard coffins.
The only Venezuela-related news gaining significant visibility in the U.S. is a Hillary Clinton-supporting campaign ad laughably comparing Hugo Chavez, the country's original Chavista, to GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
