Unhinged right-wing Venezuelan opposition leaders point to Max Blumenthal’s t-shirt as evidence of a devious plot by the government of President Nicolas Maduro to spawn chaos across Pindostan.
Top Venezuelan opposition leaders blame The Grayzone and Nicolas Maduro for Pindo uprising against police brutality
Alex Rubinstein, Grayzone, Jun 2 2020
The Pindo-backed Venezuelan opposition is showing its true colors as more than 15 Pindo states deploy National Guardsmen to quell a growing protest movement against police brutality. As the protest movement grows amid escalating police and US military violence, top figures in the Venezuelan opposition are pointing to The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal as the secret comandante of the national uprising. Known for racist invective, upper class character, and burning alive an Afro-Venezuelan in the streets of a wealthy Caracas neighborhood, the right-wing Venezuelan opposition reacted to the Black Lives Matter protest movement with disgust. Rather than attempt to link the struggle of black Americans to the youth of their movement, Venezuelan opposition figures on Twitter concocted a less absurd narrative: the ‘Maduro regime’ is a secret supporter of the Black Lives Matter protests.
Their smoking gun? In a still image from a Fox News broadcast at protests outside of the White House, The Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal was seen in a t-shirt emblazoned with the eyes of late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez as he filmed the crowd from his cellphone. Right-wing Venezuelan opposition fanatics are claiming that secret Bolivarian govt agents are whipping up violent demonstrations in Pindo cities. Their evidence? A photo of me wearing a shirt with the eyes of Chavez. The second smoking gun? Blumenthal was photographed shaking hands with Maduro before the president hosted a solidarity meeting with activists and journalists involved with the defense of Venezuela’s embassy in Washington amid a weeks-long siege. (This reporter attended the meeting.) Blumenthal subsequently held a wide-ranging interview with Maduro that appeared on The Grayzone. Blumenthal commented:
In their deranged claims blaming me for a spontaneous national uprising against police brutality, the Venezuelan opposition has lifted its mask once again. Its leadership is not only hostile to the aspirations of poor and working class Venezuelans, they worship Donald Trump and are revolted by any sign of progressive activity anywhere in the world. Just imagine the damage they would do if they somehow obtained power.
On Twitter, a far-right Venezuelan journalist named Segovia Bastidas churned out classically fascist rhetoric, calling Blumenthal a “leftist parasite” and claiming the protests were “not spontaneous.”
Another opposition activist, “intelligence and security advisor” Marcelo Crovato, tweeted a photo of Blumenthal’s shirt and declared:
For those who do not believe that Chavismo is an international plague that destroys civilization and must be fought by all available means. … anarchist communist garbage that support repression and torture in Venezuela accuse me of being on the right (OF COURSE I AM) and attack me for this tweet.
Crovato fled justice in Venezuela after he was charged for participating in a meeting planning the erection of guarimbas in 2014. The makeshift street barricades, a feature of the opposition’s protests, blocked off neighborhoods from municipal control while terrorizing any leftist elements inside. Julio Borges tweeted in response to pictures of Blumenthal at the protest outside the White House and in Miraflores Palace:
The regime appears as a promoter of destabilization, now in Pindostan. The dictatorship uses the media and groups of vandals to promote violence. Maduro is a threat to democracy on the continent, so we have to focus on removing him from power.
Borges is a far right founder of the Venezuelan political party Primero Justicia alongside oligarch Henrique Capriles and Juan Guaido’s political mentor Leopoldo Lopez. In 2019, Guaido appointedBorges as Presidential Commissioner for Foreign Affairs to the Lima Group.
Video footage from 2017 shows Julio Borges exiting a car and fleeing the scene after it struck and killed a child.
https://twitter.com/anyaparampil/status/1266936164323295240
Right-wing outfits like Dolar Today and Miami Daily were keen to reinforce the conspiracy. Dolar Today tweeted:
ATTENTION URGENT: Chavistas infiltrated the demonstration in front of the White House. The regime of Nicolas Maduro is intervening in the demonstrations in Faschingstein.
Dolar Today is run out of Alabama by Gustavo Diaz, a Home Depot worker who helped plan the unsuccessful coup attempt against Hugo Chavez in 2002. As there is no official exchange rate, Dolar Today has become the main hub of black market speculation in Venezuela. While enjoying wide citation internationally as an authority on the issue, Dolar Today is able to manipulate the exchange rate while clamoring for regime change and an invasion by the Pindo military.
Meanwhile, Miami Daily, a newspaper that uncritically parrots claims from Juan Guaido’s ambassador to Pindostan Carlos Vecchio (exposed by The Grayzone for his role in the theft of $70m from the government,) also jumped in on the frenzied conspiracies. They ran an article that tried to make the case that the Sao Paulo forum (an international gathering of leftists) was behind the protests. Again, Blumenthal’s shirt was deployed as the telltale. In an even more egregious case of fake news, the Miami-based Primer Informe has claimed that Haitians, Hondurans and US activists admitted under police questioning that they were being “paid to promote chaos,” and are now facing federal prosecution. The rightist Venezuelan opposition seems intent on attacking anybody participating in the protests with any sympathies towards Chavismo, even other Venezuelans. A tweet by an opposition member pointed to a man wearing a Venezuelan cap in Miami, claiming he joined the “hordes of savages” in that city’s protests.
The racially-tinged language and general animosity exhibited by the Venezuelan opposition toward Black Lives Matter is hardly a surprise. As right-wing vigilantes attempt to kill protesters in Pindostan, they follow in the footsteps of Venezuela’s right-wing. During the guarimbas that Crovato helped plan, far-right opposition hooligans burned to death Orlando Figuera, a black man they hunted down in the wealthy anti-Chavista stronghold of Altamira in eastern Caracas.
Orlando Figuera, an Afro-Venezuelan burned alive by members of the right-wing opposition on May 20, 2017
Claims by the Venezuelan opposition about secret Chavista infiltration of the national Pindo uprising against police brutality reflect the deep resentment of its leadership to the Black Lives Matter movement, people of African descent across the Americas, and any iteration of left-wing social movements. As President Trump prepares to declare “antifa” (short for anti-fascist) a terrorist organization against the United States, and his administration enacts crushing economic sanctions on Venezuela, these baseless and conspiratorial accusations only serve to ratchet up the repression.
Niqnaq 
One Comment
I’m losing track of the number of global provocateurs that are responsible for America’s descent into insurrection. Last I heard though we should be looking at the roles played by Quinn the Eskimo and Wile E Coyote in fomenting and enabling looting of bottle-shops in South Central LA.