The US push to topple the Venezuelan government of Nicolas Maduro once again pits Washington against South America
One of the numerous tragedies here is our textbooks. I remember vividly the first time I realized that a good half the governments the US has pulled down in the Middle East and South America were democratic. Just not "US democratic." Never got that in school, certainly. Every high school history textbook paints democracy as our worldwide goal and pretends to be entirely unaware that we're just as against democracy as we are communism if it comes in a form not amenable to us. Ridiculous.
The linked abstract of last year's voting study is worth looking at just for the idiocy it highlights: A statistical analysis of the audit of 53 percent of voting machines from Venezuela’s April 14 election, done on the day of the election, shows that this audit was decisive. The odds of getting the April 14 audit result if in fact the unaudited machines contained enough errors to reverse the election outcome are far less than one in 25 thousand trillion. This new paper details and explains the statistical analysis behind these results.The initial results of Venezuela’s April 14 presidential election returned 7,575,506 votes for Nicolás Maduro, and 7,302,641 votes for opposition candidate Henrique Capriles. This is a difference of 272,865 votes, or 1.8 percent of the two-way total between the candidates. Following the announcement of the official results, Capriles asked for a full audit beyond just the “hot audit” of 53 percent of voting machines that was done on site, in the presence of observers from both campaigns, as well as witnesses from the community, on the night of the election. Venezuela’s National Electoral Council (CNE) agreed to audit the remaining machines, although Capriles later rejected their proposed audit. The U.S. government, unlike almost all other governments in the world, has held off on officially recognizing the Maduro government until such an audit is conducted.
The US support for regime change is certainly about oil/socialism/anti-american rhetoric, but I don't think that discounts the fact that a lot of Venezuelans are pissed off about the state of the country. They have major economic problems and serious political oppression, and the guardian is blowing that off in the article. Also "$5 million dollars funding opposition activities" being the tip of the iceberg... give me a break. It's totally unsubstantiated guesswork - bad journalism.