Washington brands Nicols Maduro a dictator, celebrates Volodymyr Zelenskyy as democratic, and sponsors Mara Corina Machado to achieve regime change in Venezuela rather than promote genuine democracy.
By Roger D. Harris
Within the narrow spectrum of establishment punditry, dictator functions as aterm of opprobriumreserved for governments Washington designates as enemies. By this measure, Maduro is cast as the dictator, while Zelenskyy is sanctified as democratic.
Ronald Reagans UN ambassador, Jeane Kirkpatrick, wrote about a democracydouble standardin 1979. A Democrat turned anti-communist neoconservative, she formulated a convenient rhetorical distinction. The so-called Kirkpatrick Doctrine supported authoritarian traditional dictatorships and opposed leftist totalitarian regimes.
In its modern incarnation, the Brookings Institution argues that US geopolitical interests justify backingfriendly autocratswhile opposing regimes critical of Washington.
Thus Ahmed al-Sharaa, former Al Qaedaterroristand now head of Syria after aUS-backed coup, was welcomed to the Trump White House. A week later, thebenevolent monarchfrom a country that does not even bother to hold national elections Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman graced the Oval Office.
Ukrainian exceptionalism
What about the leader whobanned opposition parties,shuttered critical media,arrested political opponents,closed trade unions, sentsecurity forcesinto churches, andpersecuted speakersof Ukraine's main second language? When Zelenskyys term in office was set to end on May 20, 2024, he declared martial law to suspend elections.
YetSenate Democratsstill deem Zelenskyy to be in the front lines of democracy. Forbes praises hismoral velocity. NPR anoints him anicon of democracy.
While Trump and company may have uttered unkind words about the Ukrainian president, follow the money. The US has showered Ukraine with$128137 billionin aid since Trump took office.
Ukraine is widely recognized as being caught in a war. Yet the deadly hybrid war against Venezuela is rendered invisible reduced to merelysanctionsagainst an errant regime or at mostpressure. The latest escalation involves what are euphemistically called kinetic strikes on small boats, backed by the largest armada in the Caribbean since the 1961 Cuban Missile Crisis. The most recentact of war, theseizureof an oil tanker, has been condemned by the Venezuelans asinternational piracy.
Causalities in the Ukraine war are mourned, but the over100,000 fatalitiesby US sanctions in Venezuela are ignored. Both are at war and should be judged by the same standards.
Venezuela the exception that proves the rule
Since Hugo Chvezs 1998 victory and the initiation of the Bolivarian Revolution, Venezuela has held over 20 national elections. Washington deemed only the two won by the opposition as legitimate, proving the operative rule that democracy is attained when outcomes please the hegemon.
Maduro first ran for president in 2013 after Chvezs death. The US was the only country not to recognize his win.
In 2018, Washingtons regime-change offensive of sanctions, amounting to illegal collective punishment, and other coercive measures was taking its toll. The US called a boycott of the presidential election, hoping to achieve by extra-parliamentary means what it could not attain by the ballot. Declaring the contest illegitimate six months before the actual vote, Washington even threatened opposition politician Henri Falcn with sanctions for running.
Venezuela did not fall in 2018. Falcn came in second with 21% of the vote after Maduro, who the US again refused to recognize.
The following year, Washington tried a new democracy promotion gambit. Juan Guado, after receiving a call from Trumps VP Michael Pence, declared himself interim president of Venezuela on a Caracas street corner. The 35-year-old hadnever run for national office. This embarrassment lasted until 2022, when Guaids own opposition found him so toxic that he wasgiven the boot.
The making of Nobel Laureate Mara Corina Machado
Ahead of the 2024 Venezuelan presidential election, Washingtons regime-change campaign had failed. Maduros resolute political leadership and the unbroken civilian-military unity haddefeatedWashingtons illegal measures.
The Biden administration faced a choice: boycott again and hand Maduro an uncontested mandate, or back a candidate and thereby legitimize elections in a government it refused to recognize. Washingtonsworkaroundwas to promote a candidate who could not legally assume the presidency.
The audition began with a USHouse Foreign Affairs Committee bipartisan roundtable in February 2024 featuring Mara Corina Machado as thesoleopposition candidate. Machado had been disqualified in 2015 from running for public office due to treasonous activities. But thefanatical Zionistwas photogenic, fluent in English, and came from one of Venezuelas wealthiest families.
Even so, Washingtons favorite was not a consensus candidate among those opposed to the ruling Chavista party. Widely resented, Machado belonged to the extremeinsurrectionary wingin a fractious field of competing opposition groupings.
She returned to Venezuela to stage a dubious opposition primary, not run by the electoral authority but by herown private NGO, Smate, which had received NED funding. Machado claimed animplausiblylopsided victory and destroyed the ballots, eliminating any possibility of verification.
Barred from running, Machado hand-picked Edmundo Gonzlez Urrutia as her surrogate. A minor Foreign Ministry official in the 1980s, he was unknown even in rightwing circles. With Washington and the corporate press running interference, Gonzlez did not even bother to leave the capital city during the campaign. Which was just a well since his platform of privatization at home and genocide in Palestine was far more popular inside the Beltway than in Venezuela.
Predictably, both Maduro and Gonzlez claimed victory. The contested election went to the Venezuelan supreme court, which required all candidates to submit their evidence proving they won. Largely underreported in the US press, Gonzlezrefused to submitanything, leaving no legal pathway for him to be declared president, even if he had won. Even Trump, disputing his 2020 defeat, fought it out in the courts.
To this day, the US has not formally recognized Gonzlez as president of Venezuela. Why bother when the objective of demonizing Maduro was accomplished with ahelp from the fourth estate.
Propaganda gap
As MAGA mavens might say, exporting democracy exhausted our strategic reserves at home. Masked ICE agents now have license to terrorize US cities.
Trump rationalizes the mission against Venezuela as a war on narco-terrorism. The problem is thatfew buythe alibi from the worlds largest consumer of narcotics, leading drug money launderer, and top gun runner to the cartels.
Proving the obvious, TrumpsprungJuan Orlando Hernndez from federal penitentiary, after the former Honduran president was convicted in US courts of aiding in the importation of over 400 tons of cocaine. Sentenced to 45 years for running anarco-state. Hernandez was freed in Trumps undisguisedinterferencein Hondurass November 30 presidential election.
As Trumps hypocrisy on narco-trafficking and his weak justification for naked imperial aggression falter and as USpublic opinion rejectsfurther escalation thecorporate presshas moved in to fill the propaganda gap, justifying Maduro must go.
In the end, the dictator narrative reveals less about Venezuela or Ukraine than about Washingtons geopolitical imperatives. Media caricatures, selective indignation, and shifting standards of legitimacy validate intervention when convenient and dismiss democratic processes conflicting with US aims. Stripped of moral pretenses, the discourse reduces to a simple calculus: allies are democratic by definition, adversaries authoritarian by decree, The empires issue is not democracy, but domination.
Roger D. Harrisis a founding member of theVenezuela Solidarity Networkand is active with theTask Force on the Americasand theSanctionsKill Campaign
Pressenza New York
