With Venezuela War On The Horizon, Mainstream Media Manufacturing Consent Goes Into Overdrive.

Yet Again, The Mainstream Media Is Manufacturing Consent For War.

With the regime change war on Venezuela ramping up, the mainstream media is getting to work and manufacturing consent for a U.S. military invasion to overthrow Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and install a puppet government.

Playing neo-con mad libs, the Wall Street Journal published an article which claimed that, “Venezuela has become a major launchpad for huge volumes of cocaine shipped to West Africa, where jihadists are helping traffic it to Europe in record quantities.”

One of the only named sources in the piece for the claim is the former U.S. military intelligence officer Jesus Romero, who, according to his bio, also used to work for the arms manufacturer BAE Systems.

On multiple media appearances, Romero has repeated the false Trump/Rubio claim that Maduro runs a gang called “cartel de las soles,” which in reality does not exist.

France 24 noted that, “in March, the latest US State Department report on global anti-drug operations made no mention of the ‘Cartel de los Soles’ or any connection between Maduro and narco trafficking” adding, “There is no such thing, so Maduro can hardly be its boss,’ Phil Gunson, an analyst at the International Crisis Group think tank, told AFP of the so-called ‘Cartel de los Soles’. Direct, incontrovertible evidence has never been presented for the existence of an organized cartel by that name in Venezuela”.

In reality, as the think tank InSightCrime noted, “The phrase ‘Cartel of the Suns’ reportedly emerged in 1993, when two GNB generals – anti-narcotics unit chief Ramón Guillén Dávila and his successor, Orlando Hernández Villegas – were investigated for drug trafficking and related crimes. As brigade commanders, each wore a single sun insignia on their epaulettes, giving rise to the phrase ‘Cartel of the Sun.’ When division commanders – who bore double suns – were later accused of trafficking, the name evolved into the ‘Cartel of the Suns.’”

Ironically, a 60-minute investigation from the time uncovered that Ramón Guillén Dávila's drug smuggling was being supported by the CIA.

Why the Wall Street Journal is willing to publish such blatant propaganda makes more sense when one looks at the fact that the paper’s editorial board openly supports a regime-change war in Venezuela.

The editorial board of the paper, in an article titled “The High Stakes in Venezuela” wrote, “President Trump is in a high-stakes showdown with Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro … One of the two presidents is going to lose, and it will be Mr. Trump if Mr. Maduro isn’t ousted one way or another.”

The article then went on to openly call for a regime change war in Venezuela writing, “We think deposing Mr. Maduro is in the U.S. national interest … If Mr. Maduro flees and the democrats take over, it will be a giant step for freedom in the region … But if Mr. Maduro refuses to leave, and Mr. Trump shrinks from acting to depose him, Mr. Trump and the credibility of the U.S. will be the losers.”

Just like the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times wrote its own article, manufacturing consent for war by demonizing Maduro.

The most absurd claim in the article is that, “After Mr. (Hugo) Chávez died in 2013, Mr. Maduro used Stalinist tactics to cement his grip on Mr. Chavez’s fractious socialist movement, known as chavismo”.

What the paper does not mention is that after Hugo Chavez died in 2013, Maduro was elected that April in an election certified by the U.S. Carter Centre.

The Carter Centre report on the 2013 election wrote, “As the high turnout and many opinion polls demonstrate, the Venezuelan population, and the political parties and candidates in general, have confidence in the performance and integrity of the automated touch-screen voting machines. As the post-election citizen verification audits of 100 percent of the voting machines demonstrated, the automated system functioned as expected in recording the votes cast, transmitting, and counting them on April 14.”

Moving to the Washington Post, the outlet published an article that blamed many problems in Venezuela caused or exacerbated by U.S. sanctions on Maduro, without mentioning the sanctions.

The outlet wrote, “The population of this oil-rich nation has been battered by years of economic mismanagement and political repression by the authoritarian socialist government. Inflation and unemployment are high, supplies of water, food, medicine, and energy are unreliable, and political persecution is widespread.”

The article does not even mention U.S. sanctions.

Francisco Rodríguez, a pro-opposition economist from Venezuela, put out a detailed study showing that U.S. sanctions prevented Oil production from recovering.

As economists Mark Weisbrot and Jeffrey Sachs noted, “It is important to emphasize that nearly all of the foreign exchange that is needed to import medicine, food, medical equipment, spare parts and equipment needed for electricity generation, water systems, or transportation, is received by the Venezuelan economy through the government’s revenue from the export of oil”.

The UN noted in 2021 that sanctions on Venezuela have “exacerbated pre-existing economic situations and have dramatically affected the whole population of Venezuela, especially but not only those in extreme poverty, women, children, medical workers, people with disabilities or life-threatening or chronic diseases, and the indigenous populations.”

Just like with every previous war, the mainstream media- right on cue- is publishing propaganda to justify another regime change war.

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