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International Crisis Group Against Venezuela
by Mark Weisbrot
Written by Mark Weisbrot
Friday, 17 May 2013 10:59
The International Crisis Group (ICG) sells itself as working to prevent conflict worldwide but there is one country where their mission looks more like promoting rather than preventing conflict. Exhibit A is their report on Venezuela, released today.
There is a lot wrong with this report most of it reads like a statement from the Venezuelan political opposition, rather than a neutral third-party observer. But the most ugly and pernicious thing is the reports insistence that the validity of the election result (in Venezuela) needs to be clarified and that a full and transparent audit result is necessary, or else the governments rule will increasingly come to be seen by many as an imposition, with unpredictable, possibly violent consequences.
These statements strongly imply that the Venezuelan government is to blame if the opposition returns to violence, as it has in the past, in its ongoing refusal to accept the results of a democratic election.
For the governments of Latin America, and almost all of the world, there is no doubt about the validity of the election result. It is really only the Venezuelan opposition and the U.S. government that has questioned it.
The International Crisis Group has a $20 million dollar annual budget, about half of which comes from the United States and allied governments who share the State Departments political agenda, with additional contributions from big oil companies including BP and Shell. So in some ways it is not surprising that it would take the position of the U.S. government, even when the U.S. government is, as in this case, completely isolated in the world. However, the ICG does not always do this in other countries, so this report stands out as a particularly disgraceful blot on their record.
The report is so heinously one-sided that it does not even mention the results of the audit that took place on April 14, the day of the election. In Venezuela, voters express their preference by pressing a computer touch-screen, which then prints out a paper receipt of their vote. The voter then checks to make sure that the receipt was the same as her choice, and deposits the paper receipt in a sealed box.
When the polls closed, a random sample of 53 percent(1) of all the machines (20,825 out of 39,303) was chosen, and a manual tally was made of the paper receipts. This hot audit was done on site, in the presence of the observers from both campaigns, as well as witnesses from the community. There were no reports from witnesses or election officials on site of any discrepancies between the machine totals and the hand count. Nor has the Capriles campaign alleged that any such discrepancies occurred.
What does this fact that ICG left out of its report mean? It means that the probability of getting this audit result, on April 14, if in fact Capriles had won the vote, is less than one in 25 thousand trillion (see here and here). Which means that a full and transparent audit result has already occurred, but the ICG without saying why, in its 16-page report with 77 footnotes, doesnt seem to think it means very much.
Nonetheless, the National Electoral Council, at the request of the Capriles campaign, is auditing another 12,000 of the remaining 16,000 ballot boxes in the same way. But the opposition decided to boycott this audit, after it first agreed to it. The ICG adopts the opposition spin on these post-electoral events, implying that it is the government that is reneging on its commitment by not doing the 100 percent audit that the opposition wanted.
This part of the report is particularly laughable:
Perhaps ICG doesnt know it, but UNASUR and Brazil have already made it very clear that they will not tolerate further destruction of the rule of law and democratic values. Its just that their idea of the rule of law and democratic values is different from that of the ICG and its government sponsors: it includes respect for the results of democratic elections. That is why all of the presidents of UNASUR countries met in Lima on April 18 after the election and why most of them flew to Venezuela the next day to attend President Maduros inauguration.
Lula da Silva said, in rejecting the U.S. governments attempt to de-legitimize the Venezuelan election, "Americans should take care of their own business a little and let us decide our own destiny."
And on May 9, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff made a similar statement, while standing next to President Maduro of Venezuela:
For UNASUR and its biggest member country, Brazil, the threat in this case to the rule of law and democratic values is coming from the U.S. government and its allies, not from the Venezuelan government. Its really shameful to see the ICG promote political conflict by trying to de-legitimize election results that everyone else can see are valid.
(1) Another 1.02 percent was audited the next day.
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Benton D Struckcheon
(2,347 posts)but this US idiocy over the Venezuelan election has to stop. The US has to recognize Latin America's independence someday.
Carter is so far the only US president in the entire history of this country who actually realized this. I've updated my sig to reflect this truly extraordinary fact. We certainly didn't elect Obama to continue Reagan's policy towards Latin America.
Catherina
(35,568 posts)I love your new sigline. One of your first comments about "hog tying the big banks, first, and then breaking them up into itty bitty pieces, second" was a early favorite. We don't have to agree on everything
It comes at a good time too because I was just reading some of the references in the wiki entry about the 2010 coup attempt against Rafael Correa and needed that bright note.
bemildred
(90,061 posts)Been watching it all my life. Even now, we are not leaving Latin America and the Middle East through lack of the will in Washington to carry on, much as we did not leave Vietnam because anybody in DC realized how stupid it was; they have not admited that to themselves, most of them, even yet.
That is why they need the permanent war, it's getting harder and harder to sell this shuck-and-jive to the peons, and they have to let the peons vote, that is the only source of what shreds of legitimacy they have left.
Judi Lynn
(160,621 posts)Very similar sentiments from Dilma Rousseff, and other Latin American leaders.
Funny how rightists always seem totally oblivious to statements like this from the Latin American leaders, in every case. It's as if they were all out of town when these positions are reiterated, every time.
Just saw who the ICG's president is, it's the beloved Thomas R. Pickering, favored by Richard M Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush. What a shock.