this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2024
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The whole tenure of the Venezuela election discussion has American news media bias slathered all over it. Nobody seems to want to discuss how Maduro's biggest contender for the Presidency was running the same hyper-Christian, anti-government, private-the-oil-industry shit that is wildly unpopular in the country outside of the bigger cities. Basically the same campaign Anez ran in Bolivia and Bolsanaro ran in Brazil. A Trumpian candidate that the majority simply couldn't stomach.
Venezuela doesn't have anything resembling a centrist liberal faction. Its either another term with Maduro or a full-blown reactionary counter-revolution. And there are plenty of people alive in Venezuela today who still remember right-wing military junta that ran the country back in the '50s. Plenty more familiar with the brutal treatment of Haitians, El Salvadorians, and Guyanans. Or, hell, the very ham-fisted Operation Gideon sponsored by the US at the tail end of the Trump administration.
Very hard to get a pro-Western government to win popular support under these conditions.
Yeah I have no disagreement with what you're saying. This was also true with Russia, where Navalny was hardly left wing. I think it's moreso the idea of a democratic system versus dictatorship.
Even the so-called Communist Party of Russia is a vestigial remnant. That is as much a result of the socio-economic rewiring of the nation after Yeltsin's coup as any functional dictatorship. People are saturated in Putin-friendly right-wing media in Russia not unlike how Americans have been surrounded by ultra-orthodox conservative news media.
What's the difference between a democracy and a dictatorship in a nation where mass media and big business are all beholden to a handful of oligarchs?