As elections approach, the final psyop of the Venezuelan regime | Opinion

The psychological war waged by the chavista regime on the Venezuelan citizens over the past quarter-century may have inflicted more profound damage than the horrible physical harms and tortures suffered by tens of thousands of regime victims, who have documented their cases in numerous dossiers at the International Criminal Court.

This harm fostered a collective mindset of fear, resignation, humiliation and learned helplessness for an extended period.

This tragic spell has been shattered by the tenacious opposition leader who has tirelessly toured Maria Corina Machado, the country over the past decade and, with increased intensity over the last ten months, mobilized millions of Venezuelans.

Regardless of the outcome of the Venezuelan elections on Sunday, Maria Corina Machado has already freed the minds and hearts of the overwhelming majority of Venezuelans who yearn for regime change. Machado has rekindled the sense of nationhood among a population that has been systematically humiliated and vilified.

The only remaining targets for the architects of the regime’s pathological narratives are the increasingly alert elements of the Venezuelan armed forces and the democratic international community. The regime’s potent propaganda machine is wholly committed to crafting a narrative that legitimizes the grossly illegitimate: a fresh wave of widespread human rights violations, without which the chavista regime has no hope of retaining control of the country’s executive branch. The master psyop currently being deployed combines the following three mechanisms:

Fabrication of a Fictitious Electoral Victory:

There is no doubt that the elections are already unjust and opaque. The regime has already enacted a series of fundamental violations of the electoral law.

It unlawfully removed the main opposition candidate from the race after Maria Corina Machado won the opposition’s primary race by a landslide. It has hindered the registration of millions of voters in Venezuela and abroad. It continually alters the nature of voting centers at will. Despite this, thanks to Machado’s unwavering support, the opposition candidate, Edmundo Gonzalez, leads by unprecedented margins in all credible polls. To fabricate a narrative of victory, the regime concocts its own polls, presented by unknown companies with no track record in the field.

Intimidation and Repression of Voters and Opposition Leaders:

The international press has witnessed the many obstructive actions that the regime has deployed during the opposition’s campaign. Maria Corina Machado’s audacious strategies to overcome these obstacles have become an iconic myth in Venezuela: people protecting her and transporting her on horses, motorcycles, trucks and Indian canoes, bypassing official road blockades and all conceivable forms of authority abuses. Her close collaborators have been arrested or forced to seek diplomatic asylum and her supporters have been threatened and harassed.

Demonization of citizens’ right to protect their votes

Given its history of electoral manipulation, the regime needs to insulate its known fraudulent methods from the outstanding and unprecedented vote-defense organization that Maria Corina Machado has been preparing for months with her millions of followers.

For this purpose, the regime is actively working to create a preventive opinion matrix, falsely portraying the opposition as having a destabilizing plan, which allegedly includes denouncing fraud just to incite violence.

With this preemptive demonization, the regime anticipates its intentions of neutralizing the appeal to respect Venezuelans’ human rights, preparing the ground to criminalize the citizens’ constitutional right to demand transparency in the scrutiny peacefully and to defend their votes from any fraudulent intentions.

Although the regime has denied the possibility of quality international observation in adequate proportions, the democratic international community can contribute in many ways to prevent another massive violation of human rights and the harmful consequences for the whole region.

Governments, institutions and democratic leaders worldwide need to keep their eyes focused on the observables at the center of this demonizing projective operation. Only their coordinated action can serve as a serious precautionary measure to protect the human rights of Venezuelan citizens and the integrity of opposition leaders.

Luis Emilio Bruni is an Associate Professor at Aalborg University in Denmark and director of the Augmented Cognition Lab, which is dedicated to neuroscientific research on narrative cognition.