The presidential election in Venezuela was yet another opportunity for the West to destabilise the country. The international press consciously presented a totally false version of events in order to discredit President Nicolás Maduro and support his main challenger, Edmundo González.

The disputed re-election of President Nicolás Maduro has little to do with the outcome of the ballot box. In fact, as soon as they came to power in the United States on 11 September 2001, the Straussians (i.e. the followers of Leo Strauss, whose thinking was popularised by neo-conservative journalists [1]) thought that the then President of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, should be shot. Since then, Venezuela has faced attempted military coups and colour revolutions.

The current president, Nicolás Maduro, is following in Hugo Chávez’s footsteps, even if he lacks the stature. In 2019, President Trump’s Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, commissioned the Straussian Elliott Abrams to overthrow President Maduro.

Elliott Abrams, who had already taken part in the massacres in Guatemala in the 1980s, then in the Iran-Contra affair (for which he was convicted in the United States [2]) and the 2002 coup against President Chávez [3], is now the man in Israel who is piloting the ethnic cleansing of Gaza behind Benyamin Netanyahu [4]. In Venezuela, Abrams relied on a young deputy, Juan Guaidó. He got a handful of MPs to elect him president of the National Assembly, challenged Maduro’s election and proclaimed himself interim president.

After being recognised by the West [5], having looted the country’s assets abroad [6], and having organised unsuccessful coup attempts [7] et de guérillas [8] and guerrilla warfare [9], Juan Guaidó stepped down in 2023 in favour of a front man, who himself gave way to María Corina Machado. He now lives in exile in Miami.

As for Eliott Abrams’ plan [10], it was stopped by President Donald Trump just before the military operation was launched by SouthCom.

María Corina Machado took part in the coup d’état against President Hugo Chávez in 2005. She ran as a Liberal candidate against him in 2012. At the time, she advocated the privatisation of natural resources, particularly oil. She described President Chávez as a "thief" for having carried out expropriations with compensation. She was removed from her parliamentary mandate in 2014 because she had agreed to be appointed by Panamanian president Martín Torrijos as ambassador to the Organisation of American States (OAS).

In 2005, when her party was funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), she was received by US President George W. Bush in the Oval Office. In 2014, she was one of the main figures behind La Salida, a campaign to overthrow President Nicolás Maduro [11]. In 2015, she hoped to be brought to power by the US military in "Operation Jericho" [12]. In 2020, she signed the Madrid Charter, which brought together those nostalgic for Latin American dictatorships and described Latin American left-wing governments as affidavits of Cuban communism. She was banned from standing for election on the basis of her emails, which attested to the preparation of a coup d’état.

Unable to stand, she nominated the 80-year-old philosopher Corina Yoris to replace her. But her candidacy did not take. In the end, she appointed Edmundo González, a former diplomat. While María Corina Machado declared herself in favour of........

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