Hands Off Venezuela @*HOVcampaign* <https://twitter.com/HOVcampaign>
*Mexico rally in solidarity with Venezuela April 18 PIC pic.twitter.com/SO7utHQuzc <http://t.co/SO7utHQuzc> VIDEO http:// youtu.be/Mi6TxWlQUy4 <http://t.co/okgY7tX0Hj> VIDEO http:// youtu.be/GwS7g3UAzVY <http://t.co/rVQ8CfCFyD>* * * * * * * *Hands Off Venezuela<https://twitter.com/intent/user?screen_name=HOVcampaign> @HOVcampaign * *via @villegaspoljake <https://twitter.com/villegaspoljake> VIDEOs of attacks on CDIs:youtube.com/watch?feature= <http://t.co/KJto1kefFQ> youtube.com/watch?feature= <http://t.co/ouCoztRl1F> youtube.com/watch?feature= <http://t.co/B5d7WXUIV4> youtube.com/watch?feature= <http://t.co/wL0ogVe0Lw>* * * *ZULIA: Peoples' power and alternative media discuss defence of Bolivarian revolution VIDEO via @ViVe_Television <https://twitter.com/ViVe_Television> http://bit.ly/17BIIKB <http://t.co/zmQbc7KWBW>* Venezuela's Nicolas Maduro Sworn in, Promises "a Revolution of the Revolution" Apr 19th 2013, by Ewan Robertson [image: Maduro receiving the presidential sash (Prensa Presidencial)] Maduro receiving the presidential sash (Prensa Presidencial) Mérida, 19th April 2013 (Venezuelanalysis.com) Nicolas Maduro was sworn in as Venezuelan president for the constitutional period 2013 2019 today, promising to continue Hugo Chavezs legacy and spearhead a revolution of the revolution. In a formal act in the National Assembly in Caracas, Maduro took his presidential oath before assembly president Diosdado Cabello. I swear by the whole people of Venezuela, by the supreme commander [Hugo Chavez], that I will abide by and make respected the Constitution of the Laws of the Republic to construct an independent, free and socialist nation for all, Maduro declared. Cabello and daughter of late President Hugo Chavez Maria Gabriela Chavez then placed the presidential sash upon Maduro. In the presence of representatives of sixty-one countries and various government and public figures, Maduro made his first speech as constitutional president, which was broadcast to the nation. The beginning of the speech was interrupted when an unknown man ran up to Maduro, taking the microphone and made an inaudible statement. After the man was escorted away, Maduro criticised the failure of security, warning I could have received a bullet. Un-phased, the Venezuelan president spoke on various themes, including the legacy of Hugo Chavez and trajectory of the Bolivarian revolution up to the current moment. The speech also touched upon events in Venezuela since last Sunday, when opposition candidate Henrique Capriles refused to recognise his electoral defeat, losing to Maduro by just 1.8%. Maduro criticised Capriles for calling his supporters onto the streets on Monday night to protest the result, rather than taking the constitutional route of formally submitting any claims to the National Electoral Council (CNE). The president also attacked what he called an opposition strategy to promote xenophobia in Venezuela, through criticisms of the role of Cuba and the presence of Cuban doctors in the country. Maduro ventured that this strategy was responsible for the attacks against Cuban-staffed health clinics this week, after the oppositions protests led to confrontations and violence. As a result, Maduro swore to promote peace and to defeat the anti-values of racism and intolerance. Further, according to the Venezuelan president, whatever comes out of the CNEs widened audit of the presidential vote, they [the opposition] arent going to recognise the result; they have another plan. However, the former bus driver assured that the government is ready for any further attempts at violence and sabotage, and that the nation is strong, it is awoken. *Dialogue and revolution* Maduros speech also focused on working with various sectors of Venezuelan society, including those who voted against him last Sunday. Fellow countryman or countrywoman who is at home or work that for some reason voted against the candidate of the nation, I stretch out my hand to you. We guarantee peace in this country, he said. Maduro set out his vision of governance for the coming period, looking to reinvigorate the Bolivarian revolution after last Sundays narrow electoral victory. This approach was termed a revolution of the revolution, with Maduro looking to tackle problems which have cost the government support. These include pledges to reduce crime, improve government efficiency and crack down on corruption. On the economy, Maduro said he would work to raise production while tackling shortages and economic sabotage. The Venezuelan president also set the ambitious aim of zero poverty in Venezuela by 2019, to be pursued through continuing government social programs and other anti-poverty mechanisms. Finally, Maduro committed to a democratic revolution by working to promote community councils and communes and move towards a socialist mode of living. He assured this could not be done by the government, but rather by the people. The inauguration coincides with the 203rd anniversary of Venezuelas independence, with Maduro participating in a military parade through in the Heroes Avenue in Caracas. *Opposition stance* The oppositions parliamentary deputies did not attend todays swearing-in event, refusing to recognise Maduro until the CNE undertakes a 100% audit of Sundays vote. Defeated opposition candidate Henrique Capriles called on supporters to bang pots and pans and play salsa during the event as a protest against what the opposition claims is Maduros illegitimacy. A legal effort to block the swearing-in event in the National Assembly (AN) was quashed by the Supreme Court yesterday, which ruled that any challenges to the 14 April election result should be directed to the CNE, and had nothing to do with the AN. Further, Henrique Capriles has formally returned to his post as governor of Miranda, after the Miranda state legislative council moved to declare his absolute absence from the post. The governments United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) holds a majority on the council. Miranda legislative council president, Aurora Morales, welcomed Capriles decision, arguing that he assumed before the world that he isnt president of Venezuela and that he was made to respect the laws and democratic institutions of the country. ------------------------------ *Source URL (retrieved on 20/04/2013 - 1:18am):* http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/8703 Claims of Fraud in Venezuela: The Fake Evidence of Henrique Capriles Apr 20th 2013, by Chris Carlson - Venezuelanalysis.com [image: Henrique Capriles holds up a vote tally at a press conference last Monday (Getty Images)] Henrique Capriles holds up a vote tally at a press conference last Monday (Getty Images) Immediately after Nicolas Maduro was elected to the presidency of Venezuela last Sunday, opposition candidate Henrique Capriles refused to acknowledge the results of the election, and claimed that the government had committed fraud. In what follows, I will list all of the alleged evidence of fraud cited by Capriles, and explain why every single example is either demonstrably false, or extremely implausible. The first example given by the Capriles campaign has to do with what is known as an assisted vote in which electoral authorities assist certain voters in using the electoral machine. The Capriles campaign presented on Sunday videos of various people being aided in this way at various voting centers. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=mQ7OZqI0Ir0 The claim was that with assisted voting people were being pressured by electoral authorities to vote for Nicolas Maduro, and that the votes at those voting centers should therefore be voided. Capriles claimed that this had happened at 564 different voting centers, affecting nearly 1.5 million voters. However, there was not a single independent report of any voters who said they were not able to vote for who they wanted. Not a single voter or witness came forward to say that they had been obligated to vote for one candidate or the other. The assisted vote exists as a mechanism that voters can request if they do not understand how to use the electoral machine, or if they have physical limitations that make it difficult for them to vote alone. As one Venezuelan commented on thevideo<http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=mQ7OZqI0Ir0> on Youtube, You can ask to have someone help you vote if you want. I asked for help the first time I voted and it was a family friend who was there. My god, these people [the opposition] will make up anything." Shortly after, it was shown that one of the videos<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrWOX5hWiMw> going around on the internet was fake. It had been posted on Youtube last October, and thus was obviously not from Sundays election as was being claimed. The source of the other video could not be confirmed, and the Capriles campaign did not give details about who the people were that were involved. But more importantly, the assisted vote claim ignores the fact that nearly all voting centers have witnesses present from the opposition parties, in addition to randomly selected citizens working the voting stations, who would have noticed if any voters were being pressured to vote against their will. Yet not one of these witnesses reported seeing anything, nor have any media outlets presented a single case of this happening, even though Capriles claimed it happened at 564 voting centers. All of the opposition witnesses signed off on the electoral process at the closing of the polls on Sunday, certifying that nothing had gone wrong. As another commenter on Youtube said: "This is a lie. I worked at the voting center. We were watching the people from the [governing party] PSUV and everything came out excellent..." In the days that followed the elections, new allegations and accusations of fraud came out of the opposition camp. On the internet, many opposition supporters began circulating photos of ballot boxes being burned, and claimed the government was destroying the results to hide the evidence. Opposition media disseminated the photos and claimed they were real. Below is a tweet <https://twitter.com/RCTVenlinea/status/323881102982934529> from opposition media outlet RCTV that says, More electoral material that they want to make disappear, and we received from our followers. Opposition newspaper *El Nuevo País* published<http://www.difundelaverdad.org.ve/portada/el-nuevo-pais-tras-el-golpe/#.UXHXWKt4Z-o> a similar photo on their front page, with the headline Lucenazo, which can be roughly translated as Lucenas Coup, referring to the President of the National Electoral Council Tibisay Lucena. Opposition website La Patilla<http://www.lapatilla.com/site/2013/04/15/encontraron-papeletas-de-votacion-en-la-troncal-5-en-barinas-fotos/> published other photos that appeared to show electoral material being manipulated by authorities. The photos were later shown <http://www.aporrea.org/ddhh/n226929.html> to be false, taken from several years ago<http://www.eluniversal.com/2010/09/18/pol_ava_cne-incinero-materia_18A4487571.shtml> when officials were destroying electoral materials from the 2006 and 2008 elections, as mandated by law. Yet the word had already been spread, and many Venezuelans were convinced that the materials were being destroyed. At no time did Capriles make a statement about the falsehood of the various photos and videos circulating on the internet and in opposition media to separate himself from the lies, or to calm his supporters. On Monday evening, Capriles called for a press conference<http://www.elmundo.com.ve/Noticias/TuVoto/Las-denuncias-electorales-presentadas-por-Capriles.aspx> with the presence of international media in order to present the alleged evidence of electoral irregularities that his campaign had assembled. Once again, the evidence presented was either demonstrably false, or completely baseless. First, Capriles cited a high number of electoral machines that had broken down on the day of the elections. He said there was a total of 535 cases, affecting an alleged 189,982 voters. But what Capriles did not mention is that the Electoral Council maintains a reserve<http://www.telesurtv.net/articulos/2013/04/17/gobierno-venezolano-desarma-denuncias-sobre-supuesto-fraude-6147.html> of 10 percent of all machines, more than 3,000 extra electoral machines, all across the country so that machines can be quickly replaced if they do not function correctly. As Maduros campaign manager Jorge Rodriguez said, Only 535 broken machines is actually good news because it is such a small percentage. Next, Capriles gave various examples of what he called irregularities in the vote count, claiming that these kinds of irregularities were widespread and affected nearly 1,200 different voting centers. However, the only concrete examples he gave are demonstrably false. In one example, Capriles showed an actual vote tally from one voting center, claiming that the totals did not add up. He claimed that there were more votes in that voting center than total voters registered to vote, however this is false. Capriles said that there were only 536 electors registered to vote at this center, but that over 700 votes had been cast, but the actual results<http://www.cne.gob.ve/resultado_presidencial_2013/pp/0/reg_190303002.html> clearly show that there were 1,066 electors registered at this center, and a total of 712 votes were cast (see below). *Centro de Votación: LICEO BOLIVARIANO ANTONIO JOSÉ SALDIVIA<http://www.cne.gob.ve/resultado_presidencial_2013/pp/0/reg_190303002.html> * The other examples given were also not irregularities, but simply more manipulations on the part of the Capriles campaign. Various examples were cited of voting centers in which there were much higher vote counts for Maduro than what Hugo Chavez had gotten in 2012. They claimed that this was implausible, since overall Maduro did not get as many total votes as Chavez. However, once again Capriles left out the rest of the story. The truth was that at these particular centers the vote count for *both* candidates had greatly increased due to a higher level of total votes in 2013 at these centers. In one example, Capriles misleadingly claimed that the vote count for Maduro had been 530 percent higher than Chavez in 2012. What he did not say was that votes in favor of *him* increased by even *more*, by more than 1000 percent (from 7 votes<http://www.cne.gob.ve/resultado_presidencial_2012/pp/3/reg_120201010.html> in 2012 to 75 votes<http://www.cne.gob.ve/resultado_presidencial_2013/pp/3/reg_120201010.html> in 2013), in that particular voting center. It was the same situation in the other two examples <http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/8665> given by the Capriles campaign. But the lies did not end here. Capriles went on to make several more claims without providing anything more than a fancy piece of paper<http://venezuelasomostodos.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Incidencias-del-proceso-electoral-14A.pdf> as evidence. He claimed there had been government propaganda outside more than 400 different voting centers, yet the only photo he provided was of a tent that had the PSUV slogan on it. It is hard to imagine how this would cause anyone to change their vote, let alone 270,000 people, which was the margin of victory. He also claimed there had been violence near voting centers, but again there was no evidence that this had affected anyone's vote. Perhaps the most outrageous claim was that opposition witnesses had been forcibly removed at gunpoint from hundreds of voting centers by government authorities. Capriles claimed that this had happened at a total of 286 different voting centers, affecting over 700,000 voters.However, once again, there was not a single independent report of this happening anywhere in the country on Sunday. Not one video, not one photo, not one media report, not one witness report, not one independent claim, not one person interviewed who had witnessed anything like this on election day. As ex-head of Venezuelas Electoral Council Germán Yépez said<http://www.telesurtv.net/articulos/2013/04/16/funcionarios-de-venezuela-muestran-pruebas-para-desmontar-supuesto-fraude-del-cne-6366.html> : It is absurd to talk about this happening at 286 voting centers that according to Capriles include over 700,000 voters. That means we are talking about more than 2,800 voting booths and their respective witnesses. How is this going to happen in so many different voting centers, forcing out more than 2,800 people at gunpoint, in front of international observers, more than 3,800 electoral observers from local NGOs, thousands of journalists deployed around the country, and thousands of randomly selected voting booth workers? None of these thousands of people said anything about this? Finally, it should also be noted that opposition representatives were provided with a copy of the vote tally at every single voting center in which their witnesses were present. As even opposition blogger Francisco Toro has noted<http://caracaschronicles.com/2013/04/16/the-recount-as-red-herring/>, if there really were any fraud in the official electoral results, the discrepancy would show up in the vote tallies that were audited on the night of the elections in the presence of opposition witnesses. If there really were fraud in the electoral outcome, the Capriles campaign would simply have to show where the vote tallies do not coincide with the official vote count. The fact that they have not done this clearly reveals that they do not have any credible evidence of fraud. Instead, they have chosen the path of lies and manipulation, creating a furor among their supporters with this series of fake examples of fraud, and calling on them to take to the streets to protest what Capriles continues to call an illegitmate government. The result has been multiple deaths<http://www.telesurtv.net/articulos/2013/04/16/al-menos-cuatro-muertos-deja-violencia-opositora-en-venezuela-664.html>, dozens of wounded, and several incidents of vandalism and burning of political party headquarters<http://canaldenoticias.com.ve/media/k2/items/cache/01aee280cf96fe5d5b5ee67c65c43aa5_XL.jpg> and health clinics<http://lubrio.blogspot.com/2013/04/no-existieron-los-ataques-los-cdi-son.html>, events which Capriles has refused to take responsibility for, or even express regret to the families<http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=9QpXgmSSZuU> of the dead. Moving forward, as the CNE conducts a full audit<http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/8683> of 100 percent of the votes as requested by the Capriles campaign, it seems unlikely that this will change anything. The Capriles campaign will continue to make false denunciations of supposed irregularities, and claim the audit is not transparent. They will use the opposition-aligned media outlets to continue to disseminate fake evidence of fraud in an attempt to discredit the Maduro government and the state institutions, and the Venezuelan people will continue to be subjected to one of the most deceitful and manipulative disinformation campaigns since the 2002 coup attempt. We can only hope that a majority of Venezuelans do not fall for the lies, and that those telling the lies will finally be made to pay the price for their abuses. ------------------------------ *Source URL (retrieved on 20/04/2013 - 4:46pm):* http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/8702 [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------------------------------------- LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe: <mailto:laamn-unsubscr...@egroups.com> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe: <mailto:laamn-subscr...@egroups.com> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Digest: <mailto:laamn-dig...@egroups.com> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Help: <mailto:laamn-ow...@egroups.com?subject=laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Post: <mailto:la...@egroups.com> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive1: <http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive2: <http://www.mail-archive.com/laamn@egroups.com> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yahoo! 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