Telesur is not Up for Grabs

By Stella Calloni on January 14, 2019

Our North is the South

As if something was missing from the Venezuelan scene in the last few days, where the Venezuelan opposition itself said “no” to a devalued and discredited puppet of the United States Juan Guaidó, Now he is carrying out new orders from his masters to the North by announcing that he is beginning the process of “recovering” the Venezuelan and Latin American television network TELESUR that is seen all over the world and especially in our region, despite the fact that some governments, acting as colonial subjects of Washington, like the defeated Mauricio Macri in Argentina, have made it disappear from the local grids.

Argentina’s digital newspaper Infobae, which in reality reproduces – in a supposed partnership with The New York Times – the falsified reports of the CIA and the U.S. Pentagon on the countries of our region, reports on an event headed by “interim president of Venezuela Juan Guaidó” (sic) held last Saturday in a “large town hall of citizens and deputies in Caracas”, to discuss possible solutions to the deep crisis the oil-producing country is going through, and one of its projects is to “recover” TELESUR!!??

In the article, Guaidó is treated as “president of the National Assembly” although he proclaimed himself in a newspaper room in order to continue collecting millions of dollars from the CIA, when the majority of the opposition deputies elected a new president, Luis Parra, through a vote in Congress, which is valid and constitutional.

Of course, Steven Mnuchin, the U.S. Treasury Secretary considered the opponents who voted for Parra to be “corrupt officials”, who along with other opposition colleagues are among those now sanctioned by Washington. This is one of the many brutal violations by the imperial power, making decisions about a sovereign country, and it is part of the counter-insurgency war of various characteristics that the Donald Trump government is employing against our region.

Guaidó, scandalously validated by some countries of the discredited Organization of American States (OAS) not only as interim president but also of the National Assembly as a mockery to most Venezuelan opponents and the Maduro government, received the order of not to accept dialogue or negotiation.

It is the same old US discourse. They speak of a transitional government, that is, Maduro’s resignation from his legitimate position as president-elect in the May 2018 elections, where an opposition sector participated despite Washington’s pressure to force them to refuse.

There were international observers from all over the world were there and Maduro won, at a time when the people heroically resorted to a number ways to reach the voting centers by roads obstructed by the opposition, which was filmed by dozens of journalists and of course by TELESUR, without their production we would never have been able to see what happened there and in many countries, both in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, Europe and others.

Although he has failed miserably, as soon as he attempted a coup, Guaidó has been maintained by Trump’s advisors as well a the Cuban-American representative Marcos Rubio, despite the disagreement amongst some of the president’s national security teams.

In statements made in the last few hours, the man charged by President Trump with resolving what they cynically call the “crisis in Venezuela,” the eternal Elliott Abrams – accused of encouraging and covering up crimes against humanity in Central America in the 1980s, as well as intervening in the scandals of illegal arms sales to Iran and the entry of drugs into the United States through Miami’s Southern Command, in both cases to finance the Contra’s weapons in the CIA’s war against Sandinista Nicaragua – ratified that they will not accept dialogue or negotiation with the Maduro government.

Asked by the press if the Trump government will try to use force against Venezuela he remarked that “as we have seen in the Middle East, any president of the United States, if he wants to use force to defend our national interests, is going to use force. Frankly, it’s not up to Juan Guaidó, it’s up to the president.”

Guaidó then told his dwindling supporters that one must imagine what the region would be like if TELESUR ceased to exist, asserting that it “lies, misinforms, promotes terrorist groups, seeks inequality,” trying to denigrate the extraordinary work done by those who keep “our” television station alive, in the face of the greatest imperial media power of all time.

Since the creation of TELESUR, as an expression of Latin American unity, to which former President Hugo Chávez contributed so much in moments of integration and solidarity and continues to do so today with Maduro, the United States drew up all kinds of plans to silence Venezuelan and Latin American grown television, seen all over the world and in our region and respected for its content and production, at the cost of great sacrifice.

It is the only television network in our America that has correspondents in almost all the world and, together with the Agencia Prensa Latina of Cuba, and others such as Hispan TV or Russia Today, with vast reach, they integrate the few voices of truth and comply with spreading the culture and life of our countries, attached to the international rules of providing truthful information, as an acquired right of the peoples of the world. And as a key element of decolonization.

We must remember that 97 percent of the media is in the hands of the hegemonic power, namely the United States and its submissive associates, including the governments of a Europe in decline, have replaced the truth with unrestrained lies, turning disinformation into a media missile, which kills in the same way as those fired by the military against peoples and governments, as we are seeing every day.

The idea of placing in Guaidó’s hands the campaign to take over TELESUR , which they tried to set fire to their headquarters in Caracas, and against which they have carried out a series of attacks in the framework of the cyber war, seems destined to fail, like everything else that the “chosen one” of the US government has tried so far.

The free peoples of the world, and even those who are faced with real, nonfiction dictatorships and a media terrorism that undermines all paths to peace and international justice and has ceased to be journalism to become one of the key factors of fascist world power, do not accept this brutal attempt to deprive us and will fight to prevent them from drowning out the only television voice, which comes from the very bowels of Our America.

Nobody should lay a finger on Telesur. Telesur is all of us who love true and independent freedom of the press.

Source: Contexto, translation Resumen Latinoamericano, North America bureau