Ambassador Otto Reich in Americas Forum:
Otto Reich: Rebutting Maduro’s Malicious Allegations
What is a US citizen to do when a foreign Head of State accuses the American of planning to kill the country’s opposition candidate? The American in this case happens to be a former US Ambassador to Venezuela and Assistant Secretary of State [that has been very critical of the organized crime enterprise misruling Venezuela.]
Not for the first time, Venezuela’s appointed president and candidate of the ruling party, the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), Nicolas Maduro, has alleged that I am plotting against the life of the opposition candidate, Henrique Capriles. How does one prove a negative?
I hereby, once more, categorically deny Maduro’s absurd charge and publicly challenge him to present the “proof” he claims to have. If he does not, he demonstrates his charges are false and malicious. Incidentally, alleged victim Capriles has stated that if something does happen to him he holds Maduro responsible, no one else.
Maduro’s latest hateful fabrication is part of a cynical strategy aimed at distracting Venezuela from the man-made disaster of his party’s 14-year “socialist” rule. Since Maduro could not win the election by offering the Venezuelans bread, because bread is just one of the many foodstuffs missing from store shelves, he offers circuses.
Maduro cannot defend a record of unprecedented official corruption that has seen a trillion dollars stolen or squandered in 14 years; of imported food rotting in countless containers at the ports while Venezuelan mothers riot in the interior of the country seeking milk, poultry, rice, beans and other staples that have disappeared; of illicit fortunes amassed by scores of cabinet ministers, military officers and favored businessmen who live lavishly alongside the misery they have wrought at home while investing hundreds of millions abroad; a record that now has Venezuela on the list of the world’s top ten countries in homicides and the worst in Latin America; and of the surrender of Venezuela’s treasure and sovereignty to a foreign nation, communist Cuba, that runs Venezuela’s strategic and internal security, from the Military High Command down to Acting President Maduro’s own bodyguards.
Maduro now claims that the US CIA and Defense Department have joined the conspiracy against Capriles and implores President Obama to “stop it.”
The State Department spokesperson dismissed Maduro’s conspiracy theory clearly: “The United States categorically rejects allegations of any U.S. government involvement in any plot to destabilize the Venezuelan government or to harm anyone in Venezuela.”
Maduro’s charges are so far removed from reality that we must ask what is their real purpose; what do they conceal? It is feared they could be a smoke screen behind which the current Venezuelan Government itself plans to eliminate Capriles, as it has eliminated others that challenged its monopoly of power and information, such as former Prosecutor Danilo Anderson, assassinated in 2004 while investigating political murders attributed to then-president Hugo Chavez’s allies. No one in Venezuela has been brought to justice for Anderson’s murder by car bomb.
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