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Understanding Maduro’s successful socialist economic strategy
After years of calling Venezuela's economy a dismal failure that demonstrates the dangers of socialism, Western media is now lauding its recovery for 'embracing capitalism' — but this is not accurate, argues FRANCISCO DOMINGUEZ
CHAVISTAS TO THE CORE: The 23 de Enero working-class neighbourhood in western Caracas, commemorates on July 28 2022 what would have been Hugo Chavez’s 68th birthday. January 23 1958 was the day dictator Marcos Perez Jimenez was overthrown

IN ITS intensely biased coverage of Venezuela during the hard years of 2014-21 the mainstream media wheeled in every imaginable academic pundit to “demonstrate” that the country’s economic woes were the result of President Nicolas Maduro overseeing Venezuela’s slide “into authoritarianism and economic collapse” (the Guardian, January 24 2019) and not of cruel US sanctions.  

In 2019, the Economist for instance, in line with US policy, published a front cover with a clench-fisted Juan Guaido titled “the battle for Venezuela’s future,” positing “the world democracies are right to seek change.” Very rarely, if at all, the mainstream media or the activated pundits gave any significant weight to the well over 500 illegal and criminal unilateral coercive measures (aka sanctions) inflicted on Venezuela and its people by the US and its European and Latin American accomplices.  

US economic warfare — the almost total blockade of its economy — led to a shrinking of 99 per cent of its revenues, with Venezuela living on 1 per cent of its pre-sanctions income.

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