By Roger D. Harris on November 1, 2024
Gonzalez and Machado, winners of the Sakharov Prize. photo: Cristian Hernandez/Euronews
The world’s peoples recoil in shock over the previously unimaginable barbarity of the US/Zionist assault on Palestine. The European Parliament is not impervious to what is transpiring. On the contrary, the body normalizes the cruelty by awarding its highest human rights award, the Sakharov Prize, to dissident Venezuelan genocide supporters.
This is an example of how Western “democracies” fail to respect democracy in the Global South. “Human rights” are weaponized and used to repudiate Venezuela’s right to choose its own leaders, while rewarding those who sell out their country. The US-aligned camp has a clear double standard on when and where upholding “democratic institutions” apply, considering their stances on Venezuela compared to Israel, described below.
The European Union functions as a factotum of the US empire, as is evident regarding its treatment of Venezuela. The European Parliament is a legislative body of the European Union (EU). Of the 27 member states, 23 are also members of the empire’s praetorian guard, aka NATO. The EU and NATO are official “partners” with integrated planning capabilities, closely linking security to the dictates of the US.
EU’s relationship with Venezuela
The EU is Venezuela’s fourth largest trading partner, but the relationship is abusive. The EU punishes Venezuela for being independent of the US empire when they are unwilling to do so themselves.
In 2019, the EU recognized the unelected and US-selected “interim president” of Venezuela, Juan Guaidó. In the same resolution, they imposed additional sanctions on Venezuela, hypocritically lamenting the “need of humanitarian assistance,” while making it more difficult for Venezuela to receive vital food, fuel, and medicines.
Following earlier extensions, in November 2023, the EU further extended its sanctions on Venezuela through May 2024. Then, a day before those sanctions were to expire and two months before the Venezuelan presidential election, the EU again extended their sanctions until January 2025.
The implicit message to the Venezuelan people was that they had better vote for the right candidate. Otherwise, when the new president is inaugurated on January 10, 2025, the sanctions would be extended yet again if not enhanced.
Defying foreign intervention, Venezuelans reelected incumbent President Nicolás Maduro on July 28. But from the EU’s perspective, the only possible explanation for the Venezuelans making what they viewed as the wrong choice is fraud. The EU consequently recognized the runner-up in the election, Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia, as the “legitimate president” of Venezuela. That individual was then awarded the EU’s Sakharov Prize. The Venezuelan opposition had itself renounced the corrupt Guaidó, who had been the EU’s earlier designated president of Venezuela.
A week later, the EU plus 33 individual countries signed a US-led “joint statement” expressing “grave concerns about the urgent situation in Venezuela” and calling for a political “transition” in Venezuela.
The Sakharov Prize
Gonzalez and his co-awardee Maria Corina Machado are typical recipients of the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought. Such folks are usually dissidents from countries that are targeted for regime change by US – and by default echoed by the European Parliament – such as Venezuela, but also Russia, Syria, Belarus, Cuba, and China.
Previously, the “democratic opposition of Venezuela” received the award in 2017. Ajamu Baraka of the Black Alliance for Peace commented on this “bizarre example of the reactionary nature of the European left [awarding]…a group that has openly attacked journalists and burned alive two dozen people of primarily Black or dark complexions who they assumed were probably government supporters because they were poor and Black.”
This year, beating out semi-finalist Elon Musk (I’m not making this up), the award again went to Venezuelan dissidents. Machado and Gonzalez were honored as fighters for “freedom and democracy.”
Machado’s “democracy” credentials include signing the infamous Carmona Decree, which shuttered Venezuela’s parliament, courts, and executive in a short-lived US-backed coup in 2002. After President Hugo Chávez was returned to his elected post by a popular uprising, he pardoned the coup plotters, including Machado.
Gonzalez’s “freedom” credentials include being implicated in the US-backed death squads in the 1980s when he was a Venezuelan diplomat in El Salvador. TeleSUR reported on Gonzalez’s “past of crimes against humanity.”
According to the EU’s announcement: “Machado won primary elections in 2023 to run as the candidate of the democratic opposition (Unitary Platform) in the 2024 presidential elections, but after she was arbitrarily disqualified by the Venezuelan regime, González became the candidate.”
Machado did in fact win a primary election, but not one conducted by the official Venezuelan electoral authority, the CNE. Rather, it was a private affair administered by the NGO Súmate, a recipient of funds from the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a CIA-cutout.
As Washington’s prechosen candidate, Machado won in a crowded field of 13 candidates with an incredulous 92%. When some of the other candidates called fraud, Machado had the ballots destroyed. She could do so because Súmate is her personal organization.
True, Machado had been barred from running, but that was back in 2015; the disqualification was reconfirmed by the Venezuelan supreme court this year. Far from “arbitrary,” she had accepted a diplomatic post with a foreign power in order to testify against her own country while serving in the Venezuelan parliament. Such treason is constitutionally prohibited in Venezuela as it is in many other countries.
For the US and its junior partner, the EU, Machado’s disbarment was a bonus. They could claim that their candidate was unfairly disqualified, when that was a given to begin with. Their intent was not to encourage a free and fair democratic process, but to delegitimize the one already in place.
Sakharov winners’ “strategic alliance” with Zionists
Venezuela’s far-right opposition, along with their international counterparts, support the US/Zionist campaign of extermination and regional domination in the Middle East.
Literally nothing is known about the political positions of Sakharov-winner Edmundo Gonzalez. Long retired, Gonzalez was personally chosen to run for the presidency by the other Sakharov winner, Maria Corina Machado. While the infirm “grandpa,” as the press dubbed him, convalesced in Caracas, Machado campaigned around Venezuela as his surrogate. After he lost the election, the EU’s designated president of Venezuela voluntarily left Venezuela for Spain.
In comparison, Machado is a well-known scion of one of the wealthiest families in Venezuela. Fluent in English, the photogenic Machado was first vetted for the Venezuelan presidency before the US Congress and given a bipartisan nod before running in her ersatz “opposition primary.”
Machado is a darling of the international far-right with close ties to Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu. In a leaked document signed by her, Machado requested military support from Netanyahu to overthrow the Venezuelan government in December 2018.
A month later, after Juan Guaidó self-appointed himself “interim president” of Venezuela, Machado publicly thanked Netanyahu for recognizing the US puppet and specifically called on Jews who had left Venezuela to return and help overthrow the elected government.
Machado gushed: “Prime Minister Netanyahu joins our many allies…We certainly have a common enemy with Israel: the criminal forces that undermine freedom and peace in the world.”
Later that year in an interview with the Israeli news outlet Haaretz, Machado appealed for help from Israel in “our goal of dismantling” Venezuela.
Machado’s Vente Venezuela and Netanyahu’s Likud parties publicly signed a cooperative agreement in 2020 to collude on “political, ideological and social issues.”
Venezuelan government supports Palestine
In contrast to the dissidents, the elected Venezuelan government is distinguished as a recognized world leader for, in President Maduro’s words, “unconditional support to the Palestinian cause.” Hugo Chávez cut diplomatic ties with Israel in 2009 in response to response to Israel’s military operations in Gaza back then.
The countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, including Venezuela, perhaps more than in any other region have expressed their solidarity with Palestine. Quite the reverse, on September 18, thirteen EU countries either abstained or voted against the UN General Assembly resolution demanding Israel end its “unlawful” occupation of Palestine. Meanwhile, the preponderance of humanity, 124 countries, voted to condemn the Zionist state.
Roger D. Harris is with the human rights group Task Force on the Americas, founded in 1985.