A U.S. Senator’s claim about Venezuela Sunday made him the subject of ridicule, but the underlying message of destabilizing the Latin American country remains official American policy—even as the role of sanctions is ignored.
On Sunday morning, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) tweeted that a power failure and subsequent blackout in Venezuela was due to an accident at a location known as “German Dam.”
“Today another transformer explosion at the German Dam in Bolivar State caused another massive blackout,” Rubio wrote.
There was just one problem: Germán Dam is the name of a reporter covering the blackout story who tweeted about the transformer exploding, not the location of the accident. In fact, no such location exists in Venezuela.
Rubio’s tweet led to endless rounds of mockery, not least from Dam himself.
As amusing as Rubio’s mistake was, it hints at another, more important issue: the American foreign policy establishment is using the blackout to take aim at Venezuela, no matter how they have to spin or obfuscate the facts around the power outage.
That was the message from foreign policy analyst Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, remarking on reporting about Venezuela from The New York Times over the weekend.
“This is amazing,” tweeted Weisbrot, “buried deep in this NYT article is a sentence indicating the Trump economic sanctions are a major cause of the deadly blackout in Venezuela, contradicting the rest of the article.”
That’s a meaningful thing to leave out, Weisbrot explained, because it is part of a continuing push from U.S. media to downplay the role of American sanctions in Venezuela’s current instability—when they mention it at all.
U.S. officials, meanwhile, have targeted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro with rhetoric tying the blackout to government policies.