—Silvio Canto Jr: Hello everybody this is Silvio Canto in Dallas, Texas on Wednesday, August the second. Today we are going to be chatting with our friend, Daniel Duquenal from Venezuela. Daniel is the editor of "Venezuela News and Views" a website that many of you read and in fact for me it has become a —something I check every day— I am a subscriber to it or I should say I get the updates every day whenever Daniel writes a new one. So we are going to talk of what is happening in Venezuela. I mean its horrendous what is happening in Venezuela. I never though that I would se what I saw the other night, the arrest of two opposition leaders —they went to their homes and picked them up— I mean that is pretty, uh, reminds to some of us what we saw in Cuba at an earlier time in our lives, when we saw some of our neighbours, some of the people we knew, were arrested in that fashion, so a lot of bad things are happening in Venezuela and hopefully tonight we might get a local perspective from our friend Daniel Duquenal. I have a post at the "American Thinker" where I link to one of Daniel's most recent posts and I would recommend that you check that out. I have a link to it in my blog, on twitter as well as on my political page over in Facebook. Let me say hello to Daniel. How are you Daniel?
—Daniel Duquenal: I am doing fine, well according to as much as we can "do fine" in Venezuela these days, but thank you for having me tonight.
—Silvio Canto Jr: Well its a great pleasure. We've had you on before and its always fun. Its always fun to chat with you and get that local perspective that very often we don't pick up in the, you know, in the international media. Before we get to the topic, I just, I want you to talk a little bit, take a few minutes to talk about "Venezuela News and Views" and this is the website which you have been running for several years. Just talk a little bit about it and when you got started and how often you post and so on.
—Daniel Duquenal: "Venezuela News and Views" was started in January 2003 during the very first major strike against Chávez because it was eventful at the time —of course now events are much stronger than then— but it was eventful and I was at home and somebody suggested that I started writing and transforming the letters I had written to my friends, transforming them in a blog and it started like that. At the beginning, because there was a very leftist feeling towards Chávez —"the hero of the poor" etc. etc.— very few people were getting what was going on in Venezuela. And I could say for 2003, '04 and '05, basically very few journalists and the bloggers in Venezuela —specially the bloggers that were writing in English— were about the only people that were trying to tell the world what really was going on. Eventually people started catching up on what was going on and my blog in a way over the years became unnecessary when you have all those big headlines in "The Washington Post", "New York Times", "Le Monde", whatever. So because of my personal circumstances also, in the last three, four years I became more personal in my blog, writing more my frustrations than trying to explain what happens in Venezuela because thats not my role anymore. So this kind of gives a second life to the blog that is much more "emotional" than informative because now all the information is everywhere and I think if people come to read me its not to know what is going on in Venezuela, but how it is interpreted and how it is fed.
—Silvio Canto Jr: Right, and that's what I like about it. That's one of the reasons I like your blog so much, because we can all read —as I mention in my "American Thinker" article— you're exactly right, I mean there's a lot of information about Venezuela that we can get on the international media. We have, as you know, websites, we have news cables channels in the United States that will do news segments on Venezuela, with lots of video of what is happening down there, but it is that personal touch that, it is that human touch that I think you add to the information and that's the reason that I enjoy reading it so much. Because I get that personal touch and in this post that you wrote —this would have been Monday morning, I guess, or Tuesday morning, the one that I linked to "American Thinker"— you spoke very much from the heart. You spoke about the frustrations of what was going on down there and one of those lines that I found was very interesting in your analysis was that the voting centres, meaning the places where people went to vote, were empty. Were lightly attended. So clearly from the very beginning you could see with your own eyes that this effort was going to fail. And that the only way it would succeed would be by a major fraud, which is what happened in Venezuela. So tell me a little bit about, did you go outside and walking around and see the voting centres and talk to people, Daniel?
—Daniel Duquenal: No, I could not do that because I used to live in San Felipe where I could do that such things at election time, but now because of personal circumstances I had to move to Caracas. I live in Caracas now, and where I live in Caracas is an opposition stronghold. Under Chávez, even in the best years of Chávez he was never getting more than 10-15% of votes in this area. So what happens, is right now its full protests, they tend to block all the streets, you cannot go around except walking, so when the protests start I just can't leave my area. So I cannot go around and see the voting centres. What I can tell you is all the voting centres in my area were closed on Sunday. The ones I would know about were closed. They did not open, they did not even try to open those voting centres. And yet, there are Chavistas that live here, and probably work for them but they did not even try to open that. So the only thing that I could do on Sunday was to look at the mood of people. So since it was reasonably safe as far as crime —because of course, since the roads are all blocked the criminals that rob you in open daylight in Caracas cannot come to this area right now— so I could even take my nicer camera and go for a long walk and check out the barricades by myself, took pictures until I reached a main one in an area called Caurimare where I witnessed once again, and that by the National Guard, I even got slightly gassed by tear gas and I had to retreat because I am just too old to fight like all those very brave and courageous young people that are fighting for the future. So I have to admire them because they really put their lives on line and I'm just to old for that, so I have to do other things.
—Silvio Canto Jr: Right.
—Daniel Duquenal: Such as informing what I see or giving some stuff when I can, etc.
—Silvio Canto Jr: Well now, what about, you also wrote in that post about the vote counting and what a farce it was. Talk a little about that.
—Daniel Duquenal: First I'm going to tell you a couple of things as quickly as I can. The Constitutional Assembly first is not legitimate, because the conditions it was called for meant a regression in the civil right in Venezuela. The People were not consulted on whether they want a new constitution or not. And the electoral system of the constitution kills the sanctified right of one man one vote, because —I'm not going to go into the details— the way that assembly was elected, 70% of the people for example were allowed to vote twice, at least twice, "legally" and 30% could only vote once. And all other sorts of mis —how could I explain that— well the other thing is that it was decided by geographical districts and not by population districts, so some districts with a lot of people got only one representative, well as some sides with very few people also got one representative. By a fifteen fold margin on occasions. So it was a totally unfair assembly to elect. A legitimate regression if required. Now there was a whole bunch of materials fraud already created before the election was held and when the election was held —which is more interesting to tell right now because today we have some major events about that— the regime lied nakedly about the participation of all the voters on Sunday. And all the information we've got there were no more than two or three million people that participated and a very significant chunk of them because they were blackmailed into participation. And, so we already knew that —what can we do?— and then today we had two things, first there was a major leak that was reported by Reuters early this morning, the government claims eight million votes and in fact at 5:30 pm they were registering only three million plus votes. So it is unbelievable that in the last hour of voting they were able to duplicate the number of people voting. So already right there, there was already evidence of major fraud that needs to be explained. But we have seen a couple of hours after that Reuters piece, another Reuters piece came where the manufacturer of the voting machine —Smartmatic— announced that their results were in differ from the results announced by the government in at least one million votes. That is about 15% of the votes were not real according to Smartmatic and they don't have evidence, well, they don't have the study complete to say how much more votes were fake. What we know is that we learned a third thing today is that Smartmatic representants in Venezuela were evacuated yesterday, their office emptied and they were all shipped outside of the country in a private airplane. Because they know that they would be jailed right there on the spot for announcing such an outrageous violation of electoral precedents.
—Silvio Canto Jr: So all of this came out...[Interrupted] Go ahead, I am sorry, go ahead and finish.
—Daniel Duquenal: No, just to finish, I was saying. So right now the government this afternoon has been exposed as having done a major electoral fraud. When I say major, I could be an invention of at least half of the votes cast and reported were simply faked votes. They just had electronic machines publish the results they wanted. Now, what are they going to do about that? I don't know?
—Silvio Canto Jr: Right, and this is the big news that came out today, confirming that the whole thing was a farce. Well I think that a lot of us, what a lot of us outside of Venezuela, those of us who care about Venezuela and obviously have friends in Venezuela and have met many Venezuelans over the years, we are obviously very concerned about the future of your country. And I want to ask you a couple of questions about that. First of all, lets go to the U.S. sanctions. President Trump has announced some sanctions. My guess is that he is just beginning, I think there will be more. So your impression of the sanctions, do you think they —as they say in English— do you think they have teeth? Do you think that they will make a difference? Daniel?
—Daniel Duquenal: Well, there are several things to consider. First, there is a major contrast between Trump and Obama with about Venezuela. I am not going to talk about the other contrast, of course, its not the point because I am only going to discuss what matters to Venezuela. But we have to recognise that the Cuban policy that Obama favoured has been very negative as far as Venezuela is concerned. So when Trump was sworn in, within weeks —I think within two or three weeks— he received at the oval office the wife of Leopoldo Lopez which is arguably the major political prisoner in Venezuela. So he received Lilian Tintori with vice president Pence and senator Marco Rubio, so right there the message was very clear to Venezuela: the indifference of the Obama years was over.
—Silvio Canto Jr: [Interrupts] I was going to ask, you mentioned Marco Rubio and senator Rubio of course gave a great speech a couple of days ago. He spoke to the people of Venezuela in Spanish. I think that speech, would you agree with me that speech was a success as far as at least the opposition in Venezuela?
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A Venezuela where dictatorship feels far away by @emiduarte in @CaracasChron https://t.co/m4YuGmisUr pic.twitter.com/0uFFtB4ipK— Juan J Gil V (@juantxon) August 4, 2017
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