Lilian Tintori is the wife of Leopoldo Lopez – a Venezuelan politician whom the western establishment has quite absurdly hailed as a hero. In her NYT op-ed from the other day Tintori wrote “We have no freedom of speech”.

Here is lengthy interview Tintori gave in July on Venevision, a large private TV network that anyone in Venezuela can watch free of charge. In 2013, the Carter Center said it had the largest audience share for news of any public or private broadcaster.

Tintori said numerous times during the interview that the “regime” “tortured” her husband in prison, and that she is relieved, but not satisfied, that he is now under house arrest. The interviewer was extremely sympathetic as you could tell, even if you don’t speak Spanish, simply by noting that Tintori was not badgered and interrupted.  Tintori also said that “Human Rights Watch placed Leopoldo’s case on a global level as the demonstrative example of severe torture”.

Here is an article about that Venevision interview in El Nacional – one of the country’s largest newspapers.

Here Tintori is again in May on another one of Venezuela’s largest TV networks, Globovision (which is also freely available), giving an even longer interview talking at length about the “repression of the regime” and “crimes against humanity ordered by Nicolas Maduro”, “the worst repression in our history” etc…

Interestingly, in her NYT op-ed, Tintori refers to the migration of “tens of thousands” from Venezuela last year due to the economic crisis.

Claims that have been made about infant and maternal mortality in Venezuela recently are so utterly outlandish that, if true, then migration from Venezuela would easily be millions of people per year  – again I must stress, millions per year – due to the economic crisis since 2014. The 2003 invasion of Iraq and its aftermath produced 2 million Iraqi refugees outside the country by 2007 – about 500,000 refugees per year.  That would work out to about 585,000 people per year if you scale up from Iraq’s 2003 population to Venezuela’s 2014 population, but corporate journalists are routinely claiming a collapse in living conditions in Venezuela since 2014 that makes what took place in Iraq after 2003 very minor by comparison.

For example, Lucia Newman, of Aljazeera, with a straight face, made claims the other day that if true would mean that infant mortality is now ten times higher in Venezuela than it was in Iraq in 2007.

The deceit peddled by the western media about Venezuela is so extreme because there is negligible opposition to it. Western reporters either share the extreme bias, so have no problem with it, or are too worried about keeping their jobs to speak out against it. The same applies to western politicians.

That says a lot about “freedom of expression” in our own countries, if we care to notice. 

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