Welcome to the Empire Files podcast. This is your host, Abby Martin. This is the audio of our show.

You can watch the episodes on our YouTube channel or at the Empirefiles.tv. We've all heard the same

things about Venezuela coming from every corporate news outlet. Venezuela is a dictatorship, and

Maduro is a dangerous tyrant, further consolidating power through fraudulent elections.

Weirdly enough, not many dictatorships have elections, certainly not over 20 in the last 20 years,

like Venezuela has. And there's a funny thing about how the U.S. media and political establishment

views Venezuela's elections. They're illegitimate, except when the U.S. media and political establishment views Venezuela's elections, they're illegitimate, except

when the U.S. backed opposition party has major victories, which they have twice very recently.

One of those was the 2015 National Assembly election, where they won a supermajority in the body

that is similar to the U.S. Congress. That election was

deemed legitimate by the U.S., but all the other ones before and after that fraudulent,

including the one that took place this past weekend. It's also telling that you hear more about

Venezuela's elections than probably any other country. Why is the U.S. Empire so focused on democracy in Venezuela?

Could it be that Venezuela is an oil-rich nation that doesn't follow the dictates of big oil?

Well, if you're interested in learning more context about Venezuela and why it's been in the crosshairs of the empire for the last 20 years,

we've done tons of reporting on the ground, including the

deadliest phase of protests in 2017, which you can watch on our YouTube playlist called Reporting

from Venezuela. But the propaganda campaign is an endless cycle, rebooted, every time there's a

Democratic election in the country. So with renewed claims that Venezuela must be saved,

I wanted to sift through fact from fiction with a journalist who was just on the ground observing the election.

So I'm pleased to be joined from New York by Kay Pritzker,

a reporter with Breakthrough News, a new outlet I hope everyone checks out.

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