The Opposition got so inflamed by the media whipping up a frenzy that they went berserk and rioted all over the country. About 20 Chavistas were murdered. They burned down a number of the Free Clinics that the Chavistas had built in the poor neighborhoods and staffed with Cuban doctors. The Opposition hates those clinics more than anything else. A number of medical workers including nurses and physicians were murdered by the Opposition.
There were shots fired at the homes of a number of prominent Chavistas. It turned out that all of those inflammatory photos were fake. The ballot boxes in the ravine photo was from an election five years ago when the ballot boxes were simply discarded after the ballots were all counted. There were other logical explanations for all of the other fake stories and photos. The US press ran articles about the fake stolen election and the Opposition rioting because Maduro “stole the election.”
The Chavistas decided to do a recount to appease the Opposition and the US. The recount was counted by unbiased judges, and it was completely fair. Fully 60% of the votes were recounted. The recount vote matched the official vote tally perfectly. There was not even one single excess or subtracted vote. The judges stopped at 60% because they figured that if 60% of the votes were immaculate, obviously the election was fair, and there was no point counting anymore. The Opposition and the US then went on a huge campaign screaming that the recount had been unfair because they only counted 60% of the ballots. Ridiculous, huh?
The media and the Opposition had gotten their supporters so riled up with the endless lies about the fake stolen election that the Opposition rank and file went crazy and stated staging riots all over the country. The US said nothing other than that people were protesting the fake stolen elections.
The riots were very violent from Day One. The rioters were armed with guns, bombs, grenades and other arms. They set a number of fires. They destroyed a great deal of property. They put wires up at a lot of the intersections in the middle and upper class areas, effectively freezing traffic and causing huge traffic jams. A number of motorcyclists were killed when driving through the barriers by running into the wires that they could not see.
The Chavista police got involved, and while there were some excesses as there always are, any other police force on Earth would have been much more brutal about putting down the riots. The Chavista cops’ approach was almost dainty, very cautious, restrained and by the book. This is because the Chavistas knew that if there was any police brutality, the US would scream that the “brutal thug police of Chavista dictatorship” is brutalizing “poor innocent protestors.”
The US press uniformly falsely characterized the riots as peaceful demonstrations that were only made violent when brutal Chavista police tried to break them up. But as I noted, the Chavista cops were more restrained than any other police force on Earth would have been and the riots started out violent and stayed violent the whole time.
When it was all over, 42 people were dead. The US screamed about that figure for a long time, saying that Chavista police had “murdered 42 peaceful protestors.” Actually the majority of people killed were Chavista counter-protestors. A few police were also killed. A fair number of innocent bystanders were killed by the wires or stray bullets. Some of the Opposition protestors were killed but not a lot. Fatalities were pretty equally distributed among all participants in the rioting, including demonstrators on both sides, police and innocent bystanders. The Opposition rioters got off easy because they suffered a relatively lesser number of fatalities.
Due to the “horrible police violence that murdered 42 peaceful protestors,” Obama gave a lying speech where he said comically that Venezuela was one of the major military threats to the United States, up there with North Korea, Russia and Iran. This is stupid because the Chavistas have no military desires towards the US. Obama also slapped a number of sanctions on Venezuela for the “horrible police brutality” and “murders of the innocent.” That was a bum move because those police were more restrained than anyone else on Earth would have been, but no matter, to the US, they were still jackbooted murdering thugs.
