GCM

The pretext for these sanctions is so-called human rights abuses that occurred more than a year ago, during a wave of street protests against the government of Nicolás Maduro. I say so-called because what actually happened in the streets a year ago has been systematically misrepresented. The opposition narrative is one of spontaneous, peaceful protests by all Venezuelans against a tyrannical government — in the vein of the Arab Spring or the Occupy Movement — to which the government responded with brutal repression.

The reality was very different: the protests were hardly spontaneous, and in fact part of a strategy by the radical right-wing sector of the opposition to overthrow a democratically elected government. The means were far from peaceful, and while in some cases the police and national guard responded brutally, they were on the whole incredibly patient with the protesters, who they allowed to blockade entire areas of cities for more than a month.

In the end, the forty-three deaths were distributed evenly among Chavistas, the opposition, and security forces. But while many of the police responsible for violence were arrested, the same can’t be said for the protesters who, for example, decapitated motorcyclists with barbed wire and sniped at police from rooftops. And their constituency was far from “all Venezuelans” — nearly all the protesters were from the middle and upper classes, as were the neighborhoods that saw protests.