Failed state. Eco­nom­ic and social col­lapse. Bat­tle­field clin­ics. Human­i­tar­i­an cri­sis. Descent into chaos. These are the apoc­a­lyp­tic buzz­words being used to describe mod­ern Venezuela and the Nico­las Maduro gov­ern­ment in the U.S.-U.K. press, short­ly after a con­sti­tu­tion­al coup d’état dumped Brazil­ian Pres­i­dent Dil­ma Rouss­eff of the social demo­c­ra­t­ic Work­ers’ Par­ty from office. U.S. polit­i­cal elites are hap­py with this turn of events. As his­to­ri­an Greg Grandin writes, the U.S. now ​“has com­pli­ant com­pradores in pow­er in Argenti­na and Brazil, and per­haps soon in Venezuela.”

While the crisis [in Venezuela] is real, it is also the result of an ongoing attempt by the country’s elite and international forces like the U.S. government to subvert the Maduro presidency.

Some words you will rarely read in media cov­er­age of Venezuela include ​“cap­i­tal strike,” ​“eco­nom­ic sab­o­tage,” ​“desta­bi­liza­tion plan,” ​“coup d’état” or oth­ers which pro­vide a far more com­plete and accu­rate account of what is going on in the coun­try. For while the cri­sis is real, it is also the result of an ongo­ing attempt by the country’s elite and inter­na­tion­al forces like the U.S. gov­ern­ment to sub­vert the Maduro pres­i­den­cy. In so doing, the role of the media is to wage psy­cho­log­i­cal war­fare against the Venezue­lan gov­ern­ment, doing its best to erode pub­lic sup­port and sym­pa­thy for the strug­gling government.

Many of the arti­cles lead with sto­ries of babies dying amidst pow­er short­ages, antibi­otics in short sup­ply and deaths from eas­i­ly treat­able hem­or­rhages in Venezuela’s pub­lic hos­pi­tal sys­tem. The cri­sis of med­i­cine and med­ical equip­ment short­ages is real. But for the right-wing press, it is sim­ply a sto­ry about a social­ist gov­ern­ment mis­man­ag­ing the econ­o­my, not pro­vid­ing enough dol­lars for phar­ma­cies or med­ical sup­pli­ers to import the need­ed goods or oth­er­wise seri­ous­ly screw­ing up that basic mech­a­nism of mod­ern soci­eties, the inter­na­tion­al sup­ply chain — a cau­tion­ary tale about what hap­pens when you hand the keys to a coun­try over to leftists.

But some num­bers help explain what is actu­al­ly going on. In 1998, Venezuela import­ed $222 mil­lion of med­i­cine. In 2013, accord­ing to offi­cial num­bers, that fig­ure sup­pos­ed­ly soared to $3.2 bil­lion. But, as the econ­o­mist Manuel Suther­land points out, the phys­i­cal quan­ti­ty of med­i­cines which actu­al­ly came into Venezuela decreased from 2003 – 2013, by 75 per­cent. 2003 was when the gov­ern­ment imposed cur­ren­cy con­trols in reac­tion to ruinous cap­i­tal flight.

Suther­land argues that the pri­vate­ly-owned phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal sec­tor takes advan­tage of the country’s pref­er­en­tial exchange rate for med­ical sup­plies. It obtains dol­lars cheap­ly, then sells them dear, whether on the par­al­lel mar­ket or to transna­tion­al cor­po­ra­tions, which then repa­tri­ate the cap­i­tal. The sec­tor inflates its costs by fal­si­fy­ing import bills in order to make up the difference.

The Venezue­lan phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal cri­sis, then, is not the mak­ing of the Venezue­lan gov­ern­ment; it is large­ly the mak­ing of the pri­vate sec­tor, with the gov­ern­ment often turn­ing a blind eye, Suther­land sug­gests, due to fear of fur­ther sup­ply short­ages, more intense polit­i­cal pres­sure from those transna­tion­als par­ent gov­ern­ments and con­cern for offi­cials’ reputations.

Many in the press are speak­ing the lan­guage of ​“human­i­tar­i­an­ism.” The word is not inno­cent. Offi­cials have often used it to lull the U.S. pop­u­la­tion into accep­tance of one or anoth­er form of U.S‑backed vio­lence or polit­i­cal chi­canery abroad — for exam­ple, unfound­ed claims about an ​“immi­nent mas­sacre” in 2011 Libya, or in Koso­vo in 1999. Maduro’s oppo­nents have used this lan­guage to actu­al­ly call for the Orga­ni­za­tion of Amer­i­can States to sus­pend Venezuela from mem­ber­ship, under the grounds that its per­for­mance proves it is unfit to gov­ern its own people.

If those speak­ing this lan­guage are pre­pared to be con­sis­tent, here is one pos­si­bil­i­ty: They should call for an inter­ven­tion against the Venezue­lan phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal indus­try and call for the nation­al­iza­tion of the country’s phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal sup­ply system.

In fact, the government’s unwill­ing­ness to sim­ply expro­pri­ate the pri­vate phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal sec­tor or build up a state-owned alter­na­tive made it con­tin­u­ous­ly vul­ner­a­ble to pri­vate-sec­tor sab­o­tage. The cri­sis of the phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal sec­tor is emblem­at­ic of the larg­er ten­sions and con­flicts around Venezuela’s polit­i­cal tra­jec­to­ry. For years, despite all the fear mon­ger­ing around Venezue­lan social­ism Hugo Chávez and then Maduro avoid­ed nation­al­iz­ing pri­vate indus­try or com­merce. Instead, they used mas­sive oil rev­enues to pro­vide for the country’s poor. In part this was to avoid the explo­sive domes­tic class con­flict — and per­haps direct U.S. inter­ven­tion — which would have result­ed if the coun­try had struck with more force at its pri­vate sector.

But Maduro recent­ly shift­ed tac­tics, telling sup­port­ers of the gov­ern­ment that closed-down fac­to­ries ought be giv­en to their work­ers and re-opened. ​“A stopped fac­to­ry [is] a fac­to­ry turned over to the peo­ple, the moment to do it has come.” As he said, ​“Who­ev­er doesn’t want to work should leave and those who do are wel­come, we will go unit­ed. This coun­try needs all of its eco­nom­ic struc­ture to be func­tion­ing.” This fol­lowed close on the May 13 dec­la­ra­tion of a state of emer­gency. Such mea­sures are the only ones which could help the gov­ern­ment avoid the con­stant eco­nom­ic sab­o­tage which pro­duces the ​“crises” which the U.S. media is then able to use to present the Venezue­lan gov­ern­ment as unfit to govern.

Most report­ing on Venezuela claims that the coun­try has hap­haz­ard­ly stum­bled onto bal­ance-of-pay­ments crises. After all, that’s what left-of-cen­ter gov­ern­ments do: mis­man­age their economies as min­is­ters with minds cloud­ed by exces­sive read­ings of Marx insist on byzan­tine author­i­tar­i­an mea­sures like price con­trols, import con­trols and cur­ren­cy con­trols. (Put to the side that state man­age­ment is sim­ply how devel­op­ment hap­pens basi­cal­ly every­where, includ­ing in the Unit­ed States.)

In any case, Venezuela is an oil state and relies on oil for the major­i­ty of its for­eign exchange. This is also one rea­son that claims of hyper-infla­tion are mis­lead­ing. Amidst infla­tion, the cur­ren­cy los­es val­ue against the dol­lar. But the gov­ern­ment gets dol­lars for the oil it sells on the inter­na­tion­al mar­kets. The issue is not infla­tion, but the loss of buy­ing pow­er of work­ers’ salaries. Since main­tain­ing buy­ing pow­er means sub­si­diz­ing goods, the prob­lem is not (or at least not mere­ly, and not cen­tral­ly) the rate of infla­tion. It is also about the loss of state resources to sup­port work­ers’ salaries through sub­si­dies. And that in turn is linked to the rate oil prices have fall­en — rapid­ly from 2014 through 2016. Venezuela received $70 mil­lion in oil export rev­enues in Feb­ru­ary 2016 as against $3 bil­lion in Jan­u­ary 2014.

And where are the ori­gins of that descent? Con­sid­er the com­ments of Sau­di Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Al Saud. The coun­try, he said, is not hap­py with low oil prices, ​“but it’s some­thing you have to face head on, with­out hes­i­ta­tion.” OPEC decid­ed not to decrease pro­duc­tion quo­tas at its Decem­ber 15 meet­ing, ensur­ing that prices remain low. Low prices means con­tin­ued eco­nom­ic dis­ar­ray for the oil-rev­enue-depen­dent coun­tries of Rus­sia, Iran and Venezuela — none of whom are exact­ly on the best of terms with the U.S. gov­ern­ment, the major trad­ing part­ner, backer, armor­er, and fun­der of Sau­di Ara­bia. As Iran­ian Oil Min­is­ter Bijan Nam­dar Zan­ganeh recent­ly put it, what the oth­er Per­sian Gulf coun­tries ​“want to achieve is not at all for eco­nom­ic gains.” What he means is that Sau­di Ara­bia, prob­a­bly at the Unit­ed States’ behest, is using low oil prices as a weapon against coun­tries which the U.S. does not like.

But the dis­patch­es from cor­re­spon­dents cov­er­ing Venezuela do not include any account of the rea­sons for the con­tin­ued decline in oil prices over the last two years. Be that as it may, the U.S. media’s sud­den focus on the Maduro government’s sup­pos­ed­ly self-inflict­ed crises has ulti­mate­ly lit­tle to do with a con­cern for Venezuela’s cit­i­zens, who after all have seen extreme pover­ty decrease marked­ly under the Chávez-Maduro gov­ern­ments, and a lot to do with advanc­ing the U.S. region­al agen­da of what the econ­o­mist Mark Weis­brot calls ​“roll­back” of the continent’s left­ist and pop­ulist gov­ern­ments. The Guardian, in a reveal­ing spec­u­la­tion, won­ders if the Venezue­lan gov­ern­ment will be ​“the next left­wing domi­no to fall” after Brazil.

Giv­en that calls for inter­ven­tion, expul­sion of states from the OAS and eco­nom­ic sab­o­tage all depend, to vary­ing degrees, on either the pas­sive con­sent or active sup­port of the U.S. pop­u­la­tion for these poli­cies, media mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tions of what is hap­pen­ing in Venezuela are a cru­cial tool of state­craft. They can destroy sym­pa­thy for Venezuela, head off sol­i­dar­i­ty cam­paigns and cre­ate and manip­u­late pub­lic opin­ion into sup­port for state poli­cies. For that rea­son, if Venezuela falls, the West­ern media will have played a key part in help­ing push the coun­try over the edge.