Venezuelan Opposition Sticks up Signs to Scare Caracas Small Businesses

A range of shops and kiosks located on University Avenue, in the centre of Caracas, woke up on Monday to posters that read “this could be expropriated”, part of a propaganda campaign of intimidation [by the opposition] in the lead up to the 7 October presidential elections.

Leandro Viloria, member of the Carabobo Command [the campaign supporting candidate Hugo Chavez] for Sexual Diversity in Caracas, said that furthermore, on the posters there is an image of a man saying ‘I can’t take it any more’.

He said the posters weren’t identified with any political organisation. “There’s no one who has signed the posters, who has assumed responsibility. This is dirty propaganda.”

Viloria said that he took one of the posters down and brought it before the National Elecotral Council. “The idea is to lodge a denouncement so that the opposition’s file [of electoral rule infringements] keeps getting larger.”

Rightwing intimidates the people

The member of the Carabobo Command said that the [poster propaganda] is a campaign of intimidation similar to the one the opposition carried out against the Constitutional Reform [in 2007].

“It’s a way the right wing manipulates and scares the people, as they already know the people are going to come out in a decisive way on 7 October to vote for President Chavez. The opposition is desperate and is going about looking for a way to trick people, just like they did with the reform [translator: where they made out that the government would confiscate all houses and take children away from their parents].”

He called on the Venezuelan people to not allow themselves to be tricked by this type of “dirty” propaganda.

“They [the opposition] try to manipulate the people with the idea of expropriation, when really what the President has done is hand out micro-credits to small business, encouraging investment, and it’s a lie, because the people have never had as much support as with this revolution.”

He reminded readers that part of the intimidation campaign by the opposition against Chavez’s government has been to argue that the revolution will expropriate housing, “when instead, during Chavez’s government thousands and thousands of dwellings have been handed out, not including those that are currently under construction”.

Translation by Tamara Pearson for Venezuelanalysis.com