Free Republic

Eventually, the Venezuelan government had to launch an attack on Mary O’Grady, the hard-hitting columnist at the Wall Street Journal who has criticized the Chavez government from the minute it started peeling away at Venezuela’s democracy. Like no other writer, O’Grady has described in detail the path that led to the government’s consolidation of power. While O’Grady has criticized other foreign governments, including Ecuador’s and Cuba’s, no other government in the world has an office in Washington with the sole purpose of attacking and discrediting US news media. This has made Mary O’Grady a prime target for the Venezuela Information...

When you think of a government information office, do you think of much more than dusty information pamphlets and glossy tourist brochures full of pleasant platitudes, putting the best face forward on a particular nation? Such is perfectly natural for friendly, and even some not-so-friendly nations, because that's what government information offices normally do. But Venezuela's Marxist government has an entirely different idea. The innocuously named Venezuela Information Office in Washington, D.C. is an aggressive Cuba-style PsyOps and disinformation operation sponsored by the Venezuelan government. Its operatives not only seek to get the Venezuelan government's castroite message out to the...

To look at the soft-focus propaganda pictures of Venezuela's Castroite Chavez government, you'd think Venezuela's state oil company was not about producing oil, but rather rehabilitating life's down-and-outers. The Venezuela Information Office's Web site shows smiling, supposedly contented beneficiaries of the bountiful, beneficent state oil company, which is somehow turning singers into systems engineers, and you're supposed to feel good. But that's not what's going on for workers inside the huge Venezuelan state oil company. The remnants of the once-mighty PdVSA are battling the Chavez government in a contract dispute over three miserable dollars a day in wages. Inflation from...

Caracas 29.12.04 | Let’s see, young Delacour visited Venezuela for the first time as part of a ‘delegation of observers’ that visited the country (courtesy of the Venezuelan taxpayer) during the recall referendum. The ‘mission’ was arranged by the Venezuela Information Office (VIO). Delacour’s way of counteracting unfavourable press vis-à-vis Fidelito, er Hugo Chavez, is shown in the VIO’s website as the appropriate method to be used by innocent and callous Americans ‘worried’ about biased information with respect to Venezuela. Delacour ‘denounces’ (in a government sponsored website one must add) that US media outlets give more weight to the opinions...

London 28.12.04 | Eva Golinger’s name appears as the registrar of a DOMESTIC NOT-FOR-PROFIT CORPORATION by the name of VENEZUELA SOLIDARITY COMMITTEE IN NEW YORK INC. registered in the said city of New York. Golinger seems to be the acting director of said NGO [1]. Golinger is featured prominently in a website entitled VENEZUELAFOIA.INFO, which has been registered according to WHOIS by BIGWOOD, JEREMY E. [2]. In the said website one can read the following information: This site is funded by the Venezuela Solidarity Committee/National Venezuela Solidarity Network ("VSC"), a 501 (c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to providing accurate information about...

If the U.S. embassy in Caracas began a campaign to flood a local Venezuelan newspaper critical of the USA with negative mail - openly using Venezuelans themselves as their agents - we'd never hear the end of it as a CIA 'covert' operation. And the deceptive concept is as distasteful as it is unthinkable. But that's what the activist hand of Hugo Chavez in the United States is doing now. The Venezuelan Information Office, which is financed by the government of Venezuela, yesterday announced the targeting of the Los Angeles Times because of its honest, eloquent "A Little Fidel In...