Pro-Clinton Ad Compares Trump to Chavez, Venezuela Responds

teleSUR | October 20, 2016

The U.S. Democratic Party showed its true colors in a new ad that the Venezuelan government blasted as “racist arrogance” that puts the late Hugo Chavez in the same category as fascist dictators Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler in an effort to cast Republican presidential rival Donald Trump as a dictator-in-waiting.

The Spanish-language ad, aimed at U.S. Latino voters ahead of the Nov. 8 election, features comments by Trump that Clinton should be jailed and his vow to sue media that spread “purposely negative, horrible and false” articles.

“Remind you of anyone?” the video asks before flashing images of the popular socialist Venezuelan leader Chavez.

The clips are selectively edited to portray Chavez as authoritarian but deliberately fail to mention that Chavez and his Bolivarian Revolution won support at the ballot box in over a dozen elections which former Democratic President Jimmy Carter called “the best in the world.”

“It is an expression of racist arrogance and irrationality from a party that does not serve its constituents,” Venezuela’s Foreign Minister Delcy Rodriguez said in a statement late Wednesday.

“Chavez is a leader who transcended our time for his democratic nature, his fight for the poor and universal feeling for humanity,” she added.

The video also compares Trump and Chavez, who died in 2013, with European dictators Mussolini and Hitler, and concludes by urging voters to “protect” U.S. democracy. The ad was paid for by the Democratic National Committee in support of Clinton, and was not made by her campaign.

The clip nonetheless serves to show that the U.S. Democratic Party, despite efforts to portray their party as more reasonable than their Republican counterparts, are not beneath manipulation to help their candidate get elected.

The U.S. Department of State, under the leadership of then-Secretary of State Clinton, publicly praised the results of the 2012 Venezuelan presidential elections that saw Hugo Chavez re-elected to a third term.

In statements to the press, then-State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland said they “congratulated the Venezuelan people for the high turnout and for the generally peaceful manner in which the election was carried out.”

But while Clinton publicly welcomed improved relations with Venezuela as secretary of state, she privately ridiculed the country and continued to support destabilization efforts.

Venezuela, whose economy is heavily dependent on oil exports and has suffered due to the dramatic drop in the price of oil, has been the subject a vicious media campaign which has portrayed the country as being on the brink of collapse. The ad is an effort to piggyback off that negative press to win support from the Latino community.

However, the effort may backfire as Venezuela’s socialist government enjoys support throughout Latino communities in the United States and even reached out directly to low-income people in the United States through discounted home heating oil.

In the Democratic Party primary race, both Clinton and her opponent Bernie Sanders also tried to tie Chavez into the race, with the latter calling the Venezuelan leader a “dead communist dictator.”