'It Is Unspeakable': How Maduro Used Cuban Doctors to Coerce Venezuela Voters

[MRubio]

Yansnier Arias knew it was wrong. It violated the Constitution, not to mention the oath he took as a doctor in Cuba.

He had been sent to Venezuela by the Cuban government, one of thousands of doctors deployed to shore up ties between the two allies and alleviate Venezuela’s collapsing medical system.

But with President Nicolás Maduro’s re-election on the line, not everyone was allowed to be treated, Dr. Arias said.

A 65-year-old patient with heart failure entered his clinic — and urgently needed oxygen, he said. The tanks sat in another room at the ready, he recalled.

But he said his Cuban and Venezuelan superiors told him to use the oxygen as a political weapon instead: Not for medical emergencies that day, but to be doled out closer to the election, part of a national strategy to compel patients to vote for the government.

May 20, 2018, was nearing, he said, and the message was clear: Mr. Maduro needed to win, at any cost.

“There was oxygen, but they didn’t let me use it,” said Dr. Arias, who defected from the Cuban government’s medical program late last year and now lives in Chile. “We had to leave it for the election.”

To maintain their hold over Venezuela, Mr. Maduro and his supporters have often used the nation’s economic collapse to their advantage, dangling food before hungry voters, promising extra subsidies if he won, and demanding that people present identification cards tied to government rations when they came to the polls.

In interviews, 16 members of Cuba’s medical missions to Venezuela — a signature element of relations between the two countries — described a system of deliberate political manipulation in which their services were wielded to secure votes for the governing Socialist Party, often through coercion.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/17/world/americas/venezuela-cuban-doctors.html

If the regime will use medical care to coerce Venezuelan voters, do you think they'd not use hunger and food?

[MRubio]

1. And then these interesting ditties............

One added that, on the day Mr. Maduro was elected to his first term, she witnessed officials opening ballot boxes and tampering with votes, including destroying ballots that chose the opposition. Another said she and others were asked to vote with false identification.

On April 14, 2013, officials declared Mr. Maduro the winner with 50.6 percent of the vote, one of the narrowest margins in years.

“I asked myself, ‘Why is a physician, someone who is meant to be on a humanitarian mission, having a part in who wins an election?’” said one of the doctors. “This is called tampering. There is no other word for it.”

“Because the opposition was favored to win, they gave us the work of buying votes,” said Raúl Manuel, a Cuban doctor now in Brazil. “Buying votes in what sense? Going out with medicine.”

After the shootout, Dr. Manuel said he returned to the clinic, shaken, only to learn that government officials from other departments — including the sports and culture agencies — were going out, too, posing as doctors.

“We, the doctors, were asked to give our extra robes to people,” he said.

The fake doctors were even giving out medicines, without knowing what they were or how to use them, he added.

“They were putting the lives of so many people at risk, the lives of children, all to win votes,” Dr. Manuel said.

Another Cuban doctor in Barinas offered the same account: that government employees, dressed as physicians, were sent out with medicine to get votes.

After receiving death threats from patients, Dr. Arias said he was sent to a fishing town, La Vela del Coro, where food shortages led doctors and nurses to steal medicine and trade it for groceries.

“I saw it with my own eyes,” he said, recounting how a Cuban nurse traded antibiotics for “a kilo of potatoes, a kilo of yams.”

Residents of La Vela confirmed that both Cuban and Venezuelan doctors regularly bartered medicine for goods on the black market.

In mid-2017, Mr. Maduro made a bid to consolidate power: a referendum for a second legislature to replace the opposition-controlled National Assembly.

Calling the vote illegal, the opposition refused to participate, so the slate of candidates was composed entirely of figures loyal to the president.

The new legislature quickly sidelined the National Assembly, embarking on an aggressive agenda to silence Mr. Maduro’s critics.

The government pushed a contentious identification system called the “homeland card,” used by the Socialist Party for both food subsidies and voting. Mr. Maduro urged citizens to get the card to receive groceries, and party officials opened kiosks outside polling places to review the cards after people cast their ballots.

Dr. Arias said that doctors’ house-to-house visits started registering people for the cards. But the cards terrified many Venezuelans, who feared the government would see how they voted and restrict their food in retaliation.

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Ah yes, the Carnet de La Patria. Just an innocent means of keeping track of its beloved citizens......and their every move.

[MRubio]

2. Uhhhh, these are good.......

Before an election for governors that year, Mr. Arias recalled an epileptic patient in the hospital who needed treatment but had refused the homeland card.

“‘I don’t want anything to do with this homeland! I don’t want anything to do with Maduro!’” he recalled her shouting. She was sent away without medication, he said, “because she was from the opposition.”

As the returns came in, Mr. Maduro’s party claimed a lopsided victory, taking 17 of the 23 governorships, despite polls that had projected losses.

“Today, the homeland has gotten stronger,” Mr. Maduro said that night.

In 2018, it was Mr. Maduro’s turn to face voters.

As shortages worsened, Mr. Maduro promised hefty subsidies to those using the homeland card, saying openly: “I give, you give.”

But his government withheld other essentials.

Dr. Arias said medical supplies, always scarce in La Vela, soon disappeared, hoarded until the May election. He said his superiors wanted to flood hospitals with supplies right before the vote, giving the impression that Mr. Maduro had fixed the country’s shortages.

“When the elections came, everything appeared: medicine, gas, dressings for bandages, injection serums,” he said. Residents in La Vela who had gone to the clinic confirmed it was suddenly supplied before the election.

As Election Day neared, the doctors continued to fan out in support of Mr. Maduro.

“They come to your house, they ask you a series of questions, and you start to think, if I answer ‘no,’ they can cut me from health care,” said one patient, who declined to be named, fearing government reprisals. “It just leaves you overwhelmed.”

On May 20, Mr. Maduro was declared the winner, landing him a second term. For Dr. Arias, it was too much.