If journalism is defined as the continuous and often unattainable search for the truth through the narration of reliable and verifiable stories in counterbalance with the constituted power, now it must also be understood as the emerging effort to verify that everything stated by the people in power or shared online is true to the facts. In this process of adaptation, many media outlets have failed to meet the standards of journalism, amid a race to publish first that has given place to a distrustful audience who turns to sources of information, opening a gap for misinformation or post-truth.
In this new digital ecosystem of prosumers, who in addition to consuming also produce, alter, and reproduce content on the Internet, not only citizens have taken a critical stance against media flaws. The people in power have also assumed the possibility of questioning the trustfulness of the information, always assuming dark interests and supported by the widespread mistrust of journalists and media and even the psychological impulse to only believe what coincides with our values. This is the base of the origin of the informative disorders, where we hear terms like disinformation, post-truth, fake news.
For researcher Miguel Del Fresno García of the National University of Remote Education of Spain, “information disorders represent the desire to exert authority over reality, in practice, a desire for ideological supremacy and a risk for liberal democracies.” Right after being elected for office in the US, Donald Trump pointed an accusing finger at the media for broadcasting “fake news” under the disguise of legitimate criticism or independent journalism. But he is not the first leader in recent history to accuse the media or other social actors of lying deliberately.
This populist and discrediting stance against the media has also existed among the Latin American left. Hugo Chávez, Evo Morales, and Rafael Correa not only accused the media in their countries of being despicable; they also promoted alternative state and regional media such as Telesur and La Radio del Sur. And now the Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, has followed suit and resorted to censorship.
In the time of social media, Russia also created media outlets such as Sputnik or Russia Today (RT), which are presented as capable of revealing information that has been silenced, hidden, or omitted by the large media corporations, even some that could be labeled conspiracy theories such as the use of chemical weapons against Latin American presidents to cause them cancer, or false information such as the case of the decontextualized video of an indigenous woman crying for the Amazon fires in Brazil taken months before the disaster.
While avoiding being directly associated with the Russian state, both news outlets have their own alleged fact-checking section. For example, RT published reports to challenge the alleged plan of the Sao Paulo Forum to promote socialism in Latin America and lashed out at celebrities for posting old or wrong photos of the Amazon fires in 2019. Similarly to their connections with the Kremlin, these news outlets also ally with websites like EmpireFiles or GrayZoneProject, which are portrayed as independent organizations.
These strategies have caught the attention of the United States. At a hearing called “Russian Influence and Unconventional Warfare Scheme on the” Gray Zone “: Lessons from Ukraine,” held on March 29, 2017, in the Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities of the US Senate Committee on Armed Services, civilian experts and the military warned of the coordinated work of governments and intelligence services on social networks to fabricate disinformation campaigns and propel the separatist movement in Crimea. Experts suggested that the United States should consider branding media outlets such as RT and Sputnik as Russian propaganda and recommended the use of technological tools on social media, spam filters, and data analysis in coordination with NATO to counter “the well-funded army of bots and trolls ”from Russia.
The report states that “the modus operandi of these outlets is to raise questions about the reporting of other sources and of other government statements and views such as by denying Russian military presence in Ukraine. They also tend to highlight what they portray as the hypocrisy of these non-Russian governments, for instance, the collateral damage caused by the United States and NATO military actions. These messages are then amplified by social media, including through so-called trolls”, as users who act deliberately annoyingly or aggressively against others are often called. This behavior goes against the rules of the most popular social platforms.
The report titled “The Global Disinformation Order: 2019 Global Inventory of Organized Social Media Manipulation” of the Oxford University Computational Propaganda Research Project, reveals the global activities of the internet trolls. Cyber armies from China, India, Iran, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela intervene in operations abroad, especially using Twitter and Facebook to spread disinformation.
The study indicates that in Venezuela the following strategies are used: data management, creation of disinformation or manipulated content, use of trolls, threats to publish private content related to certain users as well as harassment and amplification of online content.
The use of large groups of people was also detected. Brigades of at least 500 members, allegedly hired by the State, shape public opinion and monitor domestic politics through different channels online.
A report by Caracas Chronicles explains that Twitter’s decision to suspend thousands of accounts in Venezuela as well as several others from Iran and Russia, responds to the finding that thousands of trolls and bot accounts are the creation of government agencies to pretend to be real users.
Twitter also made public two databases that illustrate the two-way confusion strategy. The first set showed bots with a “revolutionary” online person that claimed to be loyal to Maduro, while the other was composed of “journalists, radicals supporters of the opposition and independent users” who attacked the opposition but were under the command of the government.
Who can carry out a verification?
Faced with the doubt about who has the authority to discern true information from false, the need to establish a methodology to certify a rigorous and standardized evaluation of content and speech online arises. Thus was born the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), which brings together more than 200 media outlets and agencies working against disinformation worldwide. In addition to organizing training events, conferences to discuss the state of affairs, and alliances with universities and NGOs, this platform tries to influence the protocols of large technology companies such as WhatsApp, Facebook, and Twitter to reduce the spread of disinformation.
The IFCN recommends not to use the term “fake news”, not only because of a semantic inaccuracy but because it is used by the power to disqualify or attack the media that do not favor them. In Venezuela, not only has Nicolás Maduro used it but even Juan Guaidó, who described them as “gossip in which even serious media could fall”, after Venpress and EfectoCocuyo publish and retracted from a false recount according to which he was going to participate in upcoming parliamentary elections.
First Draft, a British organization part of the IFCN which frequently publishes guidelines for verification and handbooks for journalists and citizens, details the difference between false content and false information.
While false content or disinformation is created to deceive, divert attention, or demobilize, false information occurs when false or erroneous content is distributed in good faith, out of confusion or lack of confirmation. The difference resides in the intention of the issuer: one wants to exert influence over a country or a conversation, and the other shares information that he or she believes is real based on his or her experience, desires, and values.
Wanting to join the IFCN is not enough to be certified as a verifier under its standards. A fact-checking body must complete several stages. A request must be made to a board made up of fact-checking media experts which will assign a reviewer. The reviewer will assess whether the applicant complies with the Code of Principles, agreed at the 2016 annual conference, one year after the network was created.
As of June 2019, only 210 media outlets in the world have obtained the certificate. The requirements to be met include publishing at least one check-up per week on their website and detailing their verification method, correction policy, rating system, sources of financing, and nonpartisanship.
At the same time, good practices must be observed, such as including links to the sources, which should never be kept hidden or anonymous. The methodologies and tools used to make forensic analyzes or calculations must also be revealed, so that any user can do the same and get to the same conclusions or “check the checker”, as explained by Cristina Tardáguila, founder of the Brazilian news agency Lupa and deputy director of the IFCN, during the 2019 Media and Freedom conference held in Caracas by the NGO Espacio Público (Public Space).
Types of disinformation
Professor Rafael Díaz Arias, who has worked at Televisión Española (TVE) for 30 years, summarized the book “Information Disorder: Toward an interdisciplinary framework for research and policy making” by First Draft’s Claire Wardle, which addresses the differentiation of misinformation, disinformation, and misinformation, and conceptualized the terms as “wrong information”, “manipulated information”, and “false information”, respectively.
Díaz explains that misinformation (wrong information) consists of unintentional errors that news outlets or journalists make, eventually amended or not but recognized as such. It includes statistical errors, poor translations, and wrong photo captions.
Malformation (manipulated information) is the deliberate publication of decontextualized personal or corporate information with the intention of damaging. Finally, disinformation (false information) is a combination of the first two, such as the alteration of audio records or footage, or the intentional fabrication of rumors and conspiracy theories, this time with the clear intention of confusing or manipulating.
Díaz details that the ecosystem of information disorder creators is no longer limited to the media, journalists, and users of social networks, but now includes governments, companies, political parties, intelligence services, NGOs and social movements of all kinds, through the use of propaganda and public relations.
In this ecosystem, the means to distribute the information are not frontal. They include impostor sites, laboratories or bot farms (which act automatically on social networks pretending to be real users), sensational headlines, the use of personal data, and the creation of groups that promote alternative facts or post-truth. The latter implies a reinterpretation of historical events to claim that they never happened or that they did it in a completely different way.
Mis- and disinformation can then be classified into seven types, from least to most dangerous and according to the intention of the issuer: satire or parody (decontextualized humor), false connection (titles unrelated to content), misleading content (opportunistic use quotes or partial data), false context (genuine context with false contextual information), imposter content (impersonation of sources), manipulated content (information altered to deceive) and fabricated information (content designed deceived and harm).
Díaz warns that believing in this type of content is driven by our tribal feelings such as outrage or moral superiority and our affinity with the bias: what I believe to be true must be true.
A real mission?
Misión Verdad (Mission for Truth) is a website created in 2013 to publish articles, reports, and opinion pieces under the premise of “deconstructing” the narrative against the government of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. The group defines itself as “a conglomerate of independent journalists and investigators dedicated to studying the war against Venezuela and global conflicts.”
This definition resembles that of GrayzoneProject, a site allied to Russian media outlets RT and Sputnik which showcases as “an independent news website dedicated to original investigative journalism and analysis on politics and empire.” GrayZone editor-in-chief, Max Blumenthal, was arrested for leading alongside Code Pink the assault on the Venezuelan embassy in Washington.
Similarly, the Misión Verdad website has other “twin” media such as Supuesto Negado (An Unlikely Possibility) and 15yÚltimo (Pay Day), forming a single network of official information dissemination on the Maduro administration. For example, a news article on the monetary reconversion from Telesur cited Misión Verdad, the Russian state-owned RT, 15yÚltimo and the Venezuelan News Agency (AVN) as sources, revealing a relationship between the Venezuelan State and these allegedly independent websites.
Despite presenting as independent media, their contents are part of the network of official propaganda dissemination. They are not only replicated by dozens of Chavista media inside the country, such as Lechuguinos (“The lettuce boys”, where hundreds of sensational, decontextualized, and unsubstantiated posts against the political opposition in Venezuela are published regularly) and Red Angostura (Angostura Network) but also abroad, by international media portrayed as “alternatives to the vision of the West ”such as the Iranian news outlet HispanTV, Lebanese Al Mayadeen, Venezuelan Telesur, and Cuban CubaDebate, as well as Venezuelan state media such as Venezolana de Televisión (Venezuelan TV) and YVKE Mundial (World YVKE), which repeat the RT practice of citing each other.
These organizations also have institutional backing. One of their reports was publicly presented by Venezuelan Executive Vice President Jorge Arreaza, and the website of the Venezuelan Foreign Ministry reported on a tour of their editors in Spain. Additionally, Misión Verdad received the National Journalism Award in 2015, 2016, and 2019 by the Ministry of Communication and Information of Venezuela.
A 2015 press release from the ministry promoted the Forum “New frontier of peace: an economic perspective”, hosted by sociologist Franco Vielma, who was introduced as a columnist in Misión Verdad, a publisher in the weekly magazine of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), and a national independent broadcaster at YVKE Mundial. The forum was included as part of the Ministry’s achievements in its 2015 Report.
An article by Simón Boccanegra in TalCual shows how Misión Verdad accommodates its narrative to the guidelines of the Maduro government, even contradicting itself. He reminds how the site lashed out at the Panama Papers, even pointing to a conspiracy that included magnate George Soros, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the US agency USAID, but later reconsidered it after the document was used to disqualify former presidential candidate Javier Bertucci and support Prosecutor Tarek Wiliam Saab’s announcement of the arrest of former Treasury officials Claudia Díaz Guillén and Adrián Velásquez.
Leading characters
About the methods for “deconstructing” an argument, Misión Verdad editor in chief, William Serafino told the Spanish site publico.es that he does not believe in “the myth of independent journalism” while stating that they have two methods for “deconstructing the war”: exhaustive monitoring of the media that “impose the great narratives” and “hard, indisputable data”. During the interview, he conceded that Misión Verdad has a Chavista leaning, yet this does not lead them to fabricate news or lie but to be responsible.
According to his Twitter account, @williamserafino, the editor in chief at Misión Verdad is a political scientist who graduated from the Central University of Venezuela and a teacher at the state-run National Center of History. The political scientist is frequently cited on RT. In the article “Presidential elections in Venezuela: the opposition’s wish that it never expected to see fulfilled”, the author cited one of Serafino’s decontextualized tweets in which he recalls the call for elections made by the Venezuelan opposition, while in “Steps towards peace? Nicaragua experiences another day of demonstrations and calls for dialogue”, he was quoted when comparing the protests in the Central American country with those of Venezuela “intended to overthrow the government.” A Misión Verdad analysis is also cited in “Gold in dispute: Venezuela’s battle for control of its reserves.”
Misión Verdad returns the favor to RT several times citing it as a source. That is the case of the article “Washington scolds journalists for not calling Guaidó “president” and 29 other pieces.
For his part, Gustavo Borges Revilla, director of the site, gave a hint of a position aligned to the official narrative during an interview with Resumen Latinoamericano (Latin American Briefing): he supported the thesis that Chávez’s death was “probably a homicide,” described Nicolás Maduro described. as “a credible political leader under the fire of unconventional warfare”, and assured that the opposition’s decision to abandon the 2018 municipal elections and refusal to sign the Santo Domingo “cohabitation” agreement was promoted by the US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.
In a 2018 interview with Cuba Socialista (Socialist Cuba), a digital journal of the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party, Borges Revilla reveals that he studied advertising and marketing but became involved in popular movements. He visited the country as a speaker at the Sao Paulo Forum, a network of revolutionary leftist movements in Latin America. That same year he traveled to Brussels for the launch of the Network of Solidarity with the Bolivarian Revolution. According to a profile made by the Al Mayadeen website, he worked as an advisor for three ministries and was art director of the National Electoral Council between 2008 and 2011.
In2017, Serafino and Borges visited the Casa de la Prensa (Press House) in Havana with the vice president of the Association of Journalists of Cuba.
Verifying the humanitarian crisis
In order to analyze the publications of Misión Verdad, two articles under the tag “Humanitarian Crisis” were selected based on the criteria of the fact check methods of Efecto Cocuyo from Venezuela and IFCN-certified Colombia Check and Argentina’s Chequeado, which allow evaluating, contrasting, and giving a verdict on a scale that goes from true to false.
The first article under verification is “False death toll due to the blackout rebutted”, dated March 2019. The story assured that no person died during the four national blackouts that occurred during March 2019, and claimed that the reports of deaths were part of a campaign to demonstrate the existence of a humanitarian crisis in Venezuela requiring “military interference”. The site adds as wrap up that the report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights is also part of this scheme to invoke the so-called Responsibility to Protect doctrine used in Yugoslavia and Libya.
The post analyzes three statements. The first of them is from opposition MP Juan Manuel Olivares, who affirmed that 17 people had died during the blackouts in hospitals across the country. The second refers to the report of 15 kidney patients who died after being unable to receive dialysis, introduced by Codevida, a non-governmental umbrella association of organizations that work in the promotion and defense of the rights to health and life of people with chronic health conditions. Finally, the article covers the information provided by journalist Gustavo Ocando Alex on the death of 296 people, including 80 newborns, in Maracaibo’s Hospital as a result of the lack of electrical power.
The site’s analysis not only fails to establish a difference between possibly wrong information, manipulated information, or false information and uses the inadvisable term “fake news”, but considers, as in a conspiracy theory, that the three statements were concerted. Also, Misión Verdad fails to provide a contrasting version of the information presented by Olivares and Codevida but rather uses an ad hominem fallacy, a type of argument that disqualifies the statement by attacking the person instead of the content.
In the case of the MP Olivares, the article claims that he does not live in Venezuela and omits to mention that he left the country in July 2017, arguing threats against him and his family, including his wife, for supporting the protests of medical workers and denouncing an acute medicine shortage. He is described as a “propagandist for news favorable to the alleged existence of a” humanitarian crisis” in Venezuela,” and associated with the failed attempt to bring trucks across the border with Colombia on February 23, 2019.
The article accuses Codevida of “promoting a humanitarian channel according to the intervention strategy of the White House” and suggests that Ocando’s figures were later rebutted by the president of the Zulia State Medical College, Daniela Parra. The story omits to cite the tweets in which the journalist expressed “not to have the absolute truth”. Ocando affirmed the figures had been given by his source and one day later cited two others that contradicted them. This can be classified as unintendedly wrong information under the First Draft classification.
Misión Verdad warns that no media outlet or spokesperson could present a list with the names of those who died during the blackout, which was described as a “sabotage of the Guri hydroelectric system” and “electric attack”, in line with the Maduro government version, who assured that the massive failure was the product of a “cyber attack”.
However, this is not true. Local newspaper La Prensa de Lara provided the names of two people who died from lack of dialysis, Nelly Vásquez (65) and Gustavo Dudamel Gallardo, and the name of a patient who died at the hospital while treated for a skull fracture, Arnoldo Lara Sánchez (86).
Similar to Telesur, Misión Verdad only showed as proof the statement from the Venezuelan health minister, Carlos Alvarado, denying any death related to the blackouts and claiming that the affected hospitals had power generators. This information was found to be false according to the recounts of patients and doctors and the fact that the government agreed on receiving 17 power generators for hospitals donated by the Red Cross after the incident.
For its part, the organization Doctors for Health published a count of 24 people who died between Friday, March 8 and Tuesday, March 11, in 40 hospitals monitored in the National Survey of Hospitals, which determined that 85% of tomography and magnetic resonance imaging equipment and 55% of clinical laboratories were out of service. The survey, released on February 21, before the nationwide blackout, had already recorded 79 deaths related to failures of electrical power supply between November 19, 2018, and February 9, 2019.
The fear of dying as a consequence of a power outage persisted among the patients, as Reuters learned in a May 2019 report. El Estímulo also gathered testimonies from affected kidney patients during those days. One patient was able to receive dialysis three times a week thanks to the use of private lighting equipment in Chacao and a power plant donated by his boss. However, the blackout prevented or made it difficult for 10,000 patients at the Venezuelan Institute of Social Security (IVSS) to receive the treatment, risking death due to the accumulation of toxins in their blood.
Misión Verdad also concluded that the statement by the health minister asking patients to go to their care centers to be transferred to other facilities authorized to conduct dialysis “weakened” Codevida’s narrative on a state that neglects kidney patients.
The site omitted to mention the confession to NTN24 News Channel of the former president of the IVSS, General Carlos Rotondaro, assuring that 5,000 patients had died between early 2017 and 2019 because the institute’s dialysis supplies and medicines were diverted to the black market.
The article does not use “hard data” but only a statement by the minister regarding power generators that was confirmed to be false. Instead, it makes use of discourse analysis and conspiracy theories, considering the official narrative as true and infallible. Finally, the post shows a weak method of verification, including omission of sources, a lack of contrasting versions, and the use of discursive fallacies.
Migration crisis denial
The article “Manipulation and logic of the Venezuelan migration figures plot” of June 11, 2019, lashes out at the figures and characteristics of the Venezuelan exodus, labeling it a “corporate media” campaign. The site uses quotation marks on the terms Venezuelan exodus and migration crisis.
Misión Verdad claims that the four million Venezuelan refugees figure is false, arguing that migration was first promoted by the media and increased considerably after 2017 “for economic reasons” derived from the US sanctions. To support this assertion, the site quotes a World Bank document that measured the impact of Venezuelan migrants in Colombia, claiming that most of them are “economic migrants” and Colombians returnees.
The article showed as verification the figure of 4,001,917 migrants offered in the statistics section of the Regional Interagency Coordination Platform established on the request of the Secretary-General of the United Nations to UNHCR and IOM on April 12, 2018, to direct and coordinate the response to refugees and migrants from Venezuela.
Although unspecified, the rebuttal seems to refer to a headline referring to “4 million refugees” published by Telemundo, contradicting the official version of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which in June 2019 estimated in four million the combined figure for Venezuelan migrants and refugees. Once again, Mision Verdad made no difference between wrong, manipulated, or false information.
No political intention
The post form Misión Verdad considers the UN estimate of a diaspora that could exceed 5 million migrants and refugees by 2020 to be “accommodating” with the intention of “politically instrumentalize the migratory movement” in the region.
Under this same premise, the site qualified the visit of the UNHCR ambassador, actress Angelina Jolie, to the Colombian-Venezuelan border as “a sign of the mediatization of the issue” that seeks to raise “extraordinary financial resources”. To reinforce the idea, it cites a tweet by Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza warning the UNHCR that seeking funds to tackle the “economic migration” instead of just refugees “reveals a clear interventionist political strategy.”
Misión Verdad argues that the estimates given by different sources had the true intention of “oversizing the migratory phenomenon and influencing its effect.”
Misión Verdad also takes the request of the UN and some politicians to treat all Venezuelan migrants as refugees as part of an “exaggeration for financial purposes”. However, such demand is actually based on the definition provided by the UNHCR.
According to the international agency, the so-called economic migrants are those who “leave their country in search of job opportunities” and “risk their lives to enter another to find work.” Instead, refugees “flee from armed conflict, violence, or persecution and are therefore forced to cross the border of their country to seek security.”
To illustrate this, it is worth mentioning that 22% of the Venezuelans entering Peru, as reported by Spanish newspaper El País, are older people, chronically ill patients, and pregnant or lactating women, who have not received refugee status even though Peru is a signatory to the 1984 Cartagena Declaration, ratified 30 years later in the Brasilia Declaration by the governments of the region, including Cuba.
According to this, refugees are “people who have fled their countries because their life, security, or freedom have been threatened by widespread violence, foreign aggression, internal conflicts, massive violation of human rights, or other circumstances that seriously disturb public order ”.
Foreign aggression is part of the narrative used by the Maduro administration and supported by Misión Verdad, which would make people flee from it deserving of refugee status.
Also, the UNHCR New York Declaration of February 2018 delves into redefining migrants, not just Venezuelans, against the alleged intention of considering them refugees only for political purposes. The text agreed to add the classification of “vulnerable migrants”, which makes the group similar to refugees. At the same time, the very concept of “economic migrant” has been questioned because the reasons that push migrants and refugees to flee are the same, as has been explained by Mario Ruiz-Aýucar from the Institute for Studies on Conflicts and Humanitarian Action in a July 2018 article about the European debate on African and Middle Eastern migration, such as that of Moroccans taking boats to reach Spain.
Under this light, Venezuelans who decided to migrate as a result of the protests and the repression of 2014 and 2017 can be considered both as vulnerable migrants and refugees, because they flee arrests and torture for protesting or reprisals for subverting public order. The Migration Policy Institute has reported on the different migratory waves that the country has suffered during chavismo, beginning with the dismissals of workers from the state-run oil company Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) in 2004, to the humanitarian crisis precipitated by an acute shortage of food and medicine.
Likewise, those who have decided to leave the country can be considered refugees under the government thesis of foreign aggression, even if it comes in the form of “economic war”.
Therefore, there is no political intention in considering all Venezuelan migrants as refugees, but rather a legal vision shared and ratified by the region, which regards “foreign aggression”, one of the main arguments used by Misión Verdad, as one of the reasons to do so.
Financial exaggeration
Misión Verdad adds the 61 million dollars contributed by the United States to Colombia to the 31.5 million allocated by the World Bank (WB) and the one billion dollars proposed by the Inter-American Development Bank to support Latin American cities receiving large numbers of cross-border immigrants, a complement to its well-known Emerging and Sustainable Cities program.
If put together, however, the 1,35 billion dollars Humanitarian Response Plan and the 767 million of the Regional Platform – of which only 48% has been collected as of November 5, 2019 – a total of 2,167 million dollars has been raised for all host countries. This is barely equivalent to the combined 2,05 billion dollars that Colombia (1,5 billion dollars or 0.5% of its GDP) and Ecuador (500 million) allocate to deal with the migratory flow each year.
More specifically, according to the September 2019 report of the Regional Interagency Coordination Platform for Colombia, this country requested only 315 million dollars to care for Venezuelan migrants, only 20% of the estimated 1.5 billion needed to address the crisis.
The amount of money requested for humanitarian aid ceases to look oversized after it is found that it will be divided among at least 16 host countries and is equivalent to the request of only Ecuador and Colombia for one year alone. Colombia’s formal request of only a fraction of what has been spent allows us to classify the narrative on “aspiration to large resources” promoted by Misión Verdad as doubtful.
Obstacles to migration
Misión Verdad also supports its thesis of “migratory exaggeration” with financial intentions by raising doubts on some aspects: the lack of details on the allocation of financial resources for humanitarian aid and the deliberate policy of stimulating Venezuelan migration by offering legal incentives. It mentions Peru as an example, which received 90 thousand asylum applications in 2018 alone after waiving passport requirements for a temporary residence permit (PTP).
The statement was rushed. An October 2019 report by El País revealed that eleven countries in the region had imposed bans and obstacles on the entry of Venezuelan citizens to their territories, including Peru, where there are growing reports of express deportations and mistreatment of migrants. Or the cases of Aruba, Curaçao, and Trinidad and Tobago, where international human rights organizations and the Organization of American States have denounced abuses and expulsions. Some Peruvian officials have called Venezuelan migrants “undesirable”, criminalized, and subjected them to discriminatory treatment.
The omitted expertise
In May 2003, sociologist Iván de la Vega, Director of the International Migration Laboratory and professor at Simón Bolívar University, published the paper “Intellectual migration in Venezuela: the case of science and technology”.
The article addresses the paradigm shift from a migrant-hosting country to the “brain drain” of highly qualified human capital and the return of immigrants to their countries of origin, as Misión Verdad argued but found to have started back in 1983 after the economic crisis began to evaporate the expectations of steady economic growth.
With a focus on scientists and technologists, the study details that this type of migration was driven by the search for financial, institutional support and social, economic recognition of their work and achievements. It highlights that the 1989 social outburst known as El Caracazo – officially considered the genesis of the Chavista movement – and the lack of public policies to promote a new generation of academics in the 1990s, worsened the scientific exodus.
In a 2017 interview with Notiminuto, De La Vega explained that this process changed. He assured that the migration phenomenon went from qualified professionals to the general population, when the general deterioration of the country led to a change in migration patterns, from the usual destinations in the United States, Europe, or Japan to South America.
Back then, De La Vega warned of the “migratory saturation” taking place in Panama and the informal exodus by boat or foot to Aruba, Trinidad, Colombia, and Brazil as a sign of despair.
Anitza Freitez, Ph.D. in Demography and director of the Institute of Economic and Social Research of the Andrés Bello Catholic University (IIES-UCAB), has also documented scientifically the process initially described by De La Vega and studied by the National Survey on Living Conditions (Encovi), which found that 1.5 million Venezuelans had left the country and noted that high oil prices since 2004 temporarily halted the migratory flow due to the policy of direct money transfers to students and housewives, which reduced the unemployment rate by narrowing the economically active population.
It is possible to think that the reasons for the exodus in the 1980s could have been repeated since 2014 with the progressive collapse of crude oil prices and oil production in Venezuela instead of the more recent US sanctions as the reasons for the increase in the Venezuelan migration. The work of both experts also contradicts the “mediatized” migration thesis -affirmed by Diosdado Cabello, although not quoted by Misión Verdad– showing it has fluctuated since 1989 with periods of slowdown for economic reasons.
Neither De La Vega nor Encovi are sources scorned by the Chavista state digital ecosystem. The expert is cited by Telesur to support a figure of 3.6 million Venezuelan migrants for February 2018, while Franco Vielma of Misión Verdad cites the study in an opinion piece to ensure that 52% of migrants “are wealthy” -because they do not live in poverty- and 60% come from Caracas and large cities. He admits the nonexistence of official data from the Venezuelan government to contrast those given by different agencies.
In a recent interview with América Digital (Digital America), De La Vega, who also works at the Center for Development Studies (CENDES-UCV) and the Venezuelan Institute for Scientific Research (IVIC), explained what Misión Verdad found to be part of the narrative to “justify an intervention”.
“I use 14 different sources of information, each with a different collection method. Therefore, there are multiple figures on the subject.” A methodological deviation rather than a global agenda where the difficulty in obtaining official data from the Maduro administration stands out, creating “a very serious challenge to monitor the statistics,” coinciding with Misión Verdad columnist Franco Vielma.
According to De La Vega, Venezuelans are currently in “a nomadic situation”, which he coined as a “neo concept” to explain that “people are going wherever they can, in a dramatic way”.
Misión Verdad falsely quotes the UN Special Representative for Venezuelan refugees and migrants, Eduardo Stein, as admitting “that one of the reasons why the migration flow increased in the first half of 2019 could be due to the sabotage of electricity services in March and the intensification of the financial blockade, which prevents access to medicine and food to the Venezuelan State.” However, the exact phrase of the diplomat was “It is very possible that the latest events, especially the interruption of electrical power and the shortage of medicines and food, may have increased these flows.”
Final verdict
Misión Verdad fails to comply with its purported methodology, using discourse analysis as a verification mechanism instead of its argued follow-up of narrative threads as dates are omitted, statements are changed, and it fails to provide contrasting versions or “hard data”.
The remarks about the intentions of international agencies and political actors to make instrumental use of the concept of refugees and the number of migrants fail to contextualize the discussion in a timeline of migration waves documented by statistical studies and experts who have studied the phenomenon since 1989, a decade before Chavismo took power.
When making assertions that need verification, Misión Verdad fails to refer to the legal and political debate and the regional conventions where “external aggression” or a precarious situation in a country, be it Syria or Morocco, makes “economic migrants” in a vulnerable situation deserving of refugee status.
The site rushes to affirm that neighboring countries in the region ease the process of relocation or that they benefit from the aid money, providing nominal figures without comparing them with the size of the economies or the public spending that the reception of migrants implies. It does not make estimates or explain its methodology.
Finally, Misión Verdad intentionally or falsely cited migration concepts, official statements, and study figures, failed to clarify whenever wrong information was presented as false or manipulated information, and considered political theses such as the “electrical sabotage” to be valid without contrasting them with allegations of corruption, lack of maintenance, or incompetence. When the site quoted two “hard” sources, it omitted data as well as detailing the findings and methods.
Therefore, the site’s handling of information can be considered deceitful.
Translated by: José Rafael Medina.
