Failing to win a mandate from Venezuelans in elections over the last few years, the leaders of the country’s mainstream, U.S.-backed opposition are exploiting discontent among the population in an effort to topple the democratically elected government, sociologist Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya writes.

Nazemroaya explains at BoilingFrogsPost:

The same opposition leaders and their foreign supporters are using the cover of the undeniable misgivings about rising crime rates, political corruption, and economic turmoil in Venezuela as a disguise for what is essentially looking like an attempted coup. The socio-economic misgivings of a segment of the population are being used as a pretext to legitimize street action and violence aimed at toppling the government

It is ironic that many of those opposing the Venezuelan government in the name of democracy, equality, and security were once supporters of autocratic and openly corrupt governments before the Chavez era. Memory loss or outright hypocrisy is at play. When the same oligarch’s that form and finance the Venezuelan opposition that is supporting and instigating the current anti-government protests were in charge of Venezuela, corruption was widespread, poverty rates were much higher, inequality was greater, and there was much higher inflation. Nor was Venezuela even a functioning democracy.

Despite the Venezuelan governing party’s democratic mandate, which includes winning most the municipal seats during the country’s December 2013 elections, the US-supported Venezuelan opposition wants to use flash mobs to oust the government and to take over the country. Of the 337 mayors elected in December 2013, the final vote counts awarded 256 mayor positions to the ruling party and its coalition of pro-government forces. This amounted to a win of seventy-six percent of the mayoralties in the South American country’s municipal elections, which confirms that the majority of the population supports the current Venezuelan governing party and its political allies.

Nazemroaya is described beneath the text of the article on its original page as follows:

Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya is a sociologist, award-winning author, and geopolitical analyst. He is a Research Associate at the Centre for Research on Globalization, a Canadian research and media organization based in Montreal, and a member of the Scientific Committee of Geopolitica, an Italian journal of geopolitical science based in Rome. His writing has been published in more than twenty-five languages around the world, including Spanish, Russian, Turkish, German, Arabic, Chinese, Portuguese, and Italian. Among his published works is The Globalization of NATO, one of the most comprehensive and critical books on the military alliance.

Read more here.

— Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.