How can it be that Venezuela, a country which is so terribly battered by an imperialist blockade, nearly a decade of underinvestment, frequent examples of bad decision making, wide reaching corruption and technical brain drain, in addition to recent neoliberal and anti-worker economic policies including privatisation and asset stripping, is managing to keep Covid-19 rates significantly lower than its regional partners?

While community transmission rates, which are largely caused by the return of over 70,000 migrants who found themselves unemployed and without social coverage as the pandemic battered the continent, have driven up daily case counts to around 1,000 of late, a collapse of the Venezuelan healthcare system on the scale of Brazil, Ecuador, Peru, or, most recently, Bolivia, has not been observed so far.

For corporate press outlets which prop up imperialist pretensions in the region, this is unacceptable and spits in the face of their regime change rhetoric, forcing them to twist, distort and de-contextualise the reality once again so that it may fit their pre-established script.