Mario Silva is a Venezuelan TV broadcaster and a leading supporter of the Bolivarian Republic as led by Hugo Chavez and now Nicolas Maduro.
In 2009, on his program on Venezuelan state TV called “La Hojilla” (The Razor Blade), Silva referred to a student rally in opposition to Chavez’s proposal for an amendment to abolish term limits. “There are two students, one is Diego Aaron Scharifker, and the other David Smolansky Urosa … Scharifker and Smolansky are last names of Hebrew origin, Jewish last names, you see the problems right now…”
Now, as Foreign Policy reports:
A self-declared Marxist and radical revolutionary, Silva has long been untouchable. His broadcasting of private conversations — something Venezuelan law expressly forbids — is typically done with complete impunity. Yesterday, however, the proverbial shoe was on the other foot, as Venezuela’s opposition presented a secret recording of Silva himself that shocked the political spectrum.
In the one-hour recording made public yesterday, Silva is overheard in a face-to-face conversation with an agent of Cuba’s Intelligence Services, giving him what would appear to be a briefing of the inner workings of chavista corruption. The main target of Silva’s rant was none other than Diosdado Cabello, the president of the National Assembly (Venezuela’s single-chamber Parliament) most recently (in)famous for taking away opposition lawmakers’ right to speak inside Parliament, along with their salaries.
Long seen as the main rival to Maduro, Cabello comes across in the recording as a scheming oligarch, wanting “to control everything” but “not interested in being president.” According to Silva, Cabello is the head of a tangled web of fraudulent companies taking advantage of Venezuela’s currency exchange controls. He said that Cabello uses his influence to fleece the state by obtaining cheap dollars without merit, which he then sells in the black market for enormous profits.
Cabello’s main accomplices in this scheme according to Silva are the Venezuelan tax agency and CADIVI, the office in charge of administering the fixed exchange rate regime. He also claimed that there’s a faction within the military that’s beholden to Cabello and opposed to Maduro. Silva alleges that Venezuela’s recent devaluations were carried out as a way of restraining Cabello and his cronies.
More seriously, Silva claims that the Venezuelan elections system can be tampered with, and wonders if recent election results were modified by the Cabello faction. He suggests that Maduro is a weak president who is controlled by his wife. Finally, he also says that, a few days before the election, Maduro saw his own face magically appear in a painting of Chávez that hangs in the museum where Chávez is buried. (Silva says he feared that if the story were leaked, Maduro would be labeled as “insane” and would lose the election.)
These are things the Venezuelan opposition has been saying for years. The recording seems certain to blow a serious hole in the facade of unity among chavistas that Chavez was able to enforce.
So it’s unsurprising that after the tape was released, Silva took to Twitter to claim it was a setup engineered by you-know-who. Of course Israel and the US are favorite scapegoats for chavistas– as we were reminded when the oil minister blamed them for Chavez’s death from cancer.
Muy buen montaje! El sionismo esta trabajando muy bien en breve mi declaración
— Mario Silva García (@LaHojillaenTV) May 20, 2013
Pensándolo bien mejor Respondo esta noche por La Hojilla, al bodrio que monto el mossad israelí junto con la CIA tenemos Pruebas!
— Mario Silva García (@LaHojillaenTV) May 20, 2013
Meanwhile Silva is suspending his TV program “for medical reasons.”
