The video is on youtube, here's a transcript.

Nicholas Maduro's Video Appeal to the American People Not to Start Another War - Full Transcript
Nicholas Maduro 16 hours ago | 700 words 1,143 40


Transcript:

I am Nicholas Maduro, constitutional President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.

I want to send a message to the people of the United States to warn you about the media, about the psychological war being waged in the international and especially in the US media, against Venezuela.

This campaign has been prepared to justify a coup d'etat in Venezuela that has been organized, financed and actively supported by the Trump Administration. Everybody  knows that a brutal campaign of false images, of manipulated images, of faked images, has been started.

Do not believe everything they say on the US television! I'm telling you from the heart - they could not make up a lie that Venezuela and Maduro have massive weapons of mass destruction, so they had no excuse to invade us.

So now, they invent other lies and fake news every day, to justify aggression against our country.

I call on your conscience, I call you to solidarity, I call you to an awakening to the truth.

Let’s not allow another war like Vietnam. If the government of the United States intends to intervene with us they will have a much worse Vietnam than you can imagine.

We do not want violence. We will resist it. We are a peaceful people, proud of our history and of Simon Bolivar and Hugo Chavez.

Venezuela has a solid democracy. We have our own problems as any other country, and we will solve them by ourselves. Our people deserve respect.

In our country there is the largest certified oil reserves in the world. And the eyes of those who lead the empire in the United States are on our oil, and they want to put their hands on it as they did in Iraq and Libya. That wealth belongs to us. We are now certifying the world's first gold reserves, we have the fourth largest gas reserves in the world. We are a country of great resources both natural and energetic. This is the truth and this explains the constant attacks against Venezuela.

That's why I appeal to your conscience, to solidarity with us. Don’t let Donald Trump and the group of extremists around him like John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, the CIA and Mike Pence impose their lies and their coup against Venezuela. Support the people of Venezuela in their struggle for democracy.

I have confidence in you, American citizen. Here in Venezuela you have a brother. I am an admirer of the history of the United States. I know your country well. I have driven through Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York, and Washington. I know your country’s width and breadth. I want to have relations of respect, closeness and cooperation with all of the United States. The United States is a great country, and it is much bigger than Donald Trump.

I want to have good relationships and solve our problems through peaceful diplomacy. I only ask for respect for Venezuela and I need your support to avoid a war like Vietnam.

I ask for peace and I ask for respect for my people. I am sure that we are going to continue on this historical path because we are on the just historical path, we are in the right place in history.

Thank you very much.

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Posted on RetroBBS

The US ruling class and its European clients are not interested in 'free and fair elections' in Venezuela. What they want and are attempting is a coronation of a leader whose only qualification is that he is able and willing to take instruction.
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Posted on def2

The US ruling class and its European clients are not interested in 'free and fair elections' in $country.

But it must look this at least. It just sounds better than to say: "we will start a war to make a few people rich".

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and here come some weapons, with love from langley...

https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/world/latin-america/article225949200.html



Venezuelan authorities say a U.S.-owned air freight company delivered a crate of assault weapons earlier this week to the international airport in Valencia to be used in “terrorist actions” against the embattled government of Nicolás Maduro.

An air freight company, 21 Air LLC, based in Greensboro, N.C., operates the Boeing 767 aircraft that the Venezuelans allege was used in the arms transfer. The flight originated in Miami on Feb 3.

The Boeing 767 has made dozens of flights between Miami International Airport and destinations in Colombia and Venezuela since Jan. 11, a flight tracking service shows, often returning to Miami for only a few hours before flying again to South America.

The discovery of the weapons occurred Tuesday — two days after the flight landed briefly in Valencia, Venezuela’s third-largest city — as tax authorities and other inspectors conducted a routine inspection of cargo that came off the flight, according to a statement by the Carabobo state governor’s office.

A senior Venezuelan security official, Bolivarian National Guard Gen. Endes Palencia Ortiz, who is the nation’s vice minister of citizen security, said authorities found 19 assault weapons, 118 ammunition cartridges, and 90 military-grade radio antennas, among other items.

“This materiel was destined for criminal groups and terrorist actions in the country, financed by the fascist extreme right and the government of the United States,” Palencia Ortiz was quoted as saying.

The freight company, begun five years ago, operates two cargo planes, a Boeing 747 and a Boeing 767, according to the 21 Air website. The Boeing 767, a 32-year-old aircraft once flown by the now defunct Brazilian carrier Varig, carries the registration N-881-YV and is the aircraft that landed in Valencia on Feb. 3.

The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent through its website. The cellular phone of the company’s chief executive, Michael Mendez, had a recording Thursday afternoon that said it could not accept calls.

An Ottawa-based analyst of unusual ship and plane movements, Steffan Watkins, drew attention to the frequent flights of the 21 Air cargo plane in a series of tweets Thursday.

“All year, they were flying between Philadelphia and Miami and all over the place, but all continental U.S.,” Watkins said in a telephone interview. “Then all of a sudden in January, things changed.”

That’s when the cargo plane began flying to destinations in Colombia and Venezuela on a daily basis, and sometimes multiple times a day, Watkins said. The plane has made close to 40 round-trip flights from Miami International Airport to Caracas and Valencia in Venezuela, and Bogota and Medellin in Colombia since Jan. 11.

The most recent tracking of the aircraft showed it arrived from Medellin into Miami airport after midnight Thursday.

The air cargo company’s website says that the Boeing 767 has a payload capacity of 42 tons.

The aircraft in question has passed through many hands since Varig took delivery of it in 1987. In 2004, it was passed to GE Capital Aviation Services, a leasing company that is part of the General Electric conglomerate, according to an operator history on the planespotters.net website. Tampa Cargo, Avianca Cargo and Dynamic Airways later controlled the aircraft until 21 Air received it in 2014.

The provenance of the alleged weaponry was not apparent. And questions about who the arms shipment was destined for, if the Venezuelan version of events is true, only mounted. Delivery at a commercial airport would indicate that somebody with authority there would have had a hand.

Venezuelan authorities displayed the weaponry that they said was delivered by the 21 Air cargo plane on open-air tables draped in red cloth. Some of the rifles included stands for long-range targeting. The shipment included 15 AR-15 assault weapons, a Micro Draco semi-automatic pistol with a jumbo magazine, a Colt 7.62 rifle and two telescopic sights, the governor’s statement said.

Valencia was a former manufacturing and economic hub before the collapse of the nation’s economy.

Flight records from the tracking site flightradar24.com, monitored by Watkins, indicate that the 21 Air cargo plane flew at least four times to Valencia from Miami and another four times to Caracas from Miami since Jan. 11. In many cases, the flights would head on to Bogota or Medellin before returning to Miami.

If some U.S. entity were attempting to provide arms to a Venezuelan resistance movement, it would be taking a familiar page from the history books.

The CIA operated a dummy airline, known as Air America, from the early 1950s until the mid 1970s for air operations in Southeast Asia, including air-dropping weapons to friendly forces.

More than a decade later, Sandinista soldiers shot down a cargo plane taking weapons to the U.S.-backed contra rebels fighting the Nicaraguan government. A U.S. Marine veteran, Eugene Hasenfus, survived the 1986 crash, and later told reporters that he was working for the CIA, paving the way for his release and return to the United States.

Curiously, one of the figures in the Reagan administration instrumental in delivering support to the contras, former assistant secretary of state Elliott Abrams, was named by President Donald Trump late last month as his special envoy overseeing policy toward Venezuela.

Washington Bureau reporter Alex Daugherty contributed to this report.


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