“Nicolás isn’t Chávez! Vote for me, comrades, because I’m the exact same!” Uh-huh…surrrrre.
What’s this? Dirty corporatist tricks from the Majunche campaign? Yes! And look who else is involved…the richest man in Mexico, no less. Plus a whole bunch of other putschist skank-shit from ten years ago…
The Mexican telephone operators’ union informs that the campaign command of Henrique Capriles Radonski has purchased a text-messaging and airtime package from Teléfonos de México (TELMEX), as it did during the presidential campaign of 2012.
VTV president and journalist William Castillo revealed that the cost of the package, purchased by Carlos Slim for Capriles, was $50 million.
Another fact revealed by Castillo, according to the Mexican operators’ union, the cost of the right wing’s telephone plan will be cancelled by the Pacific Rubiales oil company of Colombia, whose stockholders are ex-managers and oil workers involved in the PDVSA sabotage of late 2002 and early 2003.
Castillo says that “the phone calls and messages are not only for electoral purposes”, but that “their central objective is to wage a dirty war” by “creating destabilization and fear” in the Venezuelan population.
“No one should be surprised that the ‘telephone’ operation of Capriles and Slim has, at its bottom, the hand-over of CANTV [Venezuela’s nationalized phone company] in a neoliberal ‘paquetazo’,” wrote Mexican philosopher Fernando Buen Abad, upon hearing the news.
This right-wing move was rejected by Venezuelans, who found their peace interrupted by phone calls at midnight and other bothersome times. The text messages were also bothersome, as they are considered invasive and violations of communications privacy, a fact which puts private mobile phone companies in doubt, since these are presumed to have furnished the campaign with the database of their subscribers.
Translation mine.
Chalk up one more irony for the Venezuelan opposition. They’re so patriotic now that they’re going as far away as Mexico for robocalling and robotexting services to supplement their already dirty campaign. And as rich as these bastards are, they still need Carlos Slim to finance their robocalls and robotexts. The term shameless was invented, it seems, just for them!
I wouldn’t be surprised if the data delivery wasn’t purchased through a Colombian subsidiary of TelMex, given that a Colombian company is apparently picking up the tab … although TelMex’s Mexican operation handles the bulk of telemarketing in (or from) Latin America (full disclosure… for a time, I was hired by a TelMex subsidiary to train English speaking telemarketing supervisors).
It’s not surprising that it would have interest in acquiring access to the Venezuelan market, since it already has interests in (and has holdings in in Latin America, the U.S. and the European Union.
Oh, and meant to add… I don’t see where Carlos Slim is putting his money into this, but only where the Colombian oil company is going to pick up the tab. It just doesn’t sound like Carlos Slim to get himself involved in foreign political campaigns.