The video, published on Twitter, begins with a portion of President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address on Tuesday in which he expressed solidarity…
The video, published on Twitter, begins with a portion of President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address on Tuesday in which he expressed solidarity with the Venezuelan opposition against Maduro. It then proceeds to explain, through a timeline of actions by the Maduro regime, how the dictator systematically made it impossible for opposition parties to compete politically, noting, in particular, the use of violence to silence protesters.
“Nicolás Maduro is a master of violating the Venezuelan constitution,” the text on the screen reads. “His tactics are copied directly from the innumerable authoritarian leaders before him.”
The video then shows images of, among others, Josef Stalin, Benito Mussolini, Saddam Hussein, and Muammar Qaddafi. Those images return at the end of the video, when the text declares, “we have seen this before.”
The video’s timeline begins in 2013, when Maduro took over for late dictator Hugo Chávez. It lists among the notable acts of Maduro’s tenure the imprisonment of dissident leader Leopoldo López for organizing peaceful protests in 2014, the failed attempt to replace the opposition-held National Assembly with a false legislature known as the “National Constituent Assembly” in 2015, the killing of dozens of protesters at the hands of soldiers deployed to torture and kill them since Maduro over, and his most recent rigged election, which resulted with his presidential victory against no opposition candidates.
