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OPINION:
Most of the world was confused when Nicolas Maduro’s second in command, Vice President Delcy Rodriguez, implicated Israel in the U.S. Delta Force capture of her commander in chief.
In a Jan. 3 national address, the newly appointed interim leader said that, “the governments of the world are simply shocked that … Venezuela … is the victim and subject of an attack of this nature, which has … a Zionist tint,” and “Zionist undertones.”
Cuban communist ruler Miguel Diaz-Canel echoed her misdirected comments, declaring that “there can be no acceptance of this act of state terrorism, comparable only to the crimes against humanity committed by Israeli Zionism in the Gaza Strip.”
In reality, Mr. Maduro’s capture more closely resembled the U.S. invasions of Grenada and Panama, which captured Prime Minister Maurice Bishop and Gen. Manuel Noriega, respectively.
Ms. Rodriguez and Mr. Diaz-Canel’s comments, which blame Jerusalem for Washington’s actions may seem novel, but vilifying Jews and Israel is a decades-old practice for Latin American dictatorships aligned with Moscow. Before his capture, Mr. Maduro accused “far right Zionists” of trying to “hand this country over to the devils,” and linked opposition leaders such as Maria Corina Machado to a “Zionist agenda” while alleging that, “Zionism is behind the global extreme right.”
Ms. Rodriguez has also accused Israel of engaging in “genocide” and “neo-Nazi Zionism” as part of a “policy of extermination” in the Middle East.
These antisemitic narratives first originated across the Atlantic more than a century ago. Fourteen years before the 1917 Russian Revolution, the czarist Russian empire scapegoated Jews by publishing a fabricated text called “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” The book was meant to reveal a blueprint written by Jewish leaders aiming to take control the media and banking system, but it was really composed by the czar’s secret police.
The Third Reich adopted the text into its education system, and its antisemitic rhetoric was used by the Soviets to deflect blame and consolidate power among frustrated Europeans.
Once the Soviets realized they could use antisemitism to gain support from regional malcontents, they exploited Jew-hatred to gain international allies. Bridging this gap stoked fear and paranoia, rallying some of the angriest and most ignorant members of their societies.
In a 2006, Romanian Securitate secret police defector Ion Pacepa wrote in National Review, “In 1972, the Kremlin decided to turn the whole Islamic world against Israel and the U.S. As KGB chairman Yuri Andropov told me … we needed to instill a Nazi-style hatred for the Jews throughout the world, and to turn this weapon of the emotions into a terrorist bloodbath against Israel and its main supporter, the United States … according to Andropov … the Muslims had a taste for nationalism, jingoism, and victimology. Their illiterate oppressed mobs could be whipped up to a fever pitch.”
After weaponizing antisemitism in the Mideast and Europe, Russian state sponsored media outlets and stealth propaganda channels inundated Latin America with antisemitic conspiracy theories. Spreading lies about Jews undermining economies and national independence helped reinforce propaganda that socialism and state control could protect the common man from Western banks and capitalist predators.
Some of this rhetoric comes from Russian ‘disinformation laundering’ in which false narratives are promoted through stealth channels to legitimate ones.
In 2024, French intelligence identified Portal Kombat, a network consisting of hundreds of websites engaged in copycat branding, a technique used spread pro-Kremlin narratives on websites that mirror local news outlets. Such networks also use search engine optimization saturation to ensure that Russian media appears in search results while techniques such as LLM grooming guarantee Kremlin content gets picked up by artificial intelligence models and search engine crawlers.
Other narratives are published openly by Kremlin sponsored Spanish language media outlets such as RT en Espanol, TASS and Ria Novosti. Sputnik Mundo, one of Moscow’s most influential Spanish language news outlets pushes so many antisemitic conspiracy theories in Latin America that one of its most common search terms are the centuries old Jewish Rothschild banking family, which it accuses of manipulating intergovernmental relations to starting wars and control global markets.
“For over a century, Tsarist, Soviet and now Russian Federation authorities have used antisemitism to discredit, divide, and weaken their perceived adversaries at home and abroad,” according to a January 2024 U.S. State Deptartment report. That same year, the Digital News Association, which tracks Russian propaganda in Latin America, found at least 137 conspiracy oriented articles referencing the Rothschilds in Sputnik Mundo.
To rile popular support against diplomatic relations with Paris, Sputnik Mundo labeled Emmanuel Macron a “Rothschild protege” and reported that the French president raised funds “from a powerful network of bankers, financiers and businessmen,” suggesting he too was part of the mythical international Jewish conspiracy.
It also suggested that the Rothschilds have “been deeply involved in Ukraine’s affairs since the 2014 coup d’etat,” asserting that the Jewish family helped oust Putin ally Viktor Yanukovych to profit billions from “restructuring Ukraine’s debt.”
These kinds of narratives trigger Latin American fears of neocolonial exploitation and suggest that Jews, Israel, and Western democracies are enemies of the people. In 2023, the State Dept. published a report confirming that such false stories help Russia push a “broader false narrative that it is a champion against neocolonialism, when in reality it is engaged in neocolonialism … ”
The antisemitic rhetoric used by Venezuela’s Chavista leaders are not an anomaly. They are part of a blueprint created in Moscow to deflect blame and leverage hatred among groups that aim to undermine the U.S. and its democratic allies and values.
• Jeffrey Scott Shapiro is a journalist who has reported on Russian affairs and served as a senior official at the U.S. Office of Cuba Broadcasting. Gelet Martinez Fragela is the editor of ADN Cuba (www.adncuba.com), a news platform tracking human rights in Latin America. Both writers oversee the Digital News Association’s Latin America Disinformation Tracking Initiative, which identifies Kremlin narratives aimed at Spanish-language audiences.
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