In an editorial published by the newspaper Il Faro di Roma, Italian economist Luciano Vasapollo, leader of the Network of Communists, denounces the completely false narrative of alleged state-sponsored drug trafficking, used by the US government to justify the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores.

This disinformation campaign, which the analyst describes as a “shameful stigma,” was adopted by some governments, including Italy’s, to support the attack ordered by US President Donald Trump, which Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni justified as a supposed anti-narcotics operation.

This occurred, Vasapollo indicates, despite prominent figures from Italian and international institutions publicly underscoring the falsity of such arguments, which lacked objective evidence. Among them were Pino Arlacchi, former Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations, and prosecutor Nicola Gratteri, an expert in the fight against drug trafficking.

“For years, Venezuela has been the target of a systematic delegitimization operation built not on facts, but on an arsenal of toxic narratives,” Vasapollo, who is also a co-founder of the Italian chapter of the Network of Intellectuals in Defense of Humanity, notes.

Denouncing and dismantling these campaigns of lies is imperative to unmask the true objectives of the disinformation and media manipulation, aimed at justifying a hybrid war and economic siege, with “the pretense of deciding from the outside who should govern a sovereign people.”

Finally, in this analysis, Vasapollo calls for continued popular mobilization in Italy by political, social, labor, and youth forces “that have chosen dignity over silence” against US aggression in Venezuela and the looming threat to other countries in Latin America and the world.

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