The network evening news, deep in the throes of Trump derangement, have taken an adversarial tack towards coverage of ongoing U.S. operations in the Caribbean. In so doing, they willfully omitted reporting on the daring clandestine mission to get Venezuelan leader María Corina Machado to Oslo, Norway where she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Wearing a wig and a disguise, María Corina Machado began her escape from Venezuela on Monday afternoon.
The Venezuelan opposition leader was trying to get to Norway by Wednesday in time to receive the Nobel Peace Prize that she won for challenging Venezuela’s authoritarian leader, Nicolás Maduro. First she had to get from the Caracas suburb where she has been in hiding for a year to a coastal fishing village, where a skiff awaited her.
Over the course of 10 nerve-racking hours, Machado and two people helping her escape hit 10 military checkpoints, avoiding capture each time, before she reached the coast by midnight, said a person close to the operation.
The report goes on to note that a call was made to the U.S. military, so as to give a heads up and therefore avoid being blown up along the route to Curacao like a cocaine-ferrying drug boat. Machado had backup along the way:
Around the same time of their crossing, a pair of U.S. Navy F-18s flew into the Gulf of Venezuela and spent roughly 40 minutes flying in tight circles near the route that would lead from the coast to Curaçao, according to flight-tracking data. It was the closest incursion of U.S. aircraft into Venezuelan airspace since the U.S. military buildup began in September.
Online speculation has been rampant since the partial reveal of the details of this journey were made public, with questions about the role that U.S. Special Operations forces may have had in this extraction.
Machado missed the Nobel ceremony. Her daughter collected her Nobel Peace Prize on her behalf and gave a powerful speech. Eventually, she made it to Oslo and greeted Venezuelans still gathered outside the Grand Hotel at 2AM local time. None of this, at least the parts that happened before airtime, were reported on the network nightly news. Nothing at all on ABC, CBS, or NBC.
The legacy media focused instead on the U.S. seizure of an Iranian ghost fleet tanker chock full of Venezuelan oil and en route to Cuba. That story is easier to keep Trump-centered and Trump-washed.
