from Sputnik News:

Since January the country has been in political crisis after opposition leader Juan Guaido proclaimed himself Venezuela’s interim president on 23 January, two weeks after President Nicolas Maduro’s inauguration to a second term following elections in May 2018.

The US and its allies accused the Maduro government of starving its people, something independent journalist Eva Bartlett who visited the country this year says is not true, adding that Western media paint an untruthful picture of the situation there.

Sputnik: Why have you decided to go to Venezuela? What cities have you visited?

Eva Bartlett: It just coincidentally happened that a peace delegation was going from America, so I joined them for my first week, which was very interesting because then we were able to go to many different areas, many of the poorest areas, we also met with the representatives of civil society, and governmental representatives, including President Maduro and Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza.

Now, this is a bit of a divergence, but I had planned to go to Kyiv to see the trial of [journalist] Kirill Vyshinsky, but American Airlines cancelled all the flights out of Venezuela, so I could not leave, and I missed my flight to Kyiv.

So I decided I would just stay on since at that time what Western media was saying about Venezuela was that everybody is starving, there’s no food in the stores, greatly exaggerated fabrications.

So I went around not only in downtown Caracas, but I went to what is known as the poorest barrio in Latin America – Petare, and I went into the hills of Petare. And everywhere I went, I saw people that looked like they were not starving, and I saw a shop selling food, meat, cheese, vegetables. So mainly the takeaway I got was the media was fabricating a crisis that doesn’t exist. There is poverty, but the way the media is presenting it is that everybody is starving, everybody’s eating out of the garbage, and that wasn’t the case.

I walked quite a lot, and I took the metro all over the city, and I saw one instance of somebody eating a bag of potato chips out of the garbage, but I didn’t see this mass chaos that the media was portraying.

During that time, there were two major power outages which the Venezuelan government attributes to American government interference and sabotage. At that time, even though people were without power, therefore without water, etc., it was calm, people remained calm, they were helping one another.

So I was glad that I was there at that time, because it was a time when some of the worst war propaganda was hyping up, and I was able to see that at least these things were not true at all and tried to convey that to people who follow me.

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