Caracas Chronicles

Back in April, State broadcaster VTV and weekly political gossip rag Quinto Dia quoted White House spokeman Jim Luers saying that reports that the U.S. is investigating Diosdado Cabello are “totally false”.

Days later, El Nacional called the White House to confirm if any Jim Luers worked there. The answer? Nope.

This week, El Nacional kept up its search for this Jim Luers, asking the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York and the FBI’s NYC offices. The answer, once again: “no Jim Luers here”.

Interestingly enough, some Caracas Chronicles commenters brought the case to our attention at the time and noticed that Luers has been quoted in multiple times in Venezuela-related news by either State media or other outlets. The fun thing is that in each of those articles, his work description shifted from spokeman to investigator to FBI agent to analyst and so on.

A real jack of all trades, then.

Argentinean journalist Mario Szichman launched his own inquiry for Tal Cual and published this article in late April, which confirmed the phantasmagoria surrounding Mr. Luers. But that has not stopped State media outlets and even PSUV MP (and journalist) Earle Herrera from going ahead and quoting Mr. Luers. That report, btw, comes from State news agency AVN just came a couple of weeks ago, which probably was the reason why El Nacional went ahead with its follow-up article.

Jim Luers, it’s pretty clear, just doesn’t exist. Yet the hegemony still trusts him 100%. And that’s show how far it will go to impose their version of the story.