J.J. Rendón's Sleaze-Art of Malicious Rumors

Behind the now-demonstrably bogus rumor that SmartMatic touch screen voting machines in Sunday's Venezuela referendum on the presidency of Hugo Chávez had fraudulently imposed a cap on anti-Chávez votes was one man only, and he is known in pockets of América as a siren of sleaze: Political consultant Juan José Rendón, a.k.a. "J.J. Rendón."

Earlier this week, the pale and pasty-faced "political consultant" appeared on the national TV channel Globovision in Caracas, not disclosing any client whom he was representing, waving ballot result pages like snake oil, charging that the existence of similar numbers of "YES" votes (anti-Chávez) votes indicated that the machines had been rigged.

From what rock did this slime-ball J.J. Rendón crawl out from? Narco News has found the dirt under that stone. Read on, kind reader, read on...

His rumor - libelous against the company that made the machines - was deflated this morning in none other than The Wall Street Journal; a periodical with a special hostility to Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, but that had nonetheless had the common sense to interview an expert in statistics before repeating a viciously untrue rumor that would later discredit any newspaper or person that passed it on...

"Aviel Rubin, a computer-science professor at Johns Hopkins University, said he calculated odds of roughly one in 17 that two of three computers at a voting table would have identical results. That compares to about one in 15 that so far have shown similar results in Venezuela's referendum…"

Rendón simply invented a numbers game based on knowingly false pretenses, while Globovision, anti-Chávez bloggers, and others gave credence to his nonsense.

According to the Mexican press, he cut his teeth in Mexico, working for the PRI, the party that invented computerized election fraud in this hemisphere! Apparently, Mr. Rendón's slash-and-burn tactics have left him without many friends in Mexico… and, his behavior in recent days may find him equally loathed in his home country of Venezuela.

Mexican journalist and popular national columnist Jaime Avilés calls him "the Venezuelan neo-nazi Juan José Rendón" (La Jornada, October 13, 2001).

Mexican political columnist Luis Ocejo Martínez calls him "the spoiled foreigner" (Notícias de Oaxaca, June 6, 2004), noting that, in 2001, J.J. Rendón was reportedly implicated in eight separate criminal charges against candidates of the PRI party for using public funds in campaigns and "printing anonymous propaganda… in which the proposals of the PAN party candidate for the mayoralty of Puebla, Luis Paredes Moctezuma, were distorted."

Rendón's background in Venezuelan politics is no less shady. He managed the presidential campaign of war criminal Carlos Andres Perez in 1987, and then, according to Ocejo Martínez, "managed the image of the four defense ministers during this same administration." That is to say, the defense ministers who perpetrated the massacre of more than 1,000 Venezuelan students and protestors in 1989, as well as other atrocities, and the same Carlos Andres Perez who was convicted of embezzling public money, impeached, and driven from office. Rendón, according to Ocejo Martínez, specialized in "control of or attack by rumors." (That he found himself in the same campaign with dirty tricks consultant Eric Ekvall, who was also busy last Sunday spreading false exit poll rumors before polls closed, in violation of Venezuelan law, should surprise no one... What a team! These guys would make Nixon jealous!)

According to the magazine Latin American Public Relations (Revista Latinoamericana de Comunicación Social, April 2001), Rendón is the theorist behind the formula that "Rumor = Importance x Ambiguity."

"It's about a relation of multiplication: If the importance of the information is null or if there is nothing ambiguous about the matter, there is no rumor. At the same time, if the news has importance but there is a large amount of ambiguity, distrust, and suspicion around it, it creates the best soup to cultivate the germination of rumors… J.J. Rendón, psychologist, publicist, with a degree in ontopsychology, who managed the presidential campaign of Carlos Andres Pérez, backed this theory by reaffirming that these are the two basic and necessary conditions that a rumor catches hold in the mind of the people: First, the subject of the story must have a certain level of importance so that it is repeated by he who hears it, and next, the facts must be dressed in a certain amount of ambiguity."

The next section of this 2001 essay is prophetically relevant to Sunday's referendum in Venezuela:

"This ambiguity can be induced by the absence or shortage of news, by its contradictory nature, by distrust toward it, or by emotional tensions that make an individual incapable of accepting the facts revealed by the official news agencies…"

So Rendon had his "perfect soup" to spread the rumor on Tuesday... an opposition oligarchy that didn't want to believe the results... a compliant opposition media to spread the rumor... and the fact that the audits on the vote hadn't had a chance to occur yet, leaving enough ambiguity to spread the falsehood.

Of course, with a con artist like Rendón, it is only a matter of time before his "rumorology" catches up with him. It was just four months ago that he told Venezuelan opposition leaders that it was "very probable" that the referendum would never happen "due to the complicated situation that is the excuse by the elections agency to maintain its dilating attitude" (Cadena Global, April 15, 2004) But the referendum did happen, making an ass out of J.J. Rendón, and in recent days he took his revenge out on the National Elections Commission that had proved him wrong by spreading the ridiculous rumor of rigged voting machines with false, now discredited, numerological "proof."

Rendón appeared in Oaxaca, Mexico, earlier this year during what many news reports have since concluded was a "self-attack" by that state's governor - an attempt to fake an assassination attempt on himself to gain public sympathy - according to Ocejo Martínez.

On October 6, 2001, La Jornada's Jaime Avilés reported that Rendón is part of a larger group - a "pool" of roving political consultants - that are directed from Miami to roam Latin America and meddle in national and local elections on behalf of interests that are never quite clear:

"They belong to a pool of Latin American publicity agencies, grouped together in the Interamerican Center of Political Leadership, with its headquarters in Miami, the United States. The have a monthly publication called Political Marketing, and they shield themselves academically behind the dubious prestigue of Florida International University (FIU)….

"You can learn more and much about them in the page www.centropolitico.org on the Internet, where they present themselves as experts in the management of rumors, 'crisis situations,' and 'negative propaganda.'

"In sum, this is about a vast conglomerate of Latin American businesses dedicated to political propaganda based on terror. But in Mexico, three of its most outstanding members have been made visible: the Venezuelan Juan José Rendón, the Colombian Mauricio de Vengoechea, and the Argentine Carlos Fara."

According to Avilés, the daily Clarín of Buenos Aires, Argentina, had reported on June 9, 2000 about a talk given by J.J. Rendón - now better known as the inventor of the fraudulent Venezuelan fraud accusations - in that city. Clarín reported:

"The Venezuelan Juan José Rendón is a specialist in rumors. He brought Carlos Andrés Pérez and Rafael Caldera to the presidency, and said that rumor is something for which there is almost no remedy. In Venezuela - he told - there had been a rumor about the health of Caldera and it had come to the point where it was said he had died and that power had passed to a military junta. We capitalized on this rumor to the maximum: we let it run until the point of being insupportable and finally we published a photo of President Caldera in the dailies, playing dominos with the Armed Forces."

But it was Rendón's dirty tricks employed in the gubernatorial elections of 2001 in the Mexican state of Michoacan that brought the attention of Mexican journalists to his Goebbels-like obsession with rumors as a form of political campaigning, notes Avilés:

In Michoacán, Rendón and his accomplices have applied this formula as a footnote, distributing rumors that assure, from mouth to mouth, that (center-left PRD party candidate) Lázaro Cárdenas Batel is a "homosexual," who controls "a network of Cuban horsemen," and that he "practices Cuban Santeria" rituals. To understand the second and third accusations… (they were) based on the fact that the (candidate) is married from Mayra Coffigny, a Cuban citizen, and like many youths of her generation (she is 36) is a fan of afro-caribbean music and she plays various African percussion instruments.

The genius named J.J. Rendón has distributed in Morelia and other cities some flyers with photographs in which Lázaro appears playing a drum, but the text that accompanies it says that he was "caught while practicing Cuban Santeria rituals, linked to black magic, to which he desperately looks to try to win the election with the help of evil powers."

So that's it, kind readers: The "source" behind the election machine-rigging accusations in Venezuela... J.J. Rendón… a modern-day wannabe Goebbels in the black arts of rumor and innuendo wrapped in the moniker of "political consulting."

Did you believe him, this week, even for a moment?

If you did, it is time to inoculate yourself against this kind of manipulation-by-rumor so that you never get fooled again.