Underestimating the dictatorship as improvised is one of the biggest and gravest errors made when analyzing it. The brainwashing machinery of chavismo displays such a level of refinement and effectiveness that it has perfected its strategies for growth and expansion.
Alongside the media power of the government, achieved through the appropriation and control of the main media outlets in the country—El Universal, Últimas Noticias, Globovisión, Notitarde, to name just a few of the most emblematic—the regime of Nicolás Maduro is also imposing by training activists and influencers.
Masters in disinformation and cognitive warfare, chavismo has established a series of indoctrination programs under the guise of educational centers aimed at expanding through the training and multiplication of agents. Two clear examples of this are the Universidad Internacional de las Comunicaciones (UICOM) and the Escuela Influye.
Expansion of chavismo through influencers
Chavista activism grows and expands through the training of officialist influencers who flood social media with the official narrative to impose it over the voices of the opposition and political dissent.
These specialists in digital propaganda make up the army of misinformation and cognitive warfare that chavismo implements to maintain indefinite power.
UICOM: indoctrination center masked as a university
In what was once the new headquarters of the newspaper El Nacional, a building that along with its press and journalism equipment was seized in May 2021 by Diosdado Cabello from Miguel Enrique Otero using the justice system as a political control tool, is now home to the Universidad Internacional de la Comunicaciones (UICOM), an indoctrination center disguised as an educational institution.
The chavismo regime defines it as “an institution of university education with an official, specialized, participatory, and pluralistic character, for the academic training of technicians and professionals in the field of communications, under a humanist and solidarity profile, with social, environmental sensitivity and national, regional, and international identity, capable of integrating into a multipolar, multicultural, and multiethnic world.”
However, it is nothing more than part of chavismo’s brainwashing machine to implement one of the biggest weapons existing today to attack and destroy the truth and democracy: misinformation.
Misinformation and cognitive warfare as curriculum
UICOM is nothing more than part of chavismo’s brainwashing machinery for implementing misinformation.
With the Seán MacBride Chair as its banner and addressed “from a Marxist perspective,” the IUCOM presents this introductory course as a critical study of global communication problems. It conveniently overlooks the manipulation they perform on the reports.
The IUCOM is nothing more than a school for imposing leftist narratives aimed at indoctrinating those aptly called influencers and not true communication professionals. It is a center for content generators who repeat chavismo’s discourse under the guise of a university.
They openly expose this when they reference, for example, that the diploma in Political Communication they offer trains how to understand social media algorithms to impose chavista discourse on society.
The master’s degree in Strategic Communication for Cognitive Defense is simply a cognitive warfare and strategic communication training program. It’s, in simple terms, a training plan for misinformation.
Likewise, the UICOM program includes a master’s in Political Communication and Counterhegemony aimed at training strategists in misinformation and manipulation and cognitive warfare.
The international postdoctoral program in Media Education and Electoral Marketing is a course on how chavismo has used elections for two decades as a mechanism to maintain power.
Escuela Influye: expansion of the chavista discourse
As an organ of the Ministry of Popular Power for Communication and Information (MIPPCI), the digital communication school “Influye” is a mobile indoctrination center for chavismo, aimed at training influencers and specialists in managing social media.
It is yet another tool of chavismo’s brainwashing machine, where its members multiply through this expansion strategy aimed at training misinformation professionals or, rather, repeaters of the official narrative.
The Escuela Influye is nothing more than a program that trains individuals in the use of digital communication for promoting chavismo’s narrative and, at the same time, a mechanism for multiplying transmedia and multimedia platforms that boost the official discourse and impose it on society.
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