Venezuela: myth and reality

With a little more time on my hands, and with events in the Middle East in a less ominous state, I would certainly devote more space here to a subject I'm very interested in and haven't written nearly enough about: Latin America in general and Venezuela in particular.

Venezuela has been undergoing some very interesting changes over the past ten years, with a popular government using the nation's oil wealth to combat the grinding levels of poverty that affect most of the population[pdf]. Venezuela has also been a prominent critic of the United States, whose foreign and economic policies devastated Latin America during the twentieth century [pdf]. Indeed, Venezuela has particular reason for taking exception to a Bush Administration that backed a failed coup attempt against the Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in 2002.

Getting hold of useful information about Latin America and Venezuela is not straightforward. Mainstream news reporting passes through the standard ideological filters[pdf], with the corporate media unable to forgive Chavez for contradicting the Western script on good governance. This has resulted in some pretty unreliable coverage on the success of Venezuela's economic policies and the state of its democracy. Most bizarre amongst these criticisms are the increasingly desperate attempts to portray President Chavez as a quasi-dictator; though he has regularly contested and won elections that have been certified as free and fair by the most respected of international observers. These inconvenient facts have reduced Chavez's opponents to using dictator-substitute words such as "autocrat" and "strongman", even as the autocrat devolves democratic power to the local level, enlists public participation in writing a new democratic constitution, and removes power from the corrupt political-economic elite that, like their counterparts across Latin America, had ruled the country like a private plantation since the dawn of the Columbian era.

A good example of this sort of media coverage was a piece written by Rory Carroll for the Guardian in January this year. Carroll reported that Chavez had declared himself to be a Communist, which will have surprised many people since Chavez has never described himself in such terms before. The report contained no direct quote where Chavez said "I am a Communist" or words to that effect. I spoke to Carroll by email and, though he insisted that Chavez had indeed called himself a Communist, he wouldn't provide me with a direct quote despite my repeated requests.

Julia Buxton, a British academic expert on Venezuelan affairs, casts further doubt on Carroll's paraphrasing. Buxton told me that:

"Chavez has, as far as [I] know, absolutely never, ever said he was a communist. He has always been explicit in this - only ever a socialist and only ever a Venezuelan model of socialism. There can be Bolivarian socialism and Socialism of the C21st - but each socialism has to refect the historical and social experince of each country."

"Chavez has said he is a christian, a socialist, a democrat etc but always distant from communism - and what he calls the 'failed Marxist experiments of the C20th'" [her emphasis]

But as ever, one does not need to rely on the corporate media. More accurate information can be found on Venezeula if one knows where to look. Academic and former Guardian foreign correspondent Richard Gott is probably the UK's best known expert on the Chavez era. His book on the "Bolivarian Revolution" provides a solid introduction to the socio-economic conditions that gave rise to the current changes. Venezuelanalysis is a good one-stop shop for independent news and comment on Venezuelan affairs. And the Washington based Centre for Economic Policy Research produces detailed analysis of the Venezuelan economy on a fairly regular basis.

I would also highly recommend the work of the above-mentioned British academic Julia Buxton, who is particularly good at challenging mass media misreporting of the situation in Venezuela. Her most recent article "The deepening of Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution: why most people don’t get it" sheds light on the most recent developments in Venezuela and debunks some of the official Western mythology on the subject.

Few occurences in politics are unambiguously good or bad, but recent events in Venezuela may be viewed with cautious optimisim. If Venezuela can demonstrate that it is possible to defy the dominance of international political-economic power, and chart its own independent path whilst retaining, even deepening its democracy and effectively attending to the needs of its most deprived citizens then it will stand as a source of enormous encouragement to countries across the developing world. Perhaps it is this prospect, the threat of a good example and a functioning challenge to Western power, that so offends Washington and its ideological allies.