Guardian coverage of Venezuela: time for a change

The following is an email sent to the International Editor of the Guardian.

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Dear Harriet [cc:Rory Carroll]

I'm writing to express some serious concerns about the Guardian's coverage of Venezuelan politics over the past year.

My concerns are not necessarily due to your correspondent's obvious personal dislike for the Caracas government - he is of course entitled to his views - but for his consistant failure to put those views to one side and provide the straightforward and balanced representation of the facts that we are otherwise generally used to seeing on the Guardian's news pages.

For example, in his latest report ("Cheap and cheerful: Venezuelans cling to right for petrol at 42p a tank" - 18/1/08) Rory Carroll offers one quote from a Venezuelan citizen saying that "If it gives us nothing else, at least the government lets us have our own petrol this cheap". Carroll surely knows that the Venezuelan government has used oil revenues to provide free healthcare and education, as well as subsidised food, to the poor of Venezuela. But this is ignored, and the claim that the government "gives us nothing" goes unbalanced.

Indeed, it has to be said that (apart from in the case of recent inflation) Carroll's reporting has focused remarkably little on the situation of the poor in Venezuela, preferring his dispatches to instead consist of tiresomely regular sideways glances at the personality of the President.

For example, Chavez is repeatedly referred to as a "self-styled" revolutionary, leading a "self-styled" revolution. Those who know Venezuela describe the Caracas government as the product of a broad and deep grassroots social movement born of the iniquities of Venezuela's history. I would hope to learn something about such phenomena in the Guardian. Instead, one is given the impression that the 'Bolivarian revolution' is simply the transient and unfortunate product of one man's eccentricities.

Carroll begins his 18/1 report by juxtaposing the 'real world' (1st para) with Venezuela (2nd para), which is very much of a piece with a regular theme of his; that the government (particularly Chavez) is slightly loopy. The intellectually defective nature of the government would perhaps explain Chavez's "already dwindling support", as described by an expert that Carroll quotes. The expert provides no evidence for this assertion, but we do know that a recent Latinobarómetro poll gave the Venezuelan government an approval rating of 66%, ranking the country 1st in Latin America, where the average was 39%. It seems strange that Carroll let the expert's comment stand without mentioning this.

Stranger and perhaps more troubling, is an episode last year where in two articles Carroll told readers that Chavez (a "self-described communist" - report dated 11/1/07) planned to turn Venezuela into a traditional Soviet state, and claimed that Chavez had publicly "declared himself a communist"(report dated 15/1/07).

I emailed Carroll to ask for a direct quote on this latter point and he suggested I'd find one in a transcript of the Presidential inauguration speech. I found the transcript. No quote. When challenged with this in a subsequent email, Carroll insisted that Chavez had called himself a communist “on television” and that “millions of Venezuelans” heard him. Yet still couldn't summon up a quote.

Then a few months later, in an article on Che Guevara co-written by Carroll (4/9/07), we were quietly told that these days "Not even Mr Chávez, the reddest tinge in the pink tide, advocates communism". Interesting that just a few months previously Carroll had repeatedly insisted in print and in correspondence with me that Chavez had publicly "declared himself a communist" and that “millions of Venezuelans”, and Carroll, had heard him.

Needless to say that I found this episode puzzling, to put it generously.

Whatever one thinks of what is happening in Venezuela, we can at least agree that it is interesting. The democratic government of a third world country - in Washington's self-claimed "backyard" - is openly defying the economic and political demands both of a superpower and of the western style of "globalisation" more generally. It is also making an undoubted effort to seriously tackle poverty, achieving some notable successes. One would hope that the Guardian, of all papers, would take up such an important story in an substantive, critical and balanced fashion. Sadly, only one of those elements appears to be in play at present, and not even in a way that one can take entirely at face value, apparently.

This is a great shame, and I do hope that something can be done about it.

With best wishes

David Wearing