Venezuela: more untruths from the Guardian

In an editorial yesterday, the Guardian said that President Chavez of Venezuela had performed a "handbrake turn" when he called on the Colombian guerrilla organisation the FARC to cease its armed campaign and release all hostages, reversing his previous position.

Problem is, this is completely false. Chavez was repeating his established position, as Marc Weisbrot of the Center for Policy Research points out here. For example, on January 13, Chavez said "I do not agree with the armed struggle, and that is one of the things that I want to talk to Marulanda [the then head of the FARC] about". The only u-turn here is going to have to be the Guardian's when it issues a correction (assuming it plans to do the right thing).

"If you're not with us then you're with the terrorists".

But even if the Guardian did correct this misrepresentation, serious problems remain with the article; problems which are very much typical of the Guardian's recent, lamentable coverage .

The gist of the editorial was as follows: Chavez has attempted to transform overnight from terrorist sympathiser to peace-maker. Its hard to say why, since he's the fruitloop Caudillo of a banana republic, but we think its because he got caught red-handed by the eminently trustworthy Colombian security forces giving aid to terrorists (possibly). Anyway, maybe this episode will teach him the error of his ways, and persuade him to stop being such a beastly dictator and ripping off the poor of Venezuela, who we care deeply about.

I paraphrase, but that was about the thrust of it.

Lets look at the FARC issue first, putting aside Chavez explicit comments that FARC should lay down its arms, made several months before what the Guardian calls his "U-turn". The Venezuelans have worked hard to get FARC hostages released, and with much success. There is no proven evidence that Venezuela has given military aid to FARC. Only unsubstantiated allegations made by a US-Colombian side with a vested political interest that the Guardian bends over backwards to ignore (more of this in a moment).

Take the recent Interpol report, much-heralded by the media, that purported to back up the supposedly incriminating evidence of Venezuela-FARC collusion alleged to have been found on laptops seized when Colombian security forces carried out an illegal raid into Ecuador. Few in the media found space to report that Interpol had said:

"The accuracy and source of the user files contained in the eight seized FARC computer exhibits are and always have been outside the scope of INTERPOLs computer forensic examination."

If this was mentioned even in passing by the media, the overall tone of the reporting was as though it had never been said. And the Guardian piece of the time is a perfect example.

The "validation" carried out by Interpol was strictly on the narrow question of whether the laptops had been interfered with after the Colombians seized them. And even on that point, if you read the report in detail, the picture is far from clear.

What is known about Venezuelan support for FARC, as opposed to what is alleged by those with known vested interests, is that Caracas views FARC broadly as a legitimate resistance movement existing in the context of a civil war (during which, lest we forget, US-trained security forces and allied paramilitaries have committed grisly human rights abuses for decades). This is by no means the same as endorsing the means FARC use to pursue its objectives, which few sane people would support and which Venezuela has always explicitly rejected. Broad ideological support is clearly not the same as tactical or methodological support. But apparently we've now descended to the level of "if you're not with us then you're with the terrorists".

What we have here is a set of allegations made by a Colombian government which is bankrolled by the same White House that backed a coup against the elected Venezuelan government not six years ago. How ridiculous to see the lessons of Iraq's fake WMD forgotten so quickly. Again the political usefulness of "intelligence findings" to those offering them to the media are absolutely transparent, and yet journalists are once again ignoring these motives and acting as little more than credulous stenographers.

One of the reasons President Chavez gave for urging FARC to lay down its arms was that it was giving the US an "excuse" to intervene in the region (the US record of such interventions is well known, of course, with a historic death toll in the tens of thousands). Chavez appears to have now acted decisively to remove the US's ability to use this issue either to exert pressure on Venezuela or even to topple the elected government in Caracas, as it has tried to do in the past. These questions need to be understood within that broader context, but as is so often the case with the Guardian's dismal coverage of Venezuela, the context simply goes unmentioned.

"Hollow democracy"

Lets now turn to the Guardian's talk of Venezuela's "hollow" democracy. For the first time in Venezuelan history, a political movement rooted in the poor majority - not a party under the effective ownership of the minority wealthy class - is in government, and governs in the interests of its grassroots supporters. One of the first acts of this government was to facilitate the introduction of a new constitution in order to extend democracy in Venezuela. A constitutional assembly was elected by the population, that assembly drew up a draft constitution, and the draft was then ratified by 72 per cent of the popular vote in a second referendum.

The new draft constitution enshrined socio-economic rights, including rights for minority groups and a specific right to healthcare. It also added to the electoral toolkit the ability for an opposition to instigate a Presidential "recall referendum" at any time, giving the public the ability to remove the President before his or her term is up.

For a newspaper that has spoken often in favour of constitutional reform in the UK, you'd think these measures would be laudable. Would the liberal Guardian not be delighted if the British public were able to draft its own constitution and enshrine progressive values within it? But instead, in its assessment of Bolivarian Venezuela, the Guardian pretends these things never happened.

The leader writer says that "the central bank, the courts and the military are all politicised", but does not explain how he justifies the use of this adjective, making it hard to comment. The relevant question, ignored in the editorial, is whether the measures in question are legitimate under the democratic constitution.

When a writer makes assertions like "the central bank, the courts and the military are all politicised" we are forced to take it on trust that the adjective which is being substituted for an argument has been fairly used. It is hard to maintain such trust when in other instances the reader is blatantly mislead.

The editorial claims that "Parliament is a rubber stamp", but neglects to mention the reason that the Presidency enjoys such strong support in Parliament. The reason is that the right-wing opposition - which had previously tried to topple the government in a coup, and then engineer an oil industry management lock-out designed to cripple the national economy - boycotted the 2005 parliamentary elections in a final, desperate attempt to discredit a government that it knew it could not beat in the polls.

To use the outcome of the Venezuelan opposition's attempt to subvert and wreck democracy as evidence of Chavez - yes, Chavez - being anti-democratic, is an odious twisting of the truth worthy of that opposition itself. To see this propaganda parroted in a supposedly centre-left/liberal newspaper is truly dismaying.

"These should be the salad days of Venezuela's oil boom"

Finally, as ever, the Guardian focuses on the negatives in the Venezuelan economy while skipping lightly over the far greater positives. Inflation is indeed a concern, not least because it offsets the gains made by the poor. But the Guardian appears to suggest that inflation cancels out those gains entirely, and that the poor may even be net losers under the current government. It must know that this suggestion is absurd. Things we hear very little or nothing of from the Guardian (which I thought was concerned about third world development) include a 37.4% reduction in poverty caused by a tripling in social spending since 1998 - truly staggering numbers. And advances in the provision of healthcare and education have been equally dramatic.

Are inflation and the recent sporadic food shortages serious? Undoubtedly. In spite of this, have the lives of poor Venezuelans been transformed since 1998, making them huge net winners economically under the current government? Without question, as this detailed report demonstrates. Has the Guardian been giving you this full picture, or just stressing the bits that suit its political point of view and skimming over the bits that don't? The answer, given the Guardian's progressive reputation, is surprising. Frankly, on Venezuela, you might as well read Murdoch's Wall Street Journal.

Two countries are mentioned in the Guardian editorial: Colombia and Venezuela. While misleading its readers about Venezuela, the Guardian and its reporter on the ground found time to produce a glossy advertising brochure providing PR for the Colombian business class, a class often implicated in serious human rights abuses (see here for that PR brochure, some of which was written by the Guardian's reporter. Its now described on the website as an "advertisement feature", but in print at the time it was presented not as an advert but as a "special report" from Colombia). Perhaps the Guardian might care to reflect on the trail of misery and death left in the wake of the US and Colombian governments over the decades, compare that with Chavez's record (including no death squads, torture, dictatorships or consciously enforced impoverishment), and ask itself how a supposedly liberal newspaper got its priorities so badly wrong on Latin American politics in the past few years. With this latest editorial, the Guardian's reporting is descending into farce.