Chavez and the FARC: "you have been lied to"

Great article by Johann Hari in the Independent:

"Sometimes you hear a stray sentence on the news that makes you realise you have been lied to. Deliberately lied to; systematically lied to; lied to for a purpose. If you listened closely over the past few days, you could have heard one such sentence passing in the night-time of news.

As Ingrid Betancourt emerged after six-and-a-half years – sunken and shrivelled but radiant with courage – one of the first people she thanked was Hugo Chavez. What? If you follow the news coverage, you have been told that the Venezuelan President supports the Farc thugs who have been holding her hostage. He paid them $300m to keep killing and to buy uranium for a dirty bomb, in a rare break from dismantling democracy at home and dealing drugs. So how can this moment of dissonance be explained?

Yes: you have been lied to – about one of the most exciting and original experiments in economic redistribution and direct democracy anywhere on earth. And the reason is crude: crude oil. The ability of democracy and freedom to spread to poor countries may depend on whether we can unscramble these propaganda fictions."

Read the whole thing here.

The Real News from Latin America

Good discussion here from Pepe Escobar and Forrest Hylton on Latin American affairs, looking in particular at the role of the US and the prospects for policy change under a President Obama.



Courtesy of The Real News.

Also on the same topic, historian Greg Grandin gives an authoritative analysis here. His recent book on Latin America's place in the broader history of US imperialism is well worth a read. As is Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine", which is excellent on recent Latin American history (and in so many other ways).

And finally, check out this blog on Venezuela. Its a bit special.

Chavez and the FARC

Good report from the ever-informative Pepe Escobar.

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.

Venezuela: Complaint to the Guardian

Earlier this year, I made a formal complaint to the Guardian about what I view to be its consistently slanted and misleading coverage of Venezuelan politics. Click on the "Venezuela" label at the bottom of this post if you're unfamiliar with my views about their reporting, and you'll see what I've written previously on this.

After several months, and much prodding, the Guardian responded to me personally, and in a “Reader’s editor” article in the main paper itself. Much of the response I received either addressed points that I hadn't raised, misrepresented points I had raised, or gave answers so absurd that I began to question whether the "Reader's editor" herself believed what she was writing, or whether the exercise was designed simply to say anything to contradict me.

I wrote back, saying that I could not view my complaint as having been dealt with satisfactorily. I attached a marked-up version of the Readers' editor’s reply to me, with my comments in bold (reproduced here, below). That was two months ago. No substantive response has been received, and the reasons for that will become obvious to you as you read further. The fact is that the Guardian has, in six months, been totally unable to deal with the concerns I've raised. All it has managed is a response which dissolves upon examination, and which it now fails to defend. Have a read, and decide for yourselves whether their defence of their reporter stands up.

******************

Dear David

I write in response to your complaint about the Guardian’s coverage of Venezuela. Your correspondence raised some interesting issues about the way news is reported and I've referred to it in tomorrow’s column on the subject of whether news reports need to be impartial (without, of course, identifying you as the complainant). As I’m sure you will appreciate it wasn’t possible, in the space available in my column, to address all of your complaints about the coverage. I will try to do so here.

My response is based on your emails to Harriet Sherwood of January 19 and February 4. In the course of considering your complaint I’ve also reviewed more than sixty articles about Venezuela published in the Guardian over the last 15 months.

In the next paragraph you describe my concerns. Let me then use this opportunity to clarify what they were.

You complain that: the correspondent fails to put his “obvious personal dislike of the Caracas government” to one side when he reports on events in Venezuela; the coverage is not balanced;

The central concern is that the coverage is misleading to the reader, and that, when noting this, one cannot help but also note the political views of the reporter, which are clear.

there are too many “sideways glances at the personality of the president”; some of the news reports mix fact and opinion;

I said from the outset that the correspondent is entitled to his views. The concern is that these views are distorting – through omission or questionable contextualisation - the factual picture that is presented to the reader; skewing it in favour of the correspondent’s point of view. This is distinct from presenting both the news and the reporter’s personal view of what is happening.

and the correspondent was wrong to call Chavez a “self-described communist”.

I do not know whether the reporter was wrong to do this or not. I’ve asked for an explanation as to why Chavez was called a “self-described communist” in January, and then, in September, as someone who did not describe himself as a communist. Both these statements could not be true simultaneously. I also continue to seek a direct quote supporting the former description.

The correspondent considers himself to be open-minded in his reporting of Venezuelan politics. His view is that the government has done some good things, as well as some bad things and some bizarre things. He points out that Chavez has had a difficult year: a referendum went against him, there have been defectors from his movement, he has closed down a television station,

This provides a very good example of what I’m referring to.

As you can see here, RCTV is not closed down.

I note that this description was also used in the “Open Door” article on Monday.

RCTV’s licence to broadcast terrestrially was not renewed upon expiry, but it continues to broadcast freely on cable and satellite. The licence was not renewed because the station actively participated in the overthrow of the elected government. Personally I disagree with the decision. But I’m not asking for reporting that adheres to my personal views – just reporting that gives a fair reflection of the facts.

Suppose there’d been a communist coup in the UK during the cold war, in which the Morning Star and Daily Mirror had played an active role. If the coup had then been thwarted, those papers would, at the very least, have been put out of business straightaway (Chavez has not even done this). Such a move would probably not have been described as a “negative” news story for the restored democratic government, except perhaps in Moscow.

In his reporting, the correspondent has either ignored or played down this context, even though it is a defining feature of the story. Clearly this misleads the reader.

and there is high inflation. In the circumstances there have, inevitably, been reports about the government, which might be classified as “negative”.

This is something of a red herring. I have not asked that the Guardian stop reporting the news. The very opposite, actually. If events reflect badly on the Venezuelan government then so be it. That’s not my concern in respect of the Guardian’s reporting.

At the heart of your complaint is the issue of whether news reports need to be impartial. Your view is that they should be “more or less neutral and balanced” and, if I understand your complaint correctly, you do not think that they should contain any opinion.

Not quite true, as I’ve explained above.

Your correspondent is perfectly entitled to opine, overtly, that RCTV’s licence should have been renewed on freedom of speech grounds (irrelevantly, I would have agreed with him). But the factual background needs to be properly represented so that the reader has the basis for their own conclusion, not in such a way that would steer them towards the view of the correspondent. Misrepresentations such as “Chavez closed down a TV station”, as noted above, will plainly have the latter effect.

Therefore, the question of whether the Guardian is obliged to report like the BBC or whether the correspondent considers himself, to use his rather odd term, “a champion of impartiality”, is not of any relevance here. Hence the Open Door article did not properly address my complaint.

You suggest the paper’s approach to reporting events in Venezuela should be the same as the BBC’s. You may be aware that the BBC (like other broadcasters) is regulated by the state and is required to present news with “due impartiality”. Newspapers do not have the same requirement imposed on them. In fact there are few restrictions on the way newspapers present news. As well as a provision about the need for accuracy the Press Complaints Commission’s code of practice has this to say: “The Press, whilst free to be partisan, must distinguish clearly between comment, conjecture and fact.”

I address these points above. Here I would merely add one further observation.

There is a difference between what one is technically allowed to do and what one ought to do. What the British press are allowed to do does not, perhaps, represent the highest standard one might apply to journalism. I think most people would expect the Guardian to exceed that bare minimum standard by some considerable distance. As indeed it does 99.9% of the time.

Newspapers mix factual reporting and their own political views in various different ways. Where the balance is struck is one of the things that distinguishes a quality paper from the others. Of course, the Guardian would be free, in regulatory terms, to descend to the level of a mid-market tabloid if it took that commercial decision. But neither you nor I would view that favourably.

Your correspondent’s reporting may not fall foul of any regulations, but that hardly makes it acceptable by itself. All in all, this is a strange, and rather weak line of defence.

I used the BBC as a direct comparison of how the facts, in respect of the same story, can be given in full, or with a particular slant that serves to misrepresent them. Actually, if I wanted to provide a more general standard for Guardian’s reporting from Caracas to reach, I would simply point to the reporting in the rest of the paper. Actually, the Guardian’s reporting from Venezuela does not meet your own standards, in my view.

I turn now to the article published on January 18 with the headline Cheap and cheerful: Venezuelans cling to right for petrol at 42p a tank. You object to the fact that a quote: “If it gives us nothing else, at least the government lets us have our own petrol this cheap,” is not counterbalanced by information about what the Venezuelan government has done for the poor.

In particular you think the article should have mentioned that the government uses oil revenues to provide free healthcare and education and subsidised food. Those other policies had been reported previously but this story was about the petrol subsidy and it was legitimate to deal with that issue in isolation. The article should not be taken on its own as an indication of a lack of balance or fairness in the Guardian’s overall reporting.

The point about balance across the broader scope of the Guardian’s reporting on Venezuela is a fair one in principle. However, this does not preclude the need for a minimal amount of balance within the article itself. An article that talks about the poor of Venezuela being harmed by a government policy, but does not set this in the context of the poor having been huge net winners under that same government, is obviously an article that misleads the reader.

But in any case, the correspondent has given remarkably little focus in his overall coverage to the 37.4% reduction in poverty caused by a tripling in social spending since 1998. These are things we hear surprisingly little about in the Guardian, given the paper’s long-standing concern for third world development. The fact is that my criticism was raised with the overall scope of the Guardian’s reporting – which I have closely followed - very much in mind.

Chavez’s personality seems to me to be an entirely appropriate subject for discussion.

Again, I’m afraid this is a red herring. Nowhere do I say that Chavez’s personality is off-limits for discussion.

I note you object to phrases like “self-styled revolutionary” and “self-styled revolution” but I’m unclear as to why you say that these are inaccurate descriptions.

I find it strange that you’re unclear about this because I explained my concern in the 19/1/08 email to Harriet Sherwood, to which you refer.

I said:

“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.”

It is a matter of fact that the political change occurring in Venezuela is not Chavez’s “self-styled” revolution. It is the result of a set of national circumstances which produced a broad political movement that Chavez happens to be at the head of. To call it Chavez’s “self-styled” revolution – as though it is his simply his personal property, and not the product of the efforts of many thousands of people - reduces and trivialises an entire nation’s politics to the point of caricature.

In addition, it should be noted that Tony Blair has never been described, in news coverage, as a “self-styled humanitarian interventionist”, nor George Bush as a “self-styled regime-changer”. I would suggest that these are insidiously pejorative turns of phrase that infantilise and diminish the person concerned. There is a certain cheapness about the use of this sort of language.

With regard to the point about dwindling support the correspondent refers to the referendum, which Chavez lost, unexpectedly, in December.

In my email to Harriet Sherwood, I cited “a recent Latinobarómetro poll [which] gave the Venezuelan government an approval rating of 66%, ranking the country 1st in Latin America, where the average was 39%.”

Surely it is not being argued that the term “dwindling support”, on its own, suggests anything resembling an approval rating of 66%, and number one popularity in the region?

The government lost a referendum on a set of specific proposals (I’m glad it did, incidentally). It did not lose a popularity contest or a general election. Plainly the term “dwindling support” leads the reader away from the true picture of the government’s support.

As I indicated earlier, news stories do not have to be impartial and they may contain comment. What is crucial is that the facts (including the facts underlying any opinion) are accurate. It is also important that readers are able to distinguish between fact and opinion in stories. My assessment of the Guardian’s coverage of Venezuela is that, where the articles contained comment, readers were unlikely to have had trouble identifying it.

With regard to your complaint about the January 11, 2007 article, it seems to me that “dogmatic anti-globalist” and “US-bashing” are statements of fact rather than opinion.

George Bush is never described, in the Guardian’s news coverage, as a “dogmatic anti-Islamist” or as the “Iran-bashing” US President, for obvious reasons. Again, these are insidiously pejorative turns of phrase that infantilise and diminish the person concerned in a manner that is inappropriate in the context of broadsheet news reporting.

I don’t agree with you that the question posed by the correspondent is rhetorical. [continue reading to see the question I was referring to, which appeared in the January article linked to above]

I have to say that I find this astonishing.

The article compares the President Ortega of Nicaragua with Chavez, two presidents “separated by 1,314 miles, a late flight and an ideological time warp”. Chavez is “a social democrat turned US-bashing communist revolutionary” while Nicaragua’s Ortega is “a US-bashing communist revolutionary turned social democrat”. Chavez has "tightened his grip on power", "accelerating radicalisation on the principles of Trotsky's permanent revolution", moving to "clip his allies' dwindling autonomy". "Turning to look into the camera he saluted and said "Hello, Fidel", probably correctly assuming that his mentor, the ailing Cuban leader, was watching."

The question the correspondent then raises is this: “Whether Venezuela is moving ahead towards an innovative leftwing economic model, or moving backwards towards Cuban-style authoritarianism, is a question for ordinary Venezuelans to answer”.

If this is not rhetorical, then please let me know which part of the article suggests that “Venezuela is moving ahead towards an innovative leftwing economic model” and not in any way “backwards towards Cuban-style authoritarianism”.

It seems strange to take the line that the correspondent is not obliged to be a “champion of impartiality” and then to deny the most unambiguous examples of his introducing opinion into his news reporting. It does rather seem like trying to have things both ways.

In relation to the December 10 article, about Venezuela’s adjustment of its time zone, I cannot see that there is a problem with the tone.

I think the concern here is fairly straightforward. One article portrays the policy as (again) the product of one man’s quixotic eccentricities. The other [cited in my complaint] to gives a sensible, rounded explanation of why the measure was introduced. One informs, the other trivialises.

As far as your complaint that it was wrong to call Chavez a “self-described communist” is concerned, the correspondent’s position is that he did not claim you would find the evidence for this in a transcript of the president’s inaugural speech and his email to you of January 12 does not appear to suggest this.

The allegation was made in an article about the January 2007 inauguration speech. When I asked for a quote the correspondent said, “fish around and you’ll find a transcript”. It seemed reasonable to assume that he was referring to a transcript of the speech that his article was about. However, this is beside the point. The fact remains that, to this day, I have seen no direct quote of Chavez calling himself a communist, after two requests to the correspondent, and email to the foreign editor, and now a complaint to the reader’s editor. It is a claim that contradicts what is known about Chavez’s politics, it is something that Chavez has apparently never said about himself before or since, and it is used as the basis for the rhetoric the correspondent employs in a highly opinionated and critical article. It seems reasonable enough to expect the claim to be supported, so I would therefore repeat my request for the precise quote to be given.

The correspondent maintains that he heard Chavez describe himself as a communist in the run up to the election. His explanation for ceasing to use this description is that Chavez has not used it since.

Please confirm my understanding of the response here.

Chavez did not renounce his “self-declared” communism, to the correspondent’s knowledge. The correspondent simply did not hear Chavez explicitly describe himself as a communist in the period between January and September 2007.

It is on this basis [nothing happening] that we have gone from communism being Chavez’s defining political characteristic to his not being a communist at all, in the space of 8 months.

Please let me know if my understanding of this correct.

I have not dealt here with your complaints about the correspondent’s coverage of Colombia set out in your email to me of March 3 as this concerns a different allegation. If, after reading this response, you still wish to pursue it please let me know.

My concern was the overall nature of the correspondent’s reporting, and I have supported my concerns with a range of evidence. In bringing the Colombia/Ecuador/Venezuela story to your attention, I sought to add to the evidence supporting my complaint. I should therefore like it to be seen as part of that complaint.[no response to this, two months on. Nor to any of the above points].

Guardian coverage of Venezuela: time for a change

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

**********

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

Venezuelan referendum result

A quick initial reaction to the result of the Venezuelan referendum referred to in my last post.

I find myself, surprisingly, not particularly disheartened by the government's defeat. I said at the weekend that, on balance, I supported the reforms. On reflection (a reflection I hope I would still have taken had the government won) that's a hard statement to make meaningfully on such a broad package. How can you say "yes" or "no" to 60plus proposals at once? There are elements of the package that I'm sorry to see will not be passed into law for now. Prohibition of discrimination against homosexuals for example. There are other elements that I'm rather glad to see defeated - e.g. some of the extra powers for the Presidency.

For me, the main thing as far as the vote was concerned was its impact on the general health of Venezuelan democracy and of the overall reform agenda pursued by the government over the last nine years. More specifically, I was concerned as to whether the outcome would strengthen the Venezuelan opposition.

Early indications are that the government's defeat on Sunday was largely a result of abstentions from its own supporters. Overall turnout was down sharply from the normal level. It appears that opposition support remains more or less flatlined at about a third of the overall electorate, where it has been through its preceding 11 successive election defeats. 51 per cent of a turnout of 55 means that the opposition could only mobilise just over a quarter of Venezuelan voters to do something about the coming "dictatorship" (I found myself laughing out loud on Sunday as an opposition spokeswoman interviewed by Channel 4 tv news told the reporter that Venezuelan democracy was dead....while standing outside a polling station). To the extent that I was more concerned about the opposition winning than the government losing, that's encouraging news.

If its true that the government lost because its own supporters stayed at home, rather than because the opposition persuaded people to vote against the proposals, then the government will have to look into why this happened and take account of those views. Intuitively, I would expect that traditional Bolivarians will have abstained due to disquiet about the centralising aspects of the new constitution. If that persuades Chavez to forget about measures like ending Presidential term limits, for example, then that's all to the good. As Rahul Mahajan says in a good piece here, "15 years in power ought to be enough for Chavez; a revolution that requires him for longer than that isn’t much of a revolution".

If this analysis is correct then in many ways its very good news. The "Bolivarian Revolution" is born of a broad socio-political movement that President Chavez happens to stand at the front of. Claims that the Chavez is implementing a "self-styled" revolution ignore this fact, and should be understood as part of a drive by Western opinion formers to shape our understanding of Venezuelan politics purely in terms of (their caricature of) Chavez's personality, thus obscuring both the active popular basis of Bolivarianism and the substance of what the Caracas government has been doing in terms of social reform and international diplomacy since 1999. One might well interpret the decision of traditional Bolivarians to stay at home - if indeed that was to do with proposed centralisation - as a reminder to the government they put in power that ownership of Bolivarianism should remain with the public. If that's correct, once can only applaud the result, particularly if any gains for the opposition are minimal, as appears to be the case.

All the above is of course subject to a fuller understanding of the data. If I find anything substantial and reliable I'll link to it as an update to this post.

One more thing: as I mentioned at the weekend, there were some indications to suggest that a government victory would have been disputed deliberately as a tactic to destabilise the country and prepare the ground for a possible coup. A coup is after all the only way the broad leftward trend in Venezuela is likely to be stopped. An opposition victory precludes the possibility of that course of action being taken and of a violent return to the status quo ante. Instead, Venezuela remains as Bolivarian as it was on Saturday evening, as far as I can see. When opposition supporters (and certain western foreign correspondents) recover from their hangovers, that's the reality they'll have to face.

So all in all, I can't feel too sorry about the result. Bolivarianism goes on, perhaps even in a new and improved form now that the people have spoken in Chavez's alleged "dictatorship".

For more about Venezuela, see here and here.

A new assault on Venezuelan democracy?

Venezuela goes to the polls this weekend to vote on a new constitution. Various measures are being proposed; some that would devolve democratic and economic power to local communities, others that would grant more powers to the Presidency.

I have reservations about some elements of the package. For instance, I don't support the move to abolish presidential term limits. Plainly the attempt made by some to portray this as a move to dictatorship is, shall we say, a little shrill. But my personal view is that a liberal democratic constitution is healthier when terms of office at the highest level are limited.

However, to the extent that it devolves power to the Venezuelan people and empowers them politically, socially and economically in their everyday lives - a central theme of the Bolivarian government's reform program of recent years - I think there's much to applaud in the proposals. You can read more about them here.

Above all where Venezuela is concerned, its heartening to see a third world government acting independently of global power, and using its resources and wealth to benefit its people, instead of to enrich international capital and a domestic kleptocrat class as is more usually the case. In recent years the Bolivarian government has cut poverty by a massive 30 per cent, and access to healthcare and education have also increased dramatically. Perhaps most importantly of all, the poor majority of Venezuelan's now have an active stake in their country through grassroots economic, social and political co-operation initiatives that put power firmly into their own hands. And this example has inspired governments and populations across the continent to take major steps to kick Washington (the source of so much torture, impoverishment, brutality and oppression in recent decades) out of their affairs permanently.

Given the 500-year tragedy that in so many ways is the history of Latin America, it would take a hard heart to begrudge the poor majority in Venezuela what they have won for themselves with much effort and perseverence. But of course, there will be winners and losers from a successful move to full Latin American independence. The losers would be the US - the regional hegemon for the past century - and the wealthy elites (domestic and international) that have spent so much of the Colombian era bleeding the continent dry. Those forces have no intention of giving up lightly what they believe is rightfully theirs. That was demonstrated unequivocally in the US-backed coup five years ago when the Venezuelan business elite attempted to overthrow the democratically elected government, only to be thwarted by mass popular opposition. Now, in advance of tomorrow's vote, there is every chance that Venezuelan democracy will come under renewed attack.

An alleged CIA internal memo written last week, which Venezuelan counterintelligence claims to have intercepted, sets out a detailed plan to use the elections to destabilise the country with the eventual goal of overthrowing the government. The alleged plan involves publishing and disseminating fraudulent polls showing that the government is on course for defeat in Sunday's vote, which can then be used as "proof" of electoral fraud when the vote is in fact won, as is far more likely to happen (the government has comfortably won 11 elections in recent years, verified as free and fair by international monitors). Contesting the election results will be the focus of broader manufactured unrest designed to make the country ungovernable and set the stage for a coup.

In a sense, it matters little whether the memo is genuine or not, since it offers no surprises, only a reminder. What it describes is simply standard procedure for US covert actions in Latin America (and elsewhere). Take as an example Nixon's order to make the Chilean economy "sceam" in order to destabilise the elected socialist government and lay the groundwork for the eventual coup that brought the murderous General Pinochet (and Friedman-style neo-liberalism) into power in Santiago. The memo merely reminds anyone who knows a little of the history of US Latin America policy of the sort of black operations they can expect to now be taking place. Indeed, as you'll see below in respect of faked polls, aspects of what is described in the memo have indeed been occuring. Can we be surprised? What reason would we have, after all, to believe that the US would choose this point in history to stop doing what it has always done whenever the weakest in what it describes as its "backyard" have dared to raise their heads?

So that's the context in which I sent the below email to Rory Carroll of the Guardian (whose coverage on Venezuela I've written about previously here). The western media - with a few exceptions - have performed their standard propaganda function where Venezuela is concerned in recent years. For example, by reducing their coverage to hysterical caricatures of the personality of President Chavez instead of reporting the policy substance of the Caracas government's programme. If things do turn nasty in the coming days, the role of the media will be crucial in isolating Caracas on the world stage - portraying the democratically elected President as a "dictator-in-the-making", those working to overthrow democracy as plucky freedom-fighters, and so on. We should be alive to this now, in case the worst happens, and be prepared to politely challenge journalists with the facts wherever necessary. The end of the Bolivarian government and the return of the elites would send millions of people back to the poverty and deprivation that they have only recently begun to escape. To the extent that we can make a small but valuable effort to help prevent that from happening, we should do so.

*************************

email to Rory Carroll - sent 1 December 2007

Hi Rory - hope you're well

I notice that a couple of your recent reports have relied on polls by Datanalisis.

I've just read Luis Vicente Leon of Datanalisis telling Reuters that "The most probable [of tomorrow's constitutional referendum] is that there will be no surprise and Chavez will win 60 percent against 40 percent".

I found this strange because you reported on Thursday 29th that "A survey for Datanalisis, a polling company, said 49% of likely voters would vote no [to the constitution] and 39% would vote yes".

I thought you might be interested in the discrepancy between what Datanalisis staff think is "probable" and what they are presenting as the results of their polls. Are you satisfied that this firm is a reliable, neutral source of statistical data? Are you aware that The LATimes once quoted José Antonio Gil of Datanalysis saying that Chavez "has to be killed"? Are you aware of the recent history in Venezuela of fake polls being used by the opposition?

The opposition's alleged poll lead was central to your story of Thursday 29th ("Chávez forced to battle for long-term future"). Given that Mr Leon has now effectively admitted that the figures you published last week were fraudulent, I was wondering if you would be drawing attention to this in your next report? Please let me know.

Best wishes
David Wearing

The Guardian, Colombia and Venezuela: a paired example

Medialens have produced an excellent article detailing how the media have distorted recent events in Venezuela. The refusal of the Caracas government to renew a TV station’s license was portrayed as an attack on free speech, with the active role that station – RCTV – had played in a 2002 coup attempt against the democratic government either ignored or glossed over. The Medialens article is very useful in drawing together all the key facts to refute the Western media/political consensus on the RCTV affair. Its highly recommended reading.

Moving on from RCTV and looking more broadly at Chavez's Venezuela, the recent coverage from the Guardian has, I think, been worthy of particular scrutiny; both for the nature of the coverage and the fact that its coming from the left-hand edge of the MSM.

The Guardian's correspondent in the region, Rory Carroll, appears to have as much difficulty disguising his contempt for Chavez as Dr Strangelove did controlling his right arm. A couple of Carroll’s pieces in January were positively dripping with scorn and, though he seems to have toned it down somewhat in more recent articles, a little bile still seems to manage to ooze its way out between the lines. Certainly no one can be in any doubt about Carroll's opinions on Venezuelan politics.

Here's one of Carroll’s less restrained articles from January, about as partisan a piece of reporting as you could hope to find. And here's another, where Carroll's analysis was that Chavez planned to turn Venezuela into a traditional Soviet state, backed with the claim that Chavez had come out publicly as a Communist. As I’ve mentioned here previously, I asked Carroll 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. An interesting episode.

A useful way of testing the Guardian's coverage on this subject has been provided to us in the form of Venezuela's next door neighbour, Colombia. Paired examples of this kind don't come up that often, and when they do they provide valuable subjects for research. One of these countries is backed to the hilt by our government and its allies, the other vehemently opposed. That makes events in Colombia of particular moral concern to us in the UK. So how does the Guardian's treatment of the two countries compare?

Amnesty International's recent world report can be very helpful in making this comparison. Venezuela doesn't come out with a clean bill of health. Not by any means. But the verdict on Colombia is of a completely different order of magnitude. It is damning in the extreme. Yet the Guardian's deep concern for "freedom" and the rise of "authoritarianism" applies rather more strongly to the country that AI has less concerns about. Indeed, the Guardian appears more concerned by the shutting down of a TV station that tries to overthrow a democracy in Venezuela than by the murder of trade union activists by paramilitaries linked to a Colombian military armed by the UK. The Guardian does cover Colombia, and does not pretend that Colombia has no problems. But anyone who only knew what they read about these two countries in the Guardian, and who was then presented with the AI report, would be shocked to learn that it was Colombia, not Venezuela, with the materially worse human rights record. One might well question whether it is moral values and the objective facts that are determining the balance of the Guardian’s coverage, and not the political preference for one countries government over another.

This impression is only reinforced by last week's Guardian pull-out section on Columbia, co-authored by Carroll. In a letter to the paper, Dr Andy Higginbottom, Senior lecturer in politics and human rights at Kingston University commented that

“It is a commonplace but true that there are two Colombias, the Colombia of the establishment and the Colombia of the people. Unfortunately your Inside Colombia supplement (June 8) only entered the former, reproducing their self-serving and roseate view of the situation. They know that impunity works at many levels, and one of them is the massage of international public opinion. Despite occasional qualifying phrases, the supplement gave a remarkably pro-business outlook at a time when the country's own media are at last reporting just how complicit corporations have been in violence.

For the excluded majority, the landscape has barely changed under President Álvaro Uribe, only the degree of hypocrisy. There is supposed to be demobilisation of the rightwing paramilitaries, but last Tuesday the judiciary denied human rights victims any role in investigating the hundreds of crimes committed by the AUC. Freedom of expression is claimed, yet on Friday, teacher Juan Carlos Martinez was attacked by riot police and risks losing his left eye.

If trade unionists can now organise, why is it that last Wednesday armed thugs attacked the home of union leader Ernando Melan Cardona, shooting one son dead and wounding his partner and another son? Melan works for Coltejer, part of the Antioqueño group of businesses, featured in your supplement as some of “Colombia's finest prominent players”.

Colombia may be becoming safe for investors, but not for Colombians. Perhaps you could probe this conundrum? It is important, for have no doubt British corporations are also involved.”

Looking at the supplement last week, it was certainly not clear to me whether it was part of the Guardian's news output or an advertisement sponsored or co-produced by some corporate interest or other (its articles do not appear on the Guardian website along with the paper’s news reporting). The involvement of the Guardian's regional correspondent in the authoring of a panglossian tribute to Colombia's successes - a tribute of unclear commercial/news reporting status – provides an noteworthy juxtaposition with the damning (and apparently not always fact-based) coverage of events in the country next door.

As I say, the respective treatments of the two countries by the Guardian would constitute an interesting topic for research.

Personally, I feel that events in Venezuela call for cautious optimism. After several successive election victories, Chavez's government has a huge popular mandate from the poor majority and the evidence [pdf] suggests that the economic status of those people has been improving as a result of their government's policies. Both the fact of these economic changes and their popular ownership are to be welcomed.

It remains to be seen how Venezuelan politics, and the current government, will develop in the years to come. Obsequious tributes and hero-worship are not helpful in respect of any political figure – be it Chavez or anyone else – not least when history is still in the process of unfolding. But one can only be pleased to see what the people of Venezuela have achieved for themselves in recent years.

That being the case, it is deeply disappointing that the Guardian has chosen to cover of the affairs of Venezuela and the broader region in the way that it has. For a paper that has often shown great concern and compassion on third world poverty, its reaction to the successful implementation of policies combating this very issue has been surprising in its scornfulness and occasional outright slander. One does not ask the Guardian to share ones views. But one does at least hope that its output will be characterised by basic standards of intellectual honesty and moral concern. That it is failing so profoundly in this respect is, as I've said here, quite interesting and a good potential topic for research. But it is also, beyond this, really quite depressing for anyone concerned for the deprived majority in that region - people who have suffered so grievously at the hands of the West over the past five centuries and who deserve somewhat better from us than this.

As Higgenbottom points out, the elites that have tortured the majority in Latin America for so long “know that impunity works at many levels, and one of them is the massage of international public opinion”. Its sad to see that the leading left-liberal daily in the English speaking world has chosen to take on this particularly odious task.

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.