Foreign Policy In Focus analyst Conn Hallinan (8/6/09) has yet another debunking of "the story most U.S. readers are getting about the coup" in Honduras, being "that Zelaya--an ally of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez--was deposed because he tried to change the constitution to keep himself in power."
Calling this dominant media narrative "a massive distortion of the facts," Hallinan patiently explains that "all Zelaya was trying to do is to put a non-binding referendum on the ballot calling for a constitutional convention"--which, Hallinan notes, was "a move that trade unions, indigenous groups and social activist organizations had long been lobbying for," since the country's current "one-term limit allows the brass-hats to dominate the politics of the country."
But things get really interesting when Hallinan spots a "U.S. Connection"--via one of our largest media conglomerates:
While Zelaya is indeed friendly with Chávez, he is at best a liberal reformer whose major accomplishment was raising the minimum wage....
One of those "little reforms" was aimed at ensuring public control of the Honduran telecommunications industry, which may well have been the trip-wire that triggered the coup....
One of the charges that [right wing Latin America operative Otto] Reich levels at Zelaya is that the Honduran president is supposedly involved with bribes paid out by the state-run telecommunications company Hondutel. Zelaya is threatening to file a defamation suit over the accusation.
Reich's charges against Hondutel are hardly happenstance, as he is a former AT&T lobbyist and served as Sen. John McCain's (R-Ariz.) Latin American advisor during the senator's 2008 presidential campaign.
Writing that "AT&T, McCain's second largest donor, also generously funds the International Republican Institute, which has warred with Latin American regimes that have resisted telecommunications privatization," Hallinan perceives the seeds of Zelaya's fate in the fact that he "was known to be a fierce critic of telecommunications privatization."
In his latest "Dispatch from the Bolivarian Revolution", blogger Eric Wingerter (BoRev.net, 7/18/09) asks, "Man oh man, how bad does AP reporting have to get before a group of Latin American studies professors from top U.S. universities decides they need to take out a FULL-PAGE AD in the Columbia Journalism Review to respond?"
His answer is "Bad bad"--as illustrated in the ad's text:
The Associated Press has breached basic journalistic principles with these false reports:
[Hugo] Chávez initially suggested the synagogue attack might have been carried out by Jews eager to portray his government as anti-Semitic.
—AP February 8, 2009
Only five months after urging world leaders to back their armed struggle, he [Chávez] said that armed guerrilla movements are "history."
—AP June 10, 2008
THESE STATEMENTS ARE FALSE, and on both occasions, the AP has admitted that they are false.
Saying that Chávez "never called on anyone to support the armed struggle of the FARC—rather, he had called on the FARC to abandon armed struggle," the ad goes on to explain how, "far from blaming Jews from an attack on a synagogue, he denounced the attack as anti-Semitic and took prompt action to find and arrest the attackers."
See the FAIR magazine Extra!: "Corrupt Data: Taking On the Claim that Chávez Is On the Take" (11–12/06) by Gregory Wilpert.
Also listen to letter signatory NYU history professor Greg Grandin on FAIR's radio show CounterSpin: "Greg Grandin on Honduras Coup" (7/3/09).
Newsweek has a rather curious take this week (7/20/09) on the Honduras coup in a short piece headlined "The World Goes Bananas Over Honduras":
Poor, hot and fractious, Honduras--the original banana republic--rarely draws a second look from the global community. But on June 28, when President Manuel Zelaya was yanked out of bed by the military and bundled into exile, the world took notice. International leaders unanimously decried the "assault on democracy." The Organization of American States expelled Honduras, the only nation since Cuba to be so disgraced. Venezuela even threatened to send in troops to reinstate Zelaya. But in the rush to judgment, heads of state showed selective zeal for democracy, at best. "It's odd that world leaders have determined that coups can only be committed against presidents, [but] not against Congress or the courts," says Diego Arria, a former Venezuelan diplomat. In recent years, executives in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua have stacked their benches and legislatures with yes men and muzzled the media--while international leaders looked the other way. And unlike those aspiring autocrats, the Honduran military could reasonably argue that it was acting in good faith by ejecting a leader hellbent on seeking re-election--despite an ironclad constitutional clause preventing such a move. Of course, it's a good thing when world leaders stand up for the people. But if it's going to mean much, they should try to be consistent.
Actually, it's not odd at all that world leaders are condemning Honduras as a coup but not Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador or Nicaragua; generally, coups are state takeovers by a small group with military/police backing, which hasn't happened anywhere in Latin America besides Honduras since...oh right, the anti-Chavez coup in Venezuela by folks on Arria's side.
And the Honduran military can't justify its coup by saying the leader they ejected was "hellbent on seeking re-election" for a number of reasons. First of all, it's clear that Zelaya wasn't even seeking re-election, since the actual advisory vote on amending the constitution was to happen in the same fall election that would choose Zelaya's successor. But the very word "election" in that excuse should give you a hint that perhaps there's something wrong with the logic involved. Asking voters if they want to vote on whether to change the constitution can hardly be considered such a threat to democracy that the military has to suspend that democracy in order to defend it.
It's notable that all the countries Newsweek listed have leftist governments aligned with Venezuela, while right-wing Colombian president Alvaro Uribe, who not long ago engineered a change to his country's constitution in order enable his re-election, didn't merit a mention--or much coverage at all when it happened, for that matter--nor did Venezuela's anti-Chavez coup, which U.S. media heartily endorsed. Perhaps the issue Newsweek ought to be probing is U.S. media's "selective zeal" for Latin American democracy.
Robin Varghese's 3 Quarks Daily link (6/30/09) to a Boston Review piece purporting that, "over the past four years, Venezuela has witnessed alarming signs of state-directed anti-Semitism, including a 2005 Christmas declaration by President Hugo Chávez himself," has engendered some homespun media criticism from a commenter logged-in as "Pepito," who argues that "this canard about Chávez and Chavismo being anti-Semitic has been debunked several times in the past, but it comes backs very often."
In response to the excerpt's lead example of "15 heavily armed men" who attacked a Caracas synagogue, "held down two guards, robbed the premises, and desecrated the temple" with swastika graffiti, Pepito illustrates exactly "how ridiculously inaccurate that article is" with "a couple of points":
Not mentioned in that article was that the attack on the synagogue was perpetrated by a band of thieves led by a night guard who had worked at the place for years and who used the anti-Semitic slogans so they could throw off the police investigation. They were captured a few days later with a hundred thousand dollars they had stolen from the synagogue's vault.
After the attack on the synagogue, Chávez himself talked live on TV to Elias Farache, president of one of Venezuela's main Jewish associations, and gave him his word that he was not going to tolerate anti-Semitic attacks in his country and that he was going to protect the Jewish community. Farache himself denied the government's supposed culpability in the attack....
Also, the article does not mention that Fred Pressner, president of [the Confederation of Jewish Associations of Venezuela, a group] representative of Venezuela's Jewish community, repeatedly complained to the Wiesenthal Center, asking them to consult with the Venezuelan Jewish community before accusing Chávez of anti-Semitism.
Pepito's parting shot at 3 Quarks Daily and the Boston Review: "Pointing the finger at Chávez's government for some isolated anti-Semitic events in the street while ignoring the fact that for many years (and before Chávez was elected) there have been small groups with anti-Semitic leanings (usually formed by conservative ultra-Catholics) is disingenuous, to say the least." See the FAIR Media Advisory: "Editing Chavez to Manufacture a Slur: Some Outlets Spread Spurious Charges of Anti-Semitism" (1/23/06).
Observing that Latinobarómetro's 2008 report on Latin American public opinion again "went entirely unreported in almost all of the world's major media outlets," with "only small snippets selectively analyzed by writers at the Economist, Christian Science Monitor and Washington Times," Latin American history major Kevin Young's ZNet analysis of the survey (5/27/09) gives some probable reasons:
Washington's contempt for the Chávez and Morales governments is readily apparent given frequent Bush administration denunciations and threats directed at the two leaders, U.S. support for violent opposition groups and coup attempts in Venezuela and Bolivia, and its ongoing and well-documented (though still highly secretive) channeling of funds to opposition groups in the two countries. Conversely, the governments of countries like Colombia and Mexico draw frequent praise from U.S. government leaders and media analysts and also receive large sums of U.S. taxpayers' money in the form of military and/or economic aid. Colombia ($657 million) and Mexico ($579 million) top all Latin American countries in total.
That U.S. media consistently praises official U.S. friends and condemns official enemies goes hand-in-glove with their refusal to acknowledge polling that directly contradicts their justifications for U.S. Latin American policy. Young lists Latinobarómetro results showing "Hugo Chávez's Venezuela is the third 'freest' country among the 18 surveyed," while "the three large countries whose governments remain closely aligned with the United States--Colombia, Mexico and Peru--rank well below Venezuela in every category" polled, such as "Democracy [in my country] guarantees the freedom to participate in politics," "Democracy guarantees freedom of expression, always and in all parts [of the country]" and "The most effective way to change things is by voting to elect those who defend my position."
See the recent issue of FAIR magazine Extra!: "FAIR Study: Human Rights Coverage Serving Washington's Needs: FAIR Finds Editors Downplaying Colombia’s Abuses, Amplifying Venezuela’s" (2/09) by Steve Rendall, Daniel Ward & Tess Hall
NACLA has Latin America writer Daniel Denvir's review (5/11/09) of a new Bart Jones biography of Hugo Chávez. In it, Denvir's reasons for having "never been a big reader of biographies"--"the product of our most unfortunate and idol-indulging tendencies"--give way to the fact that some leaders' "images become proxies for larger ideological, social and cultural debates--often to the point of caricature." Denvir's contention that "a good biography can take on this echo chamber residuum and tell a more reality-based story" becomes that much more urgent when, "in the case of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, this is a politically necessary task":
The New York Times editorial board claims Chávez aids guerrillas. Ethically challenged televangelist Pat Robertson called for his assassination. And when talking heads aren't calling him a terrorist, they take up the Venezuelan right wing’s cartoonish image of Chávez as hyperbolic and verbose buffoon. Admittedly, recent conservative attempts to provoke hysteria over the Chávez-Obama handshake at the Summit of the Americas seem to have fallen flat.
The Jones book crucially "takes on mainstream media coverage of Chávez and explains the Bolivarian Revolution's victories--and thus its high level of public support" while it also "acknowledges that Chávez is a leader with serious faults... but methodically knocks down the charge that he is a dictator." Denvir further notes that "conservative talk radio and mainstream media have eagerly spilled copious ink cataloguing Chávez's sins. Meanwhile, far less attention is given to President Álvaro Uribe and the Colombian political establishment's ties to right-wing paramilitaries, who actually kill their political opponents," and suggests that "a comparative Lexis-Nexis study on the subject would be enlightening." Well... see Extra!: "FAIR Study: Human Rights Coverage Serving Washington's Needs: FAIR Finds Editors Downplaying Colombia's Abuses, Amplifying Venezuela's" (2/09) by Steve Rendall, Daniel Ward & Tess Hall
The Washington Post editorial page regularly slams Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, so it was no surprise to see it do the same on April 30. Their real point, though, was to suggest that Barack Obama's desire to change the tone of the U.S.-Venezuelan relationship wasn't going to work:
The administration's strategy--to open up a constructive dialogue with Venezuela and avoid being cast as Mr. Chavez's Yanqui foil--is reasonable; it is also the same strategy as was tried, unsuccessfully, by the previous two administrations.
It's hard to imagine that anyone believes that the Bush administration's Venezuela policy amounted to "constructive dialogue." The Bush administration--at the very least--seemed to approve of the April 2002 coup that briefly removed Chavez from power. And Bush policy after that disaster was hardly more "constructive."
Even more curious is the Post's suggestion that President Bill Clinton had similar trouble with Chavez. That sounds implausible; Chavez was elected in 1998 and took office the following year--leaving very little time for Clinton's generous attempts at dialogue to be rebuffed by Chavez. Chavez, for his part, told Post co-owner Lally Weymouth that he "entertained the best of relations with the Clinton administration." (See Extra!, 11-12/06.)
But when it's Hugo Chavez they're talking about, apparently, for the Post editorial page the facts don't matter.
Images of the U.S. media's longtime foe, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, with Obama at last weekend's Summit of the Americas in Trinidad prompted some corporate reporters to take the unusual step of questioning the political motivations behind an official photo-op. On ABC's World News, Jake Tapper referred to Chavez's gift of The Open Veins of Latin America to Obama as a "stunt" (video available here).
George Stephanopoulos questioned whether Chavez was not just posing with Obama in order to take advantage of Obama's popularity. "You have to wonder who would win a popular vote between Obama and Chavez in Venezuela these days," Stephanopoulos stated in an early Sunday morning ABC News broadcast.
Yet, as even Miami Herald columnist Andres Oppenheimer--a Chavez critic--acknowledges in his latest column, "there are no recent polls on Obama's popularity in Venezuela." So just where does Stephanopoulos get the idea that Obama polls so favorably in Venezuela? Why, likely from Obama's own adviser on Latin America!
In an interview with Tapper broadcast on ABC, Jeffrey Davidow--a senior adviser to Obama on Latin American affairs and director of the Summit of the Americas, who is also president of the Institute of the Americas think tank, stated that Chavez
rushed photos of his handshake with president Obama on to his government's website, along with his express desire to be friends. That was for a reason.
There's a sizable population in Venezueala, probably the very, very vast majority of Venezuela Venezuelans, who have a more favorable attitude to president Obama than to him.
Tapper: You're saying president Obama is more popular in Venezuela than Chavez is?
Davidow: Yeah.
What better authority on what "probably the very, very vast majority of Venezuela Venezuelans" want than a White House senior advisor?
In its initial report, CNN (Newsroom, 4/18/09) appeared to be completely unaware of Galeano's classic 1971 treatise on the history of European and U.S. imperialism in Latin America, failing to correct Obama's initial mistaken belief that the book was penned by Chavez himself.
Both CNN (CNN Newsroom, 4/18/09) and AP (4/19/09) contrasted the immediate surge in the book's sales on Amazon with its previous "obscurity":
It's gone from obscurity to bestseller overnight. In just hours, it zoomed to No. 14 on Amazon.com's bestseller list, and on Friday, it was ranked number 60,280, making its way to the top of the list very fast.--CNN, 4/18/09
The publicity about the gift of the Galeano book helped propel it from relative obscurity to No. 13 on the Amazon.com list of bestsellers by Saturday night.--AP, 4/19/09
The book may not have ranked highly a month ago on Amazon, but it can hardly be described as "obscure." A classic Latin American history text that was banned by several military dictatorships, with its author "forced into exile as the book grew in popularity," according to the New Yorker, the book boasts more than 50 Spanish editions, and has been translated into more than a dozen languages. As demonstrated by Chavez's choice, it still has currency with Latin American political leaders.
The Washington Post editorial page produced a remarkable editorial on Saturday (3/21/09) headlined "Victory in El Salvador." It's not surprising that the Post would try to argue that the victory of left-wing FMLN presidential candidate Mauricio Funes was not another sign that the region's politics are shifting to the left. No, in fact it was a blow to folks like Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez: "El Salvador's election was also a triumph for a system that Mr. Chávez has disregarded: liberal democracy."
The Post didn't elaborate on that idea. They did, unfortunately, attempt to recast U.S. involvement in El Salvador's bloody civil war. The U.S. provided support to the death squad-linked military leaders over the course of the conflict--a war in which the U.S.-backed government and its allies killed 75,000 Salvadorans, mostly civilians.
Somehow, though, this election was what the U.S. had in mind for El Salvador all along (see bold):
If Mr. Funes as well as the election's losers now respect the rule of law, the result could be the consolidation of the political system the United States was aiming for when it intervened in El Salvador's civil war during the 1980s. At the time, the goal of a successful Salvadoran democracy was dismissed as a mission impossible, just as some now say democracy is unattainable in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the right-wing ARENA party, whose leaders were linked to death squads in the 1980s, proved during the last few years that it could embrace democratic practices. Its presidential candidate, Rodrigo Ávila, acknowledged his defeat on election night.
Official U.S. policy towards El Salvador was based on a paranoid anti-Communism that insisted on supporting any government threatened by left-wing guerrillas, no matter its record of brutality. To suggest the goal was merely the "consolidation of the political system"--the mind reels.
The Post closes by saying the Funes goverment "has the potential to complete a victory for Latin American democracy--and U.S. foreign policy."
On this morning's Fox & Friends, the hosts were having a laugh about Mauricio Funes, the new president of El Salvador. Funes won as the candidate of the FMLN, the political party of the former guerrilla group--and he was once a freelancer for CNN. Ergo, Fox could make jokes about CNN's "communist" ties.
One of the hosts (a substitute) tried to show that this was actually no laughing matter, since the FMLN "allegedly has ties to strongman Cesar Chavez." It takes the other hosts a little while to figure out that he means Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez--not the labor organizer regular host Steve Doocy refers to as "the lettuce guy."
The author of an upcoming "people's history of the Bolivarian Revolution entitled We Created Him," George Ciccariello-Maher tells (CounterPunch, 2/15/09) an eerily "familiar" tale of one unnamed political leader who, after being "in power for nearly eight years,"
no longer feels the need to comfort his opponents, and his discourse radicalizes as his view of term limits shifts. Dismissing his opposition as rigid "dogmatists," the leader now insists on the need to change course flexibly to meet circumstances. True and sustained change, he argues, requires the continuity of his successful leadership....
Not without controversy, then, was the decision of the region's largest newspaper--aligned politically with the leader--to wade into these conflictive waters with the following declaration: ..."The bedrock of… democracy is the voters' right to choose. Though well intentioned… the term limits law severely limits that right, which is why this page has opposed term limits from the outset… Term limits are...profoundly undemocratic, arbitrarily denying voters the ability to choose between good politicians and bad."
While the paper had previously insisted that any change to term limits come through popular referendum, it now reverses this view, taking the position that for reasons of political expediency, a simple vote in the small executive council will do.
While consumers of corporate U.S. media may recognize this as the common narrative against current official U.S. enemy Hugo Chávez, Ciccariello-Maher lets us know that this land where "weak-kneed apologists parade about under the banner of free press" really "is none other than New York City, the leader none other than Michael Bloomberg, and the newspaper none other than the New York Times." Cautioning "patience: we haven't even gotten to the hypocrisy part yet," Ciccariello-Maher then goes on to note how
the New York Times has never been bashful about the crush it has on this tale of hypocrisy’s third character: the narco-terrorist president of Colombia, Alvaro Uribe. Uribe is currently engaged in an effort to change the Colombian constitution for a second time to allow his own re-election, doing so not through popular plebiscite, but rather indirect legislative vote. But not that you would know this from reading the press.
Read the current issue of FAIR's magazine Extra!: "FAIR Study: Human Rights Coverage Serving Washington's Needs: FAIR Finds Editors Downplaying Colombia's Abuses, Amplifying Venezuela's" (2/09) by Steve Rendall, Daniel Ward & Tess Hall
