by John Pilger
Travelling with Hugo Chavez, I
soon understood the threat of Venezuela. At a farming co-operative
in Lara state, people waited patiently and with good humor in the heat.
Jugs of water and melon juice were passed around. A guitar was played; a
woman, Katarina, stood and sang with a husky contralto.
“What did her words say?” I
asked.
“That we are proud,” was the
reply.
The applause for her merged
with the arrival of Chavez. Under one arm he carried a satchel bursting
with books. He wore his big red shirt and greeted people by name,
stopping to listen.
What struck me was his capacity
to listen.
But now he read. For almost
two hours he read into the microphone from the stack of books beside him:
Orwell, Dickens, Tolstoy, Zola, Hemingway, Chomsky, Neruda: a page here, a
line or two there. People clapped and whistled as he moved from author to
author. Then farmers took the microphone and told him what they knew, and
what they needed; one ancient face, carved it seemed from a nearby banyan, made
a long, critical speech on the subject of irrigation; Chavez took notes.
Wine is grown here, a dark
Syrah type grape. “John, John, come up here,” said El Presidente, having
watched me fall asleep in the heat and the depths of Oliver Twist.
“He likes red wine,” Chavez
told the cheering, whistling audience, and presented me with a bottle of “vino
de la gente.” My few words in bad Spanish brought whistles and laughter.
Watching Chavez with the
people, la gente, made sense of a man who promised, on coming to power, that
his every move would be subject to the will of the people. In eight
years, Chavez won eight elections and referendums: a world record. He was
electorally the most popular head of state in the Western Hemisphere,
probably in the world.
Every major chavista reform
was voted on, notably a new constitution of which 71 percent of the people
approved each of the 396 article that enshrined unheard of freedoms, such
as Article 123, which for the first time recognized the human rights of
mixed-race and black people, of whom Chavez was one.
Their First Champions
One of his tutorials on the road
quoted a feminist writer: “Love and solidarity are the same.” His
audiences understood this well and expressed themselves with dignity,
seldom with deference. Ordinary people regarded Chavez and his government
as their first champions: as theirs.
This was especially true of
the indigenous, mestizos and Afro-Venezuelans, who had been held in
historic contempt by Chavez’s immediate predecessors and by those who
today live far from the barrios, in the mansions and penthouses of East
Caracas, who commute to Miami where their banks are and who regard
themselves as “white.” They are the powerful core of what the media calls
“the opposition.”
When I met this class, in
suburbs called Country Club, in homes appointed with low chandeliers and
bad portraits, I recognized them. They could be white South Africans, the
petite bourgeoisie of Constantia and Sandton, pillars of the cruelties of
apartheid.
Cartoonists in the Venezuelan
press, most of which are owned by an oligarchy and oppose the government,
portrayed Chavez as an ape. A radio host referred to “the monkey.” In the
private universities, the verbal currency of the children of the well-off
is often racist abuse of those whose shacks are just visible through the
pollution.
Although identity politics are
all the rage in the pages of liberal newspapers in the West, race and
class are two words almost never uttered in the mendacious “coverage” of
Washington’s latest, most naked attempt to grab the world’s greatest
source of oil and reclaim its “backyard.”
For all the chavistas’ faults
— such as allowing the Venezuelan economy to become hostage to the
fortunes of oil and never seriously challenging big capital and corruption
— they brought social justice and pride to millions of people and they did
it with unprecedented democracy.
Stellar Election Process
“Of the 92 elections that
we’ve monitored,” said former President Jimmy Carter, whose Carter Center,
is a respected monitor of elections around the world, “I would say the
election process in Venezuela is the best in the world.” By way of
contrast, said Carter, the U.S. election system, with its emphasis on
campaign money, “is one of the worst.”
In extending the franchise to
a parallel people’s state of communal authority, based in the poorest
barrios, Chavez described Venezuelan democracy as “our version of
Rousseau’s idea of popular sovereignty.”
In Barrio La Linea, seated in
her tiny kitchen, Beatrice Balzo told me her children were the first
generation of the poor to attend a full day’s school and be given a hot
meal and to learn music, art and dance. “I have seen their confidence
blossom like flowers,” she said.
In Barrio La Vega, I listened
to a nurse, Mariella Machado, a black woman of 45 with a wicked laugh,
address an urban land council on subjects ranging from homelessness to
illegal war. That day, they were launching Mision Madres de Barrio, a
program aimed at poverty among single mothers. Under the constitution,
women have the right to be paid as caregivers, and can borrow from a
special women’s bank. Now the poorest housewives get the equivalent of
$200 a month.
In a room lit by a single
fluorescent tube, I met Ana Lucia Fernandez, aged 86, and Mavis Mendez,
aged 95. A mere 33-year-old, Sonia Alvarez, had come with her two
children. Once, none of them could read and write; now they were studying
mathematics. For the first time in its history, Venezuela has almost 100
percent literacy.
This is the work of Mision
Robinson, which was designed for adults and teenagers previously denied an
education because of poverty. Mission Ribas gives everyone the opportunity
of a secondary education, called a bachillerato. (The names Robinson and
Ribas refer to Venezuelan independence leaders from the 19th century).
In her 95 years, Mavis Mendez
had seen a parade of governments, mostly vassals of Washington, preside
over the theft of billions of dollars in oil spoils, much of it flown to
Miami. “We didn’t matter in a human sense,” she told me. “We lived and
died without real education and running water, and food we couldn’t
afford. When we fell ill, the weakest died. Now I can read and write my
name and so much more; and whatever the rich and the media say, we have
planted the seeds of true democracy and I have the joy of seeing it
happen.”
In 2002, during a
Washington-backed coup, Mavis’s sons and daughters and grandchildren and
great-grandchildren joined hundreds of thousands who swept down from the
barrios on the hillsides and demanded the army remained loyal to Chavez.
“The people rescued me,”
Chavez told me. “They did it with the media against me, preventing even
the basic facts of what happened. For popular democracy in heroic action,
I suggest you look no further.”
Saddam Hussein Incarnate
Since Chavez’s death in 2013,
his successor NicolásMaduro has shed his derisory label in the Western
press as a “former bus driver” and become Saddam Hussein incarnate. His
media abuse is ridiculous. Onhis watch,
the slide in the price of oil has caused hyperinflation and played havoc
with prices in a society that imports almost all its food; yet, as the
journalist and film-maker Pablo Navarrete reported this week, Venezuela is
not the catastrophe it has been painted.
“There is food everywhere,” he
wrote. “I have filmed lots of videos of food in markets [all over Caracas]
… it’s Friday night and the restaurants are full.”
In 2018, Maduro was re-elected
president. A section
of the opposition boycotted the election, a tactic tried against
Chavez. The boycott failed: 9,389,056 people voted; 16 parties
participated and six candidates stood for the presidency. Maduro won
6,248,864 votes, or 68 percent.
On election day, I spoke to
one of the 150 foreign election observers. “It was entirely fair,” he
said. “There was no fraud; none of the lurid media claims stood up. Zero.
Amazing really.”
Like a page from Alice’s
tea party, the Trump administration has presented Juan Guaidó, a pop-up
creation of the CIA-front National Endowment for Democracy, as
the “legitimate President of Venezuela.” Unheard of by 81 percent of the
Venezuelan people, according to The Nation, Guaidó has been elected
by no one.
Maduro is “illegitimate,” says
Donald Trump (who won the U.S. presidency with 3 million fewer votes than his
opponent), a “dictator,” says demonstrably unhinged Vice President Mike
Pence and an oil trophy-in-waiting, says “national security” adviser John
Bolton (who when I interviewed him in 2003 said, “Hey, are you a
communist, maybe
even Labour?”)
even Labour?”)
As his “special envoy to
Venezuela” (coup master), Trump has appointed a convicted felon, Elliot
Abrams, whose intrigues in the service of Presidents Reagan and George W.
Bush helped produce the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s and plunge
central America into years of blood-soaked misery.
Putting Lewis Carroll aside,
these “crazies” belong in newsreels from the 1930s. And yet their
lies about Venezuela have been taken up with enthusiasm by those paid to
keep the record straight.
On Channel 4 News, Jon Snow
bellowed at the Labour MP Chris Williamson, “Look, you and Mr. Corbyn are
in a very nasty corner [on Venezuela]!” When Williamson tried to explain
why threatening a sovereign country was wrong, Snow cut him off. “You’ve
had a good go!”
In 2006, Channel 4 News
effectively accused Chavez of plotting to make nuclear weapons with Iran:
a fantasy. The then Washington correspondent, Jonathan Rugman, allowed a
war criminal, Donald Rumsfeld, to liken Chavez to Hitler, unchallenged.
Overwhelming Bias
Researchers at the University
of the West of England studied the BBC‘s reporting of Venezuela over
a 10-year period. They looked at 304 reports and found that only three of
these referred to any of the positive policies of the government. For
the BBC, Venezuela’s democratic record, human rights legislation,
food programs, healthcare initiatives and poverty reduction did not
happen. The greatest literacy program in human history did not
happen, just as the millions who march in support of Maduro and in memory
of Chavez, do not exist.
When asked why she filmed only
an opposition march, the BBC reporter Orla Guerin tweeted that
it was “too difficult” to be on two marches in one day.
A war has been declared on
Venezuela, of which the truth is “too difficult” to report.
It is too difficult to report
the collapse of oil prices since 2014 as largely the result of criminal
machinations by Wall Street. It is too difficult to report the blocking of
Venezuela’s access to the U.S.-dominated international financial system as
sabotage. It is too difficult to report Washington’s “sanctions” against
Venezuela, which have caused the loss of at least $6 billion in
Venezuela’s revenue since 2017, including $2 billion worth of imported
medicines, as illegal, or the Bank of England’s refusal to return
Venezuela’s gold reserves as an act of piracy.
The former United Nations
Rapporteur, Alfred de Zayas, has likened this to a “medieval siege”
designed “to bring countries to their knees.” It is a criminal assault, he
says. It is similar to that faced by Salvador Allende in 1970 when
President Richard Nixon and his equivalent of John Bolton, Henry
Kissinger, set out to “make the economy [of Chile] scream.” The long dark
night of Pinochet followed.
The Guardian correspondent,
Tom Phillips, has tweeted a picture of a cap on which the words in Spanish
mean in local slang: “Make Venezuela fucking cool again.” The reporter as
clown may be the final stage of much of mainstream journalism’s
degeneration.
Should the CIA stooge Guaidó
and his white supremacists grab power, it will be the 68th overthrow of a
sovereign government by the United States, most of them democracies. A
fire sale of Venezuela’s utilities and mineral wealth will surely follow,
along with the theft of the country’s oil, as outlined by John Bolton.
Under the last
Washington-controlled government in Caracas, poverty reached historic
proportions. There was no healthcare for those could not pay. There was no
universal education; Mavis Mendez, and millions like her, could not read
or write. How cool is that, Tom?
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