By Sonali Kolhatkar
Diplomatic
relations between Venezuela and the U.S. have just taken a big hit,
with the government of Nicolas Maduro demanding that the American
Embassy in Caracas reduce its staff by 80% and that U.S. visitors apply for visas.
Most symbolically, Venezuela has now barred a
number of U.S. officials from visiting, including George W. Bush and
Dick Cheney. The backdrop to these political moves is a new crisis
within Venezuela that has an old script: right-wing leaders plan a coup,
with the U.S. deeply implicated; wealthy protesters take to the
streets; and the Western media cover both stories with great sympathy
while openly mocking the democratically elected government for
attempting to defend itself.
The
latest crisis began when authorities acting on Maduro’s orders arrested
Caracas Mayor Antonio Ledezma in mid-February. A well-known right-wing
opposition figure, Ledezma will face trial for conspiracy against the
government in what is now being called the “blue coup.” Among the pieces
of evidence the
government says it has collected are phone calls made by the mayor to a
U.S. phone number, as well as a cache of weapons, including Molotov
cocktails, grenade-like explosives and gas masks, found in the office
headquarters of the opposition political party.
The
U.S. has long been involved in attempts to destabilize Venezuela’s
socialist government. Its role in the 2002 coup against Hugo Chavez is well-documented.
Over the years, many organizations, including ones in which right-wing
opposition figures are involved, have received funding from the likes
of USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED),
both U.S.-based agencies notorious for fomenting unrest in countries
hostile to U.S. interests. For example, Machado headed an organization
named Sumate that has received funding from the NED.
U.S. officials have also made no secret about their hostility to Venezuela. Last year the Obama administration imposed sanctions on
a number of Venezuelan officials it claims are implicated in human
rights abuses and corruption, although it is keeping the list of names
secret. In President Obama’s 2015 National Security Strategy,
he announced that the U.S. would “stand by the citizens of countries
where the full exercise of democracy is at risk, such as Venezuela.”
Despite
this documentation of American animosity toward Venezuela, media
outlets continue to harbor an inexplicable blind spot on the U.S. role.
The New York Timesopined last week in what we can consider Exhibit A in the case against media coverage of Venezuela:
Listening to embattled President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela ramble for hours about an international right-wing conspiracy to oust him, it’s clear that he would use any fabricated pretext to jail opposition leaders and crack down on dissent. In recent days, the government’s claims have become outlandish and its repression of critics even more vicious.
Professor Miguel Tinker Salas, one of the few U.S.-based experts on Venezuela, has written a book that will be released May 4 titled “Venezuela: What Everyone Needs to Know.” In an interview on “Uprising,” he
responded to the editorial, saying, “We know that there was a
historical amnesia on the part of the New York Times that celebrated the
2002 coup against Hugo Chavez.”
Salas was referring to the paper’s mea culpa at
initially celebrating that coup and then retracting its words days
later when it was overturned. In its new editorial, the paper failed to
raise the historical context of U.S. backing for the 2002 coup or its
own contradictory stances dismissing Maduro’s concerns.
Exhibit B is The Economist, which
went as far as headlining the current crisis in Venezuela “A
slow-motion coup.” If by “coup” the magazine means “coup d’état”—which
is generally defined as the illegal takeover of a government—then it is
unclear what the writers mean, for the article claims the “regime is
lurching from authoritarianism to dictatorship.” (Is Maduro’s government
organizing a coup against itself?) The magazine also goes on to assert
that “Crackpot economic policies have brought food shortages, soaring
inflation and rising poverty.”
Salas
explained that the writers are irked by the fact that “[s]ixty percent
of the government’s budget actually goes to social programs and [the
opposition] would rather it go to infrastructure and oil companies so
that they can produce more oil and have a larger supply of oil on the
world market, and have it be privately owned.”
Thanks
to this type of media coverage, the Venezuelan right-wing opposition
has been extremely successful at generating sympathy, especially among
the U.S. public, and even among American celebrities. Last year’s
right-wing protests inspired a shout-outby actor Jared Leto during his Oscar acceptance speech, a supportive blog post by Kevin Spacey and even a social media post by singer Madonna.
What
neither the Times nor The Economist nor the supportive celebrities
notice are the troubling double standards of criticizing Venezuela when a
close U.S. ally such as Mexico suffers from far worse problems of
anti-democratic corruption and violence. Salas pointed out the
hypocrisy, saying that 43 people were killed in Venezuela last year on
both sides of the divide, and still, “The New York Times blames the
government for these deaths, and yet they remain silent about the 43
students that were killed in Mexico.” Additionally, Salas pointed out,
although Mexico has “100,000 dead and a real humanitarian crisis,” the
Times says “almost nothing, while on Venezuela they ... mock the
government.”
A November 2014 editorial
by the Times on Mexico’s 43 missing students expressed not nearly as
much vitriol for that country’s clearly corrupt and discredited
government as the paper reserves for Venezuela’s Maduro, whom it called
“authoritarian,” “erratic” and “maniacal.”
Additionally,
The Economist’s mocking of Venezuela’s economic crisis is also
hypocritical because, according to Salas, in Mexico, “fifty percent of
the population lives in poverty” and yet the country “is portrayed as a
model for Western development and neo-liberal economics.” And while
media outlets make fun of Venezuela’s toilet paper shortage,
Salas counters that in Mexico, which is a U.S. ally, huge numbers of
“people don’t even have access to basic services and foods.”
Media
coverage of Venezuela is so skewed that even the contentious issue of
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seems to generate fairer coverage these
days. Salas attributed the bias to the savvy organizing of right-wing
Venezuelan groups, who he says have “learned the lesson very well from
Cuban Americans in Miami and South Florida, so they know how to target
the media, they know how to create public opinion and they have done
that very well.”
But
Salas thinks there is another explanation, and that is “the lack of
knowledge that existed about Venezuela in the U.S. before Hugo Chavez
came to power.” Most of what Americans knew about the country other than
that it had abundant oil reserves was the fact that it once won a Miss
Universe contest and was home to a few good baseball players. That
ignorance has been a perfect blank slate on which the U.S. government,
mainstream media and right-wing opposition parties have been able to
carve their warped perspectives about Venezuela’s left-wing government.
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