Оваа Член by Peter Foster in the UK Telegraph prominently features a picture of a grieving man in Caracas who just lost his wife. He is sitting next to his family holding up a picture of her. He is quoted as follows by Foster:
“It’s the government who is responsible for my wife’s death, not the doctors,….Things are very bad in this country, and they are getting worse. I feel that we are in a dictatorship. At the start I believed in Chavez, now I can’t look at him. He is in the best place now.”
But Foster assures us that people are “wary of speaking ill of a regime that has a track record of taking revenge on its critics, excluding them from the handouts and government jobs that became the hallmark of Chavez’s rule.” The “track record” is an opposition allegation that Foster reports as fact. When Latin American scholars challenged Human Rights Watch (HRW), who also regurgitated this allegation in a report, to offer evidence, HRW’s response was pathetic. In 2012, the New York Times quoted a Venezuelan public sector worker who said she was afraid to even vote for the opposition. It turned out she had been cheerfully tweeting her support for the opposition far and wide. She rightly assumed the NYT would take whatever she said at face value. Public sector workers in Venezuela are only about 18% of its workforce but an AP article by Christopher Toothaker once made an exceptionally brazen effort to mislead readers about that fact in order to make opposition allegations seem credible.
Foster doesn’t tell his readers that the print and television media in Venezuela regularly feature vehement attacks on the government. He wants us to believe that this grief stricken man’s candor is very rare.
Foster also doesn’t inform his readers that much of the Venezuelan medical establishment has been engaging in provocative protests and denunciations of the government for years – long before the current economic downturn began. It has been bitterly opposed to the tens of thousands of Cuban doctors working in “missions” for the poor and, quite reprehensibly, tried to get the courts to stop them from practicing. Cables released by Wikileaks revealed US officials in Caracas во 2009 privately noting to themselves that
“In recent months, newspapers across Venezuela have carried daily reports of a growing crisis in the public hospitals. On November 30, for example, ‘Notitarde’ published reports of a vigil by patients and doctors to protest…the daily ‘El Universal’ reported that doctors in Merida had shut down the University Hospital of Los Andes (HULA) due to medical supply shortages, pronouncing the hospital ‘dead.’”
Foster writes “the crisis is no longer about inconvenience, but the worth of a human life.”
Unfortunately, the “worth of human life” doesn’t motivate Foster to mention any of the ways private businesses have aggravated shortages. Businesses have been caught engaging in massive amounts of шверц складирање. Businesses have also fraudulently acquired US dollars from the government at preferential rates (intended for the importation of basic necessities like hospital) and then resold them on the black market. Political motives are certainly driving some of this very destructive profiteering. In the 2002-2003 period, the opposition deliberately orchestrated the worst Venezuelan recession since at least 1980 (and perhaps ever) – vastly worse than the one being experienced today. In fact, the 2002 coup briefly installed the head of Venezuela’s largest business federation as dictator. Corporate journalists like Foster invariably ignore all of those facts and dismiss any allegation against Venezuela’s business community. Some “track records” don’t matter no matter how well documented. The same applies to human lives. Some matter, some don’t.
As I write this, the trial of a wealthy landowner accused of orchestrating the murder of a Venezuelan indigenous leader, Сабино Ромеро, is entering a crucial phase. Hundreds of peasant activists have been murdered since 2001 in crimes that strongly implicate wealthy landowners opposed to land reform. International corporate journalists based in Caracas for many years have simply ignored the issue entirely.
Foster also wrote an Член about opposition leader (and Miranda state governor) Henrique Capriles which failed to mention his participation in the 2002 coup. Unlike Leopoldo Lopez, who also participated, Capriles has tried very hard to reinvent himself since then as a Lula-style leftist. However, the coup and economic sabotage of the 2002/2003 years did long-lasting damage to the opposition’s credibility. It is striking that the opposition has not been willing or able to purge its top leadership of perpetrators and supporters of the coup. The corporate press can’t make that observation because it completely undermines its efforts to portray the Venezuelan government as intolerant of dissent. Participate in a coup in the UK or USA. If you live to tell about it at all, you will not be holding public office or leading political movements.
The Telegraph is a notoriously right wing newspaper that has been aptly dubbed the Torygraph by critics. However, as I’ve explained овде овде, the Liberal end of the corporate media doesn’t report about Venezuela any differently. Perhaps, though it’s debatable, one slight difference may be that a hard-right outlet like the Telegraph is more willing to fudge economic data. Foster tells us that “real inflation” in Venezuela is 100%. The IMF, which has strongly challenged Argentina’s inflation figures, has made no such claim about Venezuela’s. Foster may deserve credit for breaking new ground with that one and sinking a bit lower than his colleagues.
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