Good Things Happening in Venezuela

I visited one of the government-supported community food stores that are located around the country, mostly in low income areas. These modest establishments sell canned goods, pasta, beans, rice, and some produce and fruits at well below market price, a blessing in a society with widespread malnutrition.  

Popular food markets have eliminated the layers of middlepeople and made staples more affordable for residents. Most of these markets are run by women. The government also created a state-financed bank whose function is to provide low-income women with funds to start cooperatives in their communities. 

There is a growing number of worker cooperatives. One in Caracas was started by turning a waste dump into a shoe factory and a T-shirt factory. Financed with money from the Petroleum Ministry, the coop has put about 1,000 people to work. The workers seem enthusiastic and hopeful. 

Surprisingly, many Venezuelans know relatively little about the worker cooperatives. Or perhaps it’s not surprising, given the near monopoly that private capital has over the print and broadcast media. The wealthy media moguls, all vehemently anti-Chavez, own four of the five television stations and all the major newspapers. 

The person most responsible for Venezuela’s revolutionary developments, Hugo Chavez, has been accorded the usual ad hominem treatment in the U.S. news media. An article in the San Francisco Chronicle described him as “Venezuela’s pugnacious president.” An earlier Chronicle report (November 30, 2001) quotes a political opponent who calls Chavez “a psychopath, a terribly aggressive guy.” The London Financial Times sees him as “increasingly autocratic” and presiding over something called a “rogue democracy.” 

In the Nation (May 6, 2002), Marc Cooper—one of those Cold War liberals who nowadays regularly defends the U.S. empire—writes that the democratically-elected Chavez speaks “often as a thug,” who “flirts with megalomania.” Chavez’s behavior, Cooper rattles on, “borders on the paranoiac,” is “ham-fisted demagogy” acted out with an “increasingly autocratic style.” Like so many critics, Cooper downplays Chavez’s accomplishments and uses name-calling in place of informed analysis. 

Other media mouthpieces have labeled Chavez “mercurial,” “besieged,” “heavy-handed,” “incompetent,” and “dictatorial,” a “barracks populist,” a “strongman,” a “firebrand,” and, above all, a “leftist.” It is never explained what “leftist” means. 

A leftist is someone who advocates a more equitable distribution of social resources and human services and who supports the kinds of programs that the Chavez government is putting in place. (Likewise a rightist is someone who opposes such programs and seeks to advance the insatiable privileges of private capital and the wealthy few.) The term “leftist” is frequently bandied about in the U.S. media, but seldom defined. The power of the label is in its remaining undefined, allowing it to have an abstracted built-in demonizing impact, which precludes rational examination of its political content. 

Meanwhile Chavez’s opponents, who staged an illegal and unconstitutional coup in April 2002 against the democratically elected government, are depicted in the U.S. media as champions of “pro-democratic” and “pro-West” governance. We are talking about the free-market plutocrats and corporate-military leaders of the privileged social order who killed more people in the 48 hours they held power in 2002 than were ever harmed by Chavez in his years of rule. 

When one of these perpetrators, General Carlos Alfonzo, was hit with charges for the role he had played, the New York Times chose to call him a “dissident” whose rights were being suppressed by the Chavez government. Four other top military officers charged with leading the 2002 coup were also likely to face legal action. No doubt, they too will be described not as plotters or traitors who tried to destroy a democratic government, but as “dissidents,” decent individuals who are being denied their right to disagree with the government. 

President Hugo Chavez, whose public talks I attended on three occasions, proved to be an educated, articulate, remarkably well-informed and well-read individual. He manifests a sincere dedication to effecting some salutary changes for the great mass of his people, a person who in every aspect seems worthy of the decent and peaceful democratic revolution he is leading. Millions of his compatriots correctly perceive him as being the only president who has ever paid attention to the nation’s poorest areas. No wonder he is the target of calumny and coup from the upper echelons in his own country and from ruling circles up north. 

Chavez charges that the United States government is plotting to assassinate him. I can believe it.