-Caveat Lector-
Begin forwarded message:
That the "student leaders" are tied to the opposition is far from
controversial: for example, spokesperson Yon Goicochea is a member
of Primero Justicia and the aptly-named Stalin González belonged
until recently to the strangest of opposition organizations,
Bandera Roja. BR is a nominally Marxist-Leninist group which made
the unlikely transition from a respectable guerrilla organization
to the attack dogs of the far right, claiming to use the opposition
as a vehicle to topple the fake communism of Chávez and institute a
true dictatorship of the proletariat. But González recently
revealed the extent of his opportunism by joining Rosales and Un
Nuevo Tiempo.
Begin forwarded message:
From: "Vigilius Haufniensis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: June 9, 2007 8:55:32 PM PDT
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: [cia-drugs] Who's Pulling the Strings? Behind Venezuela's
"Student Rebellion"
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2007/06/360793.shtml
Who's Pulling the Strings? Behind Venezuela's "Student Rebellion"
author: By GEORGE CICCARIELLO-MAHER (reposted by anon)
In response to the Venezuelan governments non-renewal of RCTV's
broadcasting license, a concession which expired on May 27th at
midnight, a new student movement emerged that has since grabbed
headlines domestically and internationally. Thousands took to the
streets, some marching peacefully and some squaring off against the
police with rocks and bullets, all in the name of "freedom of
expression." But it's worth asking: who are "the students," and
what do they represent? In recent days, it has become clear that
these student mobilizations have been, in fact, largely directed
and supported by sectors of the opposition, all in an effort to
provoke, in Chávez's own words, a "soft coup" against the
revolutionary government. The opposition's strategy vis-à-vis this
student movement has consisted of two fundamental elements, both of
which could only be executed mediatically. But now, after being
revealed and discredited, that strategy is rapidly disintegrating.
Step One: Don't Be Seen
Firstly, opposition parties made a clear decision to stay out of
the spotlight, emphasizing the "independent" and "spontaneous"
nature of the student protests. Beyond anything else, this gesture
proves the degree to which the opposition has been discredited,
garnering a reverse Midas touch through years of poor
decisionmaking and supporting coups. From the beginning, the
government was arguing that opposition politicians were behind the
student mobilizations, and so when government-run channel 8 covered
one of the early student demonstrations in Plaza Brion in Chacaito,
the headline read "opposition demonstration disguised as a student
demonstration."
This claim was perhaps justified by the appearance at the
demonstration of Leopoldo López, mayor of opposition stronghold
Chacao, formerly of far-right party Primero Justicia, which he more
recently abandoned in favor of Manuel Rosales' nominally social
democratic Un Nuevo Tiempo. Opposition news channel Globovisión
countered with the thoroughly unconvincing claim that López, 36
years old and an established politician, was a "youth leader."
López himself wouldn't help the situation when at a press
conference he "accidentally" called for the students to employ "non-
peaceful" tactics (he later claimed that he had meant to call for
"non-violent" forms of protest).
That the "student leaders" are tied to the opposition is far from
controversial: for example, spokesperson Yon Goicochea is a member
of Primero Justicia and the aptly-named Stalin González belonged
until recently to the strangest of opposition organizations,
Bandera Roja. BR is a nominally Marxist-Leninist group which made
the unlikely transition from a respectable guerrilla organization
to the attack dogs of the far right, claiming to use the opposition
as a vehicle to topple the fake communism of Chávez and institute a
true dictatorship of the proletariat. But González recently
revealed the extent of his opportunism by joining Rosales and Un
Nuevo Tiempo.
But the contours of the opposition's hands-off strategy wouldn't be
fully clear until the revelation of a taped phone conversation in
which Un Nuevo Tiempo leader Alfonso Marquina spoke of the need to
remain in the background, but to pull the strings regardless:
"Let's mobilize all the kids We have a strategy as an organization
Let's mobilize all the kids, because you know [UCV student leader]
Stalin [González] is our vice president here in Caracas Let's
mobilize the kids from the Catholic [University] We've decided that
the politicians won't intervene, that we'll leave it to the kids in
their natural environment. We'll give them support, stick them in
trucks If I go out there, they'll say it's the politicians that are
calling the kids out"
"The only thing that can save us in this situation is if something
extraordinary happens," replies Elías, an advisor to RCTV head
Marcel Granier, on the leaked tape. It's comments like this that
lead the Vice President of the National Assembly Desiree Santos to
argue that the political opposition to Chávez was "looking for a
death" among the students, to "repeat the actions of 2002" in which
pre-meditated deaths were inserted into a pre-fabricated media
strategy to overthrow Chávez.
Santos continues: "We want to denounce today a campaign which
intends to convince the country that these student protests are
spontaneous, civil, peaceful, and democratic, but behind them there
lies an entire conspiratorial apparatus. They are using these kids
as cannon fodder..." It was little surprise, then, that when a
student was indeed killed (but under circumstances unrelated to the
protests), the opposition press immediately ran with the story,
only later rectifying their erroneous reports that she had been
shot by police. This convenient misreporting even led to the story
reaching the pages of Spain's El País.
Despite Marquina's revelations, Globovisión has continued to toe
the opposition line that these are apolitical "student
demonstrations" and that their objective is not to bring down a
government, but merely to support RCTV and "free speech." To make
such claims, they continue to systematically obscure the political
affiliations of the students, their interactions with opposition
political actors, and conveniently ignore the frequently heard
chants asserting that "the tyrant will fall."
Step Two: Construct "the Students"
The second element of the opposition's strategy is to present the
students as a unified mass. This is not as difficult as it may
seem: Venezuela's university system is notoriously exclusionary,
and this applies both to private universities like the Andrés Bello
Catholic University (UCAB) and selective public universities like
the Central (UCV). In most of these bodies, which represent the
wealthy historical cream of Venezuelan society, the opposition has
significant strength, controlling most of the official student
unions and political bodies.
But, as Metropolitan Mayor Juan Barreto recently emphasized in a
response to the mobilizations, Caracas boasts 200,000 students,
whereas these demonstrations have not managed to mobilize more than
5,000. And these mobilizations had been largely concentrated in the
wealthy East of Caracas, with no student protests in the sprawling
barrios that house half of the city's population. Who are the rest
of these students? It is here that we see another piece of the
puzzle, and another crucial sector which opposes the policies of
the Bolivarian Revolution. As a response to the entrenched elitism
and conservatism of the existing Venezuelan university structure,
and lacking the political weight to attack the long-cherished
tradition of university autonomy head on, Chávez's government opted
for a different strategy.
Rather than attempting to change institutions like the UCV, the
government has funneled resources into the creation of new,
alternative educational institutions like the Bolivarian University
(UBV), among others. In all, the government has created 8 new free
universities and plans 28 more (11 national, 13 regional, and 4
technological institutes) as a part of the recently-baptized
Mission Alma Mater. And this isn't even to mention the vast network
of already existing educational missions which stretch from
preschool to post-graduate education, and whose participants are
currently demanding that they, too, be recognized as "students." As
it stands, these new universities reach approximately 1.5 million
students, and the educational missions a further 3.8 million,
together representing more than 8% of the Venezuelan population, a
figure which will only continue to grow.
Recognizing that the students of these new universities are
actually "students" would certainly put a damper on the
opposition's plans, and so the opposition and international press
has insistently maintained the rhetoric by which "the students" of
the opposition stand in for students as a whole. It's a classic
strategy of substitutionism, and one intimately tied to the
purportedly apolitical nature of the protests: since they aren't
political, the opposition press is attempting to paint a picture of
a unified (i.e. opposition and Chavista) student body standing
together in support of press freedom.
A Scripted Performance in the Assembly
The efforts of the students to appear peaceful and democratic
ultimately led them down a blind alley. This alley ended in the
National Assembly, and revealed with absolute clarity the falseness
of the "unity" of the student movement. Perhaps not expecting a
positive response, the opposition students demanded first to be
received at the Assembly, and later to be given the opportunity to
address the national parliament in an emergency session.
Unfortunately for them, Assembly President Cilia Flores accepted.
But here's the kicker: the opposition students were invited to
participate in a debate with a group of students identifying with
the Revolution. While opposition students had continuously
emphasized their openness to debate, the structure of the proposed
debate threatened to fracture their meticulously-constructed image
as the sole representatives of the Venezuelan student population.
This was clearly a debate that the opposition students couldn't
accept. But on the appointed day and time, they arrived at the
Assembly. I was standing outside, when shouts went up about
"escualidos [i.e. opposition] disguised as Chavistas." Sure enough,
the anti-Chavista students were entering the National Assembly
wearing red t-shirts, a color generally reserved for supporters of
the government.
At first, it was thought that they had merely donned the red to
ensure safe passage through the crowds of Chavista students massed
outside, chanting "education first to the children of the worker,
education second to the children of the bourgeoisie," and, "the
people have spoken, and they are right, now it's Globovisión and
Venevisión's turn [to go off the air]." But the red t-shirts were
far more than a safety strategy: they were an integral part of a
professionally-designed media strategy.
The first speaker to the podium was Douglas Barrios, an opposition
student leader and economics student from the private (and
notoriously-elite) Metropolitan University (UNIMET). His speech,
while well-crafted, contained no arguments, only vague promises of
continued struggle for RCTV and, somewhat paradoxically, a process
of national reconciliation. At the end of his speech, Barrios said:
"I dream of a country in which we can be taken into account without
having to wear a uniform." At this point, he and other opposition
student leaders in the chamber removed their red t-shirts,
revealing a variety of pro-RCTV messages.
The opposition students then began to withdraw from the Assembly,
and it was only the entreaties of the Chavista students and
Assembly members that convinced them to stay to hear the speech by
the first revolutionary student, Andreína Tarazón of the UCV (and
representative of the revolutionary M-28 movement). Tarazón began
by attacking the opposition students' anti-democratic threats to
withdraw from the debate. Comparing their performance to the recent
behavior of Condolezza Rice at the summit of the OAS, in which Rice
attacked Venezuela before withdrawing to avoid critical responses,
Tarazón observed that "they had a march, they demanded freedom of
expression, and when it was granted to them they withdraw."
Tarazón continued, demanding that the opposition students clarify
their concepts. They seem to be confusing, she argued, "libertad de
prensa" (press freedom) and "libertad de empresa" (the freedom of
private businesses). Any productive debate would need to set out
from clarifying what these opposition students mean by freedom of
expression. Tarazón went out of her way, moreover, to attack the
racism, sexism, and otherwise exclusionary nature of RCTV, noting
that Barrios himself had spoken of the "political exile" Nixon
Moreno, a student leader who, among other things, is wanted for
attempted rape. "I can't believe," Tarazón added, "that actresses
would come on television crying because they will no longer be able
to market their bodies as sexual commodities."
After Tarazón's speech, and a brief intervention by Primero
Justicia member Yon Goicochea, in which he again asserted the non-
political nature of their intervention, the opposition students
withdrew from the chamber and the debate, and their exit was
carried live on a national cadena, or simultaneous broadcast on all
channels. The students, after demanding the right to speak in the
Assembly, had withdrawn, refusing to debate with Chavista students.
This being the first time in Venezuelan history that student
organizations of any stripe were invited to address the Assembly,
their departure rightly shocked both Chavistas and anti-Chavistas:
after all, these were the same students who had been professing
their democratic credentials and demanding national debate. But the
most interesting part of the day was yet to come. As the opposition
students were making defiant press declarations before being
hustled out the Assembly's back door to avoid the masses of pro-
Chavista students gathered out front (who were, at the time,
shouting "Cowards! Cowards!" and "Victory, victory, victory of the
people!") they failed to notice that they had forgotten something.
Speeches by the scheduled Chavista students continued, with each
laying out substantive arguments about the nature the Bolivarian
Revolution and its relationship to traditional notions of press
freedom. When it came to be his turn to speak, Chavista student
leader Héctor Rodríguez of the UCV stepped up to the podium with a
sheet of paper that he promptly held up in front of the gathered
deputies. It was the last page of the opposition's scripted
performance in the Assembly, which laid-out the text of the speech
and the exact moment at which Barrios was to remove his red shirt.
And the script was signed by ARS Publicity, a company owned by none
other than the Globovisión media empire. Together with Globovisión
(as well as all other private media outlets), ARS was directly
implicated in the planning and execution of the 2002 media coup
against the constitutional order.
Let's go over this again, slowly: the students' withdrawal from the
National Assembly was scripted. This isn't all that surprising. But
that it was scripted by an organization owned by the opposition
press is quite revealing. It makes transparent not merely the
political nature of the opposition students and the fact that they
don't represent the totality of Venezuelan students, but more
importantly it reveals the fact that the opposition media has
played an active role in planning and structuring this wave of
student protests that they themselves have painted as a
"spontaneous" rebellion.
In the meantime, Globovisión is busy broadcasting some of RCTV's
programs, a tactic which while seemingly benevolent, conveniently
assures Globovisión's control of much of RCTV's former audience
share. And this alongside advertisements sponsored by opposition
party Un Nuevo Tiempo which encourage the population to do all they
can to get RCTV back on the air: "it's in your hands," so the
people are told. But RCTV's hope had been pinned on "the students,"
an apolitical and unified rebellion that threatened to disrupt
Chavista hegemony. Unfortunately for the opposition, the rebellion
was more meticulously-crafted media image than hard reality, and
this image has begun to crack.
George Ciccariello-Maher
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