http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=90001&d=14&m=12&y=2006&pix=opinion.jpg&category=Opinion´
Thursday, 14, December, 2006 (24, Dhul Qa`dah, 1427)
The Lies Being Told About Venezuela's Chavez
Johann Hari, The Independent
After the landslide victory comes the landslide of lies. Last
week, Hugo Chavez was re-elected as president of Venezuela with 63 percent of
the vote - in an election declared "totally free and fair" by the international
legal monitors, in a country where almost all of the media militantly opposes
him.
I know the reason why. Her name is Maria Gonzalez. She is a
lined, stooped 60 year-old grandmother I stumbled across last year in Barrio
Neuva Tacagua, a fetid slum made of tin and mud in the high hills around
Caracas.
Maria grew up in a Venezuela that was dripping in oil wealth
- but she never went to school and she never saw a doctor, because the
country's petro-profits surged only into the bank accounts of the country's 25
richest families. Like the vast majority of Venezuelans, she was left to live
and die in makeshift rust-and-cardboard shacks.
The day I met her, Maria wrote her name - in shaky
handwriting, on a blackboard - for the first time in her life. Since Hugo
Chavez was first elected, in another free and open election in 1998, Maria's
world has begun to change. The new president began to use the country's oil
wealth to build clinics where Maria could be treated free of charge, to
subsidize food prices for the 70 percent of Venezuelans who, like her, live in
grinding, binding poverty, and to establish mass literacy programs to teach his
country - and a million Marias - how to read.
But somehow, somewhere in-between Maria's Venezuela and the
newspapers and television screens of the US and Britain, Chavez undergoes a
strange transformation. He ceases to be the most popular leader in the
democratic world, and instead morphs into "a grotesque dictator," "like Hitler,
Stalin or Mao."
Why is that? I know of only one persuasive explanation: These
people reporting on Chavez are deeply ingrained in a political culture that
views the rest of the world as a trough for corporate profit. When a
developing-world regime funnels its profits to a handful of rich, they
instinctively describe it as aiding "regional stability" and "democratic."
But when a government uses its resource-riches for people who
live in slums, they become suspect and "a threat to stability."
Let's go through the lies about Hugo Chavez one by one to see
how this deception occurs:
Lie No.1: Chavez is a dictator. In reality, he has been
chosen by the Venezuelan people in elections praised by the Carter Center - the
gold standard for election monitoring across the world - as "impressively
open." This is hardly, as some critics who have never visited Venezuela jeer,
because the people are pickled in Chavista propaganda. Pick up any of
Venezuela's seven national newspapers any day and six of them will blast you
with ferocious anti-Chavez invective. I have been to dictatorships - from
Saddam Hussein's to Bashar Asad's - and they are nothing like this.
Lie No. 2: You can tell what Chavez is really like by looking
at his allies. It is true Chavez has allied himself with some repellent
dictatorships, praising Fidel Castro and - when I met up with him earlier this
year - Robert Mugabe. Similarly, Tony Blair has allied himself with the
torturers and murderers Vladimir Putin, the Chinese Communist Party and found
praise for them all. Does this mean Britain is not a democracy? All democratic
governments make unsavory alliances but it does not reveal the true nature of
the government in Caracas any more than in Westminster.
Lie No. 3: Chavez is suppressing human rights. This
accusation is screamed loudly but with little evidence. Sometimes, the critics
claim there are 200 political prisoners in Venezuela.
Here's the reality. In 2002, an anti-democratic junta
consisting of oil barons, media bosses and a few disgruntled generals kidnapped
Hugo Chavez and announced they were taking over the country. They dissolved
Parliament and the courts, and announced a military lock-down on the streets,
threatening to shoot anybody who came out. The Bush administration jumped in
praising the coup with suspicious speed. With incredible courage, more than a
million democrats descended from the barrios on to the streets around the
Miraflores palace in Caracas, refusing to allow their elected president to be
toppled. The soldiers holding Chavez joined the rebellion, and he was returned
to power.
The only "political prisoners" in Venezuela - the so-called
200 - are the people who directly planned and participated in this attempt to
destroy the country's democracy. If a foreign-funded group had kidnapped Tony
Blair, trashed Parliament and the Old Bailey, and placed Britain under military
curfew, would we imprison so few of the guilty?
Lie No. 4: Chavez is a communist who is determined to
nationalize the whole of the country's economy. This is a Rumsfeldian lie that,
ironically, is also reinforced by some of Chavez's old left supporters in
Britain, such as that smirking Stalinist carbuncle George Galloway. In reality,
Chavez is a European-style social democrat who believes in an active government
that lifts up the poor alongside a vigorous market economy. He calls this
"21st-century socialism."
The tragedy is that in Latin America, under the heel of the
IMF and US power, it takes a revolutionary to be a social democrat.
The evidence for this is pretty overwhelming. During Chavez's
presidency, the proportion of Venezuela's GDP that is in the private sector has
actually increased, and the Caracas Stock Exchange is at an all-time high.
Chavez has not nationalized land; instead, he has redistributed it, breaking
the vast unused landed estates of the rich into smaller packages for landless
peasants. For all his rhetorical praise for Fidel Castro, Chavez's policies are
much more like Abraham Lincoln's Homestead Act of 1862, which doled out the
land in the West to poor people who wanted to settle there.
While market fundamentalism and communism deflate an economy
- look at the history of Latin America for proof - mixed social democratic
states work: Venezuela grew by 12 percent last year. The anti-Chavez critics
carp that this is due to soaring global petrol prices. How do they explain that
in the 1970s when the oil price was - adjusted for inflation - just as high,
the Venezuelan economy hardly grew at all?
No, it's not just the size of your oil money that counts,
it's what you do with it. Chavez is using his petrodollars to carry out the
will of the people - to lift them out of their slums. A woman like Maria does
not need to be tricked or intimidated into voting for Chavez. She is doing it
for a simple reason: He has kept his promises to her. No amount of lies can
bury this bright, shimmering reality.
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