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[Hagerty comment: The following article is somewhat long, but it is well worth the time it takes to read the entire interview. Significantly more material is covered than the following summary can provide.]
SF IMC Interviews Al Giordano on Venezuela, the media, and anarchism
(nessie, San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center, December 20, 2002)
[Al Giordano is the publisher of The Narco News Bulletin. A former political reporter for the Boston Phoenix, Giordano has also written for The Nation, The Washington Post, American Journalism Review, Evergreen Review, IndyMedia, and scores of other periodicals. He is also a veteran radio, TV, and Internet journalist.]
In fact, we (and that �we� includes IndyMedia) have an enormous network of friends and allies on the ground there who are the ones Venezuelans proudly call Community Journalists. The independent media movement in Venezuela is the most advanced in the hemisphere, probably in the world. There are 25 Community TV and Radio stations in Venezuela, many of which began as "pirate stations," one dating back to the 1960s, that were legalized under the Bolivarian Constitution of 1999. The movement also includes important print and Internet publications. . . . Anyone who has been reading the Aporrea site for the past two weeks has witnessed, time and time again, how the people from the grassroots are leading and pushing Ch�vez to resist the coup, not vice versa. . . . There's something very racist in the reporting of simulators like the British journalist Phil Gunson, a freelance mercenary who has published knowingly false stories recently in Newsweek/MSNBC, the Christian Science Monitor and the daily newspaper of coup-plotters everywhere, the Miami Herald. There's something positively sleazy about this guy and his work. . . . You can see the frustration on their faces of having to report on this dark-skinned hawk-nosed soldier who is smarter and more popular than they are, and who during a five hour press conference answers all their snotty questions in great detail - Imagine Bush or Gore or Clinton ever doing that! . . . You can see them, these divine caste "reporters," wince as it happens because they know that Ch�vez is not the buffoon they try to portray him to be. He's smarter than they are. In fact, if anything, he's very suave and smooth, which is why his five-hour live TV shows every Sunday - "Alo Presidente!" - are the most popular or at least one of the most popular programs in the country. Whole families gather every Sunday to watch the show, on which he takes live phone calls. . . . For days the popular organizations, from the neighborhoods and towns, were writing open letters to Ch�vez and the government, demanding that he do something about the constant stream of lies and bile being spread by the Commercial TV stations as the media invented a so-called "strike" that was not happening in the majority of Venezuelan neighborhoods or towns! The people were seeing one portrayal on TV that did not reflect the reality on their streets, where shops were open, where people were working, and working hard, as is another trademark of poor Venezuelans. They have to work hard in order to eat! . . . The real story is going on in the barrios, in the hills, in the poor and working neighborhoods and towns. It is a revolutionary process, sweeping away decades of a caste system and its injustices. . . . What has changed most markedly among Venezuela's poor majority is the same thing that changed among the indigenous communities of Chiapas and much of Mexico beginning in 1994: the people's view of themselves. . . . They're not available any more to sign up for duty as slaves. And this is what drives the former ruling class crazy. . . . There's a self-led reorganization of the economy from the bottom up. Everything is changing. . . . The seeds of a South American Union are beginning to sprout. It was Ch�vez in Venezuela who first brought Sim�n Bol�var's dream of a united Latin America back into the datasphere, the international public discourse, as a possibility. And the globalized economic forces, led by Washington and Wall Street, have placed him and Venezuela under a savage attack. . . . If Venezuela falls to a U.S. coup, it's going to turn the clock back 30 years in the entire hemisphere. We'll be right back in Santiago de Chile, September 11, 1973. Pinochet rounded up and shot all the anarchists, too, you know. Remember that the Chile coup led to Operation Condor and military dictatorship terror in Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil, and Bolivia among other places. The cancer spread all the way to Mexico. THAT is what is being attempted right now. The people whining about Ch�vez today are like those who whined about Allende in the early 70s . . . he wasn't politically perfect enough for them. Well, look what they got. Chile 1973 wasn't about Allende, and Venezuela 2002-2003 is not about Ch�vez. It's the entire social process in all Am�rica that rides on this one. . . . anarchist thought and action have to confront the single biggest shift of our times in State Power. State Power has shifted from governments to economic institutions . . . Today, in Venezuela, the uniformed Armed Forces build housing and infrastructure. It's interesting; one of the key demands of the �opposition� is to prohibit the army from building houses! The poor cheer when the military enters their neighborhoods, because they're usually coming to build some houses. Not, like before, when they came to round up the dissidents and repress the social movements. . . . Ch�vez's reform of the military, his purge of the "School of the Americas" trained coup-plotters, his opening the spaces for Community TV and radio, his political movement's creation of and support for the Bolivarian Circles, this, no one can deny, is a revolution by any standard. I'm not going to hold it against him or them that they did it via an electoral path. To the contrary, the Venezuelan "war machine" has drawn a new map for how to navigate government power to fight the larger global State. In April, the battle forever changed the military. In December, the battle forever changed the oil apparatus and economic structure. Next up: the revolution in Media. . . . The only respectable anarchist position is to fight tooth and nail against these coup attempts. Who was it that said, "the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who remain neutral at times of moral crisis." People who sit on the sidelines today, make themselves deservedly irrelevant tomorrow. I don't want to share a foxhole with people like that. I say to them, "see ya across the barricades. I'll be on the side with the masses."

posted by LoZo 6:58 PM

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AP�s One-Sided Venezuela Coverage
(Dan Feder, Narco News Bulletin, December 18, 2002)
The statement seemed clear enough. After a total of 25 hours of negotiations that framed this past weekend, the Organization of American States � representing 34 governments - released a much-awaited declaration on the crisis in Venezuela. The OAS rejected any solution that is not consistent with the Venezuelan constitution � which went into law with the support of President Hugo Ch�vez in 1999 only after the entire nation approved the text in a referendum � and �fully support(s) the democratic and constitutional order of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, whose government is headed by Hugo Ch�vez Fr�as.� . . . But the Associated Press (AP)�s Nestor Ikeda, who until yesterday had not written on Venezuela since the coup last April, doesn�t seem to get it. And looking at the coverage AP has provided on Venezuela for the last two weeks, this is hardly surprising . . . Ikeda apparently felt the need to bend over backwards trying to prove that the OAS had, in fact, �given no direct support to Chavez.� What could have been more direct than the above statement? A photo of the 34 ambassadors wearing red berets shouting �viva la revoluci�n bolivariana?� . . . How long can people like Ikeda deny that the opposition has lost the bulk of the international support that it once had? . . . Some of AP�s other reporters have been producing simply awful journalism since long before Ikeda joined this round of the Venezuelan tug-of-war. AP stories are picked up by thousands of newspapers large and small across the country every day, and are often read by newscasters on the radio and television. So the tone they set and messages they break to the public are no small matter; they lie at the heart of the media-created reality through which most United States citizens and many English-speaking people in other countries experience the larger world. . . . The very structure of the AP -- the impersonal bureaucracy through which this huge volume of information is filtered -- encourages �desk reporting� from foreign correspondents. This means gleaning stories from the local commercial newspapers and taking phone calls from Embassy, political, and corporate spin-doctors rather than going outside and talking to the real people their stories concern. According to many familiar with the organization, AP correspondents are typically wined and dined by the English-speaking elites in the Third World outposts where they are assigned. . . . In sum, the typical AP report on a major event in a foreign country is first filtered through a friendly English-speaking establishment spin-doctor before reaching the writer, then filtered through a giant bureaucracy of AP editors with no relationship to either the writer or the ultimate reader, and finally chosen, not chosen or tampered with by news editors at the commercial media outlets who buy the story. . . . Rather than the heroic working-class resistance suggested by the term �general strike� --chosen no doubt to inspire sympathy from working people in Venezuela and around the world -- it is Venezuela�s business class that has conspired to shut out its workers and close down its shops. And as a conspiracy, it�s failed miserably � most of the owners and white-collar workers who participated went back to work after only a few days. Only the participation of the oil industry gave the opposition the power to really threaten the government. . . . While the opposition movement doubles in size and strength every day in the fantasy world created for AP correspondents, in the real world stores are now open again, the government has removed the disruptive management of the state oil company, and other Latin American nations have now put the brakes on U.S. efforts to make the Organization of American States the mechanism for foreign intervention. . . . the AP Managing Editors Association must, to regain lost credibility, reform the way foreign news is �reported� � with a particular eye on Latin America � with a series of checks and balances that provide greater accountability, a mechanism to receive and act on complaints by readers and subjects alike, and an insistence that AP correspondents get up from their desks and interview real people to counter the triumph of the spin-doctors over AP�s foreign bureaus.

posted by LoZo 8:30 AM

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Am�rica Reborn: 32 Nations Back Venezuela
(Narco News Bulletin, December 17, 2002)
the Organization of American States (OAS), for the first time in the organization�s history, rejected a major United States initiative. . . . The OAS backed, by a vote of 32-0 � with two countries not counted � a resolution to support the continuance of the democratically elected government of Hugo Ch�vez of Venezuela. . . . The nations of the Western Hemisphere rejected, once and for all, any attempt at coup d�etat, in Venezuela or elsewhere. . . . In a veiled message of �no confidence� for its own secretary general�s pro-coup efforts in Caracas over the past 15 days, the Organization of American States equally called upon the Carter Center and the United Nations to promote dialogue in Venezuela, but not to permit any coup attempt nor pretension of interrupting democracy; not even by the OAS�s own representative.
The foreign ministries of Mexico and Peru � who had, 48 hours ago, been willing patsies for Washington in this historic debate - stuck their fingers in the air, and saw which way the wind was blowing. And by voting with the majority they kept the door open for their membership in the New American Union that will gain traction in 2003.

posted by LoZo 5:39 AM

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White House Venezuela Error Backfires
(Al Giordano, Narco News Bulletin, December 16, 2002)
Friday�s desperate maneuver by U.S. President George W. Bush � his cynical call for �early elections� in Venezuela, a country that has had six national elections in the past four years � has backfired after it was revealed as unconstitutional. . . . The final and total collapse of efforts to close shops and lock out workers by businesses owners � dishonestly called a �strike� by commercial media for the past two weeks: By Monday morning, almost every store in the wealthy neighborhoods and suburbs of Eastern Caracas (the last holdouts in �The Strike That Wasn�t�) opened for business. . . . 90 percent of all contracted oil industry employees have returned to work, now that saboteur executives have been fired and removed from their offices. . . . There were also violent clashes between police and blockaders at 10 locations. Although the simulating Associated Press refers to this as �spiraling� out of control� violence,� there were no deaths before the blockade disbanded. Despite commercial media spin that the failed blockades were somehow an �escalation� of the �strike,� the true intent was to mask the fact that almost every shop and store in Venezuela, including in the wealthy sectors, is now open for business. . . . The response of twice-elected Venezuelan President Hugo Ch�vez to the White House, saying that U.S. officials were �confused� because their �early elections� call would violate the Venezuelan Constitution. . . . It took White House diplomatic and legal counsel four days to amend its �early elections� call to one for a non-binding referendum. And Fleischer continues to try and spin it dishonestly as �that�s what we meant all along!� . . . The anti-democracy faction in OAS (Bush's United States with Vicente Fox�s Mexico, Alejandro Toledo�s Peru, and Alvaro Uribe�s Colombia, and a few other countries) is in a panicked hurry to try and force a �diplomatic junta� on Venezuela before January 1st, when Brazil inaugurates its new president Lula de la Silva, the popular Workers Party leader of Latin America�s largest nation who will become the hemisphere�s main interlocutor with the United States and the world. Ten days later, on January 10th, Ecuador will inaugurate Colonel Lucio Guti�rrez as president, further weakening the anti-democracy crowd�s grip over the OAS.

posted by LoZo 5:36 AM

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Bush�s Desperate Venezuela Statement
(Al Giordano, Narco News Bulletin, December 13, 2002)
Today's Statement by the Press Secretary of the White House that �Calls for Early Elections� in Venezuela inadvertently reveals the Bush administration�s efforts against democracy in that country, and its fears that the total collapse of its foreign coup attempt is only days away. . . . The White House statement reveals that Organization of American States secretary general Cesar Gaviria is not an authentic �mediator� in Venezuela, but, rather, a biased pro-coup agent of Bush administration efforts to destroy yet another democracy in our Am�rica. . . . Gaviria has been installed in Caracas to destabilize the situation and bolster the false portrayal by commercial media that there is a �general strike,� of which there is not. The majority of stores in Venezuela are open. The subways are moving, air traffic is moving, and despite the concerted actions of executives of the Venezuelan oil company to lock out workers and sabotage refineries, oil is flowing again. We urge you to read between the lines. . . . The White House really means: �Gaviria has followed our script, but we only have a few more days of being able to sustain the false media image of a �crisis� or �national strike.� In three days a tanker with 550,000 barrels of crude oil that left from Venezuela yesterday will arrive on United States shores, proving that the �strike� was a media myth. Gaviria only has a few more days left of isolated disturbances by an exhausted upper class to use as an excuse to destabilize Venezuela. The coup is falling apart. The clock is ticking and we are trying to revive it.� . . . Court Appointed President George W. Bush has no moral or legal standing in Latin America to insist on a seventh election just because he didn�t like the results of the previous six. . . . The Big Lie of a �popular strike� in Venezuela is crumbling, as all lies crumble eventually. This one just happens to be crumbling faster than most, because of the heroic efforts of the Venezuelan majority, and its wisdom to have not been fooled by media simulation. . . . Today, the White House took off its mask and admitted for the first time that it was never in favor of Constitutional rule in Venezuela. Its agenda has always been unconstitutional. Today�s statement was meant only to give oxygen to the dying �strike of the spoiled brats,� a desperate maneuver that should and will fail. . . . The United States Congress should call immediate investigations and public hearings into the now-transparent behavior of the executive branch in manipulating a coup d�etat in Venezuela.

posted by LoZo 7:31 AM

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Copy Cat Journalists Forero and Miller
(Dan Feder, Narco News, December 12, 2002)
Juan Forero�s extraordinary dispatch from Caracas for Tuesday�s New York Times is, at first glance, simply the standard parade of half-truths and distortions we�ve come to expect from this correspondent for the �paper of record� when he covers our Am�rica. . . . Opening Tuesday�s LA Times, one comes across the headline �Venezuelan Merchants Feeling Pain of Strike.� Sound familiar? (Forero�s NYT dispatch, again, was titled, �In Venezuela�s General Strike, the Pinch Becomes Pain.�) But this story is purportedly by T. Christian Miller, it must be different. One�s eyes move down to the dateline: �El Hatillo, Venezuela.� Must be a coincidence; keep reading. As the article � much shorter than its counterpart in the NY Times � continues, we are reacquainted with our old friends: furniture vendor Gloria Mugarra, Harvard economist Ricardo Hausmann, and art market manager Javier Mart�n (this time with no accent mark in his last name; I�ll give Forero the benefit of the doubt on the correct spelling), who all give more or less the same quotes. . . . What are we to make of this? Two reporters from rival papers file the same �human interest� story on Venezuela on the same day, with the same subjects and the same academic authority weighing in? . . . So, in all likelihood, this was a story manufactured by some element of the opposition for whom Forero and Miller turned their newspapers into willing pawns. If they were paraded around separately, but still ended up writing the same story, this represents a very clever little piece of PR executed by the pro-coup forces. In any case, both correspondents should have disclosed such details.

posted by LoZo 6:30 AM

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A People Defends its Democracy Against Media Power
(Maximillien Arvelaiz, The Narco News Bulletin, December 10, 2002)
Enough already with the lies: At the hour that I write you the people of Venezuela have left their homes to rescue their petroleum industry and put an end to the lies of the Venezuelan private-sector media. Thousands and thousands of Venezuelans assemble peacefully in front of the headquarters of Globovision, Venevision, RCTV, Televen and Meridiano TV in Caracas. And in the city of Maracay, the people have taken TV5 and the daily El Arag�e�o, calling upon President Ch�vez �to govern,� and referring to the mass media as �media terrorists.� Other groups march now toward the offices of the newspaper El Nacional. . . . The Venezuelan People, once again, are showing a lesson to the entire world, defending their democracy from the pro-coup terrorism that exists through the power of the Commercial Media.

posted by LoZo 4:52 PM

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Racist rage of the Caracas elite
(Richard Gott, The Guardian, December 10, 2002)
For the past year or more, Venezuela's upper and middle classes, opposed to Chavez's government, have protested in the wealthy new neighbourhoods of Caracas, while the poor (the vast majority of the city's population) have come from their shantytowns and demonstrated to defend "their" president. . . . The opposition has been hoping to repeat in December what it failed to achieve in April, but the situation is no longer the same. The armed forces are now more solidly behind the president than before. The most conservative generals no longer hold important commands; those involved in the April coup attempt have all been sent into retirement. . . . Perhaps even more significant than the changing attitude of the military and of the US is the fact that the poor are more mobilised now, to such an extent that there is talk of a possible civil war. Until the April coup, the poor had voted for Chavez repeatedly, but his revolutionary programme was directed from above, without much popular participation. After the coup, which revealed that the opposition sought to impose a regime on Pinochet lines, the people realised that they had a government that they needed to defend. The opposition's protest marches have now conjured up a phenomenon that most of the middle and upper classes might have preferred to have left sleeping - the spectre of a class and race war. . . . Only a racism that dates back five centuries - of the European settlers towards their African slaves and the country's indigenous inhabitants - can adequately explain the degree of hatred aroused. Chavez - who is more black and Indian than white, and makes no secret of his aim to be the president of the poor - is the focus of this racist rage. . . . Petroleos de Venezuela, often described as the fifth largest oil exporter in the world, and an important supplier to the US. Nationalised more than 25 years ago, it has been run over the years for the exclusive benefit of its employees and managers - its profits being invested everywhere except Venezuela. Before the arrival of Chavez, it was being prepared for privatisation, to the satisfaction of the engineers and directors who would have benefited. But with a block placed on privatisation by the new Venezuelan constitution, the company's middle class and prosperous elite has been happy to be used as a shock weapon by the leaders of the Pinochet-style opposition, and they have tried to bring their entire industry to a halt.

posted by LoZo 4:48 PM

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People Rise Up Against Commercial Media
(Alex Main, Narco News Bulletin, December 10, 2002)
Thousands of people have surrounded the headquarters of five commercial television stations (RCTV, Globovision, TVS, Meridiano TV, Venevision) and are treating them to one hell of a cazerolazo (pot-banging). They are shouting "medios golpistas!" (putschist media) and "terroristas!". The channels have stopped (probably only briefly) broadcasting anti governmental propaganda and are at last giving some pro governmental demonstrations some coverage. . . . the images of the demonstrators: many women, old men (banging away impressively for their age), very ordinary looking citizens, many still in their work clothes. No sticks, no guns, no people trying to climb over the fences and walls of the establishments. Just peaceful groups of citizens saying: we've had enough, how about showing a little bit of us now instead of always showing rich folks demonstrating in the east of Caracas and instead of trying by any means possible to make your audiences think that this government is undemocratic, dictatorial, and "castro-communist." . . . These people are of course being depicted as mobs of uneducated, bloodthirsty Chavistas that dream of savagely attacking journalists.

posted by LoZo 4:42 PM

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USA intelligence agencies in plot to oust Venezuela's President
(VHeadline.com, December 12, 2002)
Uruguayan EP-FA congressman Jose Nayardi says he has information that far-reaching plans have been put into operation by the CIA and other North American intelligence agencies to overthrow Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez Frias within the next 72 hours. . . . Nayardi says he has received copies of top-secret communications between the Bush administration in Washington and the government of Uruguay requesting the latter's cooperation to support white collar executives and trade union activists "to break down levels of intransigence within the Chavez Frias administration." . . . "The problem is that Venezuelan television and major newspapers have been hiding the true fact that there are huge popular uprisings in support of the Chavez Frias government ... now that Venezuelans are beginning to understand that they have been duped by the anti-government media, they are demanding that these information channels should begin to tell the truth!"

posted by LoZo 4:39 PM

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Chronicle of Predicted Deaths
(Thierry Deronne, Maximillien Arvelaiz, and Paul Emile-Dupret, The Narco News Bulletin, December 7, 2002)
CARACAS, VENEZUELA, 9:35 PM: A few hours ago, as many had predicted, unidentified snipers fired shots against government opponents who accompanied the rebel military officials at Plaza Francia, in the heart of Altamira, a wealthy neighborhood of Caracas. Two are counted dead and at least six wounded. At prime television viewing hours, the moment in which Carlos Ortega, the head of an opposition union, demanded on live TV that the Organization of American States intervene in Venezuela, as the TV screen titled the story "Massacre in Altamira." Most of the commercial TV media broadcast his statement live, as he accused President Hugo Chavez of being an assassin. . . . The minority opposition movement, after failing to unite the people behind its "general strike," had nothing left except to foment violence in order to accuse Chavez of repression. Last April, the victims of snipers, blamed by the White House on Chavez, served as the pretext to launch a coup d'etat. This time, incapable of gaining the support of the army, the same factions sought to create conditions of international intervention, with the same objective: Remove a democratically elected president who causes problems for the current plans of the Bush administration. . . . Manipulated directly or indirectly by the dominant press agencies, the world's media has started, again, calling this country "ungovernable, cut in two, and of a Chavez who is authoritarian and repressive." For weeks, a rumor has spread about Venezuela being unable to meet its obligations to supply oil, a matter directly related to the national interests of the United States. The Washington Post editorial of friday, November 19, was revealing in this aspect, asking the Bush government to "act before it is too late." The rumor became a reality two days ago when the captain of an oil tanker, in spite of the opposition by his own sailors, refused to move the ship. The Venezuelan government appeared to lose control of the situation in the eyes of the world. The deaths tonight only reinforce this sentiment. . . . It doesn't matter that the "general strike" launched five days ago failed. It doesn't matter that the opposition doesn't have public support and that the majority of Venezuela's people continue supporting this process of change led by Chavez. The Venezuelan situation demonstrates that a minority of people in alliance with a media monopoly - and certainly the support of powerful sectors in the world - can cause the blockage of a voted-upon change and social transformation. . . . Today the essential task is not to define one self as "for or against Chavez," but, rather, to defend democracy in Venezuela and everywhere.

posted by LoZo 11:55 AM