[NYTr] Hugo-Bashing Continues over Venezuelan Constitutional Reform Date: Sat, 18 Aug 2007 13:05:27 -0500 (CDT) Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit [Again, the reports themselves are tediously predictable. We're sending VIO's summary and one or two interesting articles. -NYTr] excerpted from VIO Venezuela Daily News Roundup -August 17, 2007. Summary [Reuters reports today that opposition groups in Venezuela are denouncing the draft constitutional reforms proposed by President Chavez. Ironically, one opposition leader calls the reform process an "attempted coup because it weakens the republic," though the only coup on record under Chavez is that in which the opposition tried to unseat the president in 2002. The constitutional reforms must be approved in a popular referendum, and a public debate has already begun alongside that taking place among lawmakers. Venezuela achieved 75% voter turnout in the last elections, and citizens are expected to be amply involved in this new reform process. Though the constitutional reforms are being touted by some as anti-democratic, the system of checks and balances in Venezuela is in fine shape; the head of Venezuela's state-owned oil company Pdvsa faces punishment for promoting a pro-Chavez political stance, the Associated Press reports today. Rafael Ramirez -- also head of the Energy Ministry -- will be fined by the National Electoral Council for encouraging Pdvsa workers to vote for Chavez. A letter in the Pittsburgh Tribune today also points out that the Venezuelan Supreme Court recently ruled against the administration on the RCTV issue. A Washington Post editorial today expresses extreme disfavor with the constitutional reforms proposed by President Chavez, erroneously asserting that Chavez aims to be "President for life," when in fact the constitution provides for recall referendums that allow citizens to challenge his leadership mid-term. This happened three years ago, and was the third of four electoral victories for President Chavez. Contrary to the editorial's assertion, the political opposition did, in fact, participate in the last presidential elections in Venezuela: they rallied behind opposition governor Manuel Rosales, who lost to Chavez by 26 percentage points. A Hartford Courant editorial demonstrates only vague knowledge of Venezuelan politics by tenuously equating President Chavez with Fidel Castro, and ends by advocating revolution as a solution to the fact that "a people with a democratic tradition... [must] put up with a caudillo." Here again, the fact that President Chavez has survived four electoral processes is either forgotten, or Venezuelan voters are deemed irresponsible. The Miami Herald takes rumors as truths in a story today that espouses fear-inducing statements like this one: "Government opponents say [Chavez] is trying creating the means to suppress dissent and defend his presidency at all costs." No mention is made of the fact that all opposition parties withdrew from congressional elections in 2005, essentially forfeiting participation in the current National Assembly, which is simply described as "controlled by government allies." The South Florida Sun-Sentinel also relies entirely on opposition voices for its piece on Venezuelan expats, who claim "We're losing our country," but paradoxically freely elect to leave. In today's Guardian Unlimited, John Pilger draws the parallel between U.S. interventions that unseated democratic regimes in Latin America in previous decades (for example, in Chile and Nicaragua) and the campaign to discredit President Chavez. Venezuela's entrenched elite are feeling the threat of a new pro-poor orientation in government policy, and the opposition-controlled media has rallied in an attempt to sustain the status quo. With something of a global consensus surrounding neoliberalism, the Guardian piece asserts, "These days, of course, any true reforms are exotic." -VIO] *** AP via International Herald Tribune - August 16, 2007 http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/08/17/america/LA-GEN-Venezuela-Election-Fine.php Venezuela oil chief fined for telling employees to back Chavez in vote The Associated Press CARACAS, Venezuela: The chief of Venezuela's state-run oil firm was fined US$8,750 (?6,500) by electoral officials for telling employees to back President Hugo Chavez in last year's election or quit their jobs. The National Election Council on Thursday announced the penalty levied against Petroleos de Venezuela SA president Rafael Ramirez, who was captured on video telling PDVSA workers it would be "a crime, a counterrevolutionary act" to remain at the company without showing political support for Chavez. Ramirez also told them PDVSA had fired an employee for allowing Chavez's electoral rival to land an aircraft on company grounds, and other "enemies" would be purged if necessary. He has denied any wrongdoing. The closed-door speech, delivered weeks before the December vote, was determined to have violated electoral rules barring government institutions from backing candidates. Ramirez has until Aug. 30 to pay the fine, the council said in a statement on its Web site. Opposition leaders called for an investigation, but Chavez has defended Ramirez and previously urged his supporters to take up a collection to pay a possible fine. He also has said any oil workers who do not back his government should pack up and move to Miami. The president's critics also accuse PDVSA and other institutions of pressuring state workers to join his new ruling party, charges officials dismiss as part of a U.S.-led smear campaign. Chavez easily won the election, which international observers have said was fair and transparent. *** The Guardian - August 17, 2007 http://www.guardian.co.uk/venezuela/story/0,,2150654,00.html The old Iran-Contra death squad gang is desperate to discredit Chavez By John Pilger Democracy and hope in Latin America have been revived by Venezuela's leader. But the forces allied against him are formidable. I walked with Roberto Navarrete into the national stadium in Santiago, Chile. With the southern winter's wind skating down from the Andes, it was empty and ghostly. Little had changed, he said: the chicken wire, the broken seats, the tunnel to the changing rooms from which the screams echoed. We stopped at a large number 28. "This is where I was, facing the scoreboard. This is where I was called to be tortured." Thousands of "the detained and the disappeared" were imprisoned in the stadium following the Washington-backed coup by General Pinochet against the democracy of Salvador Allende on September 11 1973. For the majority people of Latin America, the abandonados, the infamy and historical lesson of the first "9/11" have never been forgotten. "In the Allende years, we had a hope the human spirit would triumph," said Roberto. "But in Latin America those believing they are born to rule behave with such brutality to defend their rights, their property, their hold over society that they approach true fascism. People who are well-dressed, whose houses are full of food, bang pots in the streets in protest as though they don't have anything. This is what we had in Chile 36 years ago. This is what we see in Venezuela today. It is as if ChC!vez is Allende. It is so evocative for me." In making my film The War on Democracy, I sought the help of Chileans like Roberto and his family, and Sara de Witt, who courageously returned with me to the torture chambers at Villa Grimaldi, which she somehow survived. Together with other Latin Americans who knew the tyrannies, they bear witness to the pattern and meaning of the propaganda and lies now aimed at undermining another epic bid to renew both democracy and freedom on the continent. The disinformation that helped destroy Allende and give rise to Pinochet's horrors worked the same in Nicaragua, where the Sandinistas had the temerity to implement modest, popular reforms. In both countries, the CIA funded the leading opposition media, although they need not have bothered. In Nicaragua, the fake martyrdom of La Prensa became a cause for North America's leading liberal journalists, who seriously debated whether a poverty-stricken country of 3 million peasants posed a "threat" to the United States. Ronald Reagan agreed and declared a state of emergency to combat the monster at the gates. In Britain, whose Thatcher government "absolutely endorsed" US policy, the standard censorship by omission applied. In examining 500 articles that dealt with Nicaragua in the early 1980s, the historian Mark Curtis found an almost universal suppression of the achievements of the Sandinista government - "remarkable by any standards" - in favour of the falsehood of "the threat of a communist takeover". The similarities in the campaign against the phenomenal rise of popular democratic movements today are striking. Aimed principally at Venezuela, especially ChC!vez, the virulence of the attacks suggests that something exciting is taking place; and it is. Thousands of poor Venezuelans are seeing a doctor for the first time in their lives, having their children immunised and drinking clean water. New universities have opened their doors to the poor, breaking the privilege of competitive institutions effectively controlled by a "middle class" in a country where there is no middle. In barrio La LC-nea, Beatrice Balazo told me her children were the first generation of the poor to attend a full day's school. "I have seen their confidence blossom like flowers," she said. One night in barrio La Vega, in a bare room beneath a single lightbulb, I watched Mavis Mendez, aged 94, learn to write her own name for the first time. More than 25,000 communal councils have been set up in parallel to the old, corrupt local bureaucracies. Many are spectacles of raw grassroots democracy. Spokespeople are elected, yet all decisions, ideas and spending have to be approved by a community assembly. In towns long controlled by oligarchs and their servile media, this explosion of popular power has begun to change lives in the way Beatrice described. It is this new confidence of Venezuela's "invisible people" that has so inflamed those who live in suburbs called country club. Behind their walls and dogs, they remind me of white South Africans. Venezuela's wild west media is mostly theirs; 80% of broadcasting and almost all the 118 newspaper companies are privately owned. Until recently one television shock jock liked to call ChC!vez, who is mixed race, a "monkey". Front pages depict the president as Hitler, or as Stalin (the connection being that both like babies). Among broadcasters crying censorship loudest are those bankrolled by the National Endowment for Democracy, the CIA in spirit if not name. "We had a deadly weapon, the media," said an admiral who was one of the coup plotters in 2002. The TV station, RCTV, never prosecuted for its part in the attempt to overthrow the elected government, lost only its terrestrial licence and is still broadcasting on satellite and cable. Yet, as in Nicaragua, the "treatment" of RCTV is a cause celebre for those in Britain and the US affronted by the sheer audacity and popularity of ChC!vez, whom they smear as "power crazed" and a "tyrant". That he is the authentic product of a popular awakening is suppressed. Even the description of him as a "radical socialist", usually in the pejorative, wilfully ignores the fact that he is a nationalist and social democrat, a label many in Britain's Labour party were once proud to wear. In Washington, the old Iran-Contra death squad gang, back in power under Bush, fear the economic bridges ChC!vez is building in the region, such as the use of Venezuela's oil revenue to end IMF slavery. That he maintains a neoliberal economy, described by the American Banker as "the envy of the banking world" is seldom raised as valid criticism of his limited reforms. These days, of course, any true reforms are exotic. And as liberal elites under Blair and Bush fail to defend their own basic liberties, they watch the very concept of democracy as a liberal preserve challenged on a continent about which Richard Nixon once said "people don't give a shit". However much they play the man, ChC!vez, their arrogance cannot accept that the seed of Rousseau's idea of direct popular sovereignty may have been planted among the poorest, yet again, and "the hope of the human spirit", of which Roberto spoke in the stadium, has returned. * ================================================================= .NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems . Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us . .339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org . List Archives: https://blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/ . Subscribe: https://blythe-systems.com/mailman/listinfo/nytr =================================================================