Foreign policy

Speakers discuss progress in Venezuela

first published in the New Paltz Times

 

Two Ulster County residents, well-known media critic Jeff Cohen and peace
activist Sue Rosenberg, spoke last Sunday night in New Paltz on the question of social changes taking place in Venezuela and relations between Washington and the Caracas government of president Hugo Chavez. Both speakers returned from a fact-finding trip to Venezuela in June.

 

“It’s a privilege to be in the liberated zone of New Paltz,” said Cohen, founder of FAIR [Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting] and author of the just-published book, Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media, as he addressed the packed village hall at the event sponsored by the Caribbean and Latin America Support Project (CLASP) based in New Paltz, a local group that has been holding monthly public meetings in the region for more than two decades.

According to Cohen, who has visited Venezuela multiple times, most recently this past June with the watchdog group “Witness for Peace,” the U.S. government has been highly critical of Chavez in recent years because of his strong opposition to Washington’s globalization and economic neo-liberal policies in Latin America and the world, as well as his close friendship with Cuba. 

“A popular Central American joke is ‘why haven’t there been any coups in the U.S.?’ and they answer, ‘because there’s no U.S. embassy there!’” said Cohen. “Bush and company are trying to subvert this democratically elected leader, who has massive support, by calling him a ‘dictator’ or a ‘proto-dictator’ and supplying millions of dollars to small opposition movements. If he is a dictator, then he is the only one in the history of the world to do so without being in control of the media, an essential tool of dictators.”

In fact, Cohen said, it is well documented that approximately $3 million has been supplied to opposition groups by NED (National Endowment of Democracy). But these revelations of U.S.-funded opposition funneling have been dwarfed by the recently uncovered $26 million the OTI (Office of Transition Initiatives), a secretive branch of the U.S. development agency AID, has been funneling to Chavez opposition groups in the run up to this year’s elections. The Associated Press broke this story and confirmed that OTI has funneled $26 million into Venezuela since 2002, but the organization refuses to say which organizations they have funded. Unlike NED, which under its bylaws is supposed to support non-partisan organizations, OTI can fund whomever it would like.

Cohen warned the audience to stay on top of U.S. involvement in Venezuela as the elections approach, and applauded both the AP and the Los Angeles Times for its “balanced” stories on the situation in Venezuela and the various U.S. financial influences trying to fund opposition movements.

Cohen, who spent many years as a political analyst on FOX News, CNN’s Crossfire and MSNBC, spent hours studying the television programs available to Venezuelans. “The programs cater to the rich, which is a minority of the population,” said Cohen. “You can get the latest news on Paris Hilton or what Tom Cruise said in Japan that night, but as far as any real news or public broadcasting, there is only one channel, the public channel, controlled by Chavez, the provides people with real news. There you see faces of the poor Venezuelans speaking out, or announcing events. There’s a tickertape that scrolls at the bottom announcing where meetings or social events are taking place throughout the barrios.”

What struck both Rosenberg and Cohen in the Venezuelan capital was the socio-economic division. “The media analysts talk about the great divide in America -- blue states and red states -- well let me say this,” said Cohen. “You haven’t seen division until you’ve been to Venezuela.”

According to Cohen, there are a few gated communities for the wealthy Venezuelans, with large boulevards, heavy security and mansions. And then “you look up at the hills surrounding the city and see shacks stacked upon shacks, shanty towns or ranchos, where the majority of Caracans live. They fled to Caracas after the farming land dried up and economic opportunities dried up after years and decades of having one corrupt government after another that squandered their vast oil wealth away.”

Then along comes Chavez. A man from humble origins, an indigenous Venezuelan with school teaching parents and an officer in the military. “He was an intellectual, a populist and, like many of the officers in the military who continued in their education, he crossed paths with the leftist, intellectual scholars.” Armed with radical ideas and a desire to bring social and economic reform to his country, Chavez first came onto the national scene during a failed military coup for which he was jailed for several years. Then in 1998 he won in a landslide victory as the country’s populist hero.

According to Cohen and Rosenberg, one of the first things the Chavez government did was to pull in people from all over the country, small towns, cities and barrios and set them up into think tanks to help write a new constitution for the country.

“See this little book,” said Rosenberg. “There were millions of copies of this printed and every time I spoke with someone they would inevitably bring it out and show me what article of the constitution bolstered their opinion or rights. It is a teaching tool in the schools. Children are asked to find an article in the constitution that best solves a problem or a situation.”

Although several women the two met pointed to an article in the constitution that said a woman’s work in the home is as valuable as it is outside the home and thus entitles them to social security, Rosenberg went on to note that “abortion is not part of the constitution and is still part of a great struggle there.”

Armed with a new constitution of the people, for the people, Chavez’s government then reined in Petavasa, the country’s oil company, and made it pay higher taxes and higher royalties so that the government could begin funding social and economic programs in a country where many were starving and few had any health care or had ever seen a doctor.

“In 2000 he was re-elected under a new constitution and pledged to end the corruption and rebuild the capital,” said Cohen. “The revenue harnessed from Petavasa heavily funded health, food, literacy and land reform programs. It was like our New Deal, only on steroids.”

Rosenberg attested to the change she witnessed this past June in the barrios of Caracas. “You go up these impossibly narrow, bumpy, windy roads, with raw sewage running down them and poverty unlike I’ve ever seen. But when we were brought into people’s homes we learned of how they were running for positions, serving on commissions and working to put this funding to good use. They’re not social programs forced on people, the people get to have a say in what they want and how to use it. One thing they wanted desperately was health care.”

Both Cohen and Rosenberg visited these octagon-like brick structures that are being built throughout the barrios in the hillsides with health clinics on one floor and doctors staffed on the top floor. “Many of the people I spoke to had never been to a doctor or even seen a doctor before!” said Rosenberg. “They’re mostly from Cuba, which is an issue, but there are lots of young Venezuelans training to become doctors and nurses and being sent to Cuba for their medical education with a strong commitment to return and help their neighborhoods.”

“I talked to many people who said they didn’t care if the doctor was Cuban, French, German, they were just happy to have a doctor!” said Cohen.

Loans are being given out to cooperatives, small and large so that the Venezuelans can jumpstart their economy and have jobs. “So many of these people just wanted to work. And now they can. Even if their cooperative is barely surviving, it’s something and it’s theirs,” said Rosenberg.

The two talked about massive urban and rural land reforms the Chavez government is working on to provide people in the cities with titles and deeds to their homes. Many of them had been acquired through “squatting” after the residents fled from the countryside. The government is also trying to reform millions of acres of land for productive farming. “There is a real movement to get people out of the city and have them return to the countryside where the parents’ generations were from. But to do that they need to make it economically viable,” said Cohen.

The media critic also said that it was hard to “dislike a government who sends around its ministry of labor to visit cooperatives and industries and tells people about their rights as workers!” Not only that, “but whenever they hold these meetings they start out by playing the Charlie Chaplin film Modern Times, where he caught in the gears of a factory!”

Chavez charges that Washington is intent upon halting the process of progressive social change taking place in the region.

The United States was implicated in a coup to overthrow the democratically
elected Chavez in 2002. Relations between the two countries have remained
frigid ever since.
 

Both speakers admitted that life was not perfect in Venezuela, which is still suffering from high crime rates, drug use and prison abuse and has areas the social programs have yet to reach, but that it is gaining control of its own country, refueling its citizens and empowering them into action.