John Dinges on Venezuela

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dear John Dinges,

I stumbled across your CJR article on the Venezuelan press through a rave
review on Marc Cooper's blog. Since Marc, who apparently is an old friend
of yours from Allende's Chile, has staked out "The God that Failed"
territory with Paul Berman and Christopher Hitchens recently, I fully
expected your article to be 100 percent crapola. As it turns out, it is
only half-crapola. Congratulations.

To begin with, I must commend you for a bravura centrist performance. By
staking out a position between the "extremism" on both sides in Venezuela,
you remain true to the NPR ethos that you must have absorbed in your tenure
there as managing editor. It is the same sort of centrism that was on
display in their coverage of the war in Iraq and that led Scott Sherman to
make these observations in a long article in the Nation Magazine on NPR
three months ago:

>>Since 9/11 NPR's ombudsman, Jeffrey Dvorkin, has devoted a number of his
columns at npr.org to the network's coverage of the Bush Administration and
the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's perhaps too early for a definitive
assessment of NPR's reporting on these subjects, but what's clear is that
quite a few listeners are dissatisfied with the coverage of George W. Bush
and his foreign policy. Consider a recent missive from Richard Steinman, a
research scientist at Columbia University. On the weekend of March 19,
2005, Steinman turned on his radio, looking for coverage of the
demonstrations that marked the second anniversary of the Iraq War. In a
subsequent letter to Dvorkin, Steinman recounted NPR's programming choices
that weekend: "a 'patriotic,' feel-good West Point piece; sports fans'
feelings toward a baseball player (yes, steroids); more feel-good filler
about an Iraqi-American painter and her use of color; Bantu Refugees Adjust
to New Lives in America. Quote from the story: 'we give the government of
America the high five'; Army Chefs Battle for Best-Dish Honors; a singing
physics professor."<<

Although I will give you credit for acknowledging Chavez's popularity among
the poor and for distancing yourself from the kind of hysteria in liberal
circles in the USA that no doubt led to Cooper's characterization of him as
a "Frankenstein," I do believe that the section of your article that deals
with Teodor Petkoff to be both tendentious and propagandistic.

Let me cite it in its entirety:

>>Teodoro Petkoff may be the closest thing to a genuinely independent
journalist in Venezuela. It helps that he owns his own newspaper, Tal Cual,
a thin afternoon daily that combines brainy, fact-laden editorials with
bitingly humorous news reports. He is an acerbic critic of the government,
but he condemned the military coup and keeps the opposition at arms length.
Petkoff describes himself as a one-time revolutionary who learned to
appreciate democracy and to reject all forms of militarism and
totalitarianism. He is a man of the left who wants the Chavez experiment to
succeed, and while he applauds its attention to the poor he faults the
government for not using its oil profits for long-term investment and job
creation. He sees Chavez as a military man with an authoritarian streak and
an indelible suspicion of a free press. "He has one foot in democracy, one
foot in authoritarianism. But he is going to maintain that ambiguity, that
unstable equilibrium. He is not going to become a dictator," Petkoff predicted.

Petkoff is optimistic about the future of both democracy and the media.
More than devotion to journalistic principle, it is the prospect of six
more years of Chavez, plus the fear of sanctions under the new press laws,
that have put the media owners on a more balanced path, he says.<<

full:
<http://www.cjr.org/issues/2005/4/dinges.asp>http://www.cjr.org/issues/2005/4/dinges.asp

Let us perform an exegesis on this ungainly clot of prose that might pass
muster in the Columbia Journalism School but not among the more critical
minded. You state that Petkoff faults the government for eschewing
"long-term investment and job creation." Don't you think that you owe it to
your readers to put this into some kind of context? We are not dealing with
some sort of disinterested Keynesianism here. Petkoff has a history as a
finance minister in the government that preceded Chavez's. In an April 19,
1996 report, The Financial Times made it clear that Petkoff was like
Argentina's Menem or any other of the politicians ramming neoliberalism
down the throat of the poor:

>>Far from having qualms about his new job, the socialist minister assures
foreign investors about Venezuela's commitment to implement market-oriented
reform and to seek an agreement with the IMF. Mr Michel Camdessus, IMF
managing director, said yesterday he was 'optimistic' the IMF and Venezuela
would be able to reach an agreement on a loan package soon. 'I hope we will
see in the next few days a conclusion of the negotiations,' he said.<<

When Petkoff was finance minister, he had a chance to demonstrate his
commitment to Venezuelans about the benefits of "long-term investment." In
a Jun 13 1996 InterPress article by Humberto Marquez, we learn:

"Venezuela is trying to attract investment in oil and petroleum
derivatives, mining, tourism, telecommunications and construction. And it
is seeking buyers for shares in enterprises to be privatised, including
aluminum, steel, telephones, electricity, tourism and transport.

"The Agenda, whose stringent adjustment of the buying power of Venezuelans
- four out of five of whom are poor - began to go into effect in April,
with the aim of taming inflation and restoring fiscal balance based mainly
on higher revenues.

"The government instrumented a sixfold rise in fuel prices - the oil sector
is a State monopoly - and its second 70 percent devaluation in four months.
And it freed up the currency, prices, rates on public services and interest
rates, while parliament was asked to raise sales taxes from 12.4 to 16.5
percent."

So beneath all of Petkoff's lofty phrases about "democracy" and
"investment," we discover a track record that led to the class polarization
that swept Chavez into power and that keeps him there now.

Finally, on the question of Chavez's alleged human rights violations, I
think it is useful to remember the state of affairs that existed in
Venezuela in the period that Petkoff waxes nostalgic for:

>>Between October 1994 and September 1995, security forces killed 126
people, 46 in extra judicial executions, and 28 while they were in police
or military custody. Authoritarianism and repression are growing. Of 13,941
arbitrary detentions, 94 per cent occurred during anti crime operations
mainly in poor neighbourhoods. Amnesty International has detailed many
examples of miscarriages of justice and claims that the main perpetrators
of human rights violations are agents of the state. It is not that the
country is lawless. On the contrary. There is, for example, a Vagrancy Act
in operation which allows the police to arrest and detain without charge,
and for up to three months, anyone considered "vagrant". As the local
police stations cannot cope with so many detainees it has become common
practice to "sell" them to the bigger prisons where the most horrible and
horrifying abuse is meted out to them. It is hardly surprising, that AIDS
has become rampant within the prison system; hardly surprising that up to
four prisoners die each day in captivity.<< (The Irish Times, October 17, 1996)

Yours truly,

Louis Proyect


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