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The battle over the media is about race as well as class
The protests in Venezuela are motivated by more than a TV
station. The oligarchy fears it is losing its right to run the
country
By Richard Gott
June 7, 2007, The Guardian (UK)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2097076,00.html
Caracas - After 10 days of rival protests in the streets of
Caracas, memories have been revived of earlier attempts to
overthrow the Bolivarian revolution of Hugo Chávez, now in its
ninth year. Street demonstrations, culminating in an attempted
coup in 2002 and a prolonged lock-out at the national oil
industry, once seemed the last resort of an opposition unable
to make headway at the polls. Yet the current unrest is a
feeble echo of those tumultuous events, and the political
struggle takes place on a smaller canvas. Today's battle is
for the hearts and minds of a younger generation confused by
the upheavals of an uncharted revolutionary process.
University students from privileged backgrounds have been
pitched against newly enfranchised young people from the
impoverished shantytowns, beneficiaries of the increased oil
royalties spent on higher education projects for the poor.
These separate groups never meet, but both sides occupy their
familiar battleground within the city, one in the leafy
squares of eastern Caracas, the other in the narrow and
teeming streets in the west. This symbolic battle will become
ever more familiar in Latin America in the years ahead: rich
against poor, white against brown and black, immigrant
settlers against indigenous peoples, privileged minorities
against the great mass of the population. History may have
come to an end in other parts of the world, but in this
continent historical processes are in full flood.
Ostensibly the argument is about the media, and the
government's decision not to renew the broadcasting licence of
a prominent station, Radio Caracas Television (RCTV), and to
hand its frequencies to a newly established state channel.
What are the rights of commercial television channels? What
are the responsibilities of those funded by the state? Where
should the balance between them lie? Academic questions in
Europe and the US, the debate in Latin America is loud and
impassioned. Here there is little tradition of public
broadcasting, and commercial stations often received their
licence in the days of military rule.
The debate in Venezuela has less to do with the alleged
absence of freedom of expression than with a perennially
tricky issue locally referred to as "exclusion", a shorthand
term for "race" and "racism". RCTV was not just a politically
reactionary organisation which supported the 2002 coup attempt
against a democratically elected government - it was also a
white supremacist channel. Its staff and presenters, in a
country largely of black and indigenous descent, were
uniformly white, as were the protagonists of its soap operas
and the advertisements it carried. It was "colonial"
television, reflecting the desires and ambitions of an
external power.
At the final, close-down party of RCTV last month, those most
in view on the screen were long-haired and pulchritudinous
young blondes. Such images make for excellent television
watching by European and North American males, and these
languorous blondes are indeed familiar figures from the Miss
World and Miss Universe competitions in which the children of
recent immigrants from Europe are invariably Venezuela's chief
contenders. Yet their ubiquity on the screen prevented the
channel from presenting a mirror to the society that it sought
to serve or to entertain. To watch a Venezuelan commercial
station (and several still survive) is to imagine that you
have been transported to the US. Everything is based on a
modern, urban and industrialised society, remote from the
experience of most Venezuelans. Their programmes, argues
Aristóbulo Istúriz, until recently Chávez's minister of
education (and an Afro-Venezuelan), encourage racism,
discrimination and exclusion.
The new state-funded channels (and there are several of them
too, plus innumerable community radio stations) are doing
something completely different, and unusual in the competitive
world of commercial television. Their programmes look as
though they are taking place in Venezuela, and they display
the cross-section of the population to be seen on cross-
country buses or on the Caracas metro. As in every country in
the world, not everyone in Venezuela is a natural beauty. Many
are old, ugly and fat. Today they are given a voice and a face
on the television channels of the state. Many are deaf or hard
of hearing. Now they have sign language interpretation on
every programme. Many are inarticulate peasants. They too have
their moment on the screen. Their immediate and dangerous
struggle for land is not just being observed by a documentary
film- maker from the city. They are being taught to make the
films themselves.
Blanca Eekhout, the head of Vive TV, the government's cultural
channel, launched two years ago, coined the slogan "Don't
watch television, make it". Classes in film-making have been
set up all over the country. Lil RodrÃguez, an Afro-Venezuelan
journalist and the boss of TVES, the channel that replaces
RCTV, claims that it will become "a useful space for rescuing
those values that other models of television always ignore,
especially our Afro-heritage". With time, the excluded will
find a voice within the mainstream.
Little of this is under discussion in the dialogue of the deaf
on the streets of Caracas. For the protesting university
students, the argument about the media is just one more stick
with which to hit out against the ever-popular Chávez. Yet as
they mourn the loss of their favourite soap operas, they are
already aware that their eventual loss may be more
substantial. As children of the oligarchy, they might have
expected soon to run the country. Now fresh faces are emerging
from the shantytowns to challenge them, a new class educating
itself at speed and planning to seize their birthright.
Just a few weeks ago, Chávez outlined his plans for university
reform, encouraging wider access and the development of a
different curriculum. New colleges and technical institutes
across the country will dilute the prestige of the older
establishments, still the preserve of the wealthy, and the
battle over the media will soon be submerged in a wider
struggle for educational reform. Chávez takes no notice of the
complaints and simply soldiers on, with the characteristics of
an evangelical preacher: he urges people to lead moral lives,
live simply and resist the lure of consumerism. He is embarked
on a challenge to the established order that has long
prevailed in Venezuela and throughout the rest of Latin
America, hoping that the message of his cultural revolution
will soon echo across the continent.
[Richard Gott is the author of Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian
Revolution]
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