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by Steve Ellner on FB:
The corporate media reached an all-time low this week in its one-sided
reporting on Venezuela. Wil H. Hylton in a lengthy article in New York
Times' magazine section compared jailed opposition leader Leopoldo López
with Martin Luther King. Throughout the article, Hylton weaves together
the topic of King's employment of civil disobedience in the struggle to
achieve equality for African-Americans and the protests promoted by
López in 2014 known as the "guarimba." The comparison has to be seen as
part of an ongoing effort promoted by international actors including the
Trump administration to demonstrate that the Maduro government is a
dictatorship, or a dictatorship in the making. The comparison falls
short for a number of reasons.
In the first place, the four-month "guarimba" in 2014 and again in 2017
had as its principal objective the achievement of regime change. This
goal was embraced by the protesters in spite of the fact that the
opposition parties (including López's Voluntad Popular party), which
would have assumed power had the guarimba been successful, are highly
unpopular – they are certainly not any more popular than the Chavista
movement. Unlike King's civil rights movement with its well-defined
concrete objectives, Lopez's guarimba protest was an insurrectional
movement. López publicly declared that the guarimba would continue until
the Maduro government was ousted.
In the second place, the tactics employed by the “guarimberos” stood in
sharp contrast with King's commitment to pacifism. Most important, there
was no clear, well-defined separation between the "peaceful" guarimberos
who built barricades consisting of boulders, trees and fires and placed
oily substances on sidewalks resulting in numerous casualties of
motorcyclists, on the one hand, and the violent guarimberos responsible
for the death of six National Guardsmen in 2014 and the guarimberos of
2017 with their para-military appearance, on the other hand.
In the third place, opposition leaders supported the violent guarimberos
in concrete ways. One of the opposition's main slogans "freedom for the
political prisoners" made no distinction between those who had engaged
in violence and those who didn't. In 2017, Freddy Guevara, Voluntad
Popular’s maximum leader in the National Assembly, met with and gave
counseling to the hooded guarimberos who engaged in confrontational and
at times violent tactics. By conveniently passing over these facts,
Hylton is able to deny any tie-in between the “peaceful” and
non-peaceful protests.
In the fourth place, the expressions of intolerance and even hatred also
contrasts with everything that King stood for. Just one example was the
incidents of the capturing of Chavistas and policemen to humiliate or
inflict harm on them. Gurimberos in 2017 set fire to Chavista Oscar
Figueroa resulting in his death. Hylton makes no mention of these
incidents in his cherry-picking article.
Hylton’s article is replete with other deceptive statements and
omissions. Just one will suffice. Hylton discusses López’s family
lineage dating back to Simón Bolívar and Cristóbal Mendoza, the nation’s
first president. But no mention is made of the fact that his grandfather
was the brother and close business associate of Eugenio Mendoza, the
Rockefeller of Venezuela for many decades. While Hylton recognizes
López’s wealthy background, the fact that he was born into the richest
family in the nation would detract from the author’s narrative of López
as a champion of the poor. Are these omissions coincidental or are they
part of an attempt to paint a glorified image of López even at the
expense of basic journalistic principles?
By publishing the article the Times is not only sacrificing journalistic
principles. It is helping to place on center stage an opposition radical
who is well positioned to lead any movement that succeeds in removing
Maduro from office. Opposition radicalism in the Venezuelan context is
synonymous with the playbook that ousted Chávez on April 11, 2002,
dissolved the nation’s main democratic institutions, delayed
presidential elections for up to one year, hunted down Chavista leaders,
and initiated bloody repressive actions against the popular movement.
López, as mayor of Chacao (one of Caracas’ municipalities), played an
active role in these events, a fact completely ignored by Hylton. The
April 2002 strategy of effectuating a radical break with the Chavista
past implied the implementation of neoliberal formulas, shock-treatment
style.
Hylton makes the dubious claim that in the U.S. political setting López
“would probably land in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.”
In fact, the radical brand that López is identified with once in power
will translate itself into witch-hunts of Chavistas at all levels under
the slogan of "no to impunity," as well as purges of the armed forces,
the state oil company and the state in general. The repression of the
Chavistas will open the way for tough, unpopular neoliberal measures.
The electoral road to power precludes such sweeping changes, thus
explaining the policy of electoral abstention favored by the radicals on
the right including López. The New York Times, by glorifying leaders of
the ilk of López, is demonstrating that the support of the U.S. liberal
establishment for popular pro- working class reforms on the nation's
domestic front does not extend to third-world countries.
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