Did an acclaimed documentary about the 2002 coup in Venezuela tell the whole story?
BY PHIL GUNSON
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised Filmed and Directed by Kim Bartley and Donnacha O'Briain
In September 2001, two young Irish filmmakers, Kim Bartley and Donnacha O’Briain, arrived in Venezuela with plans to make a low-budget, fly-on-the-wall documentary about the country’s flamboyant president, Hugo Chávez. A former army officer, Chávez had attempted a coup d’état in 1992, spent a couple of years in jail, and was elected to the presidency in 1998. His followers revere him as a revolutionary, struggling to bring justice to the poor in the face of savage attacks from a local oligarchy backed by Washington. His adversaries call him a dangerous demagogue who has ruined the economy, polarized the nation, and is steadily dismantling a forty-five-year-old democracy. Bartley and O’Briain belong unabashedly in the former camp.
In today’s Venezuela, it is hard, if not impossible, to find an impartial observer. Most of the country’s private news media have openly joined the opposition. State radio and TV are crude cheerleaders for the government. Bartley and O’Briain, however, while rightly criticizing the former, ignore the sins of the latter.
Seven months into their project, persistence and good fortune brought a scoop: they were inside the presidential palace when Chávez was ousted by a military-civilian uprising. The resulting documentary — underwritten by the BBC, Ireland’s RTE, and other European broadcasters — is as thrilling a piece of political drama as you’re likely to see and has won armfuls of prizes, including Britain’s top documentary award, the Grierson. It has aired repeatedly all around the world, has been shown in movie theaters and at film festivals, arguably becoming the prevailing interpretation of the continuing Venezuelan political crisis. The Chávez government, which had 20,000 copies made in Cuba, has been a tireless promoter and distributor of the film.
“It is probably one of the best documentaries I have ever seen on television, and undoubtedly one of the finest pieces of journalism within living memory,” gushed Declan Lynch, a television critic for Ireland’s Sunday Independent, in a fairly typical review of Chávez: Inside the Coup. “The plot was classically simple: Chávez gets democratically elected, to the chagrin of the evil oil-barons and their good buddies in the Bush administration, who express ‘extreme concern’ that Chávez ‘doesn’t have America’s interest at heart.’ Chávez gets ousted by these malign forces, spirited away amid scenes of chaos orchestrated by them. But Santa María! his palace guards remain loyal, and amid scenes of total consternation, Chávez is brought back, the coup is declared null and void by the good guys on state television, and the evil oil-barons flee to Miami, having duly emptied the safe in the palace.”
That engaging narrative is, unfortunately, somewhat at odds with the complex, messy reality of April 2002, when a mass march on the presidential palace in Caracas ended in a massacre and a short-lived change of government. Bartley and O’Briain are entitled to their views, but a close analysis of the film reveals something worse than political naiveté. Constructing a false picture of a classic military coup devised by an allegedly corrupt and racist oligarchy, they omit key facts, invent others, twist the sequence of events to support their case, and replace inconvenient images with others dredged from archives. (A version of the film in Spanish is called La Revolucion No Sera Transmitida: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.)
By the time of the coup, Venezuela had been embroiled for almost six months in a severe political crisis. The lid blew off when Chávez moved to rid the state oil corporation, Petróleos de Venezuela, of its top managers and directors, whom he perceived as inimical to his self-styled “revolution.” Chávez recently admitted that he deliberately provoked the showdown: the result was that oil managers, business leaders, and large segments of organized labor called a work stoppage, backed by millions of Venezuelans, particularly the country’s increasingly impoverished middle class. Disaffected military officers, angry at Chávez’s drive to place the armed forces at the service of his political project, were also involved.
full: http://www.cjr.org/issues/2004/3/gunson-docu.asp
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Who's Right? The Filmmakers Respond BY KIM BARTLEY AND DONNACHA O'BRIAIN
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised Filmed and Directed by Kim Bartley and Donnacha O'Briain
Phil Gunson admits it is hard to find anyone in Venezuela today who is balanced about the events of April 2002. He should include himself. The key points he raises are themselves issues of dispute in Venezuela and they continue to divide opinion. His criticisms are conveniently identical to those outlined in a politically motivated petition against our film, led by elements in the Venezuelan opposition, seemingly determined to have the documentary discredited.
Gunson accuses us of propaganda and suggests that we failed to understand the complexity of the Venezuelan situation. We spent nearly a year in Venezuela researching and filming this documentary, and were eyewitnesses to the coup.
Gunson may obsess about de-contextualized details. He fails, however, to ask the key questions any journalist would ask:
Did elements in the military threaten force in the effort to make Chávez resign? They did. Did Chávez resign? No. Were the people who illegally seized power representative of some of the most retrograde political tendencies in Venezuelan society? Yes they were. The first action of the Carmona regime was to abolish the democratic institutions, including parliament. These facts are simply glossed over, or worse, omitted by Gunson. Some further points:
--The fact that not all the military were involved — as is the case with most coups — is irrelevant. By late on the night of April 11, the coup plotters did threaten to unleash an attack on the palace. The infamous Vice Admiral Ramírez Pérez even stated that night, on privately owned TV, that “Either he [Chávez] takes this opportunity, or we’ll launch a military operation.” Were they bluffing? Who knows? Did those who remained inside the palace fear an attack? Yes.
--The idea that Chávez supporters in 2002 were broadly poor and dark-skinned and the opposition broadly white and middle class may seem simplistic but it’s one we share with a number of commentators including the Guardian newspaper (December 10, 2002), Professor Dan Hellinger of Webster University in Missouri, and indeed Gunson himself. (See The Christian Science Monitor, April 16, 2002.)
--On one of the most crucial events — the shootings of April 11 — Gunson is guilty of omission and inaccuracy. Nowhere in the film did we say that only chavistas were shot on April 11. Nobody can say with certainty who orchestrated the shootings that day. Our focus, rather, was on the way the private media rushed to judgment, without any corroboration, stating as fact that the chavistas who were filmed on the Llaguno Bridge were shooting at the opposition march. These alleged shooters subsequently were tried in a court of law and absolved of all charges; indeed the court established that they had been firing in self-defense at snipers and police. This fact, important to any understanding of these events, is conveniently omitted from Gunson’s article. That the opposition march did not pass below the bridge is attested to by many eyewitnesses, including the deputy editor of Le Monde Diplomatique, who was on the bridge that day. The documentary Anatomy of a Coup, broadcast on Australian TV (SBS) in October 2002, came to conclusions similar to our own. Again these key testimonies are omitted from Gunson’s own constructed narrative.
He tells us nothing of the evidence, commonly known and presented in the same SBS documentary, which suggests that the violence that day was provoked and choreographed. That documentary quotes a CNN correspondent describing how on the evening of April 10 he was invited to film a press conference at which Vice Admiral Ramírez Pérez denounced Chávez for the deaths — this before the shootings had even taken place. (See also The Battle of Venezuela, published by the Latin American Bureau)
As for Wolfgang Schalk’s so-called “shadow analysis”: it is surely not insignificant that Schalk has led the well-resourced campaign, linked to the Venezuelan opposition, to discredit and suppress our film. His claim that the high shot of the empty street was filmed before the march ever neared the palace is untrue. The footage is contemporaneous with the exchange of fire between chavistas on the bridge and snipers and police.
Gunson goes to great length to suggest that we twist reality to fit a pre-ordained theory. We reject this outright. Yes, a limited number of recent archive images were used in the documentary to set the scene at the pro- and anti-Chávez gatherings on the morning of April 11, before the core narrative of the coup takes off. We could not be everywhere filming at all times. But Gunson’s claim that we used archive shots to deliberately mislead the audience is false and grotesque. It is easy to cite a few isolated images out of context in an effort to discredit the documentary as a whole, but in fact we present the reality as witnessed by us and others and as supported by the facts.
That private, non-state-owned TV stations in Venezuela are unanimously anti-Chávez is fact. On the night of the coup we were in the palace and witnessed how Chávez’s ministers were prevented from broadcasting to the nation because the government TV signal was taken off air. Opposition-led forces did in fact take control of the station, a fact corroborated by such bodies as the International Federation of Journalists.
We do not claim that our film is the definitive or only narrative of what happened during the coup. It could not be. To suggest that it is propaganda, however, tells us more, perhaps, about Gunson’s own ideological prejudices than it does about what happened in Venezuela in April 2002.
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