media

On Wednesday afternoon, we headed back to the University of the Andes for the third time, this time for a talk about the media with Dr. Robert Kirby, political scientist and naturalized Venezuelan citizen of British origin. Dr. Kirby spoke a lot about who owns our media outlets, and what other businesses they own (and what governments they’re involved with, etc.).

Los Angeles, a city of four million people, has two daily newspapers. Same with Miami. Caracas has something like thirteen, with many more in other cities and regions of Venezuela. Even after the Chávez government’s efforts to expand government broadcasting, 75% of Venezuelan TV and radio stations remain in private hands (and the government channels have a very small audience). The private print, broadcast, and cable media are overwhelmingly aligned with the opposition and against the government. So much for censorship in the Chávez “dictatorship.”

One medium that has expanded considerably in the revolution is community TV and radio (though they’re still dwarfed by the private media). I think it’s fair to assume that many community broadcasters are supportive of the revolution, although their content is entirely in their hands.

Readers may remember in 2007 when the broadcasting license for Venezuela’s wildly popular RCTV came up for the renewal, and the government refused to renew. Note that RCTV is still on cable here, just not on VHF. RCTV was openly involved in the military coup that briefly overthrew Chávez and suspended the constitution in 2002; had CBS participated in a failed military coup against the president of the United States, the network would have been shut down and it’s owners and broadcasters jailed or executed for treason. Twenty-one nations, among them the U.S, the U.K., Canada, and France, have reported 236 closures of broadcasting outlets; for instance, Prime Minister Thatcher refused to renew Thames TV’s license after they broadcast a documentary about IRA assassinations she had asked them to keep off the air for national security reasons. That being said, while the revolutionary government’s decision not to renew RCTV’s license was entirely lawful, Dr. Kirby pointed out that it was a political mistake; it really put wind in the sails of an opposition that had been floundering.

Dr. Kirby spoke with us a bit about the political situation here, apart from strictly media matters. He counts himself a Chavista (at a university that is now and historically has been solidly Christian Democrat), but he says that recently he has become disillusioned with “the process.” He feels that the president is trying to do too much too fast, and doesn’t always have good people around him. Missteps have ensued.

In contrast to an assertion in a previous post of mine, Dr. Kirby affirmed what the Movimiento 13 coordinator told us on Monday: abstention has been rising throughout the Chávez years in this country of historically high voting rates, and abstention is expected to be 60-70% (!) in November’s gubernatorial and municipal elections. Which brings up the question of Venezuela’s “neither/nor” majority (neither Chávez nor the opposition)—what do they want? There’s no question that the opposition is less popular than the government here, but Dr. Kirby is not alone in his disillusionment. The Venezuelan murder rate has tripled during the Chávez years, and is now second highest in the world after El Salvador, at 48 per 100,000 of population. Colombia, with its narcotraffic and civil war, is at 40/100,000. Dr. Kirby attributed the rise in crime to two factors: 1) you don’t get caught, the system doesn’t work, and 2) Venezuela has become a channel for drugs produced in Colombia and bound for the U.S. and European market, leading to gang violence. (El Salvador’s murder rate is due to gang membership of Salvadorans deported from Los Angeles.)

Venezuelans’ main concerns are crime, unemployment, and inflation. Last year, Venezuela’s 40% inflation rate was second in the world only to Zimbabwe. Meat just went up 50%, and bread 33%. I see the food inflation as a part of the world food crisis, which we’ve been struggling with in the U.S. as well, but it can’t be good for any Venezuelan government.

Gasoline, by the way, is subsidized and costs 18¢ per gallon. An IMF-imposed price “liberalization” in 1989 led to a rise in gas prices, which led to a rise in the price of public transportation and food, with led to the Caracazo upsrising. That 1989 popular rebellion against the effects of globalization in 1989 led to Chávez’s attempted 1992 coup, his eventual pardon under intense public pressure, and his election in 1998, and re-elections in 2000 and 2006. (One of the things Chávez has done is to pay off Venezuela’s debts and withdraw from the IMF. He has proposed ALBA—the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas and the Caribbean—as a substitute for NAFTA, CAFTA, FTAA, and all the other World Bank skullduggery afoot.)

Corruption, Dr. Kirby says, is way down on Venezuelans’ list of priorities.

One of the last things he addressed was the recent spate of disqualifications of political candidates due to corruption. Apparently, the disqualifications are an administrative procedure (upheld in a recent court decision, but the courts are no more politically independent here than is our own Supreme Court), and he feels that the accused candidates ought to have been entitled to due process. 42% of the disqualifications are of Chavistas, and many of the candidates are, undoubtedly, indeed guilty of corruption, but he believes that at least some of the disqualifications are political revenge by Chávez…another political mistake.

That same evening, we were guests on the radio program “Revolution and Salsa” on the community station Radio Zamorana. A propos of the name of the show, I quoted Emma Goldman: If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution. I also thanked the Venezuelan people and government, as a Palestine activist, for their unwavering support of Palestinian freedom. I really liked the radio host; the show reminded a lot of “Al Lewis Lives,” one of my favorite show on WBAI in New York.

On Thursday afternoon, we watched the excellent 2004 film “Venezuela Bolivariana.” The idea of the documentary is that the Fourth World War was the Cold War, and that we are now in the midst of World War V—the international popular rebellion against the post-USSR phenomenon of neoliberal globalization. The Caracas collective who made the film identified the Caracazo as the first strike against neoliberalism that continued with the Battle for Seattle, the uprisings in Prague and Genoa, the World Social Forum…and, of course, the Venezuelan revolution. After the film was over, I commented that now, six years after a popular uprising defeated the 2002 coup, I don’t feel the people’s empowerment that was so evident between 1992 and 2002 in the movie. The Global Exchange folks who live here, North American and Venezuelan alike, agreed. People are tired of the sniping between the government and the opposition, people are exhausted from all the struggles, and people don’t feel the threat that was so present earlier in this decade.

The question remains: how much is this revolution really a revolution? As our Mérida translator pointed out to me on Friday night, Fair Trade is capitalist just as much as Free Trade is, and no one in Venezuela is talking about interfering with the basic structure of private property and commerce. (We were sipping fruity drinks at a busy downtown bar as we spoke.) The current government has a lot in common with Venezuela’s Social Democrat government of the 1970s, the last time there was a boom in oil prices—lots of social programs were instituted then, too. For me, as an anti-imperialist from the U.S., the most exciting thing about this government is its international stance against the pillaging that the G7 governments have seen as a corporate right since the Soviets gave up the ghost, and its work in building a new world order based on mutual help and cooperation.

On a much lighter note, on Saturday afternoon I visited Mérida’s ice cream parlor that holds the world record for the most ice cream flavors. Zoom in on the picture below and note the signs for smoked trout ice cream, mushroom and wine, and cream of crab. Mm-mm! We were less ambitious; my friend ordered avcado, and something called jojote, and I tasted both. They were delicious.