[Peace-discuss] Always Bad Journalism - Always

[David Green]

The New York Times: Always vaguely snide and
condescending, always dismissive of anything on the
left, which can be reduced to celebrity lifestyle
choices and camp followers, always absent historical
memory, e.g., we murdered Allende and destroyed
Nicaragua. There are "many sides," and the reporter is
congenitally unable to explore which might be the more
factual in order to inform the reader.
--------------------------

March 21, 2006

Visitors Seek a Taste of Revolution in Venezuela 

By JUAN FORERO

CARACAS, Venezuela — The actor Danny Glover has come.
Harry Belafonte has also been here. So has the antiwar
activist Cindy Sheehan, the prominent African-American
writer Cornel West and Bolivia's new president, Evo
Morales. 

But most visitors are like Cameron Durnsford, a
24-year-old student from Australia who decided to
study at a new government-financed university in
Caracas. Mr. Durnsford was, admittedly, put off some
by the cult of celebrity around President Hugo Chávez,
which he says "seems a little bit Maoist." But
Venezuela's revolution, he quickly added, was not to
be missed.

"You've got a nation and a leader trying to prove an
alternative to neo-liberalism and the policies that
have ravaged Latin America for 20 years," he said.
"That's why people are coming here. There's a sense
that it's a moment in history."

Mr. Chávez is decidedly unpopular with the Bush
administration, which he has branded a terrorist
regime out to get him. That antagonism, coupled with
Mr. Chávez's huge oil-generated outlays for social
spending, is drawing a following from all over and
turning Caracas into the new leftist mecca.

Evoking other cities transformed by revolutionary
leaders, like Managua, Nicaragua, in 1979, or Havana
20 years before that, Caracas is attracting students
and celebrities, academics and activists, grandmothers
and 1970's-era hippies — a new generation of
Sandalistas, as some call them.

Some, including many Americans, have come to stay. But
others come for a new brand of revolutionary tourism
organized by the government or by private groups.

Venezuela welcomes them all, but rolls out the red
carpet for high-profile visitors like Mr. Belafonte,
the 79-year-old singer and activist. 

In January, he led an American delegation that
included Mr. Glover, Mr. West and Dolores Huerta, the
farm workers' advocate. They met with Mr. Chávez,
toured a neighborhood and visited government-run
programs promoted as a way to shift the country's oil
wealth to the poor.

"We respect you, admire you, and we are expressing our
full solidarity with the Venezuelan people and your
revolution," Mr. Belafonte told Mr. Chávez during the
president's weekly television program. He called
President Bush, a constant target of Mr. Chávez's
barbs, "the greatest terrorist in the world." Then he
shouted, "Viva la revolución!"

Other recent visitors have included the Rev. Jesse
Jackson; Ollanta Humala, a leading candidate in the
election for president in Peru on April 9; the
Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano, and the Argentine
Nobel laureate Adolfo Pérez Esquivel.

For less well-known Americans, the new vacation trail
no longer goes through the famed beaches of Margarita
Island. Rather, groups like Global Exchange, based in
San Francisco, take visitors who pay $1,300 on a
two-week jaunt through the tumbledown barrios where
support for Mr. Chávez is strongest. 

The tours include visits to literacy classes,
cooperatives and government-financed media outlets.
Visitors chat with government ministers, see "The
Revolution Will Not Be Televised," a documentary
favorable to Mr. Chávez, and meet with state oil
company officials, who explain how petrodollars are
funneled to social programs. 

Among the speakers who have met with visitors is Eva
Golinger, a New York lawyer who is dedicated to
unearthing what she claims is evidence of Washington's
support for Venezuelan opposition groups, something
the Bush administration has denied. 

Americans like Pat Morris, 62, from Chestnut Hill,
Mass., who never had a good impression of the Bush
administration, are usually left speechless. "I
thought that our current government was lying and
greedy, but I had no idea of the long-term investment
in destabilizing the country," she said, tears in her
eyes after hearing Ms. Golinger speak.

Reva Batterman, 27, a graduate student, said she had
wanted to come to Venezuela to show its people that
"we're not all just Bush supporters or imperialists." 

"I wish the people in the U.S. would try to understand
Hugo Chávez," she said.

Not everyone is as enamored. Julio Borges, an
opposition politician, said that while Mr. Chávez
certainly had showered aid on the poor, he was also a
strongman out to crush dissent. 

Instead of lionizing him, Mr. Borges said, visitors
should be aware of government ineptitude and growing
abuses, like attacks on the press, charges the
government denies.

"We always tell people who come with this romantic
idea of Venezuela that despite the changes here, the
people who carry out the transformation are the armed
forces, that Venezuelan democracy is basically a
militarized one," he said. "You have to have a
profound concern about that. We want to take off the
democratic veil the government uses."

Referring to American visitors, an American diplomat
in Caracas, who could not speak on the record because
of embassy rules, echoed the concerns, saying, "Come
down here and get your consciousness raised,
absolutely." He added, "My only request of them is
that they try to get the other side of the story."

Emily Kurland, a 26-year-old social worker originally
from Chicago, said that was exactly what she and the
others here were getting. 

"They're frustrated with Bush, frustrated with not
being listened to, frustrated with Iraq," said Ms.
Kurland, speaking in the Caracas house she shares with
several foreigners. "They don't trust Fox News. They
don't trust the mainstream news. They want to see with
their own eyes what's happening here."

She came to Venezuela thinking she would stay just
long enough to get a taste for Mr. Chávez's grandly
titled "Bolivarian revolution." A year later, she
said, she has no plans to leave anytime soon.

She has taught English in government-financed classes
for the poor and talks about volunteering at a
state-run microcredit bank for women. She spends most
of her time, though, leading tours for Americans who
flock here for a look at how Mr. Chávez is changing
his country.

There is a precedent, of course: Fidel Castro's
revolution, which in its early years placed emphasis
on "people to people" contacts that enhanced support
among vocal members of the American body politic,
while neutralizing opponents. 

Activists, intellectuals and leftists have gravitated
to other governments, from Allende's Socialist Chile
in the early 1970's to Sandinista-run Nicaragua in the
1980's, which also declared ambitions to overturn the
old order in their countries.

"Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Chile at one point
became the mecca for many leftists around the world,"
said Fernando Coronil, a University of Michigan
professor and the author of "The Magical State," a
book about Venezuela. "That has been capitalized upon
by the governments of these places, in eliciting
foreign support but also as a way of focusing on
certain elements of foreign policy that have wide
appeal, and not focusing on internal problems."

Some of the people who have visited Venezuela or have
moved here acknowledge having some doubts. Chesa
Boudin, 25, a New Yorker who has worked as a volunteer
here, notes that some on the left glorify Mr. Chávez
simply because he has positioned himself as the
anti-Bush leader in Latin America. 

But Mr. Boudin, one of the authors of a book favorable
to Venezuela's government, said many people who had
been dismayed by the advance of globalization saw the
possibility of a better world in Venezuela.

"The fact that we have a country that's trying to
create an alternative model is bold and ambitious and
unique, and that's why people are wondering, 'Is this
possible?' " said Mr. Boudin, whose parents, Katherine
Boudin and David Gilbert, were members of the 1970's
radical group the Weathermen. "The intellectual in me
is curious."

Perhaps nothing so illustrates the intertwining of Mr.
Chávez's rhetoric about serving the poor and the
government's policies as the three-year-old Bolivarian
University, which offers free tuition to its mostly
poor student body.

Jerome Le Guinio, 23, from France, came a year ago and
works in the university's administration. He lives in
Catia, a poor neighborhood where support for Mr.
Chávez is solid. "The idea is to find an alternative,"
he said, "and if you don't find it in Venezuela, you
won't find it anywhere else." 

Jens Gould contributed reporting for this article.



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