[Peace-discuss] "Human rights" as an excuse for imperialism...

[C. G. Estabrook]

[The NYT reports that "President Hugo Chávez’s government expelled two employees
of Human Rights Watch late Thursday night ... José Miguel Vivanco, a Chilean
citizen who is the Americas director for the New York-based group, and Daniel
Wilkinson, an American who is deputy director for the Americas..." --
<www.nytimes.com/2008/09/20/world/americas/20venez.html?_r=2&oref=slogin>.
Alex Cockburn writes that the following is from a column in The Nation that he
wrote about Vivanco in 2004.  --CGE]


You can set your watch by it. The minute some halfway decent government in Latin
America begins to reverse the order of things and give the have-nots a break
from the grind of poverty and wretchedness, the usual suspects in El Norte rouse
themselves from the slumber of indifference and start barking furiously about
democratic norms. It happened in 1973 in Chile; we saw it again in Nicaragua in
the 1980s; and here's the same show on summer rerun in Venezuela, pending the
August 15 recall referendum of President Hugo Chávez.

Chávez is the best thing that has happened to Venezuela's poor in a very long
time. His government has actually delivered on some of its promises, with
improved literacy rates and more students getting school meals. Public spending
has quadrupled on education and tripled on healthcare, and infant mortality has
declined. The government is promoting one of the most ambitious land-reform
programs seen in Latin America in decades.

The imperial script calls for a human rights organization to start braying about
irregularities by their intended victim. And yes, here's José Miguel Vivanco of
Human Rights Watch. We last met him in this column helping to ease a $1.7
billion US aid package for Colombia's military apparatus. This time he's holding
a press conference in Caracas, hollering about the brazen way Chávez is trying
to expand membership of Venezuela's Supreme Court, the same way FDR did, and for
the same reason: that the Venezuelan court has been effectively packed the other
way for decades, with judicial flunkies of the rich. I don't recall Vivanco
holding too many press conferences to protest that perennial iniquity.

The "international observers" recruited to save the rich traditionally include
the Organization of American States and the Carter Center; in the case of the
Venezuelan recall they have mustered dead on schedule. On behalf of the
opposition, they exerted enormous pressure on the country's independent National
Electoral Council during the signature-gathering and verification process.
Eventually the head of the OAS mission had to be replaced by the OAS secretary
general because of his unacceptable public statements. The Carter Center's team
is headed by Jennifer McCoy, whose forthcoming book, "The Unraveling of
Representative Democracy in Venezuela," leans heavily against the government.
One of its contributors is José Antonio Gil of the Datanalysis Polling Firm,
most often cited for US media analysis. The Los Angeles Times quoted Gil on what
to do: "And he can see only one way out of the political crisis surrounding
President Hugo Chávez. 'He has to be killed,' he said, using his finger to stab
the table in his office far above this capital's filthy streets. 'He has to be
killed.'"

Media manipulation is an essential part of the script, and here, right on cue,
comes Bill Clinton's erstwhile pollster, Stan Greenberg, still a leading
Democratic Party strategist. Greenberg is under contract to RCTV, one of the
right-wing media companies leading the Venezuelan opposition and recall effort.
It's a pollster's dream job. Not only does he have enormous resources against an
old-fashioned, politically unsophisticated poor people's movement, but his firm
has something comrades back home can only fantasize about: control over the
Venezuelan media. Imagine if the right wing controlled almost the entire media
during Clinton's impeachment. That's the situation in Venezuela. Just think what
Greenberg's associate, Mark Feierstein -- a veteran of similar NED efforts in
ousting the Sandinistas in the 1990 elections -- can do with this kind of
totalitarian media control. NED? That's the National Endowment for Democracy,
praised not so long ago by John Kerry, who, like Bush, publicly craves the
ouster of Chávez.

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