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

[Robert Naiman]

An important postscript to this story is that at the end of the day,
the OAS and the Carter Center and Jennifer McCoy played a very
important and helpful role, certifying that Chavez won the recall, and
that it was substantially free and fair, marginalizing the loonies in
the opposition that tried to claim fraud - many of whom were so out of
touch with the Venezuelan electorate that they regarded a Chavez
victory as prima facie evidence of fraud.

You don't hear as much about the OAS as you used to. That's in large
measure because it has become "irrelevant" - no longer controlled by
the U.S.

On Sat, Sep 20, 2008 at 1:15 AM, C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu> wrote:
> [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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-- 
Robert Naiman
Just Foreign Policy
www.justforeignpolicy.org
naiman at justforeignpolicy.org

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