Venezuela

A couple of new pieces up recently by the North American Congress on Latin America shine a necessary light on political happenings in Colombia and Venezuela.

Colombia and Venezuela: Testing the Propaganda Model looks at the two countries vis-a-vis coverage in the NY Times and Washington Post, and effectively advances the hypothesis put forth by Chomsky and Herman in their classic Manufacturing Consent.

In Free Trade, the Good Cop, and Other Myths, Pablo Vivanco examines the Canada - Colombia Free Trade Agreement through a critical lens.

Finally, NACLA has published the full text of an excellent open letter to Human Rights Watch criticizing HRW's recent report on Venezuela. "By publishing such a grossly flawed report, and acknowledging a political motivation in doing so, [Jose Miguel Vivanco, the lead author of the report] has undermined the credibility of an important human rights organization," reads the letter.

Image: "Parodia de propaganda militar en la novela de ficción 1984" by Jaume d'Urgell.

The excellent Upside Down World has an interesting, critical take on the Venezuelan cooperative movement.

In a surprise move, the Venezuela government has donated audio-visual production equipment to 69 community television facilities across the country. The Communication and Information Minister Andres Izarra, speaking to over 400 community television representatives in Caracas, said that community television has a crucial role to play in the struggle for truth. The donation comes in response to what has been described as a “savage” opposition media campaign currently underway by Globovision.

The donation has been well received by community television producers, according to Jhonny Pancho, representative of Catia TV, one of Venezuela's oldest community television stations. As for any perceived influence peddling by the government, Pancho and Caita TV president Gabriel Gil were adamant that community television remains independent of government.

Community television responds to people's needs rather than government needs, said Gil. More than 70 per cent of the programming is produced by community collectives.

Go to venezuelanalysis.com for the more story.

Also, for some background check out Justin Podur's piece on Znet.

Venezuela Analysis: "This opens up the possibility for the use of fake polling, as was done in the last (2004) referendum, to cast doubt on the results if the proposed constitutional reforms are approved"

BoingBoing calls the RCTV decision "a political decision through which Chavez seeks to gain total control of the basic freedoms of the country's citizens."

Is that sort of like a military coup that overthrows a democratically elected government?

There's another round of coverage of the expiry of RCTV's broadcast license in Venezuela.

It's entirely understandable that there would be concern about this, but news agencies are only damaging their own credibility by not reporting the relevant facts.

Democracy Now did what media are supposed to do when contentious topics are in play, and hosted a debate about the granting of "rule by decree" powers by Venezuela's legislative assembly to President Hugo Chavez.

There has been some fuss about the Venezuelan government's plan to remove the license for the Radio Caracas Television (RCTV) network. Rabble.ca even linked to it.

The main problem seems to be that an organization that receive funding from the US State Department, the National Endowment for Democracy and the International Republican Institute (and then refuse to disclose the details) is calling it a crackdown on freedom of speech.