More Troubling Doublespeak on Venezuela

The hackneyed demonization of Venezuela's popular and populist president Hugo Chavez has been rampant in the marginalia of far-right political commentary online and in print for quite awhile now. That most of this venom is being recycled and distilled in old Cold War anticommunist propaganda factories, and spit through the fangs of petrocorporate advertising machinery, is obvious to anybody with a brain. But that doesn't make it any easier to stomach the inversion of reality that the attempts are trying to manufacture into a consensus that will sway especially the American people into complacently accepting the caricature of Chavez as a new Hitler or Stalin.

While Chavez may not be a saint (what politician ever is?), so far comparisons to FDR or Nelson Mandela might be more apt. The bigger picture of what is really going on in Venezuela is fairly transparent: Chavez has brazened up to the corporate kleptocracy, especially the oil-industry, and this is what has led the U.S. to plot a CIA coup against him (which botched and failed). Chavez has dared to insist that transnational oil companies pay the millions in taxes they owe the state for extracting the country's resources, and for this he gets branded a fascist, radical communist, a terrorist threat, and his state a rogue regime.

Now the State Department is pulling their well-honed "democracy" doublespeak rabbit out of their hat, as they begin to float plans of a new "committee" in the Organization of American States (OAS). This committee, as Joel Brinkley reports in today's NYTimes, would "monitor the quality of democracy and the exercise of power in Latin America," is being orchestrated by U.S. officials, and so far poorly received in nearly all Latin American countries.

Why so? For one, the U.S., despite outright lies to the contrary, has not consulted any other countries in concocting this "democracy committee." Right to be suspicious on these grounds alone, most other states seem also to percieve it as a blatant attempt to isolate and further create pressure against Chavez and his "Bolivarian Revolution."

Even in the Times article, a corporate press machine that can hardly be called upon to voice opinions very far from the U.S. establishment lines, it is clear that oil interests and Chavez's "interference" with them lies behind the U.S. thinking on Venezuela--and the skepticism in Latin American concerning the motives of the wealthy and blustering "Northern barbarians."


"Several officials noted that, for all of Mr. Chávez's bluster, he is also using Venezuela's oil wealth to address social problems," the Times' article laconically conceded. But then goes on:

"But a senior American official who declined to be named because he did not want to inflame the debate with Latin American countries said Mr. Chávez's "prescriptions for poverty don't really work very well for countries that don't have vast oil wealth.""

This anonymous "senior American official" speaks volumes here, indicating that what is really at issue in U.S. concern over Chavez is not his politics--Americans will back any regime from a "democracy" to an outright and brutal military dictatorship, as long as it is pro-business--but his use and position on Venezuela's "vast oil wealth." This statement, non sequitur that it is, suggests also why other Latin American countries are of less or no interest to the U.S., no matter what their problems of poverty or social instability--precisely because they don't have "vast oil wealth."

The statement, as I said, is a non sequitur, it doesn't really hold much water for anything, since who cares if other countries without oil wealth cannot follow Chavez's prescriptions for poverty? Does that somehow make Venezuela's own attempts to improve social conditions and attain a modicum of wealth equality and equity, using the resources they do in fact have, somehow bad, or corrupt, or "evil" and worthy of condemnation?

To the always anonymous U.S. "officials"--as Greg Palast noted recently, anonymous sources are now acceptable only when they are favorable to Bush--the answer is yes, yes it does. The gall of a Chavez, presuming to have the power to tell ExxonMobil that it owes taxes to the nation whose land it is plundering, is criminal, to these same minds who cannot think of FDR's Social Security legacy without grinding their teeth in rage, or to whom the filling of junk military contracts is always more important and "nationally vital" than the sickness of children lacking health insurance, or the ecological vitality of a wilderness area, or a genocide going on in Sudan.

So, again predictably, such anonymous U.S. officials wrap their committee schemes for further imposing hegemony in the tattered mantle of democracy and populism.

"He added that the American proposal would actually address the concerns voiced by Mr. Tomic and others. By bringing citizen groups before the committee, the official said, "we are creating a place where you can hear the voice of the people."

"And that is a healthy thing," the official added."

Ah, "the voice of the people" will always cover, and collude with, a multitude of sins. Only problem is, Chavez was democratically elected, and enjoys wide popular support.

But in the end, this is not what the word "democracy" means in the mouth of the D.C. establishment anymore. It is political doublespeak for corporate freedom to plunder with impunity. That is the only sine qua non with the multinationals. And that will be what such a committee on "democracy" will work to enforce. The other Latin American nations see this clearly, and with the push for, and against, CAFTA-DR right now, they have every reason to fear, not just for Hugo Chavez, but for themselves.