MEDIA MANIPULATION: GENERALIZED VIOLENCE IN LATIN AMERICA AND VENEZUELA
By Gennaro Carotenuto
Venezuelanalysis.com
Sept 16 2010
The media discover periodically that the most vulnerable point in Hugo
Chavez’s Venezuela is not having known how to confront the endemic
violence of a chaotic society. They hit hard in this way, especially
now during the electoral campaign, which shows why precisely at this
moment they seem to be interested in the violence in Sabana Grande
[a major Caracas avenue], and why a murder in Chacaíto [a wealthy
Caracas suburb] makes more noise than ten or one hundred corpses in
San Pedro Sula (Honduras) or Medellín (Colombia). The political use
of information about violence has contributed to hiding the hurricane
of bullets that has been attacking Latin America over the past decade.
Venezuela and especially Caracas are absurdly, sadly, scandalously
violent; this author has been saying so for ten years. It is violent,
very violent and increasingly so, despite that in ten years inequality
has been reduced in Venezuela more than in any other place, according
to the United Nations. Even though the legacy left by the Fourth
Republic was a heavy burden, a decade is not such a short time period
so as not to be able to judge. It is not a period of time that allows
indulgences; it is, rather, evidence of absenteeism or incapacity,
in the end, to understand how colossal the problem is.
The sad reality is that inclusive policies are not sufficient, reducing
poverty is not enough, increasing well-being is not enough, giving more
health care and education is not enough. And even where on a social
level the situation has worsened in recent years, the difference is
minimum. The sad reality is that what is lacking is much more than a
popular government to control this disparity between rich and poor,
between modernity and underdevelopment, unchecked consumerism and
inequality, cocaine, alcohol, and infinite vices that attack in a
different way but deteriorate both the ruling class and the popular
classes in a large part of the region. In order to achieve Ernesto
Guevara’s “new man” what is needed is a society with less alcohol
and drugs in our bodies, less greed, fewer unfulfilled desires, fewer
frustrations, less injustice, and more possibilities for everyone.
Reading the daily newspaper, it all seems so simple. If violence
increases in Venezuela it is without a doubt the fault of socialism,
that is to say, of Hugo Chavez. But if it becomes chronic in Mexico
nobody takes the risk of suggesting that it is capitalism’s fault.
Although Cuba may be the least violent place in the world, it occurs
to nobody to attribute this, at the risk of being considered crazy,
to some merit of the 50 years of revolution.
The perspective of the media distorts everything. Raise your hand
whomever, especially after a certain time of night, walks casually
through Guatemala City or in dozens of other cities in the region. It
is only a mystifier like Moises Naim who has written in “L’Espresso”*
that in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, under Felipe Calderon, the people have
begun to come out into the streets. In reality the entire historical
center near the border with the United States is an uninterrupted
sequence of closed businesses. The tension in the air in the few open
businesses can be cut with a knife, and only the heroic will of the
citizens persists in restoring the right to a normal life. Surely, Mr.
Naim would not poke his head out of a hotel in Juarez but he spreads
an evident lie in the international press.
The reality is that the explosion of violence, now often endemic but
in new forms and quantities in the last few years in which crisis
and growth have occurred, is found in all of Latin America. The
exceptions are few among the capitals: Santiago de Chile, Montevideo
and in relative terms Managua and San Jose, paradoxically Mexico City
and Havana. Compared to countries like Guatemala and El Salvador,
Caracas still seems like an inhabitable city. Any ruling class
Guatemalan family leaves home nowadays with three SUVs in a caravan;
two escorts, one in the front and the other in back, and the family in
the middle in order to go to eat fast food or to the pool. Everywhere,
the business of private security is one of the principal industries
and is an issue about which little is written.
I look at the statistics on murders in little El Salvador and
I discover that they rose from 3,100 murders in 2008 to 4,300 in
2009 and more than 5,000 in the current year. I reject the desire to
compare them with Venezuelan deaths, and this escalation is certainly
not [Salvadoran President] Mauricio Funes’s fault. But they are
quantities that are similar to the civil war (70,000 dead between
1980 and 1992). And they were almost doubled in two years without a
clear reason, unless it is because of a society in which the lives
of the Mara members are worth nothing, like Christian Poveda shows in
“La Vida Loca” [“The Crazy Life”], referring to his own.
The lives of immigrants are also condemned to disappear, those
massacred in Tamaulipas or those who cross the continent to look
for work in the U.S., only to be systematically abducted, kidnapped,
raped, as documented by a survey that was disseminated widely by the
Latin American press (including an in-depth article in La Jornada)
but obviously ignored by the Italian press.
In this way not even the lives of the children of Juarez are worth
anything. With Clara Calzolaio we titled our report in the capital of
Chihuahua, perhaps the most dangerous city in the world: “Journey to
the End of Neo-Liberalism.” As Ignacio Alvarado, a journalist with
El Universal, told us: “65% of the deaths are people under 25 years
of age and they are children and grandchildren of the maquiladora
workers.” As Elizabeth Avalos, a union organizer, explained to us:
“Half a million young people are alive today to whom the neoliberal
model has never offered anything, not education, not health, not work,
and well in drug trafficking they find the only possibility to earn a
living and obtain social recognition. Yes, it’s true that for doing
the work of hired killing they earn around a thousand dollars, far
from the maquiladoras where they pay 500 pesos (30 euros) per week
with contracts that sometimes last only 15 days.”
Returning to Caracas, Aram Aharonian, a 30 year-old Armenian-Uruguayan
who lives in Venezuela, where he created Telesur, puts things in
perspective for me: “The violence has existed in Venezuela for 40
years. At the beginning, the detonators were poverty and exclusion.
Nowadays, the principal causes are drugs and consumerism. It is true
that more people die than in Iraq, but according to the data that I
know of, there is not more violence than in Brazil, Colombia, or the
United States.”
You are right, brother Aram, one of the greatest dreamers and builders
of the Great Homeland and a brilliant analyst, but we cannot consider
it so optimistically. Overall one perceives a clear limit in the merits
of the Bolivarian government, that 72% of the murder victims should
confront diverse sources of work in a context in which socialism cannot
consist of an egalitarian distribution of oil profits. This author
has sustained this since 2004 when I affirmed it in the presence of
President Chavez. Six years later, I do not see substantial changes.
Aram’s defense is quite reasonable with respect to the incredible
deformative capacity of the media that choose to see only what is
convenient to them. In Colombian history, “The Violence” is the
period that succeeded the assassination of Jorge Eliecer Gaitan in
1948, a violence that has lasted until today among paramilitaries,
narco-traffickers, hired assassins, and urban and rural violence.
However, when reading the large international media such as Madrid’s
“El País” it would seem that Colombia under [former President]
Alvaro Uribe had resolved all of its problems and that the only
narco-traffickers who remain are the FARC terrorists. Mexico is violent
but it’s a typical characteristic of those people who smoke drugs,
but fortunately we have a government that lives and fights together
with us – this is the interpretation. In contrast, if Venezuela is
a disaster it is surely and nothing more than Chavez’s fault. The
horrible images of the cadaver depository in Caracas that evidently
the Bolivarian government would have preferred not to have circulated,
are the same that we would find in other countries on the continent.
Living with the doctors of Barrio Adentro (the program that
develops the public health system in Venezuela) in the working class
neighborhoods of Barcelona in Anzoategui state, I confirmed that every
weekend the men were drunk and a true curfew was in force. Today in
the macro-economic data on inclusion and reduction of poverty, they
award the prize to Latin America (even The Economist recognizes it)
in Anzoategui, in Venezuela, on the continent. But when will these
men become sober? How many fewer deadly brawls between drunks? How
many robberies happen under the influence of narcotics?
All of this leads us to consider the continental dimension. In the
face of the narco-traffickers’ infinite capacity as corrupters, in
the face of the abdication of the ruling classes, in the face of the
violence, the lack of control of firearms, the alcohol that flows
like rain, the atavistic ignorance of five centuries of colonialism
and that induced by the neo-liberal period, how many steps backward
do we take for every step forward?
Download, or go to see if you can, or at least visit the website of
“El infierno, el Mexico de hoy” [“Hell, Mexico Today], the movie by
Luis Estrada that Felipe Calderon wanted to censor. It was released
this week and it has already been considered the symbol of Mexico
in its bicentenary year. For some, it could become the symbol of
this era as “El Viaje” [“The Journey”] by Pino Solanas was of the
neo-liberal period. It is the story of Benjamín García who after
20 years of work is deported from the U.S. and in his country he is
re-baptized “San Miguel Narcangel,” and the only thing he can do is
join the narco-traffickers.
Some will remember the free trade agreements, the imposition of IMF
regulations in the era of repeated debt crises incubated for decades,
all of which were favorable to the agricultural industry of the United
States and the multi-national companies, and set in motion tens of
millions of peasants (12 million in Mexico alone) who are free to
choose between migration and narco-trafficking. This is reinforced by
the fact that the evident changes achieved by the Bolivarian Republic
are not sufficient to assure that socialism (or Chavez’s rhetorical
practice of defining it as such) reduces violence.
And although the bad faith of the media makes us shiver, Chavez, in his
failure to confront the horror of those tens of thousands of lives,
almost all of them young and wasted, is in excellent company with
Colombia under, until recently, Alvaro Uribe, and the right hand of
Felipe Calderon in Mexico; from the post-Liberation Theology left of
[Brazilian President Luiz Inacio da Silva] Lula and of that “light,
light” as Alvaro Colom is defined in Guatemala, where for almost
nothing the mafias systematically shoot bus drivers in the nape of
the neck; from Mauricio Funes’s El Salvador, the little flea of the
continent with its 5,000 dead, to the United States under Barack Obama.
Firearms, the prohibition of drugs, the excessive freedom to consume
alcohol, corruption, ignoble ruling classes, and persistent inequality
are the principal evils that are shooting the wings of Latin America’s
re-birth. Education, equality, and probably a long battle for drug
legalization here in the U.S. is the remedy. In this sense, the
referendum in California on the legalization of marijuana is an
important test. But it will take decades to end the violence.
* M Naim, Milagro Mexicano, L’Espresso 13 May 2010 to which G. Mina
responded. Este es quien paga a Moises Naim. Freedom House. Reporteros
sin fronteras y a su informacion al quincenario “Latinoamerica e
tutti il Sud del Mondo”, 2010, n.110/111,pp 12-21
Translated from Italian to Spanish by Susana Merino for Rebelion.org.
Translated to English by James Suggett for Venezuelanalysis.com.
From: A. Papazian
http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/5635