Francisco,

I won’t argue that chavez and his proxies don’t overuse the United States and bush as a political tool.  As someone previously mentioned, chavez is indeed, gasp, a politician and often has political motives and often speaks rhetorically.  But you seem to imply that accusing the US of undermining and sabotaging his gov’t is a bit fantastical.  The United States interests are obviously invested in chavez’s ouster and the failure of his political program and the US has historically used its power in pretty much any capacity it could get away with to undermine and overthrow (depending on the context) unfriendly gov’ts in Latin America.  It would stretch the imagination to think it was not doing so right this very moment in various capacities in Venezuela.

Whether or not the CIA created an outbreak of dengue fever or how bolivar died (the article you link to BTW, does not mention whom Chavez was accusing of having murdered Bolivar, and also Bolivar himself said “The United States seems destined by Providence to plague America with torments in the name of freedom.”) is somewhat besides the point.  That a chavista politician (or of any stripe) says something outrageous is hardly news.  Perhaps an analogy would be Castro and others blaming the yanquis for each and all the problems of Cuba.  The US responsible for EVERY hardship in Cuba?  Not likely.  But has the most powerful nation in the hemisphere/world tried to undermine/overthrow/starve/embargo/intimidate/etc. by almost any means available a small Caribbean nation b/c of its form of gov’t?  Well, yes, and to note that Cuban/Venezuelan officials overuse this convenient excuse is true, but does not tell us anything new or useful.

Regardless, I agree that the central problem in Venezuela is the structural problem of the logic of the petro-state, and a rentier mentality by the central gov’t.  I’m sure we disagree as to if chavez is doing anything differently than previous gov’ts, but then here’s what I don’t understand exactly.  If it is indeed just business as usual in Venezuela, than why the rise of a rabid opposition?  It just seems to me that many criticize Chavez not b/c of the contradictions of the chavista project (which there are many, as with any political party/movement) but b/c they would not be for the project even if it were steallarly managed and efficient.  Not that critics have to be, of course, but it would lend them credibility.

Oh, I’ve read Chomsky, and have no trouble grasping why his brand of one-size-fits-all historical narrative appeals to a guy like Chávez, constantly on the lookout for a one-scapegoat-fits-all solution.

On the question of the “confusion” between anti-Americanism and anti-Imperialism, you should consider the fact that Chávez has even blamed the US for murdering El Libertador Simón Bolívar, all the way back in 1830, a good 70 years before American even started to play the imperial game, and despite overwhelming evidence (including an autopsy performed by his own, trusted, personal doctor) that the guy died of TB. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/nov/17/venezuela.international) Chávez even called for Bolívar to be exhumed to look for evidence to back up this cockamamie theory.

For Chávez, America *is* evil. In its essence. And has been, all along. Ever since the 1830s. This may not be what *you* understand by anti-imperialism, but it *is* what he understands by it.

Mr. Toro:  Let me make a modest suggestion.  You’ve come into Truthdig with an anti-Chavez agenda—one that you pitched to a very skeptical audience.  You have suggested that we broaden our horizons by considering your take on Venezuela, but have done so in a manner which confused anti-imperialism with anti-Americanism.

Before you post further on the subject, I think you would do well to broaden you knowledge base as to the methodology and scope of the imperial project, whose impact on ordinary peoples not only in Venezuela but throughout Central and South America is so pervasive as to explain why so many of your own countrymen—a significant majority—have voted for Chavez in successive elections.

I will propose just two books:  John Perkins, “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man” and Naomi Klein, “The Shock Doctrine.”  (I’d suggest Noam Chomsky, but since Chavez touted Chomsky’s “Hegemony or Survival” on the floor of the UN, causing the book to soar to the top of the NY Times best seller list, I am sure your antagonism to Chavez would lead you to reject its content before you read it.)

rigo23,

That’s a fine point and well developed; there’s nothing I can really say in response. As a Venezuelan, it’s easy for me to misunderstand the significance of my own words to northern ears. As a NorteAmericano, it’s easy for you to misunderstance the significance of your words on Venezuelan ears. We’re working from different frames of understanding, different interpretations of history, across a very big number of opportunities for miscommunication, and in a way the miracle is that we manage to have any fruitful dialog at all.

This, btw, is why I initially titled my video “the US election as if Venezuelan actually mattered.” I wanted to try to jog US readers out of their familiar frames of signification, to try to rethink the US election through the categories that are more relevant to people working from entirely different frames. It’s something that, unfortunately, USAmericans are very seldom asked to do.

I’ve spent the last five years stubburnly maintaining a blog dedicated to the idea that at least one forgotten little corner of the internet ought to offer up an uncompromisingly Venezuela-centric view of world events. In English. It’s a lonely existence, for sure, but it gives me a bit of satisfaction. You should check it out.

On the other point, Joe, when you write:

(And, how is it other than entirely reasonable for a left-leaning Latin American government to be paranoid about the CIA?  A battered wife would be incorrect in fearing that all men will beat her, but her paranoia is perfectly understandable.)

You rather neatly make my point: that (for perfectly understandable historical reasons) accusations of CIA plots in Latin America now enjoy such a universal aura of verisimilitude, you really don’t have to put forward any evidence at all for them to strike people as fairly probable!

But lets get serious. A CIA-engineered dengue fever outbreak?! This stuff is on a par with conspiracy theories on the government inventing AIDS to keep Africans and gay people down…it’s just plain idiotic. If *that* one doesn’t set off your BS alarms, what could!?

Seriously, what we have here is a government whose first instinct, when faced with a major outbreak of a serious disease, is to try to pass the buck to the CIA rather than to try to treat the victims. It’s really not ok.

Joe,

Certainly, reforming the petrostate will not be easy. The basic problem is not at all simple: on reaching power, Venezuelan governments discover that they’re suddenly sitting atop a mountain of petrodollars, and the temptation to just use them to minimize social conflict and buy off various constituencies is just overwhelming.  Governments of all different ideological stripes have been done in by this trap…the basic structure has shown itself compatible with traditional dictatorship (1918-1936), bureaucratic authoritarianism (1936-1945, 1948-1958), radical democracy (1945-1948, 1999-now) and clientelist democracy (1958-1999). So the petrostate is nothing if not adaptable, and has shown again and again its capacity to suck in new governing elites, conditioning the way they run the country and slowly subverting their best intentions.

The root problem, if you ask me, is incomplete institutionalization: decisions over what you do with windfall oil revenues could be taken out of the sphere of regular politics, cordoned off and made a matter of state. This would do a huge deal to put Venezuela on a path to sustainable development, but of course the idea is subverted by the fact that asking any governing elite to put the petrodollar cookie jar out of its own reach is a request for it to limit its own power unilaterally.

So there’s no simple, straightforward solution. But there are some serious proposals out there for the kind of reforms that would start to make
oil profit redistribution a matter of state rather than a political weapon various cliques use to hang on to power.

Listen, I dunno if Primero Justicia is reall up to the task of pulling off a reform of this magnitude: certainly, there are reasons for skepticism. But I do know that their party platform specifically and explicitly calls for new mechanisms to institutionalize the use of the oil revenue flow, and I know institutionalizing the oil revenue flow is the single most important thing Venezuela could do to leverage its oil into a credible development policy. At the very least, these guys realize that discretional spending of the oil kitty is the problem, not the solution, a basic lesson that Chavez has never come close to grasping.

“Alls I’m saying is that you should consider - at least consider - the possibility that there’s more than meets the eye to Chávez’s anti-imperialist rhetoric. To temporarily suspend your disbelief and think through the possibility that, in your determination not to be deceived by the corporate media, you could be leaving yourself open to manipulation from the other side.”

—> It is precisely because we *are not* easily manipulable by the corporate media or the ‘other’ side, for that matter (rather than determined *not* to be so deceived) that we are rallying against what, in our minds, appears to be a run-of-the-mill anti-Chavez hit piece.

I doubt that anyone here seriously doubts that Chavez uses rhetoric, and specifically anti-imperialist rhetoric (I’m glad you’ve shifted from calling this anti-Anerican to anti-Bush, to anti-imperialist…much more precise, no?) at least to some extent for political purposes. He is a po-li-ti-cian.  The audacity of rhetoric.

That’s not the point, but I know, I know.  That’s *your point* in the video.  That his rhetoric (anti-U.S. you call it in the video) is such a powerful and effective mechanism for social control inside Venezuela, that he’d probably privately be rooting for McCain to win b/c of how similarly McCain would fit in with his plan for domestic social control and how Obama just wouldn’t fit in to the cartoonization of yet another cowboy leader.  More on this later.

But, Mr. Toro, I’d argue that what drives people here to speak out against anti-Chavez attacks isn’t a profound and blind love for Chavez or his ‘revolution’.  The motivation to speak out against these attacks stems more from what a lot of people here see as a concerted effort by the U.S. to overthrow or undermine for the purposes of strategic regime change yet another legitimate Latin American democracy (as certified by more legitimate international election observers per capita than you’ll ever see monitor a U.S. election.) The U.S. is in Iraq now largely because of the lack of due diligence on the part of the MSM, and in many cases, cheerleading, in investigating the specious claims regarding Iraq in the run up to war. 

How many people in the U.S. still think Saddam was behind 9-11?  I bet you the percentage of people who think Venezuela is a dictatorship run by a madman is probably higher, no thanks to our diligent press:

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3009

Which belief, if incorrect would have more dire consequences?  The underestimation of Chavez’s supposed rampant use of anti-imperalist rhetoric as a mechanism for social control inside Venezuela or the belief by say, over half of the U.S. population that the current Venezuelan leader is a mad dictator?  We’ve seen how wonderful a mandate for invasion our collective illiteracy with respect to Iraq turned out to be.  Can you blame us if we see some parallels with respect to the current U.S. posture toward Venezuela?

Also, me thinks Chavez wants Obama, because the threat a McCain administration would present to him might just be greater than what he’d lose by losing the opportunity to continue to supposedly exploit the cowboy paradigm for internal control:

http://www.coha.org/2008/06/a-hidden-agenda-john-mccain-and-the-iri/

Happy 4th everyone.

Where are the angels, F., where are the angels?  What are you advocating?  I would love for God herself to be elected president here in the U.S., but in the absence of that possibility, I have to restrain my impulse to vomit and support centrist politicians to keep right wing nuts out of power.  Criticize where criticism is due, to be sure, but without a viable alternative your leftist idealism plays into the hands of reactionaries.

(And, how is it other than entirely reasonable for a left-leaning Latin American government to be paranoid about the CIA?  A battered wife would be incorrect in fearing that all men will beat her, but her paranoia is perfectly understandable.)

Alls I’m saying is that you should consider - at least consider - the possibility that there’s more than meets the eye to Chávez’s anti-imperialist rhetoric. To temporarily suspend your disbelief and think through the possibility that, in your determination not to be deceived by the corporate media, you could be leaving yourself open to manipulation from the other side.

I’m sorry Mr. Toro, but I have seen virtually identical claims emerging from both the Venezuelan and U.S. corporate media during the attempted coup thoroughly debunked—such as the claim that Chavez forces fired into a crowd when it turned out that the reverse was true.  Absent verification from independent observers, I am unable to believe one word of what you have to say.

Actually, Lewis, the inherent dichotomy is between people who feel you should know something specific about the people and movements you align yourself with, and those willing to rely on extreme informational shortcuts to arrive at positions whose implications they haven’t really worked out properly at all.

Viva thinking with your brain!

(continues previous post)

Now, at some point, sane people need to stop, take stock of this situation and think through what’s really happening here.

I mean, it’s preposterous! If the CIA can organize a covert dengue outbreak in Maracaibo, how come they couldn’t plant a few chemical weapons in Iraq even though they had the run of the country for years?

If these guys have the limitless human and financial resources it takes to infiltrate neighborhood committees throughout Venezuela, manipulate all kinds of constituencies to protest, if they can run a humongous conspiracy to make milk (MILK!) disappear from store shelves all over the country, how come they can’t recruit enough arabic speakers to know what the hell happens in Tehran on any given day?

How can the CIA be soooooo vastly, superhumanly competent when it comes to screwing with a marginal threat to US national security like Venezuela, but so utterly ineffectual when it comes to finding out what the hell is happening in, say, Syria, or Gaza, or Pyonyang?

At some point Occam’s Razor has to come. For those of us who follow Venezuelan politics (but don’t drink the kool aid) it’s patently obvious that chavistas use generic allegations about CIA plots whenever they screw up and need to make an excuse for their own incompetence, or whenever they run into a bit of dissent out there in need of crushing. It’s easy - indeed, effort free - and doesn’t even require you to put up even a token effort to trump up evidence. The accusation itself is enough. And it sure does keep people on the straight and narrow…raising the cost of dissent to unacceptable levels for people whose livelihoods depend on keeping themselves in the government’s good graces.

I mean, picture those “community council” members - mostly poor people from shantytowns all over the country - and picture the chilling effect it has on their deliberations when Chávez signals that questioning him too much, that stepping too far beyond the bounds of ideological correctness will put them under suspicion of treason…TREASON! Uffffffff. Would *you* risk making the big guy mad in that situation? Not if your next meal depended on remaining on the rolls of a state wealth redistribution program…which, of course, community councils administer!

The sheer, bizarre convolutedness of these allegations just needs to send people’s BS alarms rining. Chávez’s bush-whacking rhetoric is enticing only so long as you studiously avoid thinking through what this kind of talk achieves INSIDE Venezuela.

Because all this anti-imperialist posturing, it’s NOT foreign policy. It’s domestic policy, folks…and it works.

Dear cann4ing,

I just think you’d see things differently if you had a more detailed understanding of the kind of uses to which anti-imperialist rhetoric is routinely put in Venezuela. According to various chavista spokesmen, the CIA has, in the last few years, been responsible for:

-Setting off a major Dengue Fever outbreak in the western Zulia State (biological warfare.)

-Organizing a sprawling conspiracy to create a shortage of milk throughout the country early this year (a plan that would’ve required coordinating literally hundreds of truckers and distributors covertly, none of whom ever came forward, or was in any other way caught doing this.)

-Causing a series of bus driver’s strikes in La Victoria, Aragua State, on the flimsy pretext that several drivers had been shot dead by street criminals and they demanded police protection. (Again, none of the conspirators were ever caught.)

-A mysterious conspiracy to drive up the crime rate in Caracas earlier this year, presumably by somehow training and/or encouraging young people to commit street crime (again, nobody was ever caught.)

-A half dozen plans to kill Chávez, though no details were ever given, no evidence presented, and nobody was ever caught.

-A street protest by shantytown mothers’ in the Eastern Caracas neighborhood in Caracas in February, purportedly (again) over crime, though - maybe you’re seeing a pattern here - nobody was ever arrested, no evidence was ever produced, and nobody was ever caught.

-A cunning (though unspecified) plan to drive down the audience figures for TVes, a new - and not very popular - state run TV channel (standard, not-the-slightest-shred-of-evidence-of-this-exists addendum applies).

-A conspiracy to corrupt Interpol forensic computing experts and get them to vouch for the authenticity of computer files detailing links between Chávez and the Colombian guerrillas

-A plan to strongarm reluctant media outlets to publicize a clip of Chávez bragging about using “coca paste” (not, mind you, coca leaf, but coca PASTE, which is a precursor to cocaine) for breakfast every single day (the clip, which is real, is here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1JARwRxm4w - the idea that foreign news outlets would need ANY futher incentive to run with such a story is backed by ...you guessed it, no evidence)

-Infiltrating the “community councils” he had created and causing them to not always agree with him…

and an etc. that could fill many, many pages…

Mr. Toro, anti-imperialism does not equate to anti-Americanism, if it did, Chavez would not have offered heating oil to poor people in NYC at rock bottom prices.

(Oops, the last part of my previous post got cut off)

The chavista hive mind has been well and truly taught that dangerous thoughts like those, thoughts that reek of ideological non-conformity and free-thinking, that such thoughts are banned. Expressing them opens you up to charges of treason, of carrying water for the gringos, of, possibly, being a CIA spy, charges that will not only destroy your livelihood, but that are, by their nature, impossible to refute, since the CIA is endowed, in chavista lore, with a kind of supernatural ability to be everywhere and nowhere, all powerful and endlessly perfidious but cunningly disguised, very much like the devil in catholic theology.

This, again, was the point of my original video: to try to shine a light on the way that chavismo uses anti-Americanism to enforce ideological conformity, to ensure it can’t be challenged, that its supporters dare not question it, dare not engage the contradictions it engenders critically. That’s how anti-Americanism operates in Venezuela today. That’s why it’s a mechanism of political control.

If I was particularly brusque in my first post here it’s because, after 10-years of following this f***ed up soap opera, it pains me to my gut to see people still buying into it. Because it’s one thing to see all dissent be equated with treason on Venezuelan state TV, quite another to see estadounidenses who should know better excorciating me for criticizing that stance.

Joe,

Well, it’s hard to cover this stuff in this type of forum. The issues are complex: it’s hard to do them justice in 2 or 3 paragraphs. Again, I’d urge you to poke around my blog (starting with: http://caracaschronicles.blogspot.com/2005/10/readers-guide-to-venezuela-in-chavez.html
or http://caracaschronicles.blogspot.com/2008/03/looking-glass-revolution.html ).

I want to make clear, though, that my basic charge is not that Chávez’s reforms have been “timid” or “cautious” or “gradual” but rather that they aren’t actually reforms. There’s nothing actually “new” here: he’s just (mis)governing the country the way it’s always been (mis)governed - though, admittedly, making a lot more noise than his predecessors in the process. I realize that flies in the face of 99% of what you read about Venezuela, but it’s a statement I think I can defend:

1-The types of social programs typically cited as the heart of the Bolivarian Revolution (in areas like health, education and direct income support) amount to snazzily repackaged policies that every Venezuelan government since 1958 has supported. These policies have always been lavishly funded at times of high oil prices and had to be cut back when oil prices are low. Over the last couple of years, a LOT of money has gone into them, but then, over the last couple of years the oil market has been red hot. Comparing Chávez’s social spending at the top of the oil cycle with the previous government’s social spending at the bottom of the oil cycle is a non-sense (though, even on that metric, it’s not clear Chávez is spending a higher percentage of GDP than his predecesors, see: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3685).

2-But even the programs cited as the “meat” of the “revolution” don’t actually do anything to change the fundamental pattern of state-society relations that have characterized the Venezuelan petrostate all along. Like every single government we’ve had since the 1940s (when the principle of sharing oil revenues 50-50 between foreign oil majors and the Venezuelan state was instituted), Chávez’s government dominates the country’s foreign exchange earnings through its control of the oil industry. This puts it in a position of enormous power vis-à-vis society. It then leverages those revenues to generate political backing and to punish political dissent. Nothing new under the sun. 

Under chavismo, as under every previous Venezuelan government, the state doesn’t depend on society for its livelihood, because it doesn’t finance itself from taxes. Instead, society depends on the state for its livelihood. This reversal of the direction of dependence is the key feature of petrostates: the reason Venezuela is more like Russia than it is like Colombia.

The basic difference between chavismo and what came before is the “atmospherics”: the constant stream of rigid, dogmatic propaganda that emanates from the state and its head. It’s created a climate of deep social division, the illusion of a revolution in a country re-editing its historical experience, and an extraordinary siege mentality, marked by rampant presidential paranoia and an obscene premium of unquestioning loyalty.

The absolute loyalty that Chávez demands from all of his followers, under penalty of being kicked off of the Bolivarian petro-gravy train, ensures that his followers are never willing to raise a critical voice. So the question you ask (about how they can justify the existence of new Bolibourgeois multimillionaires alongside bits of the old elite that allowed themselves to be co-opted by Chavez) simply never comes up.

The chavista hive mind has been well and truly taught that dange

F., looking at Venezuela from my perspective - through the prism of a member of the Obama-supporting Communist Party USA - hearing that Chavez has not radically shaken up the petro-power structure does not surprise me.  Nor does it necessarily lower his standing in my mind.

Obama has been receiving millions of dollars from the financial elite and his rhetoric has been moving rightward, from pandering to the Israel lobby to shilling ethanol for agribusiness.  Yet the people who I would much rather support, who would never make even these rhetorical concessions (if rhetorical be all they are), do not have a chance of getting elected.  Within the current power structure and the (attendant) massive ignorance of the Unitedstatesian public, the people I would much rather support haven’t a chance of winning.  Obama, for a number of reasons, is the best thing going.

Likewise, I would love to hear that Chavez has nationalized the oil industry, given laborers a share in management responsibilities and managers a share of labor, radically equalized pay, and used all of the profits from high oil prices to invest in an egalitarian and self-sufficient economy.  But though I am largely ignorant of the economic power structure in Venezuela, it is easy and I think fair to extrapolate from other examples that too-radical moves can have disastrous reactionary consequences.  Full-scale covert warfare, embargo or other forms of economic strangulation might be brought on by diving into a deep socialist revolution; a socialist evolution is relatively safer.  I say relatively, because even the weak-kneed attempts you criticize Chavez for were sufficient to incur the wrath and well-financed subversion of the world’s only superpower.

That is why I asked the question: who and where are the angels?  And not just the angels, but the angels who could win elections, withstand the pressure the elites of Venezuela and abroad could and would bring to bear, and do better than Chavez at achieving the promise of socialism in Venezuela? 

Finally, how do the Chavistas explain why the oligarchic oil parasites have been kept well-fed, or would they deny it?

Mr. Toro, I found your post as demeaning as your original video was patronizing.  Your mistakenly assume you are communicating with a group of uneducated Gringos who incapable of understanding anything that occurs outside the confines of the U.S.A.

In my case, I have practiced law for 31 years.  I graduated 4th in a class of 277 from my law school.  I hold both graduate and undergraduate degrees in political science, and, now that I am semi-retired, I spend a good deal of time reading as well as acquiring knowledge not merely from corporate media types like yourself but from alternative media like Democracy Now, which has done extensive pieces on Venezuela.  I believe I have a deep understanding of the U.S.-led, neoliberal corporate project and how that has affected nations like Venezuela, Ecuador, Chile, Argentina—a project which you either out of desire or ignorance avoid altogether.

I do appreciate the additional link to Caracas Chronicles because these reinforce my perception of you as an anti-Chavez partisan linked to Venezuela’s economic elites.  I found especially amusing your reference to the spontaneous protests that began in Feb. 1989 as “riots” led by “far-left agitators” which are somehow comparable to 9/11/01 in the U.S.

While you are at it, why don’t you examine the earlier 9/11—9/11/73 in Chile.  Try reading Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine” or John Perkins, “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.”

All eyes look through prisms, F., which makes it devilishly hard at times to make out which prisms others are gazing through.  I doubt that many of the people posting here are looking through the simplistic anti-Bush prism.  I, for one, think Bush has done some great things, like severely weakening the U.S. government’s power and prestige throughout the world, though at an unacceptable cost in human lives, and implementing neoliberal prescriptions domestically to allow the theory to fully discredit itself in practice (again at an unacceptable cost in human misery).

I am curious though what your prism is.  I hope it is not of the infantile leftist sort that abhors power and so never lends support to any movement that actually achieves it, and wastes time and energy in intellectual masturbation about the perfect, never coercive (and never having existed) form of power. 

Through my prism, I would have to guess that your prism is that of a liberal, who doesn’t think much about economics and thinks one can ignore that dismal topic while discussing politics.  One cannot ignore political economy, however; so what alternate leadership would you recommend in Venezuela that would have a snowball’s chance in hell of keeping power out of the hands of the economic elite in Venezuela, the U.S., and the world, and actually be taking steps to devolve power (political and economic) down to the masses of poor people?

Rigo:  Thank you for the link.  It reveals precisely what I suspected.  Francisco Toro is an anti-Chavez partisan, whose opposition to Chavez is so extreme that even the NY Times canned him.

It is unclear whether the poster, Santy, is from Venezuela but his statement that Chavez is the democratically elected leader because Venezuelans had suffered from neoliberal policies is on the mark.  I would only add that Chavez is not only the duly elected leader but one whose position is the result of a democratic landslide.  And in the last election, Chavez, the man Toro so despises, made sure that every vote would count by utilizing optical scanners with a paper trail. 

Then, on the other hand, we have George Bush who ascended to power courtesy of the Supreme Court and massive electoral fraud.

I hate it when I come across crap—why exalt it by calling it something else or otherwise commenting on it?—like this on Truthdig. Last time I noticed something similar was when The Nation’s Marc Cooper posted “Marc Cooper on Hugo Chavez” on October 11, 2007.

It turns Truthdig into Crapdig, and I get enough of that elsewhere. It’s why I come here!

How does this crap find its way here? Who’s responsible for it?

This piece is so ad hominem, I don’t know where to begin.  First off, let’s start with Mr.  Toro’s credentials.  It seems he’s provided this sort of unbiased reporting for some time now, even having a short stint with the NYT prior to resigning due to conflicts of interest.  Check out his resignation letter to the Times here: 

http://www.narconews.com/Issue27/article584.html

Props to him for resigning in this fashion, though, admitting his conflict of interest.

To say Chavez is exerting some kind of mind control and using gringos as an excuse for all of Venezuela’s ills is laughable.  Being anti-Bush (as symbolic of U.S. foreign policy) is one thing. Being Anti-American is something else.  I believe Toro is equating these two to further his simplistic and personal-attack laced argument about Chavez’s mind control vis-a-vis anti-Americanism.

Does he really need anti-Americanism to rally voters?  How about being Pro-Venezuelan and actually not letting anyone (be they gringos or anyone else) a) force you in to debt-servitude (IMF) or b) rape you of your natural resources.  Chavez’s electoral success has a lot more to do with acting in the interests of the majority of those he represents rather than rallying those people against a scapegoat for their problems.

Who is Francisco Toro?  What news organization is he connected with?  We know that the much of Venezuelan media is associated with the former ruling elites—the same ones who backed the coup.  Mr. Toro’s take is substantially at odds with positions on Chavez taken by other Venezuelan citizens who have appeared at alternative media like Democracy Now!  Why did Truthdig fail to list his connections before posting this video?

Thanks TruthDig, for bravely offering an alternative to the mainstream English-language media’s depictions of Chavez as an anti-democratic, egomaniacal, authoritarian strongman.  You have added an entirely new perspective with the inclusion of this video portraying Chavez as an anti-democratic, egomaniacal, authoritarian strongman who would prefer a McCain victory.  Bravo!  What a contribution to the public sphere of debate here in the U.S. and the rest of the English-speaking interweb.

I would, however, love to know who Francisco would recommend to us as a better choice for Venezuela’s poor.  Who are the angels that demons like Chavez are suppressing?  Where are they, and how is Chavez’s iron grip keeping them from bringing heaven to the slums of Caracas?  For surely these angels could defeat the economic elite and their essentially interchangeable neoliberal puppet politicians, if only the evil Chavez weren’t stifling democracy with his enormous electoral victories.

http://branddenotes.blogspot.com/2008/06/demonize-enemy-ignore-demon-ally.html