Hugo Chavez and the US Media

Hugo Chavez, the president of Venezuela, is often misrepresented in our country.

He is the victim of negative framing by the mainstream media because of his socialist and redistributionist policies. What he’s building in Venezuela clashes with capitalism, rugged individualism, social Darwinism and free market ideology--or in other words, our values. While universal health care and social programs wane in our country, Chavez has attempted to improve the lives of the poor he represents by giving them bread, milk and bricks. The last commodity is extremely important, because it allows those around Caracas to add a dimension of permanence to their cardboard shacks in the barrio.



To pay for this and other social measures, Chavez has tapped the revenues of major oil companies like ExxonMobil, Shell, and BP. Rich corporations have been forced to accept cuts while drilling in Venezuela's Orinoco Basin, and the politicians representing Corporate America do not approve. In addition to this strategy, Chavez has also rendered the International Monetary Fund obsolete in South America. This too has made Washington cringe. The reason? The IMF provides loans to struggling countries so long as they sell their state-owned industries to private companies. This results in a lot of money for entities like the Bechtel Corporation. But thanks to Venezuela's surplus of oil--which rivals even Saudi Arabia’s--Chavez has nearly paid off the IMF debts of other South American countries. All of this, however, comes at a great cost. Chavez was not only the victim of a failed coup in 2002, but he has also positioned himself as an alternative to the dominant ideology. When paramilitaries, snipers, and the most powerful war machine on earth is in the mix, opposing the dominant ideology is dangerous indeed. Chavez also has to go up against specific media personalities that condone his assassination--as Pat Robertson once did seven years ago. You can watch the religious icon briefly talk about that here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4T7uCeh4Hs

You notice immediately that Robertson tries to smear him. However, there are internal plots to kill him too:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGprwzQ5UoU

But anyway, we can see Roland Barthes' and John Fiske's writings on mythologies and the dominant ideology at work. It is ever apparent in the so-called objective news stories of the mainstream press. The history of the region and what the president really stands for have been clouded. Chavez himself has been turned into a myth--that of an unjust dictator who represents nothing but being a nuisance or threat to American interests. What America stands for is by default the only permissible idea to express.

There are many factors to consider in this complex paradigm, including the IMF, former Venezuelan presidents like Carlos Andres Perez, guerilla fighters, armed insurrections, and a hidden history of US-supported violence and tragedy in Latin America. By incorporating all of these into a study one can demystify the myth and see what's really going on.

A brief history of US intervention is in order.

The intervention follows a pattern; South American countries are resource-rich, and American companies have enjoyed taking these resources and exporting them. The local populations are forced off of private property and persuaded to move into poor working conditions. Dictators are funded by the United States to watch out for private interests and quell populist peasant movements. One infamous example occurred in 1954, when the democratically elected leader Jacobo Arbenz (pictured) was overthrown by a US-backed coup when he threatened to take private land away from the United Fruit Company. This occurred in Guatemala, but the actions were certainly not limited there. The same type of thing happened all over South America.

Perhaps the most well-known and documented case involved the Sandinista guerillas (above). In the late 1970s and into the 80s, this armed movement overthrew the repressive Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua. The Somoza family, naturally, was supported by the United States. The Reagan administration had been secretly funding the Contras to fight against the Sandinistas by committing terrorist acts. This had later been brought to light and dubbed the Iran-Contra scandal. The attacks during this period were so brutal that they were defined as unlawful by the World Court. Nicaragua had asked for several billion dollars from the United States so that they could rebuild. However, our country steadfastly refused to hand over the money.

Chavez was all too familiar with this kind of thing, and he attempted in 1992 to depose someone in his own country--President Carlos Andres Perez. I read a few articles on Perez and immediately understood why populist peasants would want him overthrown. From what I could tell, the dominant interests in the US liked him because he agreed to impose IMF policies in Venezuela--which meant that state-owned industries would be sold to private foreign companies. In the meantime, austerity measures were put into place, which sunk people in poverty so low that they could not even afford to buy bread or ride the bus. The New York Times had no problem recognizing Perez as "president" or "chief", whereas the "dictator" Chavez wasn't afforded the same luxury. Perez, during his tenure, was also meeting with dominant figures like David Rockefeller and former VP Dan Quayle. Chavez wanted to reform the system but was thrown in prison after the failed coup.

After being released, however, he was democratically elected in 1998. And since he established himself as a type of socialist and overturned what Perez built in Venezuela, he has been misrepresented in the US media.

One thing I found consistent throughout the objective coverage was the complete lack of background context about what the US did over the decades. Any reference to the old government—the IMF and American supported one—was either covered up or obscured. This is a common tactic of myth in an industrial society. It naturalized this history and made it seem that the American way of life was the only possible one, and that Chavez has no merits on his own. The president is merely depicted as a nuisance with no history to back him up.

This link takes you to a recent televised Larry King interview with Chavez.

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/bestoftv/2009/09/25/lkl.chavez.long.cnn

He is allowed to speak for himself, which is unusual given the negative news stories, and he articulates many points that journalists here fail to report. Chavez says, among other things, that George W. Bush has called for his assassination, that capitalism is to blame for the world’s evils, and that the US has 7 military bases in neighboring Colombia. The last point is important to consider, because it reverses the oft-repeated charge that Chavez poses the biggest danger in the region. America has been encroaching, but you would not learn about the specifics of that if you only read the New York Times.

News articles depict Chavez negatively in all sorts of different ways. For instance, some frames simply depict him as foolish. In one example, Chavez gave President Obama a book about American intervention in Latin America as a symbolic statement, though it was written in Spanish. The particular article focused on this fact, which made the gesture seem silly because of Obama's inability to read or speak that language.

Another way Chavez is framed is that of a wild orator. Several reports each from different journalists use the same types of words to infer this, such as “inflammatory”, “incendiary”, “roaring” and “fiery”. This, obviously, makes him seem more dangerous.

A photograph comprises one other aspect I look at while considering the dominant ideology. There were only four or five images of Chavez in the fifteen or so primary sources I found. Two featured him in a dark suit and red tie, another in all black, and a third like this:

I analyzed this image and decided that the military fatigues connote violence and warfare, while the map connotes premeditated planning, expansion and invasion. This could be seen as another mechanism to make the man seem like a threat.

My study takes several more things into consideration, but the main point is that Barthes’ and Fiske’s writings on myth are reinforced by using this Chavez example. But one can see other phenomena at work, too. For instance, during the Industrial Revolution, Karl Marx spoke of the dominant class imposing a false consciousness on the proletariat in order to maintain a status quo that benefitted rich owners. The system was enforced by planting illusory beliefs in workers. I think that there are elements of this at work in the Chavez example, because the elite media owners skew the facts about the man. The illusory beliefs--that he must be overthrown and that he is a dictator--fool the working class in the United States. People that would otherwise be helped and edified by Chavist policies don't get to learn about them.

Louis Althusser, a Marxist theorist, updated Marx's idea and said that it wasn't so much one class subjecting a weaker class to an ideology, but rather that all classes freely participate to keep the status quo going. This can be seen when reading the accounts of different journalists--none of which have a stake in the success of the IMF. Journalists don't prosper when upper class oil executives prosper, yet they depict Chavez falsely just the same.

Finally, Antonio Gramsci's theory on ideology can be seen in the Chavez example as well. Gramsci updated both Marx's and Althusser's impression of the ideology. He said that people weren't always kept in a state of false consciousness, but they were at times aware of the system and fought it for social change. This is called hegemony theory, and it treats ideology as something that is constantly battled over. In my study, it seems clear that particular Americans are very familiar with what socialism is, and even familiar with what Chavist 21st century socialism is. Some even contribute to websites and other media in Chavez's defense. This goes to show that some are at war with the dominant ideology and not kept in the dark. For if everyone was in a state of false consciousness, I would not have been able to read objective and sympathetic accounts of the man to begin with.

I think that a study on Chavez is important because you can expose the dominant ideology and see the various definitions of it at work.



Photo credits: Arbenz and Sandinistas are from the To the Roots website. The two Chavez photos are from the news stories found here:

http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSTRE59A1MU20091011

http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSTRE52L19G20090322?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews&rpc=22dsp=true

The map is from: http://rds.yahoo.com/_ylt=A0WTbx6BjRtLaIQBqxSjzbkF/SIG=11uf0q7nb/EXP=1260183297/**http%3A//www.america-atlas.com/venezuela.htm