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Shut Up (About) Chavez
By Paul Buchheit
11/24/07 "ICH"
-- -- It gets tiresome to hear the
one-sided media coverage of Hugo Chavez. Yes, he’s
authoritarian. He’s also abrasive, arrogant, stubborn, and all
too human. But he knows what happened to leaders in Iran and
Guatemala and Chile and Haiti over the past half-century when
they tried to defy the western world by nationalizing oil and
other industries. He’s influenced by the memory of the US-backed
attempt to depose him in 2002. And he can see the effects of
unregulated multinational companies in Nigeria, where in 2004
80% of the revenue from the oil industry went to only 1% of the
population, and only 2% of Shell Oil’s employees were from the
local population.
Chavez has alienated the
wealthy, the business establishment, thousands of upper-class
student protestors, and, perhaps worst of all for him, the
media. But the mainstream media rarely speaks for the poor
majority. Chavez has instituted a literacy program,
land-acquisition policies that benefit the poor, job training
for unskilled workers, free health care, and manufacturing
cooperatives which give the poor an active role in business
development. He was democratically elected, and recent polls
still place him about 20 percentage points ahead of his nearest
challenger.
The Venezuelan leader’s
popularity is summarized by human rights activist Medea
Benjamin:
“Walk through poor barrios in
Venezuela and you’ll hear the same stories over and over. The
very poor can now go to a designated home in the neighborhood to
pick up a hot meal every day. The elderly have monthly pensions
that allow them to live with dignity. Young people can take
advantage of greatly expanded free college programs. And with
13,000 Cuban doctors spread throughout the country and reaching
over half the population, the poor now have their own family
doctors on call 24-hours a day.”
Opposition to Chavez comes from
those with connections to the old political elite: the
Venezuelan business community, the Chamber of Commerce (Fedecámaras),
and the major union federation CTV, who used their control over
the media to disparage Chavez for economic problems and
communist ties. Many officials and journalists in the U.S.
dismiss him as a troublesome dictator. An editor of the leading
El Nacional newspaper said Chavez and his cabinet “just want to
steal and get rich.” Even some of the Venezuelan poor resent his
attempts to spread his influence with anti-poverty programs
outside the country.
Ironically, Chavez was
criticized for two initiatives that most Americans would like to
see implemented in the U.S. — health care and increased oil
company taxes. He is maligned for his friendship with Fidel
Castro, even though some 10,000 Cuban doctors and health care
workers came to Venezuela in return for oil. His industry
reforms included a doubling of oil company taxes. He also
opposes U.S. efforts to implement free trade agreements that
would surrender the country’s raw materials in return for
expensive products from abroad. Perhaps most significantly,
Chavez is feared because of his growing independence in a
country whose vast oil reserves are coveted by the north.
One doesn’t have to be a
socialist to cheer for equal opportunity for hard-working
citizens of any country. According to the U.S. Department of
State, the income gap in Venezuela decreased between 2003 and
2005, with the Gini coefficient (a measure of income disparity
from 0 (equal) to 1 (unequal)) dropping from .618 in 2003 to
.514 in 2005. Chavez speaks, however noisily, for the poor. Most
of the media speaks for the people with money.
Paul Buchheit is a professor
with the Chicago City Colleges, co-founder of Global Initiative
Chicago ( www.GIChicago.org
)
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