Human Rights
Watch in Venezuela
Lies, Crimes and Cover-ups
By James Petras
28/09/08 "ICH
" -- - Human Rights Watch, a US-based group claiming to be a
non-governmental organization, but which is in fact funded by
government-linked quasi-private foundations and a Congressional
funded political propaganda organization, the National Endowment
for Democracy, has issued a report “A Decade Under Chavez:
Political Intolerance and Lost Opportunities for Advancing Human
Rights in Venezuela” (9/21/2008 hrw.org). The publication of the
“Report” directed by Jose Miguel Vivanco and sub-director Daniel
Walkinson led to their expulsion from Venezuela for repeated
political-partisan intervention in the internal affairs of the
country.
A close reading of the “Report” reveals an astonishing number of
blatant falsifications and outright fabrications, glaring
deletions of essential facts, deliberate omissions of key
contextual and comparative considerations and especially a
cover-up of systematic long-term, large-scale security threats
to Venezuelan democracy posed by Washington.
We will proceed by providing some key background facts about HRW
and Vivanco in order to highlight their role and relations to US
imperial power. We will then comment on their methods, data
collection and exposition. We will analyze each of HRW charges
and finally proceed to evaluate their truth and propaganda
value.
Background on Vivanco and HRW
Jose Miguel Vivanco served as a diplomatic functionary under the
bloody Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet between 1986-1989,
serving no less as the butcher’s rabid apologist before the
Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. His behavior was
particularly egregious during the regime’s brutal repression of
a mass popular uprising in the squatter settlements of Santiago
in 1986-1987. With the return of electoral politics (democracy)
in Chile, Vivanco took off to Washington where he set up his own
NGO, the Center for Justice and International Law, disguising
his right-wing affinities and passing himself off as a ‘human
rights’ advocate. In 1994 he was recruited by former US federal
prosecutor, Kenneth Roth, to head up the ‘Americas Division’ of
Human Rights Watch. HRW demonstrated a real capacity to provide
a ‘human rights’ gloss to President Clinton’s policy of
‘humanitarian imperialism’. Roth promoted and supported
Clinton’s two-month bombing, destruction and dismemberment of
Yugoslavia. HRW covered up the ethnic cleansing of Serbs in
Kosovo by the notorious Albanian terrorists and gangsters of the
Kosovo Liberation Army and the unprecedented brutal transfer of
over 200,000 ethnic Serbs from the Krajina region of Croatia.
HRW backed Clinton’s sanctions against Iraq leading to the
deaths of over 500,000 Iraqi children. Nowhere did the word
‘genocide’ ever appear in reference to the US Administrations
massive destruction of Iraq causing hundreds of thousands of
premature deaths.
HRW supported the US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan
where Kenneth Roth advised the US generals on how to secure the
colonial occupation by avoiding massive civilian deaths. In
words and deeds, HRW has played an insidious role as backer and
adviser of US imperial intervention, providing the humanitarian
ideological cover while issuing harmless and inconsequential
reports criticizing ‘ineffective’ excesses, which ‘undermine’
imperial dominance.
HRW most notorious intervention was its claim that Israel’s
murderous destruction of the Palestinian city of Jenin was ‘not
genocidal’ and thus provided the key argument for the US and
Israeli blocking of a UN humanitarian mission and investigative
report. As in all of its ‘research’ their report was deeply
colored by selective interviews and observations which
understated the brutality and killings of Palestinian civilians
by the Israeli state – even while the fanatics who run the major
pro-Israel organizations accused HRW of bias for even mentioning
a single murdered Palestinian.
Method
HRW currently makes a big play of its widespread interviews of a
broad cross section of Venezuelan political and civic society
government and opposition groups, as well as its consultation of
most available documents. Yet the Report on Venezuela does not
reflect anything of the sort. There is no careful,
straightforward presentation of the government’s elaboration and
justification for its actions, no academic critiques of the
anti-democratic actions of anti-Chavez mass media; no discussion
of the numerous journalists’ accounts which expose systematic US
intervention. The Report simply records and reproduces
uncritically the claims, arguments and charges of the principle
publicists of the opposition while dismissing out of hand any
documented counter-claims. In other words, Vivanco and company
act as lawyers for the opposition rather than as serious and
objective investigators pursuing a balanced and convincing
evaluation of the status of democracy in Venezuela.
The political propaganda intent of Vivanco-HRW is evident in the
timing of their ‘investigations’ and the publication of their
propaganda screeds. Each and every previous HRW hostile ‘report’
has been publicized just prior to major conflicts threatening
Venezuelan democratic institutions. In February 2002, barely two
months before the US backed military coup against Chavez, HRW
joined the chorus of coup planners in condemning the Chavez
regimes for undermining the ‘separation of powers’ and calling
for the intervention of the Organization of American States.
After the coup was defeated through the actions of millions of
Venezuelan citizens and loyalists military officers, HRW moved
quickly to cover its tracks by denouncing the coup – but
subsequently defended the media moguls, trade union bureaucrats
and business elites who promoted the coup from prosecution,
claiming the coup promoters were merely exercising their ‘human
rights’. HRW provides a novel meaning to ‘human rights’ when it
includes the right to violently overthrow a democratic
government by a military coup d’etat.
Following the military coup in 2002 and the bosses’ lockout of
2003, HRW published a report condemning efforts to impose
constitutional constraints on the mass media’s direct
involvement in promoting violent actions by opposition groups or
terrorists. President Chavez’ “Law for Social Responsibility in
Radio and Television” provided greater constitutional guarantee
for freedom of speech than most Western European capitalist
democracies and was far less restrictive than the measures
approved and implemented in Bush’s US Patriot Act, which HRW has
never challenged, let alone mounted any campaign against.
Just prior to the political referenda in 2004 and 2007, HRW
issued further propaganda broadsides which were almost identical
in wording to the opposition (in fact HRW ‘Reports’ were widely
published and circulated by all the leading opposition mass
media). HRW defended the ‘right’ of the US National Endowment
for Democracy to pour millions of dollars to fund opposition
‘NGO’s’, such as SUMATE, accusing the Chavez government of
undermining ‘civil society’ organizations. Needless to say,
similar activity in the US by an NGO on behalf of any foreign
government (with the unique exception of Israel) would require
the NGO to register as a foreign agent under very strict US
Federal laws; failure to do so would lead to federal prosecution
and a jail term of up to 5 years. Apparently, HRW’s
self-promoted ‘credibility’ as an international ‘humanitarian’
organization protects it from being invidiously compared to an
agent of imperialist propaganda.
HRW: Five Dimensional Propaganda
The HRW Report on Venezuela focuses on five areas of politics
and society to make its case that democracy in Venezuela is
being undermined by the Presidency of Hugo Chavez: political
discrimination, the courts, the media, organized labor and civil
society.
1.Political Discrimination
- The Report charges that the government has fired and
blacklisted political opponents from some state agencies and
from the national oil company.
- Citizen access to social programs is denied based on their
political opinions.
- There is discrimination against media outlets, labor unions
and civil society in response to legitimate criticism or
political activity.
Between December 2002 and 2003, following the failure of the
military coup of the previous April, the major business
organizations, senior executives of the state oil company and
sectors of the trade union bureaucracy organized a political
lockout shutting down the oil industry, paralyzing production
through sabotage of its computer-run operations and distribution
outlets in a publicly stated effort to deny government revenues
(80% of which come from oil exports) and overthrow the
democratically elected government. After 3 months and over $20
billion dollars in lost revenues and hundreds of millions of
dollars in damage to machinery, with the aid of the majority of
production workers and technicians, the bosses ‘lockout’ was
defeated. Those officials and employees engaged in the political
lockout and destruction of equipment and computers were fired.
The government followed normal procedures backed by the majority
of oil workers, who opposed the lockout, and dismissed the
executives and their supporters in order to defend the national
patrimony and social and investment programs from the
self-declared enemies of an elected government. No sane,
competent, constitutional lawyer, international human rights
lawyer, UN commissioner or the International Court official
considered the action of the Venezuelan government in this
matter to constitute ‘political discrimination’. Even the US
State Department, at that time, did not object to the firing of
their allies engaged in economic sabotage. HRW, on the other
hand, is more Pope than the Pope.
Nothing captures the ludicrous extremism of the HRW than its
charge that citizens are denied access to social programs. Every
international organization involved in assessing and developing
large social programs, including UNESCO, the World Health
Organization and the UN Food and Agricultural Organization, have
praised the extent and quality of the coverage of the social
programs instituted by the Chavez government covering 60% of the
population and almost 100% of the poor. Since approximately
between 20-30% of the poor still vote for the opposition, it is
clear that needy citizens critical of the government have equal
access to social programs, including food subsidies, free health
care and education. This social safety net is more inclusive
than ever before in the history of Venezuela. In fact some of
the poor suburbs of Caracas, like Catia, which voted down the
2007 referendum, are major recipients of large-scale, long-term
social assistance programs.
Only scoundrels or the ill informed could be convinced of the
HRW charge of discrimination against mass media outlets, labor
unions and civil society groups. The opposition controls 95% of
the newspapers, a majority of the television and radio outlets
and frequencies, with the widest national circulation. The
government has ‘broken’ the ruling class monopoly on information
by funding two major TV stations and a growing number of
community based radio stations.
There are more trade union members and greater trade union
participation in enterprises, internal debates and free
elections than ever before under previous regimes. Rival lists
and intense competition for office between pro and
anti-government lists are common in the trade unions
confederation (UNT). The entire HRW ‘Report’ is based on
complaints from the authoritarian CTV(Confederation of
Venezuelan Workers/Confederacion de Trabajadores de Venezuela)
bureaucrats who have lost most of their supporters and are
discredited because of their role in supporting the bloody April
2002 coup. They are universally disdained; militant workers have
not forgotten their corruption and gangster tactics when they
collaborated with previous rightwing regimes and employers.
2. The Courts
HWR claims that President Chavez has “effectively neutralized
the judiciary as an independent branch of government”. The claim
that the judiciary was ‘independent’ is a new argument for HRW –
because a decade earlier when Chavez’ 1999 constitution was
approved by referendum, HRW decried the ‘venality, corruption
and bias of the entire judicial system’. After years of
releasing the leaders of the 2002 coup, postponing rulings and
undermining positive legislation by elected legislative bodies
and after revelations of high and lower court bribe taking, the
Government finally implemented a series of democratically
approved reforms, expanding and renewing the judicial system.
The fact that the new court appointees do not follow the past
practices of the opposition-appointed judges has evoked
hysterical cries by HRW that the new reformed courts ‘threaten
fundamental rights’. The most bizarre claim by HRM is that the
Supreme Court did not ‘counter’ a 2007 constitutional reform
package. In fact the Supreme Court approved the placing of
constitutional reforms to a popular referendum in which the
Chavez government was narrowly defeated. The Venezuelan Supreme
Court subsequently respected the popular verdict – unlike US
Supreme Court, which overturned the popular vote in the 2000 and
2004 Presidential elections, a constitutional crime against the
popular will, which Kenneth Roth, Vivanco and the rest of HRW
have yet to condemn.
3. The Media
Every outside media specialist has been highly critical of the
advocacy of violent action (leading up to the coup) and gross
falsifications and libelous ‘reports’ (including racist epithets
against Hugo Chavez) propagated by the ruling class-dominated
mass media. A single opposition television network just had one
of its many outlets suspended for openly backing the opposition
military seizure of power, an action that any Western capitalist
democracy would have taken in the wake of a violent uprising.
HRW did not, has not and will not condemn the arrest of dozens
of US and international journalists, some brutally beaten,
covering the Republican and Democratic Presidential Conventions.
Nothing even remotely resembling the extraordinary powers of
‘preventive detention’ of journalists by the US Homeland
Security/local and state police forces exists in Venezuela. The
wanton destruction of journalists’ cameras and tape recorders by
the police at the US Republican Party Convention would be
un-imaginable in Venezuela today. In contrast the only offense
prosecuted in Venezuela against the media is the act of
supporting and advocating violence aimed at overthrowing
democratic institutions. Like all countries, Venezuela has laws
dealing with libel and slander; these are far weaker than any
comparable statutes in the countries upholding the tradition of
the Magna Carta. HRW blatantly falsifies reality by claiming
state control of the print media: All one needs to do is peruse
any newsstand in Venezuela to see a multiplicity of lurid
anti-government headlines, or tune into the radio or television
stations and view news accounts that compete for the worst
anti-Chavez propaganda found in the US Fox News or CNN.
4. Organized Labor
HRW claims that the Venezuelan government has violated ‘basic
principles of freedom of association’ because it requires state
oversight and certification of union elections and that by
denying the right to bargain collectively to non-certified
unions, it undermines workers’ rights to freely join the union
of their choosing and to strike. Practically every government in
the West has rules and regulations regarding oversight and
certification of union elections, none more onerous than the US
starting with the Taft-Hartley Act of the 1940’s and the ‘Right
to Work’ Laws current in many states, which have reduced the
percentage of unionized workers in the private sector to less
than 3%. In contrast, during the Chavez Presidency, the number
of unionized workers has more than doubled, in large part
because new labor legislation and labor officials have reduced
employer prerogatives to arbitrarily fire unionized workers. The
only union officials who have been ‘decertified’ are those who
were involved in the violent coup of April 2002 and the
employers lockout intended to overthrow the government, suspend
the constitution and undermine the very existence of free
unions. Former Pinochet official Jose Miguel Vivanco delicately
overlooks the gangsterism, thuggery and fraudulent election
procedures, which ran rampant under the previous rightwing
Venezuelan labor confederation, CTV. It was precisely to
democratize voting procedures and to break the stranglehold of
the old-guard trade union bosses that the government monitors
oversaw union elections, many of which had multi-tendency
candidates, unfettered debates and free voting for the first
time.
I attended union meetings and interviewed high level CTV trade
unions officials in 1970, 1976 and 1978 and found high levels of
open vote buying, government and employer interference and
co-optation, collaboration with the CIA-funded American
Institute of Free Labor Development and large-scale pilfering of
union pension funds, none of which was denounced by HRW. I
attended the founding of the new Venezuelan union confederation,
Union Nacional de Trabajadores (UNT) in 2003 and a subsequent
national congress. I have witness a totally different unionism,
a shift from government-run ‘corporate’ business unionism to
independent social movement unionism with a decidedly class
oriented approach. The UNT is a multi-tendency confederation in
which diverse currents compete, with varying degrees of support
and opposition to the Chavez Government. There are few
impediments to strikes and there is a high degree of independent
political action with no inhibition to workers resorting to
strikes in order to demand the ouster of pro-employer labor
officials.
For example, this year, steel workers in the Argentine-owned
firm SIDOR, went on strike several times protesting private
sector firings (HRW, of course never discussed private sector
violations of workers rights). Because the Venezuelan Labor
Minister tended to take the side of the employers, the
steelworkers marched into a meeting where Chavez was speaking
and demanded the dismissal of his Minister. After conferring
with the workers’ leaders, Chavez fired the Labor Minister,
expropriated the steel plant and accepted workers demands for
trade union co-management. Never in Venezuelan labor history
have workers exercised this degree of labor influence in
nationalized plants. There is no doubt that there are government
officials who would like to ‘integrate’ labor unions closer to
the state; the new unionists do spend too much time in internal
debates and internecine struggles instead of organizing the
informal and temporary worker sectors. But one fact stands out:
Unionized and non-unionized Venezuelan workers have experienced
greater social welfare payments, rising living standards,
greater job protection and greater free choice in union
affiliation than any previous period in their history. It is
ironic that Vivanco, who never raised a word against Pinochet’s
anti-labor policies, an uncritical apologist of the AFL-CIO (the
declining and least effective labor confederation in the
industrialized West), should launch a full-scale attack on the
fastest growing, independent and militant trade union movement
in the Western hemisphere. Needless to say, Vivanco avoids any
comparative analysis, least of all between Venezuelan and US
labor over the spread of union organizing, internal democracy
and labor representation in industry, social benefits and
influence over government policy. Nor does HRW refer to the
positive assessment by independent international labor
organizations regarding union and labor advances under the
Chavez Presidency.
5. Civil Society and HRW: The Mother of All Perversities
Jose Miguel Vivanco, who kept quiet during his years as a state
functionary serving the Chilean dictator Pinochet, while
thousands of protestors were beaten, jailed and even tortured
and killed and courageous human rights groups were routinely
assaulted, shamelessly claims that President Chavez has adopted
“an aggressively adversarial approach to local rights advocates
and civil society organization.”
President Chavez has actively promoted a multitude of
independent, democratically elected community councils with over
3 million affiliated members, mostly from the poorest half of
the population. He has devolved decision-making power to the
councils, bypassing the party-dominated municipal and state
officials, unlike previous regimes and US AID programs, which
channeled funds through loyal local bosses and clients. Never
has Venezuela witnessed more intense sustained organization,
mobilization and activity of civil society movements. This cuts
across the political spectrum, from pro-Chavez to pro-oligarch
neighborhood, civic, working class and upper class groups.
Nowhere in the world are US-funded groups, engaged in overt
extra-parliamentary and even violent confrontations with elected
officials, tolerated to the degree that they enjoy freedom of
action as in Venezuela. In the US, foreign-funded organizations
(with the exception of Israeli-funded groups) are required to
register and refrain from engaging in electoral campaigning, let
alone in efforts to destabilize legitimately constitutional
government agencies. In contrast, Venezuela asked the minimum of
foreign government-funded self-styled NGOs in requiring them to
register their source of funding and comply with the rules of
their constitution, that is, to stay out of virulent partisan
political action. Today, as yesterday, all the ‘civil society’
organizations, including these funded by the US, which routinely
attack the Chavez government, can operate freely, publish,
assemble and demonstrate unimpeded. Their fundamental complaint,
echoed by HRW, is that the Chavez government and its supporters
criticize them: According to the new HRW definition of civil
society freedom,the opposition has the right to attack the
government - but not the other way around; some countries can
register foreign-funded organizations - but not Venezuela; and
some government can jail terrorists and coup-makers and identify
and criticize their accomplices – but not Venezuela. The
grotesque double-standard, practiced by Human Rights Watch,
reveals their political allegiances: Blind to the vices of the
US as it descends into a police state and equally blind to the
virtues of a growing participatory democracy in Venezuela.
The ‘Report’ contains egregious omissions. It fails to mention
that Venezuela, under President Chavez, has experienced twelve
internationally supervised and approved elections, including
several presidential, congressional and municipal elections,
referenda and recall elections. These have been the cleanest
elections in Venezuelan history and certainly with more honest
vote counting than one would find in the US presidential
contests.
The ‘Report’ fails to report on the serious security threats
including the recording of phone conversations of active and
retired high military officials planning to violently seize
power and assassinate President Chavez. Under the extraordinary
degree of tolerance in Venezuela, not a single constitutional
right has been suspended. In the US, similar terrorist actions
and plans would have led to a state of emergency and the
probable pre-emptive mass incarceration of thousands of
government critics and activists. HRW ignores and downplays
security threats to Venezuelan democracy – whether it involves
armed incursions from Colombian paramilitary groups allied with
the pro-US Venezuelan opposition, the assassination of the chief
federal prosecutor Danilo Anderson who was investigating the
role of the opposition in the bloody coup of April 2002, the
US-backed secessionist movement in the state of Zulia, the
collusion of the mass media with violent student mobs in
assaulting Chavez supporters on campus or the economic sabotage
and panic caused by the private sector’s hoarding of essential
food and other commodities in the lead-up to the 2007
referendum.
One of Vivanco’s most glaring omissions is the contrast between
Venezuela’s open society approach to the hundreds of thousands
of undocumented immigrant workers from Colombia and the US
authoritarian practice of criminalizing its undocumented
laborers. While the US Homeland Security and Immigration police
have implemented arbitrary mass arrests, assaults and
deportation of working heads of immigrant families – leaving
their wives and children vulnerable to destitution, Chavez has
awarded over a million undocumented Colombian immigrant workers
and family members with residency papers and the opportunity for
citizenship.
HRW has yet to protest Washington’s brutal denial of human
rights to its Latin American and Asian immigrant workers in
recent months. HRW did not issue a single protest when US-backed
local oligarch politicians, local government officials and
racist gangs in Bolivia went on a rampage and slaughtered three
dozen unarmed Indian peasant workers. Vivanco’s squalid
selective slandering of Venezuela is only exceeded by his
systematic silence when there are abuses involving US
collaboraters!
Conclusion
The Human Rights Watch Report on Venezuela is a crude propaganda
document that, even in its own terms, lacks the minimum veneer
of ‘balance’, which the more sophisticated ‘humanitarian’
imperialists have put out in the past. The omissions are
monumental: No mention of President Chavez’ programs which have
reduced poverty over the past decade from more than 60% to less
than 30%; no recognition of the universal health system which
has provided health care to 16 million Venezuelan citizens and
residents who were previously denied even minimal access; and no
acknowledgment of the subsidized state-run grocery stores which
supply the needs of 60% of the population who can now purchase
food at 40% of the private retail price.
HRW’s systematic failure to mention the advances experienced by
the majority of Venezuelan citizens, while peddling outright
lies about civic repression , is characteristic of this
mouthpiece of Empire. Its gross distortion about labor rights
makes this report a model for any high school or college class
on political propaganda.
The widespread coverage and uncritical promotion and citation of
the ‘Report’ (and the expulsion of its US-based authors for
gross intervention on behalf of the opposition) by all the major
newspapers from the New York Times, to Le Monde in France, the
London Times, La Stampa in Italy and El Pais in Spain gives
substance to the charge that the Report was meant to bolster the
US effort to isolate Venezuela rather than pursue legitimate
humanitarian goals in Venezuela.
The major purpose of the HRW ‘Report’ was to intervene in the
forthcoming November municipal and state elections on the side
of the far-right opposition. The ‘Report’ echoes verbatim the
unfounded charges and hysterical claims of the candidates
supported by the far right and the Bush Administration. HRW
always manages to pick the right time to issue their propaganda
bromides. Their reports mysteriously coincide with US
intervention in electoral processes and destabilization
campaigns. In Venezuela today the Report has become one of the
most widely promoted propaganda documents of the leading
rightist anti-Chavez candidates.
For the partisans of democracy, human rights and
self-determination, every effort should be made to expose the
insidious role of HRW and its Pinochetista propagandist, Vivanco,
for what they are – publicists and promoters of US-backed
clients who have given ‘human rights’ a dirty name.
Professor Petras latest book Zionism,Militarism And the Decline
of U.S Power(clarity press Atlanta) - August 2008Click on
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