The artillery of ideasENGLISH EDITIONFriday | May 25, 2012 | Nº 110 | Caracas

The Venezuelan head of state announced new financing measures for a number of social pro-grams including penitentiary services to improve the technological capacity, communication system and overall security of the nation’s prisons. With the new spending, the government hopes to put an end to the rampant proliferation of arms in the country’s jails and curtail the mafias that still operate inside penitentiary walls. | page 2

page 7 | Analysis:

Former Colombian president Alvaro Uribe lashes out against Venezuela

page 8 | Opinion NATO is a well-funded war machine

Happy birthday Alo!This week Venezuela cel-

ebrated 13 years of a tele-vision program that has transformed the South American nation and cre-ated a new notion of gover-nance and transparency. The program, Alo Presi-dente! (Hello Mr. President), began as a radio show slated to provide interaction be-tween newly-elected Presi-dent Hugo Chavez and his constituents in 1999. The show later became televised and eventually occupied a steady spot each Sunday for a period ranging from two to eight hours, depending on the weekly subjects.

During the 378 editions of the program, the Venezue-lan President has interacted live on television with more than 8,000 people, received 900 phone calls live on air and attended to more than 25,000 letters from people across the nation. Chavez held the 378 programs in 259 different venues through the country and 7 interna-tional cities.

Each Sunday on Alo Presi-dente, Chavez discusses his government’s agenda and sets policies into action, live and with people’s participa-tion. There is no greater transparency than that.

Chavez: Reforming Prisons a PriorityPrison riot ends

peacefullyLast week the Venezuelan government successfully ended a violent prison uprising in the La Planta penitenciary facility in Caracas. Government officials negotiated a peaceful outcome to the dangerous situation, which had caused chaos in the city. President Chavez revealed he spoke personally with several inmates in order to end the violence. The prison, located near a residential area, was officially shut down and all inmates were transferred to other facilities as of last Friday. The violence had erupted when several prisoners objected to the prison closure. | page 3

Politics

South America advances energy integrationUNASUR nations agreed to better exchange strategic resources for regional development. | page 4

Technology for the peopleVenezuela’s

telecommunications

company invests in social

welfare. | page 4

Social Justice

Indigenous UniversityA pioneering university for indigenous peoples takes root in Venezuela. | page 5

Chavez: We will defeat the oppositionT/ Agencies

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez reappeared on Tuesday in a live

television broadcast, the first time he has been seen in public view since returning from cancer treatment in Cuba almost two weeks ago.

Chavez, 57, cracked jokes with government ministers during

Tuesday’s broadcast, which was from a cabinet meeting in the presidential palace, and repeated his plans to register his candida-cy for the Oct. 7 election in early June as set out by the country’s electoral commission.

“The defeat that we’re going to deal to the opposition will be unprecedented”, Chavez said.

“It’s part of our challenge to move to a new phase,” he said, adding that his government would strive for annual economic growth of 8 percent and single-digit infla-tion if elected for another six-year term. Prior government’s averaged annual inflation around 60%, whe-reas the Chavez administration has reduced it to 26%.

It was only Chavez’s third appea-rance in public since mid-April. He called state television twice in re-cent days but Tuesday’s speech was his first in public since he returned from Cuba after completing radio-therapy sessions on May 11.

Most opinion polls give the former soldier a double-digit lead over oppo-sition challenger Henrique Capriles, a young governor from the neo-conservative party Primero Justicia who would turn back all of the social advances from the past decade.

The artillery of ideas| 2 | Impact No Friday, May 25, 2012

T/ COIP/ Presidential Press

V enezuelan President Hugo Chavez announced new financing measures

for a number of social pro-grams including penitentiary services last Friday during a telephone call to the state tele-vision channel Venezolana de Television (VTV ).

Calling in to the program Dando y Dando (Giving and Giv-ing), the socialist head of state detailed the new initiatives and took time to inform the nation on the progress of his continued cancer treatment - a regiment which he reported to be follow-ing “rigorously”.

Describing his work ethic over the last 13 years as that of “a runaway horse”, the two-time incumbent expressed his intentions to perform his presidential responsibilities in a more measured and pru-dent manner throughout his convalescence.

“I’m following a diet, I’m working 8 hours a day as the law stipulates and I pray to God to give me the strength of a buffalo rather than that of a horse”, the Venezuelan President said.

Chavez had a cancerous tumor extracted from his pelvic area in June 2011 and has recently un-dergone treatment in Cuba for a relapse of the disease.

Despite the health problems, the head of the United Social-ist Party of Venezuela told the nation on Friday that his abil-ity to attend to the duties of his office has not been diminished and he has been working me-thodically on the issues affect-ing the nation.

While speaking on the pro-gram, the 57 year-old head of state gave details of his admin-istration’s new penitentiary spending measures that will provide $164.7 million to improve the technological capacity, com-munication system and overall security of the nation’s prisons.

The announcement follows on the heels of a violent standoff that broke out in the La Planta prison in Caracas last week.

Venezuela's Chavez announces new penitentiary funding, praises economic growth

With the new spending, the government hopes to put an end to the rampant proliferation of arms in the country’s jails and curtail the mafias that still op-erate inside penitentiary walls.

“If with this spending the prob-lem doesn’t end definitively, it must at least minimize the prob-lem of inmates having rifles, ma-chine guns, grenades, drugs and cellular phones. This has to end! This [security] system is going to allow us to manage in a much more scientific and efficient way this problem”, he said.

An additional 1.49 billion bo-livars ($346 million) will be al-located to the erection of 8 new prisons, which will begin con-struction in July, Chavez in-formed.

“The soil and land studies are being carried out”, he said of the building project. “These should be centers of education, not de-formation,” the Venezuelan head of state added, reaffirming

his administration’s commit-ment to humanize the nation’s penitentiaries.

Last July, the Venezuelan government created the Min-istry of Penitentiary Affairs, currently headed by Iris Va-rela, to deal specifically with the conditions of the nation’s prisons and protect the rights of inmates.

Historically neglected by previous governments, Vene-zuela’s jails have been plagued by overcrowding and gang ac-tivity, conditions which have been exacerbated by a slow and unresponsive judicial process.

To rectify this problem, the ministry has been working with prisoners and security forces to craft a democratic solution to the challenges facing the inmate population and to speed up the processing of individual court cases.

On Friday, Chavez con-gratulated Minister Varela’s

“Now, international finance doesn’t come from the Interna-tional Monetary Fund which came here to impose its condi-tions when Venezuela was a country subordinated to the [United States] empire, the world powers and the transnationals”, he affirmed.

Chavez pointed out similar lending agreements signed be-tween his country and neigh-boring Brazil to improve the Caribbean nation’s air travel infrastructure.

“Not long ago, we signed an accord to finance some 20 passenger jets, manufactured in Brazil, which will be des-ignated to the [state owned airline] Conviasa. This is to continue building a modern and great Venezuelan air-line with Brazilian financ-ing”, the socialist leader commented. International agreements

based in mutual respect and autonomy are partially re-sponsible for Venezuela’s ro-bust economic growth for the first trimester of 2011, some-thing which Chavez praised on Friday.

According to Venezuela’s Cen-tral Bank, the South American nation saw GDP growth of 5.6 percent in the first 4 months of 2012.

“Tremendous growth”, Chavez said of the numbers which have been attributed by Central Bank officials to the government’s spending on social programs and the boost in the construction industry resulting from the large scale Mission Housing Venezuela initiative.

The head of state also refut-ed claims made by Jorge Botti, president of the Venezuelan chamber of commerce Fedeca-maras who alleged that the na-tion’s economic performance is short-term and owing to “state capitalism”.

“The private sector is the sec-tor that has gown the most. So this is a lie... The public banks have increased the amount of credits given to the private sec-tor”, Chavez asserted.

peaceful resolution of the problem in La Planta prison, which ended in dialogue and the transfer of 600 inmates to other facilities.

“This problem of the prisons is a debt that we have with our people and it hurts me deeply every time something like this happens”, the head of state said of the violence last week.

INTERNATIONAL FINANCE & ECONOMIC GROWTH

Part of the funding for the new penitentiary initiatives will come, Chavez explained, from a $4 billion loan provided to Ven-ezuela by China.

The head of state referred to the arrangement with the Asian country as an example of his administration’s inter-national finance policy that fo-cuses on bi-lateral agreements between allied nations rather than one-sided deals dictated by Washington.

No Friday, May 25, 2012 Security | 3 |The artillery of ideas

T/ Ewan RobertsonP/ AFP

Last Thursday night Ven-ezuelan authorities re-gained control of La Plan-

ta prison in Caracas after an outbreak of violence between prisoners. The government pledged to guarantee the hu-man rights of inmates and transferred them to other penitentiary facilities. The prison was then officially closed and is set to be trans-formed into a space to benefit the local community.

The events brought to an end almost four weeks of defiance by some groups of prisoners opposed to their eviction from the La Planta facility. Venezuelan authori-ties had previously decided to close the prison citing over-crowding and dangers to the local community.

On Thursday morning gun-fire broke out within La Planta, lasting several hours. State security forces maintained a presence outside the facility. Prisons minister Iris Valera

described the situation as due to “a small group of very vio-lent people who don’t want to accept reason”.

In the afternoon a peaceful so-lution for the eviction of the pris-on was brought about by nego-tiations between Iris Valera and National Assembly president Di-osdado Cabello, a regional com-mander of the national guard and prisoners’ leaders. Transfers began Thursday night, with in-mates leaving La Planta volun-tarily, according to state press.

Prisons vice-minister, Ra-mon Garcia, confirmed Thurs-day night that the majority of prisoners were transferred to a new facility where “there is a structure of dignity for the prisoners, [in which] we can comfortably accommodate one thousand people”.

As of last Friday all 1694 pris-oners had been transferred to other facilities. Valera com-mented that while over the last few days the prison had expe-rienced “a delicate situation, we managed to build a bridge and now they [the inmates] are crossing it”.

This Tuesday, President Hugo Chavez revealed that he had intervened in the situa-tion, speaking via telephone with several of the prisoners involved in the conflict in order to find a peaceful solution.

GUARANTEEING PRISONERS’ RIGHTSState institutions have un-

dertaken to guarantee the hu-man rights of prisoners in the transfer process, according to Valera. She announced to press on Friday morning that, in coordination with the health ministry, medical staff were on standby to attend to the needs of prisoners coming out of La Planta.

Three wounded were con-firmed as a result of the con-frontations inside the prison including one police officer, stated National Assembly pres-ident Diosdado Cabello on Fri-day morning. He explained that authorities did not enter the prison to examine the facil-ity until all prisoners had been evicted.

As a condition of the nego-tiations, an Attorney Gen-

eral’s office representative accompanied prisoners on ev-ery transport vehicle during the transfer operation. “The aim is to continue guarantee-ing prisoners’ human rights”, said public prosecutor Joel Espinoza.

Valera also announced that Plan Cayapa, a program to speed up judicial reviewing of prisoners’ cases to ascertain who is due for release, is taking an immediate focus on inmates from La Planta. Six inmates from the prison were freed within 24 hours as a result.

The Chavez government provided free transportation for family members to visit in-mates in their new penitentiary centers as of last weekend.

The Attorney General’s off-fice also held therapy sessions on Thursday with family mem-bers of prisoners in La Planta.

MEDIA WARMinister Valera criticized

the opposition and private me-dia for creating a “media war” over the incident.

Opposition TV channel Globovision dedicated cover-age to the distress of inmates’ families during the violence inside La Planta, while con-servative newspaper El Uni-versal described the events as “charged with armed con-frontations, chaos in the city [Caracas] and terror in the zone”.

In October last year Globovi-sion was fined $2.2 million by Venezuela’s public regulator Conatel for manipulation and attempting to create fear dur-ing a prison hostage situation in the El Rodeo maximum se-curity facility.

Opposition presidential can-didate Henrique Capriles, who is also governor of Miranda state where the Rodeo prison is located, used the situation in La Planta to criticize the gov-ernment’s record on prisons. “The situation in La Planta is another example of this gov-ernment’s failure on the issues of prisons and Venezuela’s se-curity”, he said.

Venezuelan authorities to transform La Planta prison after violence

On Friday Valera described as “indignant” that opposition governors and spokespersons emitted their opinions on the incident but “didn’t do any-thing” to help resolve the sit-uation. She went on to ask, if opposition governors have the “magic formula” to resolve the problems in Venezuela’s prison system, “why don’t they begin to apply it in the prisons they administer?”

PRISON REFORMSince the creation of the Min-

istry of Penitentiary Affairs in July 2011 the Venezuelan gov-ernment has been pursuing a program of prison reform in order to humanize the nation’s penitentiary system and to overcome long term problems of overcrowding and slow ju-dicial processing of prisoners’ cases.

Key measures include Opera-tion Cambote, in which pris-oners decide the priorities for improving their prison envi-ronment, then work with pris-on ministry authorities and prison directors to carry out the plans.

The Cayapa program sees state judicial institutions working together to tackle the backlog in the processing of cases. Prisons minister Val-era has previously stated that the ministry expects to re-solve the backlog of cases by the end of the year. It has also began a disarmament plan to tackle organised mafias with-in prisons.

Speaking on state channel VTV on Friday, Valera stressed that the evacuation of La Plan-ta is part of a general policy this year of closing prisons in residential areas.

“Here there is a revolution-ary government providing a strong response [to problems in the penitentiary system]”, she said. “We are sure that we have now started on the path toward a transformation of the prison system in Venezuela”.

La Planta prison was offi-cially shut down on Saturday. In a symbolic finish, officials took down a metal plaque at the prison, which was built in 1964. Varela called the prison’s closing a gift to the surround-ing neighborhood and said the community could have a say in deciding what will become of the prison compound in the future.

The artillery of ideas| 4 | politics No Friday, May 25, 2012

T/ COI P/ Agencies

Representatives of the 12-country Union of South American Nations (Unasur)

regional alliance met in the Venezuelan capital of Caracas last Friday to discuss a new con-tinent-wide energy treaty and discuss further steps towards infrastructure integration.

The meeting was attended by the Energy Ministers of Unasur’s member states who signed a declaration dealing specifically with natural re-source sovereignty and the creation of what would be an historic Regional Energy Treaty.

“The greatest concentration of natural resources is found in South America. In particu-lar, [South America possesses] the greatest oil reserves, one of the largest gas reserves, great hydroelectric potential, as well as coal and bioenergy deposits. This obliges us to exercise our sovereign rights over these re-

T/ COI P/ Agencies

Venezuela’s publicly-owned telecommunications compa-

ny Cantv celebrated five years since its nationalization last Monday, marking an important milestone in the Chavez govern-ment’s policy of redistributive business practices.

Cantv is the largest telecom-munications firm in Venezuela, providing telephone and Inter-net services to millions in the country as well as mobile ser-vices through its subsidiary company Movilnet.

Since its nationalization in 2007, the company has grown substantially, doubling its cel-lular phone clients to over 15

million, tripling its profits, and doubling the number of Venezu-elans connected to the internet to over 1.7 million.

“It’s been five years since our telecommunications have been put at the service of the people to provide the greatest happi-ness possible for the population. Cantv and Movilnet are giving back to the people and we can see it with the numbers”, said Venezuelan Science and Tech-nology Minister Jorge Arreaza during an interview on state television earlier this week.

According to Arreaza, the company has cleared more than $488 million in revenues over the past five years.

These surpluses have been re-invested in the social programs

of the Chavez government in-cluding public housing, educa-tion and health initiatives.

This contrasts sharply, Minis-ter Arreaza said, with the poli-cies of previous governments, which, under pressure from the International Monetary Fund, sought to turn the nation’s most important industries over to pri-vate investors.

“In the decade of the 90s, just about everything was being privatized in the country. One of the jewels was Cantv which had a monopoly on telecommu-nications at the time”, Arreaza said.

The cabinet member pointed out that the nationalization of the firm is sanctioned by article 302 of Venezuela’s constitution

that makes provisions for state control over strategic industries including oil, energy and tele-communications.

SERVICES FOR THE PEOPLEApart from maintaining

strategic industries under public ownership and injecting funds into social programs, Cantv has also been providing other benefits to the Venezu-elan population.

Through its collaboration in different projects and the offer-ing of important services to the country’s residents, the state company has been able to make an important contribution to the raising of living standards in Venezuela.

An example of this is the Vergatario, a high quality and affordable cellular phone dis-tributed by Movilnet, which has made technologically-ad-vanced mobile devices avail-able to just about everyone in the country.

Unasur Energy Council pushes resource integration

achieve the integration of our countries”, Ramirez said during the meeting.

Other topics touched during the discussions included the pro-posed Venezuela-Colombia oil pipeline, which intends to link the Orinoco Oil Belt with the Pacific ocean, thereby facilitating great-er access to Colombian and Asian markets for Venezuelan crude.

According to Energy Minister Mauricio Cardenas, Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos continues to hold discussions with Chinese investors to help bring the plan to fruition.

“This means we’re advanc-ing. We’re carrying out the conceptual engineering stud-ies to identify the costs of the pipeline which will permit us to transport crude at the lowest cost”, Cardenas said.

Future meetings of the Unasur Energy Council are set to take place in Venezuela, Colombia and Brazil between the repre-sentatives of state-owned energy companies and tech firms inter-ested in furthering integration strategies.

The first of these will take place in the coming months in Caracas and will deal with the topics of oil and gas followed by additional meetings in the Colombian capi-tal of Bogota addressing the issue of electricity and the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro regarding energy technology.

sources for the benefit of our people”, the declaration re-leased by the Energy Council at the end of the meeting stated.

Specifically, the ministers agreed to create an Ad Hoc ju-ridical committee to provide proposals for the drafting of the new energy treaty which seeks to “promote harmonious

development” through ties of solidarity and mutual benefit.

The energy council also ac-corded to assign a group of energy experts to create a Una-sur research center to identify future “structural” projects and to “give support to compli-mentary and united economic growth”, the declaration read.

The summit was held last Fri-day at the headquarters of the Venezuelan state oil company, Pdvsa, and was hosted by the Ca-ribbean nation’s Foreign Minis-ter Nicolas Maduro and Energy Minister Rafael Ramirez.

“The topic of natural resourc-es and the articulation of an energy policy is fundamental to

Cantv: 5 years of giving back to the Venezuelan people

With a price of between $35 and $42, the Vergatario is the product of an agreement signed between the Chavez government and the Chinese companies ZTE and Huawei to manufacture phones in Venezuela.

Cantv has also been a major player in the Canaima mini-laptop program, which by the end of 2012 will have distributed more than 2.5 million free com-puters to grade school students around the country.

This year the company hopes to increase Internet speed as well as access to some of the most remote areas of the coun-try through its fiber optic net-work and Venezuela’s Simon Bolivar satellite.

“The decision of [President Hugo Chavez] to nationalize Cantv was not only the right de-cision, it was also humane and strategic - one of the best deci-sions that Comandante Chavez has made”, Arreaza said last Monday.

No Friday, May 25, 2012 Social Justice | 5 |The artillery of ideas

T/ Rhodri DaviesP/ Leliberalnews

Maracas Pemon has abun-dant space on his univer-sity campus - it is located

across 5,000 acres of forestland in Venezuela’s southern Bolivar State.

He is one of 67 students who have classes in a thatched roundhouse, water sports in a river and, along with human rights and law, a curriculum that includes buffalo rearing.

Pemon is enrolled at Ven-ezuela’s indigenous university - established to develop commu-nity leaders to safeguard lands, rights and ancient cultures.

“The importance of the uni-versity is to protect the com-munity”, said 20 year-old Pe-mon. “To raise awareness and see the world and universe from an indigenous, as well as a Western, way of thought. First is the struggle for ter-ritories and landless groups, because without land there is no education or customs. Land

is the mother of all indigenous culture”.

The native peoples of Venezu-ela comprise just two per cent of the country’s 29 million people, and many communities have been established in the jungles, swamps and waterways along the Atlantic and Caribbean coasts for centuries. There, they wor-ship the land, employ shamans, and use traditional healing.

An indigenous rights orga-nization, working with Jesuit priests, established the univer-sity at Tauca in 2001, in response to threats to their communities.

Since the Spanish first took control of the region in the 16th century, native populations have seen their lands seized - and their struggle for survival has continued ever since.

Illegal mining, evangelical Christianity and ranchers invad-ing territories have increased the pressure on communities fighting to retain their culture, language and independence. In-digenous people are also drawn to cities bloated by local oil and

mineral wealth, but typically remain excluded from any eco-nomic progress - often passed over for job opportunities and treated as second-class citizens.

The spread of modernity has overpowered customary prac-tices and cultures.

In 1999, President Hugo Chavez’s government became the first national administration to constitutionally recognize indigenous groups. Chavez is portrayed as a talismanic de-fender of native rights, and has made highly public pronounce-ments supporting their claims to land and culture.

His administration has pro-vided social programs, or mi-siones, for indigenous popula-tions, aiding in their rise out of poverty and abandonment.

Chavez’s 19th century ar-chetypal role model, Simon Bolivar, made education for indigenous people one of his first policies in an independent Venezuela - and Chavez’s ad-ministration has also backed indigenous education.

The 44 indigenous communi-ties nationwide each put for-ward students to the university. It is a bastion and a source of self-respect, after centuries of marginalisation.

Alfredo Garcia, from the Ge-nepa Keipun community in Bo-livar State, has one more year of a four-year course until he fin-ishes his studies.

“There comes a time to re-cover from the past - and I feel very proud, because we too are people”, he said. “From the sup-port we receive here, we are aware of the importance of our culture and what we should do with our lives”.

Students live on campus. They sleep in hammocks, cook together on open fires, and walk through forestland to get to classes.

Volunteers from Europe and South America also teach at the institution. A government foun-dation currently provides most of the university’s funding.

Adedukawa Etnia Ye’Kwana, a general coordinator at the

Venezuela's indigenous university

university, explained, “It’s been really hard for other cul-tures to accept this university. It is strange for the state itself. According to them, it should follow the structure of the white man. But this university is from an indigenous way of thought. The highest authority at the university should be that of indigenous peoples - the wise and the elderly”.

But the government assures it would not attempt to impose its system on the institution.

Yaritza Aray, an indigenous representative for Bolivar State, says the government supports the group protecting its cultures against modern dangers, such as drugs, alcohol and changing diets.

“It has happened in other countries, including the United States”, she said. “They say they are indigenous but they don’t speak their own lan-guage, they’ve forgotten their dances, and do not live as in-digenous people. They do not know their own culture and they’ve lost their land. We can-not allow this.

“It’s very important that this group is seeking to safe-guard their traditional values; it is a very interesting idea. Keep what is yours and fight for what is really important, without prejudice to the state. To know your culture, rather than acting like non-indige-nous people”.

But the university is battling restrictions of its own culture as well. Only five of its students are women.

“There have been hurdles for women to study, because some say it is not their do-main. But we are trying to achieve equal participation”, Ye’Kwana said.

Organizers view the insti-tution as an important step forward for indigenous com-munities. They believe it could be a pilot program for Venezue-la, and one that could be copied throughout Latin America.

Pemon envisions more imme-diate benefits. He sees his future as being in Bolivar state, work-ing for his community.

“I would like to educate chil-dren, to be aware and have a life equally in our national culture. That’s while keeping respect for both Western and indigenous cultures.

“This is the fight at the uni-versity”.

The artillery of ideas| 6 | Analysis No Friday, May 25, 2012

T/ Rachael Boothroyd

Earlier this week Al Jazeera English published an ar-ticle by Nikolas Kozloff, a

former academic turned author who now spends his time writ-ing satire and lambasting the Venezuelan government while hiding behind his Oxford PhD as a veil of objectivity.

The focus of Kozloff’s latest article was the Cuban-Venezue-lan “Barrio Adentro” initiative, a social mission which provides free healthcare to Venezuela’s poor, and free, community-based training for Venezuelan medical students. Despite the program being one of the gov-ernment’s most popular, and the fact that it is often cited as an exemplary case of Cuban in-ternationalism and solidarity, in his article Kozloff instead de-cides to detail the alleged “har-rowing” conditions that Cuban doctors are subjected to while treating patients in Venezuela.

According to Kozloff’s article, Cuban medical personnel are overworked, obliged to treat 60-70 patients a day, constantly spied on, and used by the Venezuelan state for political purposes. The sources of Kozloff’s outlandish statements are none other than leaked documents from the US embassy in Caracas, which, the cables reveal, has been aiding dissident Cuban doctors to apply to the US government for “hu-manitarian parole” so that they might be transferred to Miami as “asylum seekers”. Accord-ing to the documents, 73 Cuban medical personnel were trans-ferred to Miami by 2009.

Despite the fact that over 80,000 Cubans have worked in the mission, with 30,000 Cuban medical personnel currently working in Venezuela, Kozloff finds that these 73 Cubans are representative enough of the whole Barrio Adentro mission for him to conclude that the pro-gram is “fraying at the edges” in the run-up to this year’s elec-tions. But questionable e-mails written by staunchly anti-Cu-ban US diplomats might not be

Media & opposition: false perceptions of Venezuela’s democracy

the best sources for judging the merits of a social program which has, by all accounts, dramati-cally increased Venezuelans’ standards of living. So much so, that despite the vast amounts of propaganda against the health-care program, the opposition’s candidate, Henrique Capriles Radonski, has been forced to pledge that he will maintain it should he by some miracle win the elections this year.

Kozloff’s selective analysis of the state of the Barrio Adentro program is typical of most “po-litical commentaries” covering the Venezuelan elections in the international press, which are currently contributing to a dis-torted understanding of Venezu-ela’s political reality in the run up to the October elections.

OPPOSITION OUT OF TOUCHWhile most commentators ei-

ther stress Capriles’ youth (he’s 39) and his energetic campaign, or apparent “indecision” on the part of Venezuelan voters, the reality on the ground is quite dif-ferent in Venezuela. The opposi-tion have faced defeat after defeat

for the past two months. Not only do nearly all polls in Venezuela give Chavez a 20-30% lead over his opponent, but the Capriles campaign has also made several tactical mistakes. In a move that alienated working class voters in May, Capriles announced that he did not attend the country’s In-ternational Workers’ Day march because he was an “employer” and not an employee. His cam-paign has also been responsible for the persecution and assault of several community media journalists, harking back to the days of repression under previ-ous governments.

In the international arena, in a subtle snub against the Venezu-elan opposition coalition, Colom-bian President Juan Manuel San-tos stated in an interview that Chavez represented “stability” for the continent that was both essential for regional unity and beneficial for Colombia. Mean-while US ally and former Colom-bian president Alvaro Uribe’s vocal support for Capriles has backfired, only serving to rein-force the perception of Capriles as the candidate of US imperi-

alism amongst the Venezuelan public. Just this week, Capriles’ US advisor, Peter Greenberg, also admitted that Chavez’s lead over Capriles was “irreversible”.

These concerns are also being echoed by conservatives inside the country with even right-wing journalists such as Ra-fael Poleo mourning Capriles’ “hopeless” election campaign and members of the opposition coalition demanding that the campaign be restructured.

“Capriles could be out any-where today, but the rest of the country does not know about it... (his) strategy is not work-ing, his candidacy is not grow-ing, and Chavez’s illness has hyper-personalized electoral debate. People are only talking about Chavez”, explained Oscar Schemel, President of the Hin-terlaces polling company.

Throughout this election cam-paign the opposition’s most seri-ous failure is to have misunder-stood the extent to which new mechanisms of participatory democracy have grown in Vene-zuela. The concept of democracy has taken on new meaning and

the working class and organized communities are currently at the helm of an unprecedented exper-iment with radical new forms of democratic participation.

Citizens’ democratic participa-tion is now channelled through communal councils, communes, socialist workers’ councils and cooperatives, which extend the democratic process into their everyday lives and allow them to transform their own socio-cul-tural surroundings. Venezuelan democracy is no longer reduc-ible to national elections every 6 years, rather it is something con-structed every single day.

Following an unsuccessful 12-year battle against Chavez waged on its own terrain, the opposition is now attempting to compete on the Revolution’s terrain and the results are per-haps even less rewarding. The opposition has totally failed to understand just how Ven-ezuela’s political terrain is con-stantly shifting and continu-ously being propelled forwards by the country’s new grassroots democratic format.

Just like Kozloff, the Ven-ezuelan opposition continues to look at Venezuela from a dis-tance. Their sources are US dip-lomats, US political advisors or the Venezuelan elite. From this perspective, Barrio Adentro is merely a political strategy. For Kozloff, it is merely the product of a transient deal with Cuba which can be rolled back should another government take pow-er. For Capriles it is a program he must pledge to maintain in order to have any chance of winning votes.

But for many Venezuelans Barrio Adentro is more than a political strategy and more than a program, it is a social process which has become an integral part of their everyday lives, which has brought dig-nity, value and identity, and shaped their communities and changed their educational pos-sibilities. These are changes that can’t be perceived from the upper class district of Altamira in Caracas, and much less from a newsroom in New York.

No Friday, May 25, 2012 Analysis | 7 |The artillery of ideas

T/ COI P/ Agencies

S eeking notoriety as an in-ternational spokesman for Venezuela’s anti-Chavez

sector, former Colombian Pres-ident Alvaro Uribe issued base-less and malicious claims in international media aimed at isolating the Venezuelan gov-ernment. Openly campaigning for the opposition’s presidential candidate, Henrique Capriles Radonski, Uribe’s most recent tirades include Twitter mes-sages calling Venezuelan Presi-dent Hugo Chavez both an “as-sassin” and “dictator” as well as publicly accusing the Chavez government of being “an acces-sory to terrorism” during an interview on CNN.

URIBE’S CLAIMSLast weekend in Miami

during the Sixteenth Bien-nial Conference of the Cuban American National Coun-cil (CNC), former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe de-scribed the government of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez as a “new-style dicta-torship”. According to Uribe’s novel thesis, Venezuela’s par-ticipatory democracy and its record-breaking electoral his-tory is “dictatorial” because the Venezuelan executive uses public resources to advance social programs that benefit the country’s majority.

Uribe, who used unfounded opposition claims in an at-tempt to strengthen his argu-ment, said that “when you be-gin to have a government that expropriates private compa-nies, wastes (public) resources, doesn’t respect freedom of the press, goes about, little by little, manipulating the justice system and placing justice in the hands of criminality, that’s where you have the consolidation, not of a democratic government, but of a dictatorship under the cover of elections”.

Uribe, who tried and failed to have the Colombian courts permit him a third term in of-

Former Colombian president Alvaro Uribe attacks Venezuela

fice, made similar accusations just two months ago. Speak-ing in March at a US-backed International Freedom Foun-dation (IFF) conference titled “Latin America: Opportuni-ties and Challenges”, Uribe included Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa and Bolivian President Evo Morales in the pool of popular leaders impos-ing “new-style dictatorships” through social programs and democratic elections, accord-ing to him.

Uribe also renewed his pre-vious unfounded accusations that Colombia’s leftist guerrilla organizations “are protected in Venezuela by the Venezuelan dictatorship”, adding that “Ven-ezuela under the Chavez dicta-torship has become a paradise for drug-trafficking”.

Uribe’s repeated use of base-less claims of Venezuelan “sup-port for terrorism” almost brought the two countries to war during his eight years in office. Relations have greatly improved, however, since the election of current Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos.

Uribe is currently under in-vestigation for his role in wide-

spread paramilitary violence unleashed on Colombia’s rural poor during his eight-year term (2002-2010).

TWITTER ATTACKAware of Chavez’s successful

use of Internet technologies to communicate with others, Uribe used his own twitter account to lash out at Venezuela’s socialist President. On May 13, Uribe un-leashed a tirade against Chavez, blaming the Venezuelan Presi-dent for the entirety of violent crime in the country.

“Chavez (assassin), you want to cover up the yearly assassi-nation of 19,000 Venezuelans, killed with impunity. Chavez (assassin), you want to cover up the kidnapping of over a thou-sand people per year”. Providing no evidence to back his claims, Uribe then described Chavez as a “dictator, who knows he can lose (the 2012 election) and who appeals to a discourse against the bourgeoisie while ignoring the corrupt bourgeoisie of his own regime”.

Uribe, who openly supports Venezuela’s opposition presiden-tial candidate Henrique Capriles Radonski, titled one of his Twit-

ter messages “CaprilesPresi-dente” and wrote that “hope-fully Venezuela guarantees freedom for all citizens and not just the liberty of the Dic-tator and his friends”.

Speaking at an opposition rally in Caracas, Capriles Ra-donski tried to distance him-self from Uribe’s statements.

“With a great deal of respect for opinions that come from abroad…I say to ex-President Uribe as well as President San-tos, just like I would say to any other Head of State or ex-pres-ident, don’t involve yourself in Venezuela’s electoral process because we Venezuelans will resolve our own problems”, he said.

Asked if he would continue commenting on the Venezu-elan election, Uribe wrote via Twitter, “so long as there is a dictatorship protecting terror-ists, we will continue to give our opinion about Venezuela”.

VENEZUELANS RESPONDOne of the first to respond

to Uribe’e dangerous claims was Ivan Zerpa, Secretary of the Venezuelan National As-sembly. Using his Twitter ac-

count to do so, Zerpa wrote to Colombia’s ex-president stating, “Uribe, it is you, you and your narco-paramilitary govern-ment, that are the assassins”. He reminded Uribe that “many of your (Uribe’s) principal ad-visors are now detained, ac-cused of drug trafficking and paramilitary involvement” and asked, “How many deaths are you responsible for?”

Zerpa also insisted that Uribe, “respect President Chavez” and affirmed that Venezuela’s socialist lawmak-ers as well as the country’s growing pro-Chavez majority will continue “to defend him” at all costs.

Venezuela’s Minister of In-formation Andres Izarra also responded, adding, “the decla-rations made by Mancuso have Uribe going crazy”.

Salvatore Mancuso, one of Co-lombia’s top paramilitary lead-ers who now sits in a US prison, recently told investigators that his organization had direct ties to the government of Alvaro Uribe.

GOOD TIMING?In an article titled, “Uribe:

Advisor to the Titanic”, Rebe-lion.org writer Juan Manuel Karg noted that Uribe’s vocal support for the Capriles Ra-donski campaign “comes at a time when the Governor of Miranda begins to lose out in public opinion, after a cam-paign launch that expected to be much closer (to Chavez) in the polls, and just months be-fore the election”.

With opinion polls that place President Chavez “between 20 and 30 points ahead of Capriles Radonski”, Karg said, “one can understand the necessity the MUD has, or that Capriles himself has,” to get additional support from “international advisors”.

Kang also noted that public comments by Capriles Radon-ski distancing himself from Uribe are purely for show, and that as this year’s electoral contest approaches, “there they will be, on the one side, beyond their cosmetic dif-ferences, Capriles Radonski, Uribe, and the international lobbyists that are still trying to prevent the sinking of the Titanic better known as the MUD; and on the other side, Chavez and the courageous Venezuelan people”.

A publication of the Fundacion Correo del Orinoco Eva Golinger Aimara Aguilera Fundación Imprenta de la Cultura

The artillery of ideasENGLISH EDITION Friday | May 25, 2012 | Nº 110 | Caracas | www.correodelorinoco.gob.ve

Should NATO be handling world security?

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (better known as NATO) is in the news

once again thanks to a NATO summit meeting in Chicago over the weekend of May 19-20 and to large public demonstrations in Chicago against this military pact.

NATO’s website defines the alliance’s mission as “Peace and Security”, and shows two chil-dren lying in the grass, accom-panied by a bird, a flower and the happy twittering of birds. There is no mention of the fact that NATO is the world’s most powerful military pact, or that NATO nations account for 70 percent of the world’s annual $1.74 trillion in military spend-ing.

The organizers of the demon-strations, put together by peace and social justice groups, as-sailed NATO for bogging the world down in endless war and for diverting vast resources to militarism. According to a spokesperson for one of the pro-test groups, Peace Action: “It’s time to retire NATO and form a new alliance to address unem-ployment, hunger, and climate change”.

NATO was launched in April 1949, at a time when Western leaders feared that the Soviet Union, if left unchecked, would invade Western Europe. The US government played a key role in organizing the alliance, which brought in not only West Eu-ropean nations, but the United States and Canada. Dominated by the United States, NATO had a purely defensive mission — to safeguard its members from military attack, presumably by the Soviet Union.

That attack never occurred, either because it was deterred by NATO’s existence or because the Soviet government had no intention of attacking in the first place. We shall probably never know.

In any case, with the end of the Cold War and the disap-pearance of the Soviet Union, it seemed that NATO had outlived its usefulness.

But vast military establish-ments, like other bureaucracies, rarely just fade away. If the orig-inal mission no longer exists, new missions can be found. And so NATO’s military might was subsequently employed to bomb Yugoslavia, to conduct coun-ter-insurgency warfare in Af-ghanistan, and to bomb Libya. Meanwhile, NATO expanded its membership and military facili-ties to East European nations right along Russia’s border, thus creating renewed tension with that major military power and providing it with an incentive to organize a countervailing mili-tary pact, perhaps with China.

None of this seems likely to end soon. In

the days preceding the Chicago meeting, NATO’s new, sweeping role was highlighted by Oana Longescu, a NATO spokesper-son, who announced that the summit would discuss “the Al-liance’s overall posture in de-terring and defending against the full range of threats in the twenty-first century, and take

stock of NATO’s mix of conven-tional, nuclear, and missile de-fense forces”.

In fairness to NATO plan-ners, it should be noted that, when it comes to global matters, they are operating in a relative vacuum. There are real inter-national security problems, and some entity should certainly be addressing them.

But is NATO the proper en-tity? After all, NATO is a mili-tary pact, dominated by the United States and composed of a relatively small group of self-selecting European and North American nations. The vast ma-jority of the world’s countries do not belong to NATO and have no influence upon it. Who appoint-ed NATO as the representa-

tive of the world’s people? Why should the public in India, in Brazil, in China, in South Afri-ca, in Argentina, or most other nations identify with the deci-sions of NATO’s military com-manders?

The organization that does represent the nations and peo-ple of the world is the United Nations. Designed to save the planet from “the scourge of war”, the United Nations has a Security Council (on which the United States has permanent membership) that is supposed to handle world security is-sues. Unlike NATO, whose de-cisions are often controversial and sometimes questionable, the United Nations almost in-variably comes forward with decisions that have broad inter-national support and, further-more, show considerable wis-dom and military restraint.

The problem with UN deci-sions is not that they are bad ones, but that they are difficult to enforce. And the major reason for the difficulty in enforcement is that the Security Council is hamstrung by a veto that can be exercised by any one nation. Thus, much like the filibuster in the US Senate, which is making the United States less and less governable, the Security Coun-cil veto has seriously limited what the world organization is able to do in addressing global security issues.

Thus, if the leaders of NATO nations were really serious about providing children with a world in which they could play in peace among the birds and flowers, they would work to strengthen the United Nations and stop devoting vast resourc-es to dubious wars.