Miami media on Venezuela: Selective blindness
Some years ago, Progreso Weekly had a regular feature, titled “B.S. Detector,” that exposed the bilingual scam (B.S., get it?) perpetrated by Miami’s El Nuevo Herald when it failed to report — or underreported or misreported — news items that The Miami Herald published about Cuba, Cubans and Cuban-Americans.
El Nuevo is experiencing that kind of selective blindness again, in the case of Venezuela.
On Thursday (Feb. 27), The Miami Herald published a sobering story by two Associated Press reporters that pointed out that the opposition movement in that country is far from representative of the people at large, the people who in April 2013 elected Nicolás Maduro president and last December gave the United Socialist Party a strong vote of confidence in the municipal elections.
El Nuevo chose not to publish it.
The Associated Press article, titled “Venezuelan Opposition Struggles To Expand Appeal,” begins by conceding that the country “is plagued by some of the highest inflation, murder and kidnapping rates in the world.”
“But don’t expect a Ukraine-style street revolution anytime soon in this South American nation, where the frequently outmaneuvered opposition hasn’t united behind a single strategy or managed to broaden its appeal beyond the largely middle-class, educated followers it’s had on its side all along,” the article continues.
“For many Venezuelans, the opposition’s two highest profile leaders, former presidential candidate Henrique Capriles and the jailed Leopoldo López, are still viewed as part of an elite detached from the working class life,” it says.
The article quotes David Smilde, a senior researcher at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), as saying that “the opposition is always convinced that it’s a majority and therefore it thinks that the government wins elections by fraud […] but it’s a government that has considerable support.”
Despite an economic decline, Maduro “continues to funnel government resources into poor neighborhoods,” the Associated Press article goes on. “While people there are suffering from the country’s economic woes, they still feel little connection with the protesters they watch on television burning trash and setting up barricades in leafy neighborhoods that they could never aspire to live in.”
And not even the opposition leaders can agree on a strategy.
At least Capriles tried to reach out to Maduro’s backers during the presidential campaign, promising to protect the revolution’s social gains, the article says. That brought him within 225,000 votes of winning the election, an election that, incidentally, was acknowledged by observers as honest and transparent.
But Capriles was pushed out from that path by the fiery López, whose call for street protests landed him in jail, on arson and rabble-rousing charges.
To show the effects of that policy of nihilism, “Maduro trained state-run television cameras on the barricades of trash and furniture erected by the opposition,” the Associated Press article says, quoting Maduro as saying that the rioters “are the ones who don’t let through the trucks with rice, grains, milk and flour.”
It is unlikely that the rioting will lead to Maduro’s ouster, the AP reporters conclude. “Maduro has a near-complete grip on the military, broadcast media and institutions from Congress to the judiciary after 15 years of socialist rule.”
“Luis Vicente León, director of Caracas-based pollster Datanalisis, said the opposition hasn’t convinced the poor that it’s capable of governing in their interests.”
“The poor are not going to get out in the street to do anything if they don’t feel there is an alternative,” León told the AP reporters. And it seems clear that neither opposition leader is an alternative to the incumbent administration.
Not a reality that El Nuevo Herald would want to present to its readers, but a reality nevertheless.
