Readers Write: Who Is the Real Hugo Chávez?

By Jan Frel, AlterNet. Posted July 29, 2006.

AlterNet published two articles about Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez this week that fostered a lot of discussion in the comments sections, on our own blogs, and off-site in discussion forums elsewhere on the internet.

The first article, a piece by Javier Corrales from Foreign Policy, titled "A Modern-Day Tyrant?" drew the most criticism of the two. Perhaps the most contentious claim in Corrales' article was that since he's come into power, "Chávez has failed to improve any meaningful measure of poverty, education, or equity. More damning for the Chávez-as-Robin Hood theory, the poor do not support him en masse."

AlterNet staff writer Josh Holland took this claim and others in the article to task in a blog post, citing his previous work debunking the foreign policy establishment in D.C.'s claims about Chávez:

In 1997, the year before Chávez's election, 55.6 percent of Venezuelan households and almost 61 percent of Venezuelan citizens lived beneath the poverty line. At the end of last year, those numbers were down to 37.9 and 43.7 percent, respectively. That's a major improvement ... This, however, does not really capture the changes in the living standards of the poor in Venezuela, since there have been major changes in non-cash benefits and services in the last few years.

And Holland swatted Corrales' attempt to claim that the poor dislike Chávez:

Professor Corrales goes on to say: "More damning for the Chávez-as-Robin Hood theory, the poor do not support him en masse. Most polls reveal that at least 30 percent of the poor, sometimes even more, disapprove of Chávez." Which is also to say that 70 percent of the poor majority do approve of Chávez. That makes sense given that he won 59 percent of the vote in the recall election.

Commenter Thought Criminal added that the author Javier Corrales "was a consultant to the World Bank with a special interest in 'education reform' which looks to be 'education privatization' or rather, IMF-style 'austerity measures' aimed at enforcing debt repayment at the expense of the country's social improvement programs -- and then only the privileged few get an education, and the country stagnates. (kimaszi gave a link to Corrales' resume) His job appears to be providing intellectual justification for the economic hitmen who work for the IMF-World Bank-Import/Export crowd -- basically, it's the Tonya Harding model of economic competition in action." Thought Criminal linked to an article from the Center for Economic and Policy Research to debunk many of the claims in the piece.

Commenter Vani offered a fairly extreme explanation for why AlterNet published the Corrales article -- that it has been taken over by the CIA, or perhaps Israel's Mossad:

Although there might very well be some, even many, sincere people behind AlerNet, the management must be in the hands of some right-wing, conservative organization that is trying to derail the Left. Possibly it has been infiltrated by the CIA or Mossad. In any case, there is no way that a truly liberal news source would have published an article attacking Chavez. Any Leftie with half a brain knows that Chávez is an enormous advance over who normally leads in Latin America.

Occasional AlterNet author Jules Siegel sent an e-mail asking for an answer to a comment written by Mycos, a subscriber to newsroom-l.net, who also wondered why the piece was republished here:

"Somehow this totally bizarre article made it onto the pages of Alternet. Nobody can believe what they are seeing. It's ... well, it's simply a bizarre attempt at being critical of Chavez, and makes me wonder if there isn't more to the story of its appearance over there."

To which I can say, authoritatively, Nah! AlterNet hasn't been taken over by anything other than the desire to run a mix of articles with a blend of perspectives. Note that very recently, AlterNet ran another piece from Foreign Policy arguing that the NRA was taking its gun advocacy to the whole planet -- not a piece of gun industry PR by any standard. It sure looks like some of Corrales' claims were inaccurate, and his biases fairly easy to discern. However, the piece had a lot of material about what Chávez has done to consolidate power, which went unchallenged. Points such as "His 1999 constitution did away with congressional oversight of military affairs, a change that allowed him to purge disloyal generals and promote friendly ones" are worthy of consideration, even if you like the man.

Jan Frel is an AlterNet staff writer.