I’d like to talk about the U.S. media coverage of the crisis in Venezuela over the last several
months.
In a piece published Tuesday, the media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, known
as FAIR, found the mainstream corporate media here in the United States did not publish
even one opinion piece opposing regime change in Venezuela.
The FAIR piece is headlined “Zero Percent of Elite Commentators Oppose Regime Change
in Venezuela.”
One example FAIR cited is a New York Times opinion piece published last month headlined
“What My Fellow Liberals Don’t Get About Venezuela.”
The video features Venezuelan-American comedian and writer Joanna Hausmann.
Let’s go to a clip.
Juan Guaidó is not an American right-wing puppet leading an illegitimate coup, but a
social democrat appointed by the National Assembly, the only remaining democratically
elected institution left in Venezuela.
Guaidó’s job is to ensure free and fair elections, because—news flash—the last
election was not free or fair.
The New York Times did not point out that Joanna’s father, Ricardo Hausmann, is a
close ally of opposition leader Juan Guaidó and was appointed by Guaidó to serve as Venezuela’s
representative to the Inter-American Development Bank.
Edgardo Lander, could you talk about the media coverage and what that means?
Well, it’s obvious that the corporate media has been following U.S. policy.
And this isn’t new.
I mean, it happened during the Iraq War.
It’s happened in Libya.
It’s happened in all over the place.
The papers like The New York Times turn to be critical after the facts.
Maybe 10 years from now, they’ll be critical of their position in relation to what’s
happening in Venezuela.
But I also think that it’s important to recognize that the problems in Venezuela are
not black and white.
It’s not an issue of the democratic government, presented by Maduro, and some fascist opposition.
The problems are much more complicated.
And I think that one has to take into account that the serious economic and humanitarian
crisis in Venezuela is mainly due to the incapacity and corruption of the Maduro government.
It’s true that over the last two years U.S. sanctions has become a really critical, important
issue—the fact that there’s a financial blockade, the fact that Venezuela has been
highly dependent on oil exports and import from the United States has that—at this
moment blockaded, the fact that Venezuela has no access to foreign credit, the fact
that the central bank has been prohibited in dealing with dollars.
I mean, there’s a whole range of sanctions that is having a huge impact on the Venezuelan
economy.
But this has been happening mainly during the Trump administration, and this is from
August 2017.
But the economic crisis in Venezuela started way before that.
The decay of the Venezuelan GDP, the decay of public services, the lowering of living
standards, the limited access to what used to be the main achievements of Venezuelan
process during the first decade are all things that were happening before the sanctions.
So we have a combination of a very incompetent government, an extremely corrupt government,
an increasingly authoritarian government, on one side, and on the other side, we have
this opposition, backed by the United States, with this constant threat of intervention.
So we need to find a solution in which there is a possibility for the Venezuelan people
to have a say and decide what they want for their country in a nonviolent way.