Anyway, I'm here to comment about your recent posting at VHeadline.com.

www.vheadline.com Date: Wed, 5 Feb 2003 13:22:06 -0500 From: Justin Delacour jdelac@unm.edu To: Editor@VHeadline.com Subject: Re: Janet Kelly

Dear Editor: Hello, my name is Justin Delacour.  If you've ever checked out the NarcoNews website, you might have seen an article that I wrote about two highly-tainted Venezuelan pollsters, Jose Antonio Gil Yepes and Alfredo Keller.

Anyway, I'm here to comment about your recent posting at VHeadline.com.

You shouldn't be surprised to see your name creeping into an exchange between Phil Gunson and Al Giordano.  For those of us who critically analyze US press coverage of Venezuela, folks like you and Eric Ekvall symbolize the scandalously cozy relationship between the press and Chavez's business-led opposition.

Janet, the problem is not that you are a Chavez opponent.  Nor is the problem that you are quoted in the English-language press. The problem is that people like you, Eric Ekvall, Michael Schifter, Riordan Roett, Alfredo Keller and Luis Vicente Leon have a virtual monopoly on the press' account of what's going on in Venezuela.  That's the problem.

Let me ask you some questions, Janet.  Why do you think the correspondents love to quote you?

I read articles in the alternative press by people who -- like you, I suppose -- have vast knowledge of Venezuela.  I'm sure you have little or no familiarity with the people that I'm talking about; they don't run in your elite circles.

There's a historian at la Universidad de Oriente named Steve Ellner who has lived in Venezuela for probably twenty years.  He is an expert on the ins and outs of the Venezuelan labor movement.  Now, one might think that someone like Ellner, a specialist on Venezuelan labor, would be a worthwhile source for a correspondent who wants to learn and inform his or her readers about the recent "general strike" in Venezuela.

However, I've literally never ever seen any mainstream correspondent quote Ellner.  Not one measly quote.  Why do you think that is, Janet?  Could it be that maybe a guy like Ellner could blow the cover off this whole story you folks have been peddling about a "general strike"?

Has anyone ever heard of a "general strike" led by businessmen?

Has anyone ever heard of a "general strike" that is relegated to the affluent neighborhoods of a city?

Gee, that kind of "strike" doesn't sound very "general" to me.  In fact, it doesn't even sound like a "strike."

We here on planet earth call that a business lockout.  But the funny thing is that I never heard you or any one of your journalistic buddies ever mention the word "lockout."  Why is that, Janet?

Why is it that a prominent labor leader like Ramon Machuca of Venezuela's Iron and Steel Workers doesn't get quoted when he says that CTV leader Carlos Ortega is a fraud, a corrupt tool of the bosses, a person who doesn't enjoy the support of the majority of Venezuelan workers?

Why is it that no journalist ever bothered to ask anybody besides Ortega about how most Venezuelan workers truly felt about the so-called "strike"?

Could you tell me that, Janet?

So, once again, why do they quote you, but not Ellner or Machuca or the sociologist Greg Wilpert or the freelance writer Charles Hardy or the Venezuelan historian Samuel Moncada or the Venezuelan-born historian Miguel Tinker Salas or the Venezuelan anthropologist Fernando Coronil or the US economist Mark Weisbrot or, for that matter, any Venezuela analyst who is either sympathetic to Chavez and/or very suspicious of the opposition?  Why?

Could it be that the correspondents who love to quote you work for newswires and newspapers that are structurally tied to the interests of global finance and the "Washington Consensus"?

Could it be that these correspondents have been brainwashed throughout their entire lives to believe that insufficient subservience to Uncle Sam constitutes "communism" and "totalitarianism" or whatever other horrible sacrilege they can dream up?

Could it be that they quote you not because you are of any greater intrinsic worth as a source than any of these other people but rather because you regurgitate every cherished piece of neoliberal propaganda that has been pounded into our brains for as long as we can remember?

Could it be that, like you, these correspondents believe that the only road to economic development is to grovel before your cherished investor class, a class that is obscenely wealthy relative to the majority of people in Latin America, the most inequitable region on the planet? 

So Janet, why is it that you fell for the news reports of April 11?

And if these news reports about Chavez's "resignation" and orders to kill people turned out false, what does that say about you, a person who these same ignoramuses-cum-correspondents love to quote?

You say that anyone can make a mistake.  But I'll tell you something, Janet; I'm no genius and I didn't make that mistake.  I've paid a little attention to history, and what the record shows is that the rich of Latin America and their foreign backers -- whether in Chile, Guatemala, El Salvador, Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela or wherever -- have always been ruthless about ridding any perceived threat to their economic interests, no matter what the costs to rest of the population and no matter how many lies they have to tell to achieve their goals.

And why is it, by the way, that your admirers in the press corps have never written a story about Otto Neustald, the CNN video photographer who confessed to taping anti-Chavez Generals rehearsing their statements about Chavez's supposed sniper shootings before the shootings had ever taken place?

I have multi-angle footage of the shooters on the Llaguno Bridge, and what the footage shows is that the only people who were on the avenue below the bridge while the shootout took place were Alfredo Pena's Metropolitan Police, who were also "firing away."

Given that the majority of the shooting victims on April 11 took direct hits -- at medium to long range -- to the head and chest, don't you think it's a bit crazy to think Chavistas with handguns could be responsible for the bulk of the bloodshed?

Oh, and by the way, rather than talk about Gunson's little road-runner plagiarism, why don't we discuss the actual analogy that you dreamed up in the first place?  Chavez was standing beyond the edge of a cliff, with nothing but air below his feet, just like Bugs Bunny, right?  So what happened to the impending fall, my dear friend?

I find it fascinating that correspondents can run to people like you or Riordan Roett for these oh-so-prescient predictions, and when the events turn out oh-so-differently than you predicted, you and the correspondents go on as if you never made total fools of yourselves in the first place, and when the next crisis hits the correspondents come running back to you again to record your latest imaginings.

My God, Janet, are you really going to quibble over whether or not you're "partisan" or not?  Let's be serious.  The issue is that you're anti-Chavez.  We don't have a problem with that, per se, but we do have a big problem with the near Orwellian press coverage in Venezuela that tailors almost every story to the interests of its business and financial overlords, whom you dutifully serve.

And, by the way, Gaviria is no mediator.  He's a US puppet, a neoliberal just like yourself, a former President who stood idly by as paramilitaries slaughtered an entire leftist political party in Colombia, the Patriotic Union.  If you favor Gaviria, then you are indeed very partisan.

• Eventually, you and your ilk may wake up to the fact that you've been totally discredited among those who don't buy into the barrage of propaganda.

Don't flatter yourself into thinking that correspondents quote you for any other reason than that you bow down before the powerful, just as they do.

Justin Delacour jdelac@unm.edu