Arvind Lavakare March 29, 2003

In his speech on March 11 in Washington at a convention of Veterans of War, Paul Wolfowitz, US deputy secretary of defence, said, 'The issue is not oil' and that if war comes, 'it will be a war to disarm Saddam's weapons of mass terror... a war of liberation to secure peace and freedom, not only for ourselves, but for the Iraqi people.'

Now Wolfowitz is a Ph D, a former dean and professor of international relations at Johns Hopkins University -- qualifications that are expected to yield views that must be respected. But Wolfowitz is also a hawk, perhaps the biggest one in his supremo's parlour in the White House. He's also a neo-conservative politician and an American at that. And so the learned professor need not always be taken at face value where Uncle Sam's interests are concerned.

Consider his delinking of War Iraqi Freedom from Iraq's oil, said to be the world's second largest reserves.

According to the official energy statistics provided by the US Energy Information Administration, total gross oil imports (crude and products) of the US in the first nine months of 2002 were 11.2 million barrels per day (MMBD) representing 57 per cent of total US oil demand. After Canada, the top two suppliers were its satraps, Mexico, and Saudi Arabia with 1.5 MMBD each, closely followed by Venezuela (1.4 MMBD).

With its 60-year-old monopoly lease of Saudi oil fields coming to an end in 2005, the US may well be confronted with a problem there. Moreover, the US' own proven oil reserves have declined 20 per cent since 1990 and its production remains at a nearly 50 year low. (EIA's stats available on www.eia.doe.gov).

There was news recently that the US senate has, for considerations of environment, turned down the Bush administration's proposal to explore the rich oil reserves believed to be under the Atlantic Wild Life Refuge Region in Alaska. So despite what Prof. Wolfowitz told the simple-minded War Veterans the other day, oil is a concern for its largest guzzler in the world; though it may not be the reason for the current war on Iraq, oil could well be a major spin-off, like, you know, killing two birds with one stone.

Take, next, Wolfowitz's attempt to sell the ongoing war as 'a war of liberation to secure peace and freedom' for the US (apart from securing that for the Iraqi people.) Goodness gracious! Even the simple-minded American soldiers of yesteryears cannot be expected to swallow that bit. How on earth can an Iraq emaciated by 12 years of UN sanctions even cast a shadow on mighty America's security and freedom? It has no links with Al Qaeda; it hasn't known to threaten the mighty America even with the atom bomb of the firecracker variety.

Further, the UN inspectors didn't find anything terrorising or terrifying in Saddam's domain even in their latest round; what was found instead was that the documents (regarding Iraq's nuclear nexus with Niger) which the mighty USA presented to the UN Security Council were forgeries as poor as Saddam's subjects.

The paradox and the mystery here is that though it is North Korea that has boasted of its ability to drop nuclear-tipped missiles on US soil, the mighty America engages it -- not in a war of shock and awe, but in diplomatic talks.

What then is the truth behind the 'Iraqi Freedom War'?

Its seed lies in the document named 'Defense Policy Guidance' (DPG) written in 1992 by two who were then relatively obscure political appointees of President Bush Sr in the Pentagon's policy department in the aftermath of the Gulf War. The authors were Paul Wolfowitz and I Lewis Libby, currently Vice-President Dick Chenney's chief-of-staff.

The draft DPG called for US military pre-eminence over Eurasia by preventing the rise of any potentially hostile power and a policy of pre-emption against states suspected of developing weapons of mass destruction. When excerpts of the DPG's draft version leaked to The New York Times, Senator Joseph Biden, a Democrat, was horrified and denounced the document as a prescription for 'literally a Pax Americana.'

After eight years of Bill Clinton's regime of friendly America reaching out to the world, Pax Americana became the uninhibitedly stated major objective of another document entitled Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century prepared in September 2000 by the neo-conservative think tank called Project for the New American Century. This document, peppered with criticism of Clinton's policies, admits it 'saw the project as building upon the defense strategy' outlined by DPG of Wolfowitz and Libby. And Wolfowitz was, naturally, a participant in the PNAC. And President Bush Junior's 'National Security Strategy,' announced in September 2002, is, naturally, based on the PNAC document.

The 90-page PNAC document is an unashamedly self-righteous exhibit of America's arrogance as the globe's only superpower. Its founding 'Statement of Principles' asks --

• 'Does the United States have the resolve to shape a century favourable to America's principles and interests?'
• calls for 'a foreign policy that boldly and purposefully promotes American principles abroad' and for 'a national leadership that accepts the United States' global responsibilities"
• warns that 'If we shirk our responsibilities, we invite challenges to our fundamental interests.'

Note the absence above of stating what the American principles and fundamental interests are. Not, too, the exclusion of any reference to democracy, equality, plurality, world peace, environment preservation, poverty alleviation and human rights.

In the immediate context of the Iraq war, just two excerpts from the PNAC are revealing. It says that 'constabulary missions' (the new phrase coined to denote the traditional peace keeping missions) 'demand American political leadership rather than that of the United Nations. Nor can the United States assume a UN-like stance of neutrality; the preponderance of American power is so great and its global interest so wide that it cannot pretend to be indifferent to the political outcome in the Balkans, the Persian Gulf or even when it deploys forces in Africa.'

• 'While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification (for enforcing no-fly zones over northern and southern Iraq), the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.' (So much then for 'regime change' in Baghdad requiring an invasion by America.)

Some other alarming facets of the PNAC document are its support of a blueprint for maintaining global US pre-eminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival

• its expression of worries in the administration that Europe could rival the USA
• its spotlighting of China for 'regime change'
• its call for the creation of a 'US Space Force' to dominate space and cyberspace in order to prevent 'enemies' from using the Internet against the US
• its hint that the US may consider developing biological weapons

In short, forget the present war as being one to force 'tyrant' Saddam into history. Forget democratisation of Iraq. Forget destroying his alleged weapons of destruction. Forget what Wolfowitz tells America's Veterans of War. It's just Pax Americana, stupid, and its many gains, viceregal appointments and all, in the new 21st century colonialism of Stars and Stripes.

The Gulf War II

<a href=icwales.icnetwork.co.uk>Read on> Mar 27 2003 The Western Mail - The National Newspaper Of Wales

PEOPLE arrested in Spain on suspicion of murdering a couple from Wales had been using the couple's hire car under false registration plates, it emerged yesterday.

Two bodies exhumed at a chalet near the Costa Brava this week have been confirmed as Tony and Linda O'Malley, right, from Llangollen.

The chalet's floor was excavated the day after two couples from Venezuela were arrested on Monday.

The Fiat hatchback hired by the O'Malleys last August was never returned.

Police found it this week near the apartments where they arrested the suspects.

The O'Malleys flew to Spain last summer to search for a chalet to buy but disappeared before they were due to fly back to Manchester airport on September 13. Their relatives believe they were the victims of a con-trick by bogus chalet sellers which went wrong when the O'Malleys refused to hand over a large sum of money.

Danny Collins, news editor of the Costa Blanca News, said yesterday, "We understand that Mr and Mrs O'Malley were hoping to buy a property at auction, which is very difficult because the properties are normally snapped up by professionals. They may have become frustrated and started asking around, which is when they will have run into these Venezuelans.

"There are low-lifes here who hang around bars and target people who want to buy property. There is a scam where the idea is to show people around a property that you don't actually own, get a cash deposit and then scarper.

"It may have been that Tony O'Malley, who was a pretty sharp guy by all accounts, refused to fall for this and things turned nasty when he refused to hand over the cash.

Spanish firefighters dug through layers of brick and soil to recover the bodies at the chalet near Benidorm.

Family who owned chalet where the graves found had fled in September

<a href=www.vheadline.com>Venezuela Electronic News Posted: Tuesday, March 25, 2003 By: Manuel Rueda

International affairs commentarist Manuel Rueda writes: On the 10th of March, Acting Assistant US Secretary of State J. Curtis Struble met with diplomats from Brazil Mexico, Chile, Portugal and Spain, in Brasilia to discuss the prospects for an electoral solution to Venezuela's simmering political crisis ... delegates from Venezuela’s government and opposition presented starkly different accounts of the crisis, as they vied for support for their electoral proposals.

Over the past few weeks, both sides have certainly raised eyebrows in Washington.

Venezuela’s political polarization and economic decay have increasingly tempted the Bush administration to play a bigger role in the negotiations, to better defend vital US interests in the region.

Venezuelan Ambassador to the OAS, Jorge Valero, who spoke on behalf of the Chavez administration, presented a report on the normalization of political and economic life in the country, including the stabilization of oil production. The government obviously was trying to present an image that Venezuela was now back to its old politically stable and oil-reliable self, in order to negate support for the opposition’s proposal to achieve elections through a constitutional amendment, which if passed would shorten the President’s and Congress’ terms from six to four years.

Furthermore, the amendment would immediately terminate Presidential and Congressional terms forcing elections for both levels of governance to take place within 30 days. This bold, if self-serving initiative would challenge the government’s grip on all elective offices. It is unlikely to find many supporters on the government side, which has repeatedly insisted that Constitutional amendments lie outside the scope of the current round of negotiations.

Timoteo Zambrano, a congressman and delegate for the opposition at the negotiations table, urged delegates to pressure the government to accept the opposition’s seemingly brash terms for elections, as he painted a stark picture of Venezuelan political realities.

Prior to the meeting, he informed the press that the government is staging a “political persecution” against the leaders of the Coordinadora Democratica (CD), which heads up the opposition group. His report strongly suggested that the government is blocking efforts to reach an electoral agreement by heightening political tensions surrounding the negotiations. Zambrano cited the law on media content, drafted by Chavez supporters in the National Assembly, and the arrest of several opposition leaders for their participation in the general strike, as acts that have sabotaged prospects for an electoral solution.

The opposition also demanded that the Group of Friends send permanent representatives to the negotiations, who would be in a position to pressure the government to accelerate the negotiations, and could possibly press for a Constitutional amendment. Furthermore, they asked that Secretary General of the OAS, Cesar Gaviria, convert his role as a facilitator into that of being a mediator, in which he could influence which items must be resolved on the agenda.

The government camp would most likely consider such action as an intrusion into Venezuela’s sovereign rights, mindful of the fact that President Chavez already has lashed out at such countries as Spain for criticizing the Fernandez arrest.

But the Chavez administration’s concerns with foreign intrusion were put aside when its delegates pushed once again for the Group of Friends to include countries such as Cuba, France and China, that maintain close political and economic ties with Caracas and may dilute the group of friends’ desire to take a pro-active stance in the negotiation rounds.

Rather than ask for aid in strengthening Venezuela’s democratic foundations ... such as reformation of its biased media or its flawed judicial system ... government and opposition delegates traveled to Brasilia to push for concessions that would facilitate their political agenda which, in the government’s case involves that status quo, while the opposition vies for radical changes in electoral rules.

It may appears to some that Washington officials are siding with the opposition’s call for reform. On Thursday March 6, for example, seven members of the US House of Representatives sent a letter to Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez, in which they reminded him that they would not remain indifferent towards any actions in Venezuela’s democratic process that do not fully respect the opposition’s rights.

But do such acts come solely out of empathy for Venezuela’s embattled opposition?

After an ill-advised and embarrassing demand for immediate elections in the early days of the strike, the White House has avoided any high profile role in Venezuela’s conflict by throwing its support behind the OAS’ lengthy mediation efforts.

However, it is probable that the Bush administration might increase its involvement in Venezuela’s political strife as White House officials grow concerned that the decay and politicization of PDVSA ... Venezuela’s national oil company ... may threaten US energy interests in the region.

• Washington’s professed unrest isn’t necessarily a cover to blast Chavez for his leftist and nationalistic ideologies, or defend the interests of the local elite.

Oil has been the glue that has held Venezuela and the US together in the past 50 years. For decades, US administrations have tolerated various nationalistic measures taken by Venezuelan governments, even those appearing to be anti-American ... such as nationalizing oil production or imposing tariffs on US imports. Venezuela gained Washington’s trust by maintaining a reliable oil supply in times of both prosperity and crisis.

The Chavez administration was given similar treatment in its early days in office. Washington officials were prepared to discount the new President’s fiery rhetoric and praise for the Fidel Castro regime, as they rushed to assure the American public that his actions didn’t match his words and that there appeared to be no evidence that the Bolivarian revolution would threaten United States’ energy concerns in the region.

But PDVSA’s turmoil could give the US good reason to become more actively involved in negotiations towards resolving Venezuela’s political crisis. During the strike, PDVSA became increasingly politicized as mid-level as well as senior managers carried out an oil stoppage in consort with opposition leaders.

It is no secret that this alliance decimated PDVSA’s production levels and cut exports to the United States. As oil prices rise with a war in Iraq, US policy-makers are asking if Chavez’s embattled government will be able to supervise this fractured company and deliver oil in a reliable fashion.

• Venezuelan officials are eager to convince Washington that PDVSA will soon recover its full production and its reputation as a reliable supplier.

However, the US State Department is not altogether buying this optimistic projection. At a meeting on February 26 with Energy Minister Rafael Ramirez, US State Department officials told Venezuela’s officials that Venezuela cannot be considered a reliable oil supplier to the United States at the present time.

This sentiment is also shared by some members of the Bush cabinet.

Despite assurances from Ramirez that his country was producing 2.4 million barrels of crude daily in the last week of February, US Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham told a Senate hearing it might be two to three months before Venezuelan oil production reaches its normal levels. Prior to the strike Venezuela produced 2.8million barrels of crude daily.

Chavez’s efforts to manage PDVSA efficiently are further complicated by the opposition’s negotiation strategy. Its representatives at the negotiations have demanded that Chavez reinstate thousands of PDVSA bureaucrats, technicians and managers who were fired for joining in the general strike ... or no electoral solution will be permitted to come about.

Such a demand could be an incentive for the United States to influence negotiations, as it would offer Washington an opportunity to play a hand in the restructuring of PDVSA, its main interest in Venezuela’s current strife.

Political instability in Venezuela also appears to be undermining Washington’s war on drugs. One of the main pillars of the Bush administration’s northern South American strategy is to widen Washington’s role in combating Colombia’s drug-trafficking rebel groups. Recent reports suggesting that important leaders of the FARC, including Manuel Marulanda, are hiding out in Venezuela, have damaged the standing of the Chavez administration in Washington. At the very least, they have led some US officials to ponder whether an embattled government hobbled by protests, unpopularity and constant challenges to its legitimacy is a worthy partner, willing and able to tackle the drug traffic issue with resolve.

• On February 27, Drug Czar John Walter’s expressed this concern at a House Committee on International Relations hearing, stating that “Venezuela’s political problems have created a haven for narco-terrorists to operate with impunity."

Washington’s invigorated policy is most likely designed to comply with its own regional agenda and not destined to support the government’s or opposition’s aspirations in the negotiating table.

Oil policy and anti-narcotics interests appear to be the primordial reasons for the United States to claim a bigger stake in the resolution of Venezuela’s political tensions.

Unfortunately, it seems that democratic reforms have not been enough of an incentive for Venezuela’s contending parties to push for a widely accepted electoral solution on their own accord.

De: Fecha: Mar, 25 de Marzo de 2003, 12:44 pm Para:

Anexo un articulo merecedor de réplicas serias (bien fundamentadas con datos, estadísticas, hechos y no acusaciones y preferiblemente desapasionadas) por su obvia parcialización, mala intención, resentimiento y posibles imprecisiones.

Can you believe Venezuela's pollsters? fue escrito por Justin Delacour, a freelance writer and recent graduate of the Masters program in Latin American Studies at the University of New Mexico. He has written for Latin America Data Base (ladb.unm.edu<), a University of New Mexico-based news service. He receives email at jdelac@unm.edu

Lo he extraido de la revista ZMag (www.zmag.org) remitida por Elsa Boccheciampe quien comenta: "Acabo de encontrar un pagina web, aparentemente seria llamada ZMag "A community of People commited to social change"...Preparense para leer los articulos mas distorsionados que se pudo haber inventado alguien. Son el estilo de articulos que nos debe preocupar: serios, con datos y aparentemente escritos por personas imparciales."

Aunque la revista no es "mainstream" y es una clara manifestación del movimiento mundial "anti-establishment", por lo cual no podemos esperar encontrar en ella artículos objetivos, es bueno recordarle a los escritores el peso de sus palabras y en ocasiones, corregir errores e incluso influir en su pensamiento.

Saludos,

Can you believe Venezuela's pollsters? by Justin Delacour Narconews Bulletin February 06, 2003

Over the last year, several correspondents in Venezuela have repeatedly attempted to portray Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez as an unpopular leader. The most common basis for these statements has been the recitation of “polls” claiming that Chávez’s approval rating is down to around 30 percent.

The commercial media correspondents rarely cite the source of their polls. So this reporter contacted them, and most of the reporters offered only the names of two Venezuelan companies – Datanalisis and Keller and Associates.

An investigation into the operations of these two Venezuelan polling firms and their relationships with correspondents reveals that, by any fair measure, it is irresponsible for correspondents to cite the two firms’ polls without also mentioning that the two firms are headed by virulently anti-Chavez figures who frequently use polling samples that are unrepresentative of the overall Venezuelan population.

The first factor that calls the polls into question is the well-known political partisanship of the polling firms’ directors, Jose Antonio Gil Yepes of Datanalisis and Alfredo Keller of Keller and Associates.

In a recent e-mail interchange, The Los Angeles Times’ correspondent T. Christian Miller acknowledged that the two pollsters are “pretty anti-Chavez,” but he defends their credibility on grounds that "both do door to door polling, to get the poorest of poor represented in their surveys, and also balance for things like gender and region." Miller’s defense of Keller and Gil Yepes is very questionable in view of contrary evidence. However, before presenting this contrary evidence, we would like to point out the problems with the two pollsters’ political partisanship.

Datanalisis' Pollster: Chavez "has to be killed"

Gil Yepes and Keller are not merely “anti-Chavez”; they are openly and virulently anti-Chavez. In a July 8 article in the Los Angeles Times, Miller describes Gil Yepes as a man of “Venezuela’s elite” who “moves in circles of money, power and influence” and “was educated in top U.S. schools.”

It’s certainly shocking that the LA Times quoted Gil Yepes saying that Chavez “has to be killed.”

But it is even more shocking that the LA Times and other commercial media continued to use Gil Yepes’ polling “results” after his homicidal fantasies leaped out of the closet through the pages of last July’s LA Times.

According to T. Christian Miller of the LA Times, Gil Yepes saw an assassination as the only way out of the “political crisis surrounding President Hugo Chavez.” Gil Yepes has since claimed that his quote was taken out of context, and that he was only making reference to an oft-expressed sentiment among Chavez’s opposition.

But let’s look at the full context as reported by the LA Times:

Jose Antonio Gil is among Venezuela's elite.

He moves in circles of money, power and influence. He was educated in top U.S. schools. He heads of one of the country's most prestigious polling firms.

And he can see only one way out of the political crisis surrounding President Hugo Chavez.

"He has to be killed," he said, using his finger to stab the table in his office far above this capital's filthy streets. "He has to be killed."

One need look no further than Datanalisis’ website to find the kind of blatant political partisanship that one normally does not associate with respectable polling operations. For example, in Datanalisis’ summary of a July 2002 report, the polling firm absurdly characterizes the current political conflict as one between the government (“el oficialismo”) and “the rest of the country.”

Despite the preposterousness of this portrayal, it is nevertheless an appropriate demonstration of the deep-seated class hatred by a large segment of Venezuela’s business-led opposition, which prefers to pretend that thousands of poor and working-class Chavez supporters do not exist.

When a massive pro-government demonstration in Caracas on October 13 showed that a good portion of “the rest of the country” supported Chavez, the editorial board of Venezuela’s elite-controlled newspaper El Nacional was incensed. El Nacional, which commissions and publishes polls by Datanalisis, disparagingly referred to Chavez’s supporters as “lumpen” who were lured from the country’s interior with “a piece of bread and some rum” to “come and cheer the great con man of the nation.”

As the Venezuelan anthropologist Johnny Alarcón Puentes points out, the terms "lumpen, rabble hordes, drunks, riff-raff and mobs are only some of the epithets foisted by the wealthy on citizens of dark skin, on street merchants, on workers, on the indigenous and on all those who live in slums or modest neighborhoods and dare raise their voice against the powerful.”

Thus, from the warped perspective of much of the opposition, Datanalisis’ contention that "the rest of the country" opposes Chavez makes sense. Since elites are the people that “matter,” and those of less privilege can be reduced to virtual sub-human status, poor and working-class Chavez supporters do not qualify as part of “the rest of the country.”

Alfredo Keller's "Fight to the Death"

As with Gil Yepes, there is good reason to believe that the pollster Alfredo Keller has come to advocate a violent solution to Venezuela's current political conflict. In Keller's recent letter published by PetroleumWorld.com, he describes the current political standoff as “a fight to the death for power between two counter-posed ideological forces: an authoritarian socialism with a spirit of revenge against a democracy that is open to the market.”

The charge of authoritarianism against Chavez is weak, and is especially hypocritical coming from the likes of Keller.

Here is a country, wracked by unrest, provocation, sabotage and calls for political assassination, a country that suffered a 48-hour military coup last April, where the television media and commercial dailies routinely exhort the public to violence, but the Chávez administration has not arrested or imprisoned a single journalist or opposition leader.

In fact, Chavez often comes under friendly criticism from the left for being too soft on his opposition. Cuban President Fidel Castro recently remarked, "If I have something to regret, it's his excessive generosity and kindness."

Castro continued:

"In what country could there be a coup and then have all the perpetrators meet in a plaza to spend 50 days agitating through television networks, proposing another coup? Not in any country in the world. I believe that there is not a more democratic, more law abiding, more tolerant, more generous man than Hugo Chavez."

The authoritarian label is more applicable to Keller than to Chavez. After anti-Chavez Generals led a short-lived coup d'etat against the Venezuelan President and turned over power to businessman Pedro Carmona and his entourage of right-wing ministers, Keller called the coup "a de facto referendum". As Carmona announced the dissolution of Venezuela's democratically-ratified constitution and democratically-elected congress, Keller peddled the lie that the April 11 opposition march on the Miraflores Presidential Palace had forced Chavez to resign.

Evidence that emerged later suggests that opposition Generals coordinated the shootings of protesters on April 11, with the objective of using the killings as a pretext to depose Chavez and claim that they had rebelled against his supposed orders to open fire on the people. A CNN video photographer, Otto Neustald has admitted that, two hours before any killings had taken place, he filmed a rehearsed press statement by the anti-Chávez Vice-Admiral Héctor Ramírez Perez that Chávez was "massacring innocent people with snipers." While Neustald makes clear that Generals allied to the opposition had foreknowledge that snipers would be utilized, the U.S. and British press corps in Venezuela has maintained a blackout of Neustald's admission.

The real concern for Keller and his avaricious cohorts in the opposition is the "structure of power" that Chavez and his supporters have erected. Steve Ellner, a historian who lives in Venezuela and specializes in the country's labor movement, has pointed out that Chavez's reforms, which include agrarian reform and severance benefits for workers, "have strongly favored labor at the expense of business." Some of these reforms are enshrined in the country's new constitution, which was democratically ratified by the electorate in 2000. The majority of political representatives in the country's new unicameral congress support the reforms.

In his recent letter, Keller expresses fear of the possibility that Chavez could still be in power by August, the month when the constitution allows for a binding referendum on the fate of the government. Although Keller claims that Chavez would lose such a referendum, he says that a political transition of that sort would still represent “a tremendous defeat for the opposition” because the “structure of power… would remain intact.”

Like coup leader Carmona, zealous figures within the opposition such as Keller seek to erase the entire Chavez legacy. But since that legacy has unleashed popular social forces that will rightly resist a return to oligarchic rule, the insistence of Keller and other opposition figures' on such an uncompromising position suggests their willingness to promote violence.

Partisan Pollsters

The known political partisanship of Venezuela’s pollsters causes all sorts of problems with regard to their polling. Firstly, it calls into question whether or not they are posing survey questions in a non-biased fashion. But as any political consultant will admit, a pollster, by phrasing the questions and deciding the “survey sample” of how the poll is “weighted” to specific demographic groups, can get any result he wants.

But even if we were to assume that Keller and Gil Yepes are not loading their questions, the poll respondents’ simple awareness of the pollsters’ political partisanship is likely to skew the polls in favor of the opposition.

We asked Matthew Mendelsohn, a Canadian political scientist and specialist on polling methodology, whether or not the pollsters' well-known political partisanship -- independent of all other factors -- could bias polling results. Although Mendelsohn told us that he lacked knowledge about polling in Latin America, he responded as follows:

"Any perception on the part of the respondent that the questioner is partisan can influence results. You see this with interviewer effects all the time -- male and female, black and white, etc. interviewers get different results. And certainly if the respondent knows that you're a representative from a particular party or group, this biases results.”

Biased Polling Samples

The factors that are likely to bias the polling of Gil Yepes and Keller are not limited to political partisanship alone.

An academic source -- a person that has worked closely with Venezuela's pollsters – said that most of Keller’s polling has been done in the middle class areas of the ten largest cities, meaning that the populous slums where Chavez’s support is concentrated have been largely excluded from Keller’s polling sample.

Our source informs us that Datanalisis’ polling samples are less skewed than Keller’s due to the firm’s superior operational team of field workers and access to Venezuela’s 1998 census tracts. However, the poll that Gil Yepes is currently releasing about the population’s views of the so-called “general strike” and Chavez’s handling of the crisis appears to be highly deceptive.

Here’s another fact unreported by English-language correspondents who cite polls by Gil Yepes and Keller as gospel: Since the “strike” began on December 2, Chavistas are not allowing Datanalisis’ field workers into the Chavista-controlled slums of Caracas and Maracaibo. While Gil Yepes recently released lopsided polls that purport popular support for the “strike,” he fails to mention that his polling sample excludes the populous slums where the “strike” has proved to be a complete failure. The progressive economist Mark Weisbrot, who recently spent time in Caracas, wrote a column for the Washington Post explaining that there were “few signs of the strike” in “most of the city, where poor and working-class people live.”

The academic source said that Keller and Gil Yepes generally do not poll rural inhabitants. The opposition newspapers that commission the polls are not willing to pay the increased costs that rural polling entails. Thus, landless peasants who may benefit from Chavez’s agrarian reform are also excluded from polling samples.

Tainted Pollsters, Tainted Press

In view of the above-mentioned facts, it is mind-boggling to see just how laudatory the English-language press corps is of Gil Yepes and Keller.

AP’s Alexandra Olson calls Datanalisis' “Venezuela's most prestigious polling firm” in a recent report.

The Miami Herald’s Juan Tamayo claims, in an e-mail reply to this reporter, that Datanalisis and Keller and Associates are “the two most credible polling companies in Venezuela.”

Jehan Senaratna of Dow Jones News Wires calls Keller “the head of a respected Caracas-based polling and economic research firm.” Despite his polite remark about Keller, Senaratna tells us that Datanalisis is the “only polling firm that can be considered reliable and unbiased politically.”

Finally, Phil Gunson, a freelance correspondent in Venezuela who has written for several papers, says the “polling organizations that most of us consider to be the most reliable” are Keller and Associates and Datanalisis.

In essence, the correspondents have become so carried away with anti-Chavez hysteria that they are blinded to the fact that the pollsters whom they rely upon are neither credible, reliable, or politically unbiased. How would Keller and Gil Yepes be received in other lands, even in the United States, promoting themselves as respected pollsters while making statements that verge on inciting violence against a democratically elected government?

So the next time a member of the commercial press corps tells you that umpteen percent of the Venezuelan people feel a certain way according to “polls,” ask yourself: Did they identify the source of the “poll”? And if the “poll” was about Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, was the pollster someone in “a fight to the death” or who says “Chávez must be killed”?

In a media-fed democracy, polls and simulated polls can be lethal weapons, too.

www.vheadline.com Posted: Monday, March 24, 2003 By: Hector Dauphin-Gloire

Date: Sun, 23 Mar 2003 21:45:40 -0500 From: Hector Dauphin-Gloire montonero22@hotmail.com To: editor@vheadline.com Subject: Venezuela, Cuba, and Fidel

Dear Editor: There has been a lot of mendacious propaganda recently concerning how President Chavez is allegedly trying to turn Venezuela into another Cuba.

Left unsaid in all this is the presumption that Cuba is some sort of totalitarian hellhole that any decent person would want to avoid like the plague. But it is false to claim that Cuba is some sort of totalitarian terror that must be avoided at all costs.

In point of fact, in spite of the many problems and criticisms I have of the Castro regime, it must be acknowledged that they have done a better job at securing stability, social solidarity, and a decent standard of living for their people than most countries in the region; and while there certainly has been political repression, the fact is that human rights have been better protected in Cuba than in most Latin American countries historically.

Those who conclude that, because Cuba calls itself a Communist country, it must therefore be a tropical clone of Stalin's Russia, cannot have paid close attention to the historical record.

As a non-Communist (I am in fact highly critical of most communist countries, of Marxism as a philosophy, and of the totally unprincipled record of most world communist parties) but one sympathetic to the Cuban experience, I feel I must comment.

Let us consider, for a moment, a few facts about the historical record of socialism in Cuba. Let's consider the specific claims that the Cuban regime has disrespected human rights. One must first ask, what are human rights, or to put it another way, what are the obligations that society has to the individual?

If one accepts the general definition given by Simone Weil that these obligations involve satisfying man's spiritual as well as material needs, then we must observe that the Cuban regime has in fact provided food, housing, health care and education to all its people, something that only a few Latin American countries have done -- and something that democracies like India, to say nothing of the US itself, are still light years away from achieving.

What sort of "human rights" are being respected in the standard model of a developing-world neoliberal democracy -- the right to starve, to be without housing or without an education?

At least up until the loss of its main trade partner, these rights were met at a high level in Cuba. Today, Cuba doesn't have a whole lot of wealth to go around, it is a very poor country -- but in spite of that, everyone has the basic necessities of life, which is the most fundamental human right there is.

But more than that, Cuba has carried out a transformation in people's consciousness. They have created a society where people strive to fulfill themselves through helping others and serving the greater good, and where something more than power and money are the drivers of human relations.

For this and this alone they deserve praise, for creating a society where greed and pride are actively de-emphasized, and where true equality has been approximated more than anywhere else in the world.

What about the political repression, the executions, the lack of competitive elections that we hear so much about in Cuba?

To begin with, remember that the 10,000 or so political executions that have taken place in Cuba were almost all following either the civil war of 1957-1958, or the Playa Giron invasion ... and were of people that, by any standard were guilty of terrible crimes -- torture, civilian bombing, murder, corruption, treasonous invasion of their own homeland.

Consider how the French Resistance dealt with the Vichy collaborators after the victory of 1945, and then ask yourself if by that standard the executions carried out by Castro and Guevara were more along the lines of Stalinist terror, or were they more along the lines of justice?

Lest I seem to imply that all of the people executed by the Castro regime were guilty of war crimes, it is certainly not true (certainly innocent people were put to death mistakenly in the regime's excessive zeal to punish the guilty) but I do believe that most of them were guilty of such crimes. I also believe that such abuses, while terrible when they occur, are characteristic of all societies going through periods of war and revolution, and do not fall into the pathological model of Stalinist totalitarianism, where anyone who was or might potentially be a threat to Stalin, or simply not supportive enough, was summarily executed.

Cuba has been authoritarian, I believe, but not totalitarian -- more along the lines of Hapsburg Austria, or France in 1945, than Stalinist Russia.

My family background stems from a developing country (not in Latin America) which is a textbook example of democracy -- yet in spite of that, political violence, corruption, arbitrary arrest and police torture are commonplace occurrences.

Say what you will about Cuba, they don't have extra-judicial executions, and torture is now a thing of the past.

Yes, you can lose your job or be arrested for speaking subversively about the government, and, while that is wrong, one must bear in mind that countries under siege from a foreign power (the US) ... which has tried to overthrow it by means ranging from propaganda to outright violence ... can often not afford to be liberal.

Where are human rights better respected -- in a country like India, where you can participate in competitive elections and freely speak your mind, but run the risk of arbitrary arrest, political assassination, and be stifled by daily corruption ... or in Cuba, where you are protected against these practices, even if you do lack the right of free speech?

And let's remember that while Cuba arrested its dissidents, it did not kill them in the way that regimes like Argentina, Chile, or Guatemala chose to do.

My closest friend has worked in Cuba, and he attests to the fact that he saw better relations between the police and the people in Cuba than in any other country he has seen including the USA. In much of the US, people actively fear the police; in Cuba, my friend says, he saw people relating to the police as equals, on a friendly basis. Cuba is called a 'police state' by its enemies ... but this account seems to question that assumption.

And I haven't even begun to touch Cuban foreign policy.

While Cuba (like every country) was in bed with a lot of unsavory characters (like the genocidal Ethiopian tyrant, Mengistu) they also did more than any other country to liberate Nicaragua from the Somoza tyranny, South Africa and Namibia from apartheid and countries like Angola from Portuguese colonialism.

This is but a brief attempt to counter some myths about Cuba, Venezuela's closest friend and ally at the current moment in time.

I am sure that there will be comments regarding this, and I hope to deal with some more issues that I expect will come up in the course of those responses.

Sincerely, Hector Dauphin-Gloire montonero22@hotmail.com Environmental Technician