The New York Times Versus Chavez
You can tell that the US-led campaign against Hugo Chavez has reached a critical stage when the New York Times starts providing rhetorical cover for Condoleezza Rice’s and Donald Rumsfeld’s increasingly desperate efforts to isolate the Venezuelan president.
Chile’s center-left president Michelle Bachelet — who Rice name-drops every chance she gets to prove she can have socialist friends — just last week warned Washington not to “demonize” Chavez. Yet despite this endorsement from Latin America’s most lauded reformer, the Times on Saturday ran a 1300-word, front-page hatchet job by Juan Forero titled “Seeking United Latin America, Venezuela’s Chavez Is a Divider; Some Neighbors Resent His Style as Meddlesome.”
The article quotes seven sources, all openly anti-Chāvez save for Brazil’s president Luiz Inācio Lula da Silva. Lula, like Bachelet, has repeatedly defended his Venezuelan counterpart against Washington. But Forero ignores this support, instead choosing to cherry-pick through Lula’s public statements to find, and take out of context, a rare criticism.
Other supposedly objective comments come from the center-right — NYU’s Jorge Castaneda — to the Right-Right — Johns Hopkin’s Riordan Roett — of the political spectrum. Its worth noting that Roett’s primary claim to fame was a 1995 memo he wrote while an emerging-market consultant to Chase Manhattan Bank urging the Mexican government to “eliminate the Zapatistas” and to slowdown democratic reforms. Now that’s “meddlesome.”
counterpunch.org
Bachelet is no reformer.