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mark weisbrot
Western Media Losing Enthusiasm for Failing Coup in Venezuela
Nearly six months later, with Guaido no closer to ousting Venezuela's elected president, Nicolas Maduro, from Miraflores Presidential Palace, the enthusiasm has dampened. Now that the honeymoon is over, it would appear that corporate journalists have been compelled to reckon with some uncomfortable truths about Guaido, US sanctions and the coup they had been vigorously endorsing.
A dying romance
"Disappointed Venezuelans Lose Patience With Guaido," writes Reuters (7/1/19), in what might be read as a projection of its journalists' own frustration with Washington's failing coup.
After Guaido's self-proclamation in January, the corporate outlet (1/23/19) gushingly described him as a "salsa-loving baseball fan," who posed "the boldest challenge to socialist President Nicolas Maduro's rule in years."
Similarly, the CBC in January (1/23/19) labeled hard-right Popular Will party leader Guaido a long-time "activist" at the head of a "centrist social-democratic party." Most recently, the state network (6/29/19) declared that the opposition leader, depicted in a gloomy headshot, "has few cards to play--and not long to play them."
There is no clearer indication of the Western media's growing disillusionment than the gradual demotion of Guaido from "interim president" to "National Assembly president" or "opposition leader." For example, ABC News was referring to Guaido as "interim president" (often without the "self-proclaimed" prefix) as recently as May (5/3/19, 5/5/19). Fast forward two months, and the title is just "opposition leader" (6/26/19, 7/5/19).
In yet another sign that the US-backed coup is running on empty, corporate journalists' triumphalist tone that followed Guaido's self-proclamation has given way to reports that he "remains defiant" (CNBC, 5/2/19), "soldiers on" (Bloomberg, 6/7/19) or is "under pressure" (Telegraph, 6/19/19).
The growing doubts from the media establishment mirror those in DC, with rumors circulating that Trump is "losing patience and interest" in Venezuela (Washington Post, 6/19/19). Having gone all in on a horse falling rapidly behind in the regime-change race, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and "special representative" Elliott Abrams are now forced to take turns publicly reiterating US support for Guaido.
The opposition leader's fading luster has not been helped by a corruption scandal that accused his appointed envoys to Colombia of embezzling "humanitarian aid" money. The story was unveiled by the Miami-based and rabidly anti-government outlet PanamPost (6/18/19), and was too big to ignore. All the media could do was try to spin it as "Guaido Calls for Probe" (Reuters, 6/15/19), but the damage was done.
Cracks in sanctions denial
Guaido's failing coup has even led to a few cracks in the refusal of corporate outlets to acknowledge the devastating humanitarian toll of US sanctions on Venezuela since 2017, which were escalated in January when the Trump administration imposed an oil embargo, cutting the country off from its No. 1 cash buyer.
As Joe Emersberger reported for FAIR (6/14/19), on June 9 Reuters finally mentioned a study by economists Mark Weisbrot and Jeffrey Sachs that found US sanctions responsible for as many as 40,000 Venezuelan deaths in 2017-18.
Reuters had buried the report for over a month, and has since reverted to its standard practice of framing the humanitarian impact of US sanctions as a mere allegation by the Maduro administration.
A few exceptions notwithstanding (Financial Times, 7/7/19; Independent, 7/7/19, 4/26/19), the corporate press has all but suppressed the Weisbrot/Sachs report (FAIR.org, 6/26/19), with most outlets portraying Venezuela's economic destruction as a condition preceding US sanctions, imposed first under Obama in 2014-15 and ratcheted up by Trump in 2017.
The New York Times (7/6/19) elevates this mystification into an art form, presenting the collapse of Venezuelan agriculture, largely due to sanctions-induced fuel shortages, as the culmination of "six years of economic crisis under President Nicolas Maduro, whose policies of price controls, expropriations and state-sanctioned embezzlement have wiped out the country's private sector"--which sanctions have merely "worsened." Even more remarkably, the paper of record published an article (5/17/19) interviewing economists on the scale of Venezuela's crisis that managed to avoid quoting any anti-government economists critical of sanctions, such as Francisco Rodriguez, let alone mentioning the Weisbrot/Sachs study.
On the op-ed pages, some corporate outlets have been more candid about the danger that US sanctions could cause "famine" in Venezuela (Financial Times, 7/3/19; New York Times, 7/10/19, 2/28/19).
However, only in the Times op-ed by economist Francisco Rodriguez (7/10/19) does the public encounter an acknowledgement of the 2017 sanctions' role in Venezuela's current economic devastation. In other cases, corporate journalists continue to deny or downplay the existence of broad-ranging US economic sanctions all-together, pretending they only affect government officials.
The Guardian (5/21/19) went the farthest, referring to coercive US measures that have hit multiple sectors of the Venezuelan economy and resulted in thousands of deaths as "financial sanctions on Venezuela's president."
Old habits die hard
Disappointed by Guaido's fading star, Western reporters have labored to mint new pro-Washington heroes worthy of their regime change fantasies. In the wake of Guaido and Leopoldo Lopez's botched April 30 putsch, corporate media discovered a new champion in former Venezuelan intelligence chief Manuel Cristopher Figuera, who aided in the coup attempt.
In an exclusive interview, the Washington Post (6/24/19) glowingly described Figuera as "a muscular 55-year-old [who] was one of the revolution's true believers." Despite defecting from his country to collaborate with a hostile foreign power, the ex-top spy is heralded as a source of indisputable veracity, whose unsubstantiated claims about Cuban capture of Venezuelan politics (FAIR.org, 3/26/19) or Hezbollah activity in the country (FAIR.org, 5/24/19) are to be taken at face value.
As in the case of former intelligence czar Hugo "El Pollo" Carvajal (New York Times, 2/21/19), currently facing extradition to the US on drug charges, no effort is made to interrogate defectors' incentives to fabricate "information" that just happens to legitimate Washington's casus belli. The ultimate goal is not to prove any nefarious activity, which is highly implausible, but to provide moral justification for regime-change efforts.
In its quest for new anti-Maduro stalwarts, the corporate press does not draw the line at rehabilitating rogue spies "accused of arbitrary detentions and torture." In a remarkable feat of historical revisionism, AP's Joshua Goodman (6/25/19) exalts the "bravery" of former Caracas security chief Ivan Simonovis, who escaped house arrest and fled to the US last month.
Simonovis had been handed a 30-year sentence in 2009 for the death of two people when snipers opened fire at the Llaguno Bridge on April 11, 2002. A total of 19 pro- and anti-government demonstrators were killed in a massacre that Goodman falsely terms a "gunfight," setting the stage for a coup that temporarily ousted President Hugo Chavez.
Goodman ignores that "supercop" Simonovis' Metropolitan Police was notorious for its brutality, with even former chief Jhonny Campos casting doubt on the force's human rights record.
"Venezuela's Metropolitan Police was, without a doubt, the security force most reviled by the poorest members of society," observes George Ciccariello-Maher, an expert on Venezuelan popular movements:
Associated with political repression, drug dealing, kidnapping and rape, the Metropolitan Police was so loathed that residents of working-class barrios often demanded the army be sent in to replace them.
Goodman went on to approvingly cite Simonovis' contracting of former New York Police Commissioner William Bratton, himself accused of criminalizing poor communities with "broken windows" policing.
Western media's newfound doubts about Guaido and reluctant admissions of the deadly effects of sanctions are not a case of journalistic standards starting to take over. Rather, this cognitive dissonance reflects the utter disorientation that has come to characterize Guaido and his US handlers' operation. The end result is journalists, attempting to stay the US regime-change course tainted by Guaido's serial failures, laundering the reputations of the foulest of anti-government figures in the process.
Study Linking US Sanctions to Venezuelan Deaths Buried By Reuters for Over a Month
I emailed Stephanie Nebehay of Reuters on May 22 about her article, "Venezuela Turns to Russia, Cuba, China in Health Crisis" (5/22/19). Her article depicted the impact of US sanctions as an allegation that Venezuelan government officials are alone in making. The article stated:
The opposition blames [medical shortages] on economic incompetence and corruption by the leftist movement in power for two decades, but [President Nicolas] Maduro says US economic sanctions are the cause.
I asked why the piece made no mention of a study (CEPR, 4/25/19) released a month earlier by economists Mark Weisbrot and Jeffrey Sachs, which directly linked US sanctions to 40,000 deaths in Venezuela since August of 2017.
Her reply to me on May 23 was quite telling:
I was not aware of that study, but am now and will bear in mind.
It would indeed have been impossible for a Reuters reporter to be aware of the study if they depended only on Reuters articles to keep informed. The news agency hadn't mentioned the study since it was released, never mind written an article about it.
I asked a contact I have at Reuters about this, and he was also surprised that Reuters hadn't even mentioned the study. He suggested I query some of Reuters' Venezuela-based reporters, which I did a few days later.
In my email to them, I passed along a list of news articles since August 2017, when Trump first dramatically intensified economic sanctions, that described worsening economic conditions. I also noted that though the Sachs/Weisbrot study was ignored by Reuters, it had been intensely debated in public by Venezuelan opposition economists (i.e., the kind of people Reuters and other Western media actually pay attention to on Venezuela).
The Brookings Institution published a few rebuttals to the study (here and here), which I also pointed out to Reuters. The objections Brookings made were essentially already addressed by Weisbrot and Sachs in response to other critics.
On June 9, Reuters finally mentioned the study, at the end of an article by Nebehay, who is based in Geneva:
One study in April, co-authored by US economists Jeffrey Sachs and Mark Weisbrot, blamed sanctions for causing more deaths and disproportionately hitting the most vulnerable.
"We find that the sanctions have inflicted, and increasingly inflict, very serious harm to human life and health, including an estimated more than 40,000 deaths from 2017-2018," they said, arguing they were illegal under international law.
Nevertheless, since the day Nebehay replied to me, Reuters has continued to portray the severe impact of US sanctions as an allegation that only Maduro and other Venezuelan officials have made. It was even done by Reuters in an article published June 10, the day after the wire service finally mentioned the study:
The government of President Nicolas Maduro says Venezuela's economic problems are caused by US sanctions that have crippled the OPEC member's export earnings and blocked it from borrowing from abroad.
Other instances of Reuters representing the idea that US sanctions work as they are intended to do--in other words, that they hurt the Venezuelan economy--as an allegation made by Maduro or his government:
- "He [President Maduro] says the country's economic problems are the result of an 'economic war' led by his political adversaries with the help of Washington." (5/23/19)
- "Maduro, who maintains control over state institutions, calls Guaido a puppet of Washington and blames US sanctions for a hyperinflationary economic meltdown and humanitarian crisis." (5/26/19; repeated almost verbatim, 5/28/19)
- "Maduro's government, however, says US-imposed sanctions were responsible for the children's deaths, by freezing funds allocated to buy medicine and send the children to Italy for treatment under the 2010 agreement." (6/1/19)
- "Maduro blames the situation on an 'economic war' waged by his political adversaries as well as US sanctions that have hobbled the oil industry and prevented his government from borrowing abroad." (6/7/19)
- "Maduro says Venezuela is victim of an 'economic war' led by the opposition with the help of Washington, which has levied several rounds of sanctions against his government." (6/7/19)
Two recent articles by Reuters, however, stated the obvious about the most recent US sanctions that were implemented in 2019:
- "Venezuela is in the midst of a years-long economic and humanitarian crisis that has deepened since the United States imposed sanctions on the country's oil industry in January as part of an effort to oust Socialist President Nicolas Maduro in favor of opposition leader Juan Guaido." (6/7/19)
- "Venezuela's oil exports dropped 17 percent in May because of the sanctions." (6/6/19)
But the study Reuters belatedly mentioned shows that US sanctions have been devastating to Venezuela's economy, and seriously aggravating the humanitarian crisis, since August 2017.
Apologists for Trump always rush to say that Venezuela's depression began years before Trump's sanctions--as if that made it acceptable to deliberately worsen a humanitarian crisis. To tweak an analogy Caitlin Johnstone used, think of a defense attorney saying, "Your Honor, I will show that the victim was already in intensive care when my client began to assault him."
Moreover, as Steve Ellner recently discussed, US support for an insurrectionist opposition in Venezuela goes back over a decade before the crisis, and was a factor in causing it. Economic sanctions Obama introduced in 2015 were also harmful--Weisbrot (The Hill, 11/6/16) in 2016 called them "ugly and belligerent enough to keep many investors from investing in Venezuela and to raise the country's cost of borrowing"--even before Trump's dramatic escalation of economic warfare that they paved the way for.
Putting aside a study by prominent US economists, the "Maduro says" formulation is also inexcusable because US Sen. Marco Rubio, who has been widely reported as a major influence on Trump's Venezuela policy, gleefully tweeted on May 16 that Maduro "can't access funds to rebuild electric grid."
Rubio didn't pretend he was referring to an imaginary electric grid used exclusively by Maduro. Reuters (5/30/19) has itself referred to Rubio as the "leading voice in the crafting of President Donald Trump's Venezuela policy," in a lengthy piece about US sanctions that said absolutely nothing about their impact on the general population, implying throughout that sanctions only impacted Maduro and other officials. ("Being blacklisted also crimps the lifestyle of Venezuelan officials' families," Reuters reported.)
My fellow FAIR contributor, Alan MacLeod, interviewed many Venezuela-based journalists for his book Bad News From Venezuela. He wrote last year (FAIR.org, 5/24/18):
Media copy and paste from news organizations like Reuters and Associated Press, which themselves employ many cheaper local journalists.
In Venezuela, these journalists are not neutral actors, but come from the highly partisan local media, affiliated with the opposition, leading to a situation where Western newsrooms see themselves as an ideological spearhead against Maduro, "the resistance" to the government.
Even worse than being the "resistance" to Maduro is that Reuters has often made itself the "assistance" to politicians like Rubio, who are vicious enough to celebrate the economic strangulation of millions of people.
Reuters may carry on as if it had never reported the study by Weisbrot and Sachs. Western media outlets are perfectly willing to ignore their own reporting when it suits powerful interests (Extra! Update, 10/02). It is therefore up to all of us to not be passive consumers of news, and continually bear in mind that the news we are getting about official enemies may be less than half the story.
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