1/23/2003
Venezuelan Blog Day
Today is blog day for Venezuela. The date is chosen for the anniversary of the day the country chased out its last military dictator, Perez Jimenez (El Gordito), in 1958.
In a nation on the verge of revolution, we are seeing blogs being used for the first time to tell the rest of the world what is happening in the streets. See The Devil's Excrement for an opposition-eye view. (Or the Caracas Chronicles.) By contrast, American newspaper coverage has been curiously bland and focused narrowly on oil and geopolitics.
I don't remotely pretend to be an expert on Venezuela. I've been there. I used to be married to a Venezuelana. I've talked politics with in-laws. That's it. But the situation is dire. Most outside commentators want to see this though weirdly out-dated Cold War lenses. The left wants to paint thuggish military authoritarian Hugo Chavez as some kind of Voice of the Downtrodden. (Local labor and socialists don't seem to think so.) The right wants to paint an incoherent ultra-nationalist strongman as some kind of old-time Marxist, which is pretty strange, too. The Venezuelan people are suffering and instead of listening to them, the English-speaking press responds by playing the most threadbare of 20th century boogie men against each other. Slogan: Read the blogs, not the ideologues!
What can't be argued away is that Chavez is undermining every democratic and independent institution in the country. (OK, a lot of them were pretty weak before.) He has taken power away from elected assemblies, he created a designer constitution which could allow him to be president for life, he has intimidated and harassed the press, he has undermined the independence of the judiciary, he is turning the state oil company over to his cronies.
The national strike is more like the people-power revolution that toppled Ferdinand Marcos and Joseph Estrada in the Philippines than it is like any kind of replay of the dead ideological wars of the past century.
