On the Expulsion of HRW from Venezuela
Venezuela faced renewed criticism after the expulsion last month of two members of Human Rights Watch (HRW) from the country, including HRW’s Americas director Jose Miguel Vivanco, after they had published a report accusing the Chavez government of undermining democracy. The expulsion was a foolish and paranoid over-reaction which should not be supported by those sympathetic to the Bolivarian revolution. That said, it requires more contextualization than it was given in the western media.
After the expulsion of the two activists, Venezuela’s foreign minister Nicolas Maduro told reporters by way of justification that “these groups, dressed up as human rights defenders, are financed by the United States”. This is an accurate description of some groups that the Venezuelan government has had to deal with: one prime example being the allegedly “pro-democracy” NGO Sumate, whose director signed the decree legitimizing the 2002 coup against Venezuela’s democracy and which received generous funding from the ill-named National Endowment for Democracy in Washington. But it is misleading to claim that HRW is simply an arm of the US government - it has produced useful material documenting the abuses of the Colombian state and campaigned against the free-trade agreement between Washington and Bogota.
Maduro would have been on stronger ground if he had argued that HRW, even when it criticises the US government or its allies, remains well within the US establishment consensus. This claim naturally requires evidence, so consider the letter which HRW recently addressed to John McCain before he visited Colombia, which began with the following words:
“It is a pleasure to be in communication with you once again. Over the years you have been a defender of human rights and democratic freedoms on many occasions - whether by standing against torture in the United States, or against political repression from Burma to Uzbekistan to Russia. We appreciate the work you have done on these issues and have been pleased to work with you on many of them.”
It is hard to imagine an open letter from HRW to Hugo Chavez which praised his record of opposition to aggressive wars in the Middle East.
Consider, also, the readiness of HRW to add its voice to the chorus denouncing Hugo Chavez during the confrontation between the Colombian government and its neighbours earlier this year: among other things, HRW denounced Chavez for suggesting that the FARC was not simply a terrorist gang but had a political project which could be respected. A more faithful parroting of the establishment line could not be asked for.
Other statements made by HRW recall the criticisms made of human rights NGOs by Naomi Klein in her book The Shock Doctrine, where she accused them of “depolitisising” the question of human rights abuses. Take, for example, a letter addressed to the Washington Post on the subject of the Colombian free-trade deal: “Mr. [Alvaro] Uribe does deserve credit for taking on the violent left. But Congress is right to delay approval of a free-trade agreement with Colombia until Mr. Uribe similarly takes on the violent right.” This is completely vacuous: for Uribe and his supporters, the business of “taking on the violent left” is inseparable from his close alliance with the right-wing death squads. Waging war on the FARC and the ELN provides them with the necessary cover for a relentless terror campaign against civilian social movements.
After the Pando massacre of government supporters by the right-wing opposition in Bolivia, HRW issued a statement which gave the impression that both sides were equally responsible for containing political violence in the country. It could only bring itself to say that “the violence is rooted in an ongoing dispute between President Morales and prefects from five of Bolivia’s departments over the allocation of authority and control of natural resources”. There was no mention of the openly-proclaimed intention of the opposition to overthrow the elected government of Bolivia in a violent coup.
Needless to say, such “depoliticisation’ is itself deeply political, and protects the sponsors of violent subversion in the Bush administration from scrutiny. The double standard applied to governments in Caracas and Washington is striking. When Alvaro Uribe accused the Venezuelan government of supporting efforts by the FARC to overthrow his government by force, HRW backed up the allegations and demanded “clarification”. When Evo Morales accused the US government of supporting efforts by the right-wing opposition to overthrow his government by force, there was an ear-splitting silence from HRW.
The latest report on Venezuela is riddled with distortions, gives a completely misleading picture of the actual health of Venezuelan democracy, and could well be described as a compilation of talking points from the Venezuelan opposition (academic Francisco Dominguez has written an excellent critique). The most serious problem is one that permeates the entire document - its failure to give any serious weight to the threat of violent counter-revolution, most apparent during the coup of April 2002 but never off the agenda since. The executive summary does acknowledge that
“the most dramatic setback [for human rights ] came in April 2002 when a coup d’état temporarily removed Chávez from office and replaced him with an unelected president who, in his first official act, dissolved the country’s democratic institutions, suspending the legislature and disbanding the Supreme Court.”
There is no mention of the role the US government played, encouraging the coup plotters to act and giving them its enthusiastic backing once the coup was in progress. Mentioning that support appears to be taboo, although it was an integral part of the “most dramatic setback” Venezuelan democracy has experienced. HRW immediately proceeds to belittle the significance of the coup:
“While this derailment of Venezuelan democracy lasted less than two days, it has haunted Venezuelan politics ever since, providing a pretext for a wide range of government policies that have undercut the human rights protections established in the 1999 Constitution.”
You would gather the impression - both from this sentence and from the rest of the report - that the Venezuelan opposition immediately cleaned up its act after the coup, pledging to oppose the Chavez government by peaceful and constitutional methods only, and that Chavez has ever since had to face the same kind of opposition presented to Gordon Brown by the Tory Party. Sadly, the facts tell a different story. HRW does not seriously consider the tolerance shown to its opponents by the Venezuelan government: Chavez pardoned the coup plotters last year, while his opponent in the 2006 presidential election was a man who had signed the 2002 communiqué endorsing the dictatorship of Pedro Carmona. It is hard to imagine any western capitalist government behaving in such a lenient manner.
As noted above, HRW has lobbied Congress to oppose the free-trade agreement with Colombia. It doesn’t seem too much of a stretch to speculate that they are trying to sweeten this bitter pill for the US establishment (including both its political and media factions) by denouncing the Venezuelan government at the same time. After all, if they came out and stated the plain and simple truth - that whatever problems may exist in Venezuela today, it is a far more democratic country than it was before Hugo Chavez became president - that would surely place them beyond the pale of respectable opinion in the US.
The report is just the latest in a series of misleading and inaccurate interventions from HRW. The pity of it is, there is a crying need for objective assessment of Venezuela’s human rights record. Any government which faces a constant threat of internal overthrow or foreign aggression is liable to make serious mistakes that have to be corrected. Groups like HRW could play an important role in encouraging such corrections, if they stuck to their self-proclaimed mission to provide objective information about human rights. Instead, they have tried to curry favour with the US political class. On occasion, the latest report makes valid points, but this owes more to the principle that a stopped clock will tell the right time twice a day than it does to the integrity of HRW.
This does not take away from the fact that the Venezuelan government was wrong to expel HRW’s representatives from the country. It was perfectly legitimate to kick out the US ambassador, but HRW cannot be dealt with as if they were agents of the US state. If the Venezuelan authorities are going to deport every foreigner who makes inaccurate claims about the health of democracy in the country, they might as well boot out every correspondent from Reuters, the New York Times and god knows how many other publications. That way lies disaster. Ironically (but predictably), the expulsion of Jose Miguel Vivanco will provide more ammunition for critics of Hugo Chavez than the HRW report ever would.
Notes:
Photo of Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch taken from Robert Amsterdam’s blog.
Discussion
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Comment by: Ed Walsh
Oct 16th 2008 at 22:10
And sure enough … the latest edition of the New York Review of Books carries an article by Jose Miguel Vivanco (www.nybooks.com/articles/22033), repeating the grotesquely one-sided, misleading and inaccurate picture of Venezuela given in his report, with the following claim:
“Chávez’s decision to expel us merely served to confirm the central message of our report and ensure that it received extensive coverage around the globe.”
Half false and half true - false to claim that his report now stands vindicated (it is still a shoddy piece of work which deliberately distorts the facts), but correct to say that the expulsion of the HRW members from Venezuela gave far more publicity to HRW’s report than it would have otherwise received.
Perhaps Vivanco thinks that the US establishment will now look more favourably on the critical points HRW make about Colombia - I suspect he will be waiting a long time for that to happen.
Comment by: Donagh
Oct 17th 2008 at 23:10
Venezuela Analysis have just published their critique of the Human Rights Watch Report on Venezuela.
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/3882
From the Executive Summary: