Thursday, Sep 2nd 2010
The Irish Times on Saturday 17th July published an article about Colombian claims that Venezuela is sheltering members of the FARC guerrilla group. This is an old chestnut that Colombia and the US revive from time to time, especially if there’s need to draw attention away from other news and particularly if it’s embarrassing news. [...]
The half-page, feature length article by Peter Sherwell about the current situation in Venezuela that appeared in The Sunday Telegraph on 29th November follows an established pattern of unsympathetic and negative reporting in European and North American media, some of it touched on in my book Chávez: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. While this [...]
Chavismo and democracy
The assertion that Venezuela has become a more democratic society under Hugo Chavez is bitterly contested. We can pass over the repeated claims that Chavez is a brutal dictator who has turned Venezuela into a communist state - the people making such allegations are certainly not troubled by the burden of proof. But [...]
This is the second of a three part review of Bart Jones’ Hugo! The Hugo Chavez Story. Read the first part Chavez: The Hatred of the ‘Dark-Skinned Yokel’ here and the second part Chavaz: ‘A Subversive in Miraflores’?here.
Build-up to the putsch
It’s impossible to discuss the reaction provoked by the Chavez government, of course, without addressing [...]
Castro comes to visit
In 1971, Fidel Castro went to Chile as a guest of its new president Salvador Allende. The Cuban leader left with a gloomy view of the prospects for the first democratically-elected Marxist government in the Americas. Confiding to associates in private, Castro predicted the tragic defeat of Allende’s Popular Unity experiment two [...]
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 [...]
Jeremy Paxman once explained the secret of his interviewing technique - before speaking to a politician, he simply asks himself “why is this lying bastard lying to me?” In the case of Colombian president Alvaro Uribe, a journalist would be well advised to stiffen the measure: “Why is this blood-thirsty, amoral gangster lying to me?” [...]