" Speakout: Picture of Venezuela's Chavez twisted

Saturday, Jun 26, 2004 Print format
   Send by email


By: Charles Hardy

While I was watching a huge rally in support of Venezuela's current government, President Hugo Chavez passed through the crowd on the back of a truck. A stranger nearby commented: "Look at the eyes of the men. They're crying." They were - a reaction few presidents could provoke.

I have lived in Venezuela for most of the past 19 years. As a Catholic missionary priest, I spent eight of those years in a cardboard-and-tin shack with mice, rats and cockroaches, surrounded by human and animal excrement. It was part of a public housing project constructed during the first presidency of Carlos Andres Perez (1974-1978) when oil money was pouring into the country.

In 1989, a few months before the happenings in Tiananmen Square, I witnessed the Caracas massacre when hundreds were shot down in the streets. I saw naked bodies strewn on the floor of a hospital morgue.

A year later I slept in the cemetery several nights when bodies that the government had buried in black garbage bags were being excavated from a pit that it denied ever existed.

The beautiful democracy that the aristocracy here painted for the world was a fraud.

In 1998, Hugo Chavez was elected president with almost 60 percent of the votes, incredibly overthrowing the entrenched and well-financed elite that had controlled the country for decades. That elite has never forgiven him and today is doing everything possible to tumble him. Sadly, the U.S. government and mass media have joined in this very undemocratic effort.

Their accusations have some common themes. First, Chavez is a communist because of his close association with Cuba. Is George W. Bush a communist because the U.S. has close ties with China?

Chavez's hero is Simon Bolivar, not Marx or Lenin. Bolivar liberated much of South America from the Spaniards, but he was also concerned about another colonial power, saying that "the United States appears to be destined by Providence to plague Latin America with misery in the name of liberty." It is a concern Chavez shares. After the April 2002 coup against him, Condoleezza Rice warned Chavez, not the coup leaders, to "respect constitutional processes."

A second accusation is that Chavez is a dictator and will limit freedom of expression very shortly. This has been said since 1998 when he was just a candidate for the presidency. To date, there is not one deprecating word against Chavez that has not been printed or spoken.

But I have government-censored Venezuelan dailies, before the time of Chavez, with blank pages."

And in the next post.