...nessie: So Al. You're the closest thing we have to a guy on the ground there. We need your input. Care to enlighten us as to what's really happening?
Al Giordano: In fact, we (and that "we" includes IndyMedia) have an enormous network of friends and allies on the ground there who are the ones Venezuelans proudly call Community Journalists. The independent media movement in Venezuela is the most advanced in the hemisphere, probably in the world. There are 25 Community TV and Radio stations in Venezuela, many of which began as "pirate stations," one dating back to the 1960s, that were legalized under the Bolivarian Constitution of 1999. There are movement also includes important print and Internet publications.
The Popular Revolutionary Assembly has one of the best online centers of information I've ever seen at: http://www.aporrea.org It updates every hour or more often for 24 hours a day. In recent days it has been invaluable. Anyone who has been reading the Aporrea site for the past two weeks has witnessed, time and time again, how the people from the grassroots are leading and pushing Chávez to resist the coup, not vice versa.
nessie: How does their work compare to the corporate media?
Al Giordano: There's something very racist in the reporting of simulators like the British journalist Phil Gunson, a freelance mercenary who has published knowingly false stories recently in Newsweek/MSNBC, the Christian Science Monitor and the daily newspaper of coup-plotters everywhere, the Miami Herald. There's something positively sleazy about this guy and his work. I observed him in action down in Venezuela during a presidential press conference - him and this little clique of boy reporters from England and the U.S., and their snobby superiority complex, who would be more comfortable with Chávez as their gardener than as president of an oil-rich nation of 24 million people.
You can see the frustration on their faces of having to report on this dark-skinned hawk-nosed soldier who is smarter and more popular than they are, and who during a five hour press conference answers all their snotty questions in great detail - Imagine Bush or Gore or Clinton ever doing that! - and he beats them on the facts and they have to call him "president" in their reports. And the press conference itself is broadcast on national TV, and the Venezuelan people get to see just how snotty and clueless the U.S. and European press corps, as a group (because there is always the occasional good one or two in their midst; they know who they are), get completely beaten at their own game by Chávez.
If your sympathies are with the working class, and you distrust the commercial media correspondents as I do, it's great entertainment, and it's part of the educational process underway there. You can see them, these divine caste "reporters," wince as it happens because they know that Chávez is not the buffoon they try to portray him to be. He's smarter than they are. In fact, if anything, he's very suave and smooth, which is why his five-hour live TV shows every Sunday - "Alo Presidente!" - are the most popular or at least one of the most popular programs in the country. Whole families gather every Sunday to watch the show, on which he takes live phone calls.
I could just see the Gunsons and others like him sitting there, thinking to them selves, "if this guy were my gardener or chauffeur, he'd be a lot of fun." Oh, it's a sad thing, what happens to U.S. and British and Spaniard correspondents when they enter lands with oligarchies, because they start to think of themselves as landed gentry. They move into the wealthy neighborhoods and live behind walls, they send their kids to private schools with the other oligarchs, and from that perspective flows their reporting. They also develop very unhealthy parasitic relationships with US and European Embassy, and multinational corporate, spin-doctors. But back to Gunson, because he's got this coming.
Gunson, interviewed last week on NPR, gave an example of this inherent racism and snobbery when he said, and I quote: "I think it's important to point out that last night what we saw was perhaps the worst example so far of something, a phenomenon that we've seen before, which is concerted attacks on different media organizations by mobs that are clearly organized by the government. For example, the mobs in most places were led by deputies, by congresspeople, belonging to the ruling party." Gunson said that, not me. The idea that the people - who Gunson calls "mobs" - would only protest at Commercial TV stations if "organized by the government" has a racist ring to it. He suggests that the people aren't smart enough or organized enough to think of it or do it themselves.
But anyone who has been reading the Aporrea website and following the Community Media coverage in Venezuela, as I do, watched the process in the days before the TV station protests last Monday night, December 9th. For days the popular organizations, from the neighborhoods and towns, were writing open letters to Chávez and the government, demanding that he do something about the constant stream of lies and bile being spread by the Commercial TV stations as the media invented a so-called "strike" that was not happening in the majority of Venezuelan neighborhoods or towns! The people were seeing one portrayal on TV that did not reflect the reality on their streets, where shops were open, where people were working, and working hard, as is another trademark of poor Venezuelans. They have to work hard in order to eat!
I sometimes think these First World reporters have no life experience to understand that reality. For days these community groups had called upon Chávez to revoke the licenses of the simulating TV stations that, after all, do use the "public airwaves" and therefore ought to have public responsibility and be open to all the public, not just the paying class. And Chávez did nothing at all to the TV stations, so the masses came down from the hills and surrounded them, as they had last April. In both cases, in April and in December, the surrounding of the TV stations marked the turning points against coup d'etat. The TV owners cry "intimidation" and the racist simulators like Gunson claim these "mobs" of poor and working people were pushed to do it from above. But the reality is that at all moments they are the ones running the show, pushing the government, pushing Chávez, pushing the media, as the people should do in every land.
Gunson sees some Congressmen and women in these demonstrations and says, from his little pea brain, "aha! they're the ringleaders!" He profoundly misunderstands the dynamic at work in Venezuela. The congress members were dragged by the masses to come with them, not vice versa! If you believe in Authentic Democracy, it's a wonderful process to watch and participate in. The saddest thing of all - and this is where I feel a tinge of pity for Gunson, for T. Christian Miller of the *LA Times*, for Juan Forero of the NY Times and the other professional simulators - is that the correspondents are missing the story of a lifetime because of their upper-class fear of the people.
The real story is going on in the barrios, in the hills, in the poor and working neighborhoods and towns. It is a revolutionary process, sweeping away decades of a caste system and its injustices. It's part of what I think Tony Negri meant when he referred to "self-valorization" in his book "Marx After Marx," so wonderfully formed by the Northern Italian autonomy movement of the 1970s. The first step to economic self-valorization by workers is the process of psychological self-valorization.
nessie: Since you lack that upper-class fear of the people, you must be privy to the real story. So help us out up here. Tell us what's really happening in the barrios, the hills, and the poor and working neighborhoods and towns. What has changed that has brought about this upheaval.
Al Giordano: What has changed most markedly among Venezuela's poor majority is the same thing that changed among the indigenous communities of Chiapas and much of Mexico beginning in 1994: the people's view of themselves. When I first walked through the popular barrios of Caracas and talked to every stranger in sight my first thought was: "This is just like what I lived in Chiapas."
I had known Chiapas before and after the Zapatista uprising and therefore had a yardstick by which to measure what had occurred. And the same thing has occurred with the masses of Venezuela. They're not available any more to sign up for duty as slaves. And this is what drives the former ruling class crazy. The gardener, the cook, the maid, the nanny, the tutor, the chauffeur, and of course the farmer and factory worker, no longer have to pretend that the master is god.
The self-valorization process in Venezuela - like that in Chiapas - has caused a personality crisis for the upper classes. It's hard to maintain the illusion that one lives on Olympus with the gods - and if you've ever spent any time among the oligarchies in Third World outposts, you know about this attitude I'm describing - when you no longer have adoring minions, or when the plebes stop faking the adoration.
And this is only the first stage of self-valorization; the psychological transformation. Karl Marx (who once cried out "I am not a Marxist!") and Tony Negri referred more concretely to the economic stage; to the worker as his and her own subject and no longer the object of the ruling elite. Which is why you hear the crazy oligarchs screaming so loudly about the "Bolivarian Circles," because that is the mechanism by which the Venezuelan revolution begins to do what the oligarchs find unforgivable: to organize this new positive self-image among the people into neighborhood and economic entities.
nessie: What exactly are the Bolivarian Circles?
Al Giordano: To hear the oligarchs and the Commercial Media screech about the Bolivarian Circles, you would think they are armed paramilitary organizations of vampires coming to drink their precious children's blood. I went and spent time with these Circles. Do you what they're really doing? The old guy in every neighborhood who loves the architecture, the history, you know him, these guys even exist in San Francisco and New York, the one who goes and spends hours at the library researching the construction of the local church? Well, this guy is now in the Bolivarian Circle. And for the first time he has an eager audience of children and adults and elders all excited to study and learn the history of their barrio. And the lady who understands herbs and natural medicine is holding very popular workshops and training sessions to help everyone understand it. She's the Bolivarian Circle, too. So is the neighborhood baseball team, and kids who do rap or theater. They're the Bolivarian Circles, too. That's what they are "armed" with: library books, herbal remedies, boomboxes and baseball gloves.
And, you know, the upper classes have a point in their fear of this, which is why the Commercial Media preys on this fear: the family using herbal remedies is no longer spending a week's pay on expensive pharmaceuticals. It's healthy without them. There's a self-led reorganization of the economy from the bottom up. Everything is changing.
So the Commercial Media yelps "Beware! Vampire Bolivarian Circles are coming to kill you!" This is why the most popular chant in Caracas today is "Chávez Makes Them Crazy!" Because the people watch these former ruling class members railing all their fears on TV, and they really do have psychological problems with the loss of their illusory power over others.
Meanwhile, the psychology of the majority has never been healthier or more positive than it is today. The concept of "Psy-war," thank you, Venezuela and Chiapas, is no longer a strictly top down phenomenon. If there's any gringo reading this who is spending hundreds of dollars on a shrink to cope with the post-9/11 insanity up there, I say, save your money and go to Venezuela, to the popular neighborhoods, you probably just need a good dose of "self-valorization" yourself!
nessie: How does Community Media fit in?
Al Giordano: Many thousands of people are now involved in Community Media. If only we had this connection with the masses at all the IMCs and other "independent media" in the United States! To me, they are our teachers in how to make independent media popular with the masses, and how to deflate the convocatory power of the corrupt Commercial Media....
[The full text of the interview is available at <http://sf.indymedia.org/news/2002/12/1552703.php>.] -- Yoshie
* Calendar of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html> * Anti-War Activist Resources: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/activist.html> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osu.edu/students/CJP/>