How to Grossly Misrepresent Venezuelan Reality: A Reply to Alejandro Toledo [View all]

[polly7]

By Lucas Koerner
Source: Venezuelanalysis.com
April 24, 2015

In a recent op-ed in the New York Times titled “How to Fix the Mess in Venezuela”, former Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo dutifully recites the tired litany of fabrications and distortions which have long become standard fare in international media coverage of the Bolivarian Republic.

It is precisely this glaring double standard towards Venezuela that allows Toledo and 25 other ex-presidents- including notorious human rights abusers Alvaro Uribe, Felipe Calderon, Alfredo Cristiani, (while Toledo himself currently faces trial for corruption)- to accuse the Bolivarian government of human rights violations.

In this twisted, orwellian world where corrupt oligarchs and profligate desk murderers parade as human rights crusaders, the violently anti-democratic Venezuelan Right is miraculously transformed into the peaceful, law-abiding victim of an authoritarian regime.

In reality, the US-backed Venezuelan opposition has since the election of Hugo Chavez in 1998 tried tirelessly to violently overthrow the Bolivarian government. From the temporarily successful US-supported coup in 2002 and opposition-led oil strike later that year to the 2014 guarimbas and the thwarted “Blue Coup” plot this February, Venezuela’s oligarchic elites have stubbornly refused to recognize the popular majority government that has triumphed in 17 of the country’s last 18 elections.

There is no denying that Venezuela is currently embroiled in a severe recession precipitated by decade-low oil prices, which has hit the country’s popular classes- the social base of Chavismo- the hardest. Mr. Toledo is honest in admitting that the present crisis is rooted in Venezuela’s structural dependence on oil, yet he fails to acknowledge the concrete steps taken by the Revolution to overcome this neocolonial dependence by developing socially productive, communal enterprises from below.

Indeed, the more revolutionary sectors of Chavismo are actively struggling to organize communal councils and communes- the nuclei of what they call the “communal state”- which will replace the top-down bourgeois petro state with participatory democratic structures and communally controlled production. Today, Venezuela has 1070 communes and almost 44,600 communal councils, an achievement Toledo is incapable of celebrating, because it signals a radical rejection of the Washington Consensus ideology of neoliberal privatization under whose banner the ex-president made his career.

Full article: https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/how-to-grossly-misrepresent-venezuelan-reality-a-reply-to-alejandro-toledo/