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who laid out the victims in the street, and claimed the victims were all anti-Chavistas. IF you saw the documentary with the clips taken of the people in the street you saw how the private tv stations presented a completely MANIPULATED, TOTALLY MISLEADING view of the shootings to the people of Caracas, and were exposed in short order. Here's a response from the filmmakers to charges made by anti-Chavista Phil Gunson which cover that shooting of protesters: DOCUMENTARY
Director's Cut
Who's Right? The Filmmakers Respond
BY KIM BARTLEY AND DONNACHA O'BRIAIN
~snip~
Gunson accuses us of propaganda and suggests that we failed to understand the complexity of the Venezuelan situation. We spent nearly a year in Venezuela researching and filming this documentary, and were eyewitnesses to the coup.
Gunson may obsess about de-contextualized details. He fails, however, to ask the key questions any journalist would ask:
Did elements in the military threaten force in the effort to make Chávez resign? They did. Did Chávez resign? No. Were the people who illegally seized power representative of some of the most retrograde political tendencies in Venezuelan society? Yes they were. The first action of the Carmona regime was to abolish the democratic institutions, including parliament. These facts are simply glossed over, or worse, omitted by Gunson. Some further points: * The fact that not all the military were involved — as is the case with most coups — is irrelevant. By late on the night of April 11, the coup plotters did threaten to unleash an attack on the palace. The infamous Vice Admiral Ramírez Pérez even stated that night, on privately owned TV, that “Either he takes this opportunity, or we’ll launch a military operation.” Were they bluffing? Who knows? Did those who remained inside the palace fear an attack? Yes.
* The idea that Chávez supporters in 2002 were broadly poor and dark-skinned and the opposition broadly white and middle class may seem simplistic but it’s one we share with a number of commentators including the Guardian newspaper (December 10, 2002), Professor Dan Hellinger of Webster University in Missouri, and indeed Gunson himself. (See The Christian Science Monitor, April 16, 2002.)
* On one of the most crucial events — the shootings of April 11 — Gunson is guilty of omission and inaccuracy. Nowhere in the film did we say that only chavistas were shot on April 11. Nobody can say with certainty who orchestrated the shootings that day. Our focus, rather, was on the way the private media rushed to judgment, without any corroboration, stating as fact that the chavistas who were filmed on the Llaguno Bridge were shooting at the opposition march. These alleged shooters subsequently were tried in a court of law and absolved of all charges; indeed the court established that they had been firing in self-defense at snipers and police. This fact, important to any understanding of these events, is conveniently omitted from Gunson’s article. That the opposition march did not pass below the bridge is attested to by many eyewitnesses, including the deputy editor of Le Monde Diplomatique, who was on the bridge that day. The documentary Anatomy of a Coup, broadcast on Australian TV (SBS) in October 2002, came to conclusions similar to our own. Again these key testimonies are omitted from Gunson’s own constructed narrative. He tells us nothing of the evidence, commonly known and presented in the same SBS documentary, which suggests that the violence that day was provoked and choreographed. That documentary quotes a CNN correspondent describing how on the evening of April 10 he was invited to film a press conference at which Vice Admiral Ramírez Pérez denounced Chávez for the deaths — this before the shootings had even taken place. (See also The Battle of Venezuela, published by the Latin American Bureau)
As for Wolfgang Schalk’s so-called “shadow analysis”: it is surely not insignificant that Schalk has led the well-resourced campaign, linked to the Venezuelan opposition, to discredit and suppress our film. His claim that the high shot of the empty street was filmed before the march ever neared the palace is untrue. The footage is contemporaneous with the exchange of fire between chavistas on the bridge and snipers and police. More: http://74.125.93.104/search?q=cache:FhWisEJGLJwJ:cjrarchives.org/issues/2004/3/bartley-docu.asp+Venezuela+coup+false+image+shooting+bridge&hl=en&client=firefox-a&gl=us&strip=1Colombia Journalism Review ~~~~~~~~~~~~If you haven't seen this documentary yet, put aside some time to watch it: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5832390545689805144
Published on Saturday, November 22, 2003 by the Guardian/UK
Chavez Film Puts Staff at Risk, Says Amnesty
Recriminations after documentary on Venezuelan coup attempt is dropped from a Vancouver festival
by Duncan Campbell in Los Angeles
An award-winning documentary about the coup last year that briefly ousted the Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez, has become the subject of a bitter dispute. Last week, it was withdrawn from an Amnesty International (AI) film festival because Amnesty staff in Caracas said they feared for their safety if it were shown.
The film, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, was made by two Irish film makers, Kim Bartley and Donnacha O'Briain. They were preparing a documentary about Mr Chavez, with his cooperation, before the coup and were inside the presidential palace in April 2002 when the events unfolded.
The film has since been shown on television by the BBC, by RTE in Ireland, and elsewhere in Europe. This week it won two prizes at the Grierson documentary awards in Britain.
Mr Chavez was briefly removed from office by a military coup but returned to power after 48 hours. The political situation was then, and remains, highly polarized. The president as portrayed by his opponents is a dangerous, anti-US communist, while Chavez supporters see the opposition as the privileged seeking to preserve their powers from the underprivileged.
The film portrays Mr Chavez in a sympathetic light. It was shown on the public television channel in Venezuela earlier this year. The private television channels are all opposed to Mr Chavez.
Last week, the film was due to be shown at the AI film festival in Vancouver. The organizing committee came under pressure from Chavez opponents in Venezuela and eventually decided not to show it.
More: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/1122-10.htm |
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