Just Egg or the Whole Pie? American Media and the Colombian Hostage Situation

In an incident rarely so conspicuous, the mainstream American media was caught with egg on its face with regards to Venezuela.

The background: Chavez has been involved in hostage negotiation with Colombia's FARC for some time now. The belligerent government of Uribe has clearly demonstrated it has no interest in opening a dialogue with the FARC over the years, and would rather engage in spectacular telenovela style politics and military intervention in order to maintain its tenuous hold over the Colombian electorate, even while it shoves both hands into the public cookie jar. Since the Venezuelan government is obviously to the left of Uribe, and closer in ideological leanings to the FARC than the Colombian government, they offered to act as a more sympathetic intermediary that might be able to relate to the FARC, something that the traditional Colombian political parties had refused to do since La Violencia.

After long talks, a handover of some of the FARC hostages was scheduled over the New Year, but failed to materialize. The FARC cited Colombian military activity in the region where the handover was supposed to take place, and refused to meet. The major American media outlets, and consequently unthinking conservative and liberal bloggers, trumpeted this delay - one CNN article put it - as demonstrating the "limits" of the Chavez government. They recognized everything that I have here, and yet still chose to frame this incident in the most curious way that they did. To me, this either shows their complete ineptitude in understanding the South American dynamic, their blatant ideological leanings, or most likely, both.

Today, two hostages were freed with the help of Chavez. The most recent CNN article on the topic says nothing of Chavez's past "failures", though it does include a quote by one freed hostage, Clara Rojas, who thanked Chavez for "returning [her]... to life". How embarrassing it must be to conclude irrationally and prematurely that Chavez had failed, that somehow his integrity as the president of Venezuela had been challenged by his failure to succeed in work that he was effectively doing pro bono, only to find that he did succeed. There is nothing more satisfying when editorials by the elite masquerading as 'objective' news stories are exposed for what they really are. This happens continually with regards to Venezuela, for despite all of his faults, Chavez is an institutional socialist that has certainly learned from the mistakes of his predecessors. Rarely, however, does it happen so neatly.