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.

Praxis and the Engine of Revolution

I came across this very interesting image detailing the reform process underway in Venezuela. As usual, this is courtesy of Venezuelanalysis.com.

Historically, this has been a pretty common trajectory for new socialist states, begging the quetsion - what is '21st century' about Venezuela's socialism? Or perhaps the more pertinent question is how accurate a depiction of the revolutionary process this image is?

Rather than follow a linear '5-step' process, Chavez has cobbled together a number of these steps, and a host of other strategies to get to where he is now. This graphic, though fascinating - and a great starting point for discussion - demonstrates the disconnect between 'theory' and 'practice' that orthodox Marxists have consistently reinforced. Can't anyone recall Gramsci?

The Trials of Hugo Chavez

For anyone following the course of events upon which Chavez has led Venezuela for the last nine years, two things are immediately clear: the mainstream American press has sought to discredit and attack his policies from day one, and the alternative, broadly 'left', press has sought to vindicate him, and where this was not possible, provide rational justification or at least explanation for his policies. I feel it is necessary to join in this rhetorical struggle by examining two articles on the recent curriculum change in Venezuela that is being ushered in with the new school year.

An AP article covering this story immediately focuses on the least important part of the story: the 'threat' of 'nationalization' if the schools do not adhere to the curriculum. Instead, an article at venezuelanalysis.com delivers a much more informative piece detailing the real newsworthy item: that Venezuela is changing its school curriculum and what they are changing it to. To be clear, this article does not shirk the statement made by Chavez that there must be public oversight of all schools within the country, and that private schools who refuse this will be forced to shut down (with the slack being picked up by the public school system - so called 'nationalization'). Yet it does so in a way this actually informative instead of simply fear-mongering.

While the AP article claims in a trite little sentence that "Just what the new curriculum will include and how it will be applied to all Venezuelan schools and universities remains unclear", the article at Venezuelanalysis.com provides an answer. "The new Bolivarian education is based on four pillars: learn to create, learn to participate and coexist, learn to value, and learn to reflect", which would include revised readings of history that take into consideration relatively recent developments in Latin American historiography. Thus, earlier textbooks glorified 'heroic' conquistadores and portrayed the development and evolution of the Venezuelan nation from the perspective of the contemporary economic elite, conveniently silencing voices in the past who in the present might pose a problem to the tenuous official nationalism geared towards capital accumulation and special privilege. AP conveniently leaves this explantion out, instead editing Chavez only to include the apparently self-explanatory phrase "They taught us to admire Christopher Columbus and Superman", which to an Anglo-American audience with the sort of education system that Chavez is decrying will only make him sound ludicrous.

Of course, Chavez's "Bolivarian" curriculum is clearly designed to serve the interests of his own state to the detriment of his capitalist and elite competitors. No curriculum can ever claim neutrality, for such neutrality does not exist, and Chavez does not deny this. As quoted on venezuelanalysis.com, Chavez states that "we want to create our own collective, creative and diverse ideology". Still, the question of the relative value of two equally normative education systems (the Bolivarian and the capitalist ones) should be secondary to a much more fundamental question. 'Nationalization', a usual suspect on the list of dirty words used to describe Venezuelan developments, in this context merely means standardizing a publicly-developed curriculum across various tiers of education. As Chavez notes, this is something that has been a pillar of western education for nearly a hundred years (to see why, take a look at George Orwell's novel A Clergyman's Daughter!). Private schools in 'developed' countries, perhaps with a few exceptions, cannot teach 'murder and mayhem' or 'bacci ball' and expect to recieve the same accreditation as public schools. Standards are imposed by the state to, at least theoretically, suit the social context in which the recipients of education are living. Hugo Chavez simply is altering the curriculum for precisely the same reasons Americans do not restrict women to home economics and men to shop class anymore or racially segregate their public education (although I understand Southwestern Baptist Seminary, a university under different regulations than public schools, is bucking this trend with regard to the former example).

Opponents of Chavez in the media usually fall into two camps. Those who know precisely what Chavez is trying to do and are worried that his success might spread to their own countries and threaten their elite privilged position, and those completely unaware of larger historical struggles who, jumping on the bandwagon of this former camp, feed off their rhetoric. It is amazing to me how much effort and toil goes into defending this privilege, when half of that effort is probably enough to yield benefits for all but the most privileged pretty comparable to what they get today. But I guess that's just the irrationality of the capitalist logic that we in the west like to infuse into our 'rational' education system.