[In the article below Nikolas Kozloff, author of the recently published book about U.S-Venezuelan relations entitled Hugo Chavez: Oil, Politics, and The Challenge To The U.S., recounts his experiences following a six week trip to Venezuela. --Ed]
Venezuela: A Country Seeking to Define Itself against the U.S.
By: Nikolas Kozloff
August 31, 2006
I have just returned from a fruitful six week trip to Venezuela, where I interviewed people from across the political spectrum. The country is in the midst of cultural and political ferment and in many ways is trying to seek greater autonomy from the United States.
Though I spent almost a year in Venezuela in 2000-2001, I had not returned to the country since that time and physically Caracas looked quite different from what I remembered.
Walking around Caracas, I was struck by the anti-imperialist murals which had proliferated throughout the city. One particularly jarring mural depicts an image of Uncle Sam wielding a dagger reading “CIA.”
There is no face underneath the hat, just a bare skull.
Later, as I walked inside the Venezuelan National Assembly, I spotted an interesting exhibit: a series of billboards, each one displaying a key, separate date in the history of U.S. interventions in Latin America.
One billboard discussed the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989 under George Bush Senior and the bombing of the civilian population in El Chorrillo, a poor district of Panama City.
On a separate trip I visited Catia, a district located on the outskirts of Caracas. There, I toured a so-called “Endogenous Center of Development,” where working class women had organized themselves into a cooperative. The women were busily working on sewing machines, producing red T-shirts.
Peering closer, I glimpsed an image on the shirts: a profile of the famous Communist revolutionary and arch nemesis of the United States, Che Guevara.
Back in my Caracas hotel room, I was struck by the stridently anti-U.S. tone on state run media. On my last trip several years ago, state TV routinely aired Chavez’s anti-imperialist broadsides against the United States.
But since then, in response to Washington’s support for the Venezuelan opposition and the neo-conservatives’ relentless demonization of Chavez, which has gone so far as to label Chavez a modern day Adolf Hitler, the tone on state TV had become more shrill.
Again and again on ViveTV, a state run station, the channel would broadcast a short segment showing stark, bombed out images of Iraq. “Imagine if your city was invaded and destroyed by a foreign army,” intoned a solemn voiceover.
Vive TV is designed to instill a sense of cultural pride in ordinary Venezuelans. Under Chavez, there has been a great drive towards cultural autonomy as a means of counterbalancing the pervasive influence of U.S. media (for a more in depth discussion of the issue, see my recently released book from St. Martin’s Press, Hugo Chavez: Oil, Politics, and The Challenge To the U.S.).
On Vive, I watched intellectual round table discussions on such themes as Venezuela’s cultural and political relationship to the African continent. But the station also specialized in cinema verité style footage of rural life in the Venezuelan plain or llano.
At one point I saw a long segment with no narration showing poor farmers making blocks of cheese. During another segment, I watched as young Venezuelans danced the joropo, a traditional dance common in the plain.
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