The Assassination of Hugo Chavez, a film by Greg Palast (DVD, 2007, 24 minutes, www.gregpalast.com)
Puedo hablar?/May I Speak?, a film by Sol Productions (DVD, 2007, 73 minutes, www.sol-productions.org)
Two recent films, The Assassination of Hugo Chavez and Puedo hablar?/May I Speak?, exemplify a growing body of alternative media sources that offer a more balanced view of Chávez’s presidency than that of the corporate media. Both films follow the trail blazed by The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, in which two Irish filmmakers captured the brief 2002 coup against Chávez. The films trace the story of Venezuela’s charismatic leader and his agenda in the years since the coup.
Gumshoed muckraker Greg Palast directly confronts U.S. anti-Chávez coverage and political sentiment in Assassination. The opening sequence captures criticisms of Chávez set to ominous music: The New York Times calls him a “ruinous demagogue,” Colin Powell questions his “understanding of what democracy is all about,” and Pat Robertson calls him a “dangerous leader to our south” who should be “taken out.” This raises the obvious question: Why is the U.S. establishment so hostile toward Chávez? Palast’s short answer is both simple and predictable: oil. His film sets out the longer answer through a well-researched narrative of the chain of events leading up to the coup.
Drawing on U.S. government documents and interviews with key actors surrounding the coup—including Chávez himself, coup leader Pedro Carmona, and OPEC president Ali Rodríguez—the film examines how a potential oil shortage that would enable Venezuela to become the second-largest U.S. oil provider, behind only Canada, played a role in propelling the coup forward.
When asked about how he survived the coup, Chávez replies coolly, paraphrasing Montesquieu: “A leader should be able to see a wave of events coming, and ride it, ride the wave.” In fact, Chávez had been warned ahead of time by Rodríguez. So, prior to the coup, Chávez hid troops loyal to him inside the palace, and when Carmona took power, they appeared with their guns raised and demanded that Chávez be returned to power.
Carmona is then shown appearing before the Venezuelan National Assembly to answer for his actions, describe any U.S. involvement in the plot, and help the country understand why the private media—particularly Venevisión, the TV station run by staunch Chávez opponent Gustavo Cisneros—fed the public misinformation in the days leading up to the coup. When asked about U.S. Ambassador Charles Shapiro’s role, Carmona replied simply that “he was only there to collect information.” For reasons unknown, Chávez let Carmona slip out of Venezuela without a fight. This was likely a smart move, since it lessened the number of enemies Chávez had at his doorstep at a time when many were still calling for his removal from office.
When Chávez came into office in 1998, Venezuela was the biggest supplier of oil to the United States, but by 1999 he had slashed oil production and doubled the royalties taken by the government on oil company profits. The fact that Chávez has continued to sell oil to the United States, and has even increased trade deals with certain U.S. oil companies, is less important than the fact that this presidency is perceived as a threat to U.S. interests.
So why, the film asks, has Venezuela only recently begun flexing its oil muscle? The answer lies in the costs of extraction and the rising price of oil. Palast, while flying over oil fields and tankers, giving us a view of “U.S. interests,” does an excellent job of laying out the calculus of associated costs and benefits. Much of Venezuela’s oil is heavy crude found in reserves deep in the ground. These reserves are five times greater than those found in the Middle East. But it is also far more expensive to extract; nonetheless, with the recent increase in oil prices, Venezuela is poised to cash in on the black-gold rush. Palast also highlights what the oil revenues under Chávez have meant for many ordinary Venezuelans, examining the government-supported community programs and income taxes imposed on the wealthiest segments of Venezuelan society. It is this latter group, the wealthy, who have the most to lose under Chávez; however, with the economy growing at above-average rates (the CIA country profile puts growth in 2007 at 8.3%) and the oil still pumping, it seems that what the wealthy are most upset about is losing their grip on political power.
The second film, Puedo hablar?, makes another fitting contribution to the alternative coverage of Venezuelan politics, this time by documenting the 2006 presidential election, which Chávez won by almost 60%. Sol Productions’ self-proclaimed mission is “to make a personal contribution to democracy and to inspire others to pursue their own questions.” The Sol Productions team—Maureen Masterson, Magee McIlvaine, and Christopher Moore, who previously produced Democracy in Dakar, a film documenting the role of musicians in Senegalese politics—travel through Venezuela asking citizens on both sides of the political divide two questions: What is Venezuela to you? And why do you like or dislike Chávez?
The interviewees include professors at the University of Caracas, students at the larger but more peripheral University of the Andes located in Mérida, indigenous people, barrio dwellers, middle-class venezolanos, the two opposition candidates, and finally, Chávez himself. The interviews are linked by brief narratives of Chávez’s presidency, set to Venezuelan folk music. The film leads us back and forth from barrios to middle-class neighborhoods and back again, highlighting the vast difference in living standards between Chávez’s supporters and his opponents.
What the film captures in these interviews is that the Venezuelan right is set on depicting Chávez as a divisive force for the country, while many on the left see him as the heroic leader they have been waiting for. One caption states that Chávez’s ascension “has led to a more deeply socially divided country, where before it might have only been characterized as an economically divided one.” This is also emphasized by presidential candidate Teodoro Petkoff, who says his goal is break the country’s polarization, “this pathological division.” The eventual lead Chávez challenger, Manuel Rosaldo, says Venezuela has “potential [but is] poorly administered, poorly governed, up until today.”
The opposition rallies featured in the film seem to include few Venezuelans of color. (At on point we see a frenzied white woman screaming, “Chávez is a killer! Chávez is a killer!”) This division is not, however, always the case. In one scene, we see a brother and sister, each with their own family, but living next door to one another in a barrio, holding signs in support of different candidates. The sister, who supports Rosales, says, “I dare to ask him to look at how Venezuela is. . . . I don’t blame just him, but also those around him. Over there [pointing to her brother’s house] are a bunch of fanatics. What do they have? Three boys, no work, no nothing. That’s my brother.” The brother, who is waiting for a government-subsidized home, supports Chávez and says he is happy. It is hard to believe that if Rosaldo were elected president he would continue to distribute goods and services, let alone housing, to barrios of Caracas, but it is clear that Chávez has already shifted the political discourse in such a way that it would be quite difficult for the right to move things back to the way they were before 1998 without profound resistance.
Toward the end of the film, the filmmakers interview a passionate young opposition mayor who lays out a strategy for taking back power. The Harvard graduate’s vision entails setting new goals and not opposing Chávez, since “to oppose is one thing, to present an alternative is another. In politics, this is huge.” But taking back power remains a faraway goal for the Venezuelan right. Although Chávez lost a national referendum in December aimed at instituting various constitutional changes, he successfully ratified the Bank of the South in October 2007 and has signed many trade deals with important U.S. allies. Among his many programs and agreements the Bank of the South will be the most interesting to watch, since its primary mission is to replace the IMF and World Bank.
These two films undermine the biased portrayals of Chávez put forth by major media outlets—while also avoiding the trap of romanticizing Chávez as the answer to Latin America’s problems. The political programs pursued by leaders like Chávez, and now Evo Morales in Bolivia and Rafael Correa in Ecuador, that break with U.S. dictates deserve to be critically examined, as they are in these films.
Christopher Hewlett is an anthropologist living in New York City. He is NACLA’s editorial assistant.
