Just one week from today, Venezuelans will vote on a wide array of amendments to their Constitution, which will include everything from a shorter workweek to protections for gay & lesbian citizens. It will also increase the power of the executive branch and eliminate term limits for the president, potentially making Chavez as powerful as FDR almost.
Naturally the U.S. media establishment is up in arms. According to the New York Times, the plebiscite might turn Chavez into “an all-powerful strongman,” while the Washington Post explains that the vote (the VOTE!) would “complete Venezuela's transformation into a dictatorship.” Powerful words, no? These people are really concerned about the wording of this particular referendum, aren’t they? Haha. Actually, they’ve been saying the same thing for the past 8 years. Whatever Chavez was about to do next was going to lead to autocracy. It doesn’t actually matter that it never happened.—you just keep pushing the old goal posts back another few yards.
It’s really quite mind boggling when you add it all up. Join us on a head-slapping trip down memory lane, after the jump.
>>> Before he was ever elected, the Los Angeles Times was already referring to candidate Chavez as “a populist and a dangerous demagogue.” Because really, why wait?>>> Two weeks after his election, the New York Times decided he’d served long enough for a diagnostic. Reporter Larry Rohter declared Chavez to be “an all-too-familiar specter that the region’s ruling elite thought they had safely interred: that of the populist demagogue, the authoritarian man on horseback known as the caudillo.”
>>> When the first Constitutional Assembly was being discussed in early 1999, the Los Angeles Times referred to it as an example of Chavez’s “dictatorial methods.”
>>> By September, the LA Times had forgotten their earlier position, noting that Chavez “got off to a promising start as president by having an elected assembly rewrite the country's 1961 constitution.” This was a lead-in to their latest gripe: a “$950-million program to open new schools, rebuild old ones and repair decrepit hospitals,” which was clearly just a populist ploy to “augment[..] his populist message.”
>>> In 2001, after Chavez complained about the U.S. bombing of civilians in Afghanistan, the Los Angeles Times ed board actually wrote, “Everyone is free to express his opinions and choose his friends. But at a moment when President Bush has said that nations are either with the anti-Al Qaeda coalition or with the terrorists, the Venezuelan president's choices are particularly unfortunate.” (Remember how retarded the press was after 9/11?)
>>> In 2002, When Chavez was briefly overthrown in a coup d’etat and replaced with by an actual dictator who dissolved the judicial and legislative branches along with the Constitution, the New York Times rejoiced that “Venezuelan democracy is no longer threatened by a would-be dictator.”
>>> The Chicago Tribune was downright giddy over the coup: “"It's not every day that a democracy benefits from the military's intervention to force out an elected president.”
>>> Newsday showed its deep respect for the will of the Venezuelan electorate with it’s own editorial, titled, “"Chávez's Ouster Is No Great Loss."
In 2003 the Los Angeles Times declared Chavez “unpopular” at home even as approval ratings begged to differ, and once again rejiggered its opinion on the Constitutional Assembly of 1999, saying that the president had “manipulated the constitution to amass enormous personal power.”
>>> Later that year the New York Times’ Caracas-based reporter was forced to resign when it turns out he was actively involved with anti-Chavez political campaigns. He was immediately picked up as a Venezuela reporter by the Financial Times.
>>> In 2004, just four months after defeating a recall referendum in a democratic landslide, the Los Angeles Times wrote that a law that would restrict graphic sex and violence on television during family hours would convert “Venezuela's nascent democracy into a dictatorship.”
And it was all downhill after that. Rest assured that no matter what happens on December 2, 2007, we’ll all be reading a New York Times editorial in 2008 explaining how a dictatorship is Just Around the Corner™ in Venezuela an not reading about the blood spattered police state that Alvaro Uribe has created next door.
