In March, when cases of coronavirus began to accumulate in the United States and among South American allies such as Brazil and Ecuador, Washington was busy setting the alarm about “the expansion of the Covid-19 pandemic in the region, if not globally, if VenezuelaArray … Cannot fix Venezuela reported less than 150 instances at the time.
This alarmist propaganda has repeated itself to the point of exhaustion through the Western media ever since.
Despite relatively low death and infection figures in Venezuela, corporate journalists denigrate Maduro’s “authoritarian” handling of the pandemic government and actively obscure the effect of sanctions from U.S. criminals who oppose the Caribbean country.
Maduro is said to “strengthen its control over power, aided by the blocking of the coronavirus” (CNN, 19/06/20), “using Covid-19 to further silence its conflicting parties” (Americas Quarterly, 7/21/20) and causing “hunger, contagion, repression” (New Yorker, 29/05/20). The country’s health care formula is “paralyzed by a damaged economy overseen by an authoritarian government” (New York Times, 4/10/20; FAIR.org, 16 4/20), which makes the Covid-19 epidemic in Venezuela “terrifying prospect” (Washington Post, 20/03/20) that “constitutes a global threat,” as Tamara Taraciuk Broner of Human Rights Watch and Kathleen Page of Johns Hopkins University (Foreign Policy, 12/03/20) say.
More recently, Broner and Page (Washington Post, 2/7/20) have bluntly blamed the collapse of Venezuela’s fitness sector for the “irresponsible and repressive measures of the Nicols Maduro government,” have speculated that “US monetary and oil policy sanctions can exacerbate the crisis.” However, they refused to call for the lifting of the U.S. illegal embargo, which, according to Venezuelan economist Francisco Rodriguez, gives the country about $17 billion a year in lost oil revenue, insisting that “pressure will have to continue.” As a benchmark, Venezuela imported only $2.6 billion in food and medicine in 2018.
As well as the media’s recitation of the disorderly US attacks on China’s reaction to Covid-19 has helped divert attention from the corrupt incompetence of Trump’s leadership (FAIR.org, 21/06/20, 9/9/20, 24/03/20 ), Venezuela’s defamation goes hand in hand with the washing of right-wing US consumer states in the region.
Together with Brazil, Peru, Ecuador and Chile, they have recently led South America in the total number of deaths per Covid consistent with the capita. However, unlike Brazil, whose far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, has been described as a poster of Covid-19’s denial through the same Western media that helped forcibly take him (FAIR.org, 12/4/20), the pro-American neighbor regimes have largely won a pass.
While Peru, Ecuador and Chile are, like Brazil, members of the anti-Venezuela coalition for the replacement of the regime known as the Lima Group, their right-wing neoliberal leaders are identified in the Western press as reliable technocrats and “pro-business”, in contrast to the “authoritarian populists” of Trump and Bolsonaro’s taste and with their opposing left-wing numbers (FAIR.org, 5/20).
Despite presiding over the highest moment in line with the death toll in the world, the right-wing Peruvian government in Vizcarra has won the policy of broad sympathy of foreign media. The New York Times (12/6/20) hailed President Martín Vizcarra as a “centrist” technocrat who “followed the recommendation when the coronavirus arrived in Peru”:
He ordered one of the first and strictest closures in Latin America and introduced one of the largest economic aid systems in the region to keep citizens at home.
The Times attributed the failure of Peru’s pandemic reaction to “deep-seated inequality and bribery,” but have largely moved away from blaming Vizcarra’s neoliberal management.
Peruvian sociologist Anahi Durand told FAIR that the government had rejected left-wing orders from a universal fundamental source of income “that would have allowed others to stay home.” Instead, she opted for a policy of assistance to the poor, which “not many other people who loved her,” the Times reported, but refrained from criticizing Vizcarra for the debacle.
At the same time, a small organization of giant corporations, ranging from forest corporations accused of tax evasion and fined for environmental crimes, such as Maderera Bozovich, to transnational giants such as Deloitte and Ernst and Young, earned $2.5 billion in loans from the government’s $7.5 billion credit program, which was channeled almost exclusively through primary personal banks. Neither the New York Times nor other Western media such as the BBC (07/09/20), the Wall Street Journal (14/06/20) and Time (29/05/20) discussed this very important fact in their account of The Disaster of Peru.
“Government policy has been to put the economy ahead of public health,” Durand concluded.
While corporate hounds are right to point the finger at Peru’s precarious informal economy and the severely underfunded fitness system, they refuse to blame Vizcarra and the country’s “chain of business-friendly presidents,” which they congratulate on reducing poverty. (New York Times, 6/12/20).
The fact that the Andean country of nearly 33 million other people spends only $700 on fitness care according to the user and has only two extensive care beds according to another 1,000 people is widely reported (Washington Post, 18/06/20; Time, 05 / 29/20). But this is not presented as evidence of the “reckless contempt of Peruvian neoliberal elites… for the life and fitness of … [their own] other people,” which the Washington Post (7/2/20) and others withs cite as the cause of Venezuela’s stalled fitness crisis. Other criteria appear to apply to unbreakable U.S. visiting states.
Ecuador has won a limited policy in recent months, while the South American country is the world leader in per capita deaths. In one of the few recent in-depth reports, the Wall Street Journal (30/06/20) recounted the “success story” of how the devastated city of Guayaquil in Ecuador has “greatly defeated the new coronavirus,” in which the former and right-wing mayors since 2000, Jaime Nebot and Cynthia Viteri, are strangely among the heroes.
While acknowledging that the country’s economic capital has suffered another 16,700 deaths (0.7% of the population, nearly 3 times the Covid mortality rate in New York City), the Journal has consciously moved away from any critical assessment of the role of neoliberals. Managing LenOn Moreno in the disaster, which attributes to a strange “deadly on the calendar” ‘slow reaction’ and ‘political struggles’.
The New York Times (23/04/20), meanwhile, by renouncing any claim for journalistic research, dismissing the disproportionate number of deaths as an “insatiable mystery of explaining”: “There is no apparent explanation for why ecuador is far more devastated than other countries.” What about Moreno’s government’s obsession with nice bankers and pursuing political opponents?
Last October’s national uprising (FAIR.org, 23/10/19; CounterSpin, 29/10/19) has virtually disappeared from Western media coverage, invoked only to slander the popular as “violent demonstrations” where “eight other people were killed and thousands wounded in two weeks of chaos that left the historic center of Quito resembling a war zone” (Financial Times, 15/06/20). Readers will hardly find in the press any mention of Moreno’s brutal and militarized repression, nor to the continued imprisonment and persecution of former President Rafael Correa. More recently, when Covid-19 instances soared in Quito, Moreno and his corrupt auditor general sought to ban Correa’s political party ahead of next year’s presidential election.
The media account also does not mention the fact that Moreno’s government, in combination with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), has imposed savage cuts in public spending, adding 64% relief in public investment in fitness over the more than two years. In 2019, 3,680 members of the public fitness staff, or 4.5% of the total Ministry of Health, were dismissed. In addition, 2,279 departmental administrative arrangements or 2.8% of the overall settlement were dismissed in May, following the signing of a new IMF loan, which required the government to reduce public spending by 6.2% of GDP through 2025.
It was this program of neoliberal austerity – not indistinct accusations of indifference through the federal government, as reported through the Journal (30/06/20) – that prompted the resignation of the minister of health last March, who said that “no cattle have been allocated from the competent authority for emergency management.”
Economist Andrés Arauz, who was in Ecuador’s past Minister of Knowledge and Director General of the Central Bank, told FAIR:
The minister complained that the Finance Department moved a bachelor penny to the emergency, while billions of dollars were paid in margin calls and speculative trades on the stock exchange.
Between February and April, Ecuador spent nearly $2.5 billion on debt payments, adding heaps of millions on margin calls on Wall Street loans.
Large corporations have virtually forgotten about payments, but more bragably forget the fact that Moreno’s voluntary resolve to cede national sovereignty to the IMF and Western banks portrays him as the unfortunate victim of “economic anguish” (Financial TimesArray 15/06/20).
Moreno had many opportunities to increase the state’s revenue, which he proceeded to close. His government eliminated a couple of laws that required extraordinary oil and mining revenues to be shared at 50% between the Ecuadorian state and transnational corporations, refused to renew import price lists and even passed a law abolishing a dollar exit tax, as well as preventing the state from funding itself internally through indebtedness in the country (Counterunch, 13/11/18). All of these measures aimed to enrich Moreno’s main local and foreign capitalist supporters, who continue to embark on a large capital flight of $900 million in April alone.
But this media account of Moreno chained up through massive external debt, for which he supposedly has no duty (FAIR.org, 23/10/19), is to justify the kind of war of elegance that the editors of the Financial Times (6/15/20) salivate to:
The president said the budget deficit would be at least $12 billion this year, or about 11 percent of gross domestic product. To close the gap, his government announced $4 billion in spending cuts, adding the scrapping of state-owned enterprises, liquidating the national airline, and asking government workers and teachers to reduce their hours and wages.
Eight state-owned enterprises are on the block, with 3,604 employees about to lose their jobs, joining the 180,000 employees laid off by the pandemic, according to official figures.
Meanwhile, facing no scrutiny from foreign media, Moreno took advantage of the existing state of emergency to adopt even more radical neoliberal measures, which had been interrupted by major street protests last fall, adding arduous reform that violated workers’ rights, the elimination of fuel subsidies, and adjustments to the tax code in the past rejected by lawmakers.
Indeed, despite his pro-capital bloodshed of the country, fans of the brown corporate media (FAIR.org, 4/2/18) will never refer to the friendly leader of the American right as an “authoritarian” whose “irresponsible and repressive measures “have claimed thousands of lives, as Venezuela describes it.”
Since its emergence as a world leader in Covid-19 consistent with death in the past month, Chile has won critical politics from all media. Western media have criticized Piaera’s right-wing government for being “too confident” (Washington Post, 23/06/20) and “disconnected” (Bloomberg, 16/06/2020), based on its questionable policy of stirring quarantines and immediate reopening. Chile “did not recognize that the rich have maids, gardeners and cooks who may also be infected,” NPR (2/7/20) reported.
The media criticized President Sebastion Piaera for failing to fix the “government-nation disconnect” revealed through last year’s antineoliberal national uprising, which Bloomberg (16/06/20) denounced as “massive riots … [which] turned the city center into a war zone of damaged lights, debris, burned buildings and graffiti. At that time, corporate hounds had looked the other way while the Chilean state arrested 11412 people, imprisoned 2500, tortured 1516 and wounded 3756, of which 460 were shot in the eye through the police, according to the Chilean National Institute of Human Rights (FAIR.orgArray 23/10/19, 26/10/19, 05/11/19, 06/12/19).
Frontline fitness dismisses the media’s comfortable complaint about Chile’s reaction to Covid-19 as euphemisms, accusing the government of Trump-style negligence.
According to Dr. Roberto Bermudez, who serves Covid patients in two public hospitals in Santiago, the Piaera administration has “followed the Trump administration’s example” by manipulating statistics, refusing to put a national quarantine into effect and prioritizing corporate profits over public ones. Bless you.
“The strategy is very macabre. Chile has let many other people who seek to discharge collective immunity die,” he told FAIR, referring to former health minister Jaime Ma’alich’s embarrassing commentary in April that “the only way to get ahead is for most other infected people.”
For months, Ma’alich, a close friend and confidante of Piaera, manipulated the country’s death figures, making public only the deaths confirmed by controls, not the abundant number of Covid-19 deaths diagnosed through doctors but without managed control. The regional director of the United Nations Development Programme, Luis Felipe López-Calva, estimates that Chile could report fewer coronavirus deaths by 61%, about the excess of death knowledge compiled through The Economist.
Corporate journalists have euphemistically described government-to-public lies as “gaps” (NPR, 7/2/20) that have “divisions [with] sectors of the medical community” (Guardian, 14/06/20).
They also ignored the fact that mayors and fitness experts across the country have suggested to Piaera claiming around 40 nationals since the arrival of the pandemic in March, which was reported at the time (Reuters, 20/3/20; Newsweek, 23/3/20) but has since been erased from the media narrative. In reaction to the government’s obstacle, court proceedings have been initiated to qualify Piaera and Ma’alich as murder, which has also not been reported.
As in Peru and Ecuador, the press has turned a blind eye to the government’s systematic prioritization of personal capital over human life. In April, Chile’s president enacted a law allowing employers to temporarily suspend workers’ contracts under the pretext of avoiding mass layoffs as a result of insolvency.
More than 677,000 employees have been left with fractions of their already meager source of income from unemployment funds, while transnational conglomerates, now free of wage obligations, pay multimillion-dollar dividends to their shareholders. For example, Latin American retail giant CENCOSUD paid investors more than $234 million between two of its subsidiaries after postponing the contracts of 7,731 employees. LATAM Airlines paid $57 million and halved wages until June, fired 4,400 employees and filed for bankruptcy in the United States. Meanwhile, social eaters now canopy the landscape of the city of Santiago, shaping a new geography of hunger.
Any complaint about Piera’s crusade to normalize the state’s militarized repression, adding the deployment of active-duty troops to physical fitness restrictions and evening curfews enacted in March, is also absent from the headlines.
Reuters (12/6/20) can hardly hide its infatuation with the armed forces “that protect Chilean locks and curfews, with infantry soldiers and police running in tandem, wielding weapons but with a carefully gloved fist.” The cable service did not mention that it was the same infants and policemen who, although “aware of the development of poverty and hunger … caused by the pandemic,” they mutilated, killed and tortured, not only under a state of emergency, but also the last uprising of the year as well.
Despite Piera’s illegal militarization of Mapuche indigenous territory and efforts for Parliament to pass a new intelligence bill targeting popular movements as “internal enemies,” the pro-American leader is accused in the Western media of “strengthening its control of power, aided through the blocking of the coronavirus “or” using Covid-19 to further silence its parties in conflict.”
It is transparent that such rates are reserved for official enemies such as Venezuela, China (FAIR.org, 3/6/20) and Cuba (FAIR.org, 31/05/20, 14/04/20), but never hesitant. to the United States. Vassals.
Lucas Koerner is editor-in-chief and political analyst of Venezuelanalysis.
Thank you for that.
Brilliant reports and investigations of corporate media propaganda that make Americans the world’s greatest ignorant bastards.
Thank you for the full, and deeply miserable, report on the predations of this organization of rebel South American leaders. Major American media are a disgrace and their supposed journalism is a barometer of how the American empire is vile.
Excellent analysis! Thanks a lot.
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