![\"Daily](\"https:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/Daily-Beast-Calle-e1632765802226.png\")
According to Daily Beast<\/strong>‘s Nick Schager (9\/13\/21<\/a>), <\/em>A La Calle “addresses the sad state of affairs plaguing Venezuela, a country ruled by a so-called ‘socialist’ dictator who refuses to acknowledge his anti-democratic nature.”<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n HBO Max<\/b><\/a> began streaming a documentary on September 15: A La Calle<\/i> (“To the Street”). It portrays US-backed opposition leaders in Venezuela as pro-democracy heroes battling a brutal dictatorship\u2014a total reversal<\/a> of the truth. A Daily Beast<\/b> article (9\/13\/21<\/a>) promoting the film is headlined \u201cCapturing Venezuela\u2019s Descent Into Socialist Hell,\u201d which succinctly conveys the film\u2019s slant, and suggests why it found a big corporate platform<\/a> like HBO Max<\/b>, a subsidiary of AT&T<\/b>‘s WarnerMedia<\/b>.<\/p>\n From the trailer<\/a> alone, it\u2019s obvious that A La Calle<\/i> depicts Venezuelan opposition leader Leopoldo L\u00f3pez as a noble democrat. That\u2019s outrageous.\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n L\u00f3pez, a former oil industry executive, was one of the perpetrators<\/a> of a US-backed coup in 2002 that briefly ousted the democratically elected president at the time, Hugo Ch\u00e1vez. A dictatorship under business executive Pedro Carmona<\/a> killed 60 protesters during the two days it was in power. (Another 19 people<\/a>, half of them Chavistas, were killed in violent confrontations just before the coup.) L\u00f3pez\u2014along with another prominent politician, Henrique Capriles\u2014led the kidnapping of a Ch\u00e1vez government minister while Carmona was in power. L\u00f3pez appeared on local TV, proudly saying<\/a> that he had briefed \u201cPresident Carmona” about the kidnapping.<\/p>\n Leopoldo L\u00f3pez (center) and his wife Lilian Tintori (left) get a lot of screen time in <\/em>A La Calle\u2014all of it aimed at glorifying them. Several months later, L\u00f3pez backed a second major coup attempt<\/a>, the opposition-led sabotage of the oil industry that supplied almost all Venezuela\u2019s export revenue. The coup attempts against Ch\u00e1vez drove the poverty rate to over 60%<\/a> by early 2003.<\/p>\n L\u00f3pez supported violent protests again in 2013 after the candidate he backed, Capriles, refused to accept his loss<\/a> to President Nicol\u00e1s Maduro in the first presidential election after Hugo Ch\u00e1vez’s death. Later that year, L\u00f3pez criticized Capriles<\/a> for calling off the protests, saying they should have continued until Maduro was ousted. When Capriles called off the protests, they had already left nine people dead, all supporters of Maduro.<\/p>\n L\u00f3pez initiated protests early in 2014 that led to 43 deaths<\/a>: Half of them<\/a> strongly indicate the responsibility of his supporters. It was only after leading that fourth US-backed effort to oust the elected Venezuelan government that L\u00f3pez finally went to jail<\/a>.<\/p>\n I watched the whole documentary, curious to see how exactly the film would whitewash all the coup attempts L\u00f3pez was involved with, and how it would deny the violence his supporters and allies perpetrated over the past 20 years.<\/p>\n I also wondered how the film would excuse murderous US economic sanctions on Venezuela\u2014acts of war that have been linked to the deaths<\/a> of tens of thousands of Venezuelans by the end of 2018 alone. By 2021, US sanctions, which have been relentlessly intensified since 2019, reduced Venezuela’s government revenue by 99%, according<\/a> to UN special investigator Alena Douhan<\/a>.<\/p>\n I expected to see bad arguments justifying all these crimes. Instead, the documentary edited them out of existence completely. None of these things were mentioned even once: nothing about the US-backed coup attempts prior to 2014, nothing about devastating economic warfare the US has inflicted on Venezuela since 2017.<\/p>\n Venezuelan economist Ricardo Hausmann<\/a> and Tamara Taraciuk<\/a> (deputy Americas director of Human Rights Watch) deserve special attention for the mendacity of the statements they made.<\/p>\n \u201cIn 2004, the price of oil shot up,” says economist Ricardo Hausmann\u2014as if oil prices hadn’t been on an upward trajectory<\/a> since 1998.<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n In the film, Hausmann said that Ch\u00e1vez came to power because 1998, the year Ch\u00e1vez was first elected, \u201cwas an economically difficult year.\u201d In fact, Venezuela had a few disastrous decades<\/i> before Ch\u00e1vez was first elected. Hausmann should know, because in 1992, he became a minister<\/a> in the government of Carlos Andres P\u00e9rez, which had perpetrated the Caracazo Massacre<\/a> in 1989: Hundreds, possibly thousands, of poor people were gunned down during five days of protests against an IMF-imposed austerity program.<\/p>\n In a recent article (FAIR.org<\/b>, 8\/26\/21<\/a>), Justin Podur and I reviewed Venezuela\u2019s economic history, showing that it had always been plagued with shocking poverty and inequality, despite Venezuela being a major oil exporter since the 1930s. Of course, \u201cVenezuela\u2019s Descent Into Capitalist Hell\u201d is not a headline you are likely to find in corporate media coverage from the pre-Ch\u00e1vez era.<\/p>\n After deceptively explaining why Chavez was first elected, Hausmann moved on to bigger lies. \u201cHugo Ch\u00e1vez, in the first five years, changed many things,” he said, “but the economic situation did not improve.\u201d<\/p>\n That\u2019s a very crude lie of omission. Hausmann neglected to say that within those first five years, Ch\u00e1vez was hit with two major US-backed coup attempts that devastated the economy. By surviving those coup attempts, Ch\u00e1vez was, in 2003, finally able to get control of the state oil company, PDVSA, the country\u2019s main source of hard currency.<\/p>\n Hausmann then deceived viewers again by saying, \u201cIn 2004, the price of oil shot up. Suddenly Hugo Chavez realizes that he has a lot of money.\u201d<\/p>\n The price of oil had actually been rising since 1998<\/a>, the year before Ch\u00e1vez first took office. Fortunately for most Venezuelans, oil prices kept rising for several years after Ch\u00e1vez finally wrested control of PDVSA from saboteurs. The economy was therefore able to quickly recover from the coup attempts and begin a period of dramatic poverty reduction<\/a>.<\/p>\n Poverty in Venezuela fell sharply not when oil prices rose but when President Hugo Ch\u00e1vez broke the opposition’s efforts to sabotage the economy. Source: INEC via CEPR (3\/7\/13<\/a>)<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n Tamara Taraciuk of Human Rights Watch asserts that violent protests have “no precedent in recent Venezuelan history”\u2014which suggests a very limited knowledge of recent Venezuelan history.<\/p><\/div>\n About 40 minutes into the documentary, Tamara Taraciuk of Human Rights Watch says that the violent protests of 2017 (which the film shows Leopoldo L\u00f3pez encouraging from his jail cell) have \u201cno precedent in recent Venezuelan history.\u201d The word \u201crecent\u201d does a great deal of heavy lifting in this absurd statement.<\/p>\n Was the April, 2002 coup attempt (which killed 79 people, overwhelmingly supporters of Hugo Ch\u00e1vez, and briefly overthrew the government) not \u201crecent,\u201d deadly or politically significant enough to offer a \u201cprecedent\u201d for the protests in 2017, which left 126 people dead? Also, it\u2019s not clear<\/a> if most of the victims in 2017 were opposition protesters. Some of the protesters perpetrated gruesome atrocities, like burning alive Orlando Figuera<\/a>, a 21-year-old Afro Venezuelan government supporter.<\/p>\n What about the Caracazo Massacre of 1989, which was perpetrated by a pro-US government? Does it count as \u201crecent Venezuelan history\u201d? In five days, the Caracazo death toll surpassed, possibly by an order of magnitude, the combined death toll on all sides during US-backed protests against Venezuela’s Chavista governments in 2002, 2013, 2014 and 2017. (Incidentally, the Caracazo Massacre also had no impact on friendly US\/Venezuela relations, or on the flattering US press coverage of the Venezuelan government at the time\u2014FAIR.org<\/b>, 8\/26\/21<\/a>.)<\/p>\n About an hour and 28 minutes into the film, Taraciuk says that any \u201cdecent government\u201d in Venezuela\u2019s dire economic situation would \u201cask for help,\u201d but that Maduro has \u201cclosed the door to international aid, which is available.\u201d This was a commonly told lie around February 2019, when Trump\u2019s government, fresh from recognizing Juan Guaid\u00f3 as Venezuela’s interim president, demanded that Venezuela\u2019s military defy Maduro and allow about $20 million of supposed \u201caid\u201d to enter from Colombia (FAIR.org<\/b>, 2\/12\/19<\/a>).<\/p>\n Even at the time, this quantity of \u201caid\u201d was a rounding error compared to the impact of economic sanctions<\/a> that Trump had imposed since August 2017. Taraciuk never questions the \u201cdecency\u201d of Trump deliberately choosing to strangle an economy that was already in crisis. That alone makes her comment obscene, but also, contrary to what she claims, Maduro had requested international aid that Venezuela was receiving prior to the US-led aid stunt of 2019 (FAIR.org<\/b>, 2\/12\/19<\/a>).<\/p>\n A New York Times<\/strong> analysis (3\/10\/19<\/a>) showed it was a protester and not the Venezuelan government who set fire to an aid truck.<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n The documentary is so committed to debunked propaganda from 2019 that it also gives the impression that an aid truck on the Colombian border was set on fire by forces loyal to Maduro. “Three or four trucks entered into Venezuelan territory, but one of them was burned,” L\u00f3pez says on camera. The Grayzone<\/b> (2\/24\/19<\/a>) and a bit later even the New York Times <\/b>(3\/10\/19<\/a>) refuted that lie at the time, noting that video<\/a> shows that the truck was set on fire by an opposition protester.<\/p>\n After 2019, Western media actually moved on from pushing the lie that Maduro rejects international aid, largely because Trump, and now Biden, became so blatantly sadistic with their economic warfare on Venezuela (FAIR.org<\/b>, 3\/25\/20<\/a>, 7\/21\/21<\/a>).<\/p>\n About 70 minutes into the documentary, Taraciuk strongly insinuates that votes were not secret during the May 2018 presidential election that Maduro won by a landslide, saying that voters “had to go through the punto rojo<\/i> to register their vote.” The puntos rojos<\/i> (\u201cred points\u201d) are kiosks the government has always set up<\/a> near voting centers for exit polling. Even an anti-Maduro writer who attacked these kiosks as \u201cblackmail\u201d<\/a> conceded that the government can\u2019t know how people voted.<\/p>\n It\u2019s also profoundly hypocritical to allege that Maduro coerced voters, while ignoring the obvious threat the US has sent Venezuelan voters since 2017: that crippling economic warfare against Venezuela will continue and intensify until Maduro is overthrown.<\/p>\n In any case, Maduro\u2019s vote count in 2018 was in line with the level of support a Pew Research poll<\/a> (hardly a pro-Maduro outfit) suggested he had several months later. It found that 33% of Venezuelans \u201ctrust the national government to do what is right for Venezuela.\u201d That\u2019s also a level of support among eligible voters that routinely wins elections in Canada, the US and UK (Mint Press News<\/b>, 1\/28\/19<\/a>).<\/p>\n A BBC<\/strong> journalist frowns at Nicol\u00e1s Maduro in<\/em> A La Calle.<\/p><\/div>\n Throughout the film, numerous clips from big media outlets reinforce the film\u2019s dishonesty. Fox News<\/b> correspondent Bryan Llenas says, \u201cVenezuela is crumbling under the weight of Maduro\u2019s oppressive regime.\u201d A BBC<\/b> journalist glares at Maduro with imperial contempt as he, quite validly, rejects the claim that his 2018 re-election was illegitimate.<\/p>\n Western media have long developed a kind of shorthand, repeated endlessly, that demands total impunity for US-backed politicians like Leopoldo L\u00f3pez in Venezuela. Any legal consequences for US-backed sedition are portrayed as oppression (FAIR.org<\/b>, 4\/23\/18<\/a>).<\/p>\n US entertainment media<\/a> have also contributed to the vilification campaign against Maduro\u2019s government (FAIR.org<\/b>, 9\/18\/19<\/a>). Last year Ethan Hawke<\/a> did a fawning interview<\/a> with L\u00f3pez (an old friend whom Hawke met while attending a private high school in New York). It\u2019s very easy to see why HBO Max<\/b> would feel comfortable streaming a documentary as ridiculous as A La Calle<\/i>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The post HBO’s Anti-Maduro Propaganda Is Cruder Than Venezuelan Oil<\/a> appeared first on FAIR<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n This post was originally published on FAIR<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Western media have long developed a kind of shorthand that demands total impunity for US-backed politicians like Leopoldo L\u00f3pez in Venezuela.<\/p>\n The post HBO\u2019s Anti-Maduro Propaganda Is Cruder Than Venezuelan Oil<\/a> appeared first on FAIR<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2283,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1303,259,35932,59,262,263],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327682"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2283"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=327682"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327682\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":327782,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327682\/revisions\/327782"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=327682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=327682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=327682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Legacy of violent coup attempts<\/b><\/h3>\n
![\"Leopoldo](\"https:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/Lopez-A-La-Calle.png\")
<\/em><\/p><\/div>\nNot excusing but ignoring crimes<\/b><\/h3>\n
Distorted history lesson<\/b><\/h3>\n
![\"Ricardo](\"https:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/Hausmann_A_La_Calle-1.png\")
![\"Venezuela](\"https:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/Venezuela-Poverty.jpg\")
<\/a>No ‘recent’ precedent?<\/b><\/h3>\n
![\"Tamara](\"https:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/Taraciuk_A_La_Calle-1.png\")
Committed to debunked propaganda<\/b><\/h3>\n
![\"New](\"https:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/NYT-Venezuela-Truck.png\")
Part of the Western media herd<\/b><\/h3>\n
![\"BBC](\"https:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/BBC_Journalist_A_La_Calle-1.png\")