Of Venezuelan origins herself, Garcia Gunderson has lived in the US for about 30 years. Though she has family in Venezuela and visits it often, she only became involved in the solidarity movement after the April 2002 coup against Cha'vez, which was strongly supported by the Bush administration. "I was not actively involved in any movement," she said, "until I saw the manipulation in April 11 2002, how CNN manipulated the news." The US media failed to report the truth, and the Venezuelan media played an active role in promoting and aiding the leaders of the 2002 coup.
Garcia Gunderson described the 2002 events as "primarily a media coup because it was all manipulated and created by the media." In Venezuela, wealthy families, which opposed the election (in 1998 and 2001) of President Cha'vez and the repeated passage of his policies in the National Assembly, own and control just about all of the major television, radio, and print media. According to Garcia Gunderson, perceptions that President Cha'vez controls the Venezuelan media "couldn't be farther from the truth."
Media watchdogs in Caracas have reported that opposition media personalities, such as columnist Patricia Poleo, daughter of a wealthy newspaper owner, aside from giving full support to the violent and illegal coup in April 2002, may have also provoked terrorist attacks against government officials. In one such incident, government prosecutor Danilo Anderson, appointed to investigate the involvement of police and business officials in the April 2002 coup, was assassinated in November 2004.
Despite the passage in Venezuela's National Assembly of a law to promote the social responsibility of the media, the opposition-controlled media still does what it pleases and encourages violence and social disruption. This social responsibility law is regularly given as evidence that the government has tried to crack down on the "free" press in Venezuela. Some human rights groups, short of condemning Venezuela, have described the law as too vague and containing the possibility for abuse. But the promotion of violence and lawlessness and calls for the assassination of the President of the US would never be tolerated in the US, and have always engendered swift responses from law enforcement officials when such irresponsibility has been exhibited. Why can't Venezuela do the same?
Nevertheless, the opposition-controlled media in Venezuela breaks the law "all the time and there are no consequences," Garcia Gunderson noted.
For its part, the US media persist regularly in promoting many falsehoods about Venezuela. For example, on just about any Fox News report, one can find references to President Cha'vez as a "strongman" and other thinly veiled claims that he is a dictator. CNN and others typically reduce the Venezuelan president to a "firebrand" or troublemaker. The truth, however, is that the Venezuelan "government is democratic and constitutional and President Cha'vez has been elected president in multiple elections," Garcia Gunderson pointed out.
Garcia Gunderson described the Venezuelan government as truly representative. "Venezuela has one of the most progressive Constitutions in the whole continent, if not in the world," she added. "This Constitution was done by a consultation with all the regions of the country. Every region of the country sent representatives to work out this constitution."
In an August 2004 recall referendum sponsored by the wealthy opposition parties, President Cha'vez won 60 percent of the vote, the highest total for any presidential candidate in that country's history. And even conservative polling companies controlled by the opposition estimate his current approval rating to be about 57 percent, somewhere between 15 and 20 points higher than President Bush's. Garcia Gunderson said that she does not believe those polls reflect the depth of Cha'vez's support accurately, however. "Like we say in Venezuela," she remarked, "those pollsters don't climb the hills where the poor people live or go to the poor neighborhoods."
Despite this high level of popularity, these same pollsters dishonestly claim that public opinion is evenly divided for the upcoming December 3rd national elections. Pollsters tied to the opposition hope to give an impression that Cha'vez's wide lead in the opinion polls is much smaller in order to foster disruption after the election, Garcia Gunderson argued. "They're going to scream fraud and try to disrupt the country," she predicted.
The political opposition has been in disarray since the coup was thwarted in 2002. Despite their access to large financial resources and control of the major media and many large businesses, opposition parties suffer from a lack of unity and popular support, facts repeatedly demonstrated between 2003 and the present.
For example, in December 2003, opposition parties, with the backing of the Bush administration, promoted what they called a general strike, which was supported by most of the major media, including Poleo's newspaper. In reality, it was an illegal lockout by managers in major industries, especially the oil industry, that blocked workers from going to work for a couple of weeks. In addition to tremendous damage to the entire economy, the goal of the lockout was to create enough social disruption to either destabilize the Venezuelan government and force President Cha'vez's resignation or to seriously damage his popularity.
In the end, the workers forced their way into the industries and almost single-handedly restarted the economy. Few of the lockout masterminds were brought to account for the crime, and many left the country disingenuously claiming they were victims of political repression.
After the lockout failed, opposition parties again sought support from the US government. Through the National Endowment for Democracy, tens of millions of US taxpayer dollars have been used to intervene in Venezuelan politics. All of it has gone to opposition parties under the guise of funding civil society groups that claim to "promote democracy." Most opposition groups that received these funds, however, are less than civil. Some have been involved in violent disruptive behavior such as attacks on the Colombian and Spanish Embassies and violence towards supporters of the government. None of these stories appear in the mainstream media in either Venezuela or the US.
In 2005, opposition groups could not develop a unified, coherent platform to run effective campaigns in the National Assembly elections. Instead, they chose not to run any candidates and pretended to boycott the parliamentary elections purposely in order to give the appearance of a lack of popular support for the parties aligned with Cha'vez. Of course, polls indicated that they again would have been soundly defeated.
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