The Dominican Republic June 25, 2007
The Dominican Republic. A tourist dream. Far more complicated than it seems.
Dominican Republic June 22, 2007
I´m in the Dominican Republic shooting for an NGO until July 3.
After that I´ll have about two weeks of free time to explore the island and work on a photo essay.
Welcome to the Revolution Slideshow June 14, 2007
I’ve put up this audio slideshow of my work in Venezuela.
It’s my first attempt at this kind of audio editing and slideshow. Have a look.
Venezuela RCTV Demonstrations An Afterthought June 5, 2007
Note: This was orginally written last Saturday. A Broken Computer Forces Me To Post It Today
A couple of weeks ago I made a comment on this blog that I had learned all that I could in Venezuela.
This was unfortunate. Learning is of course a continuous process. What I meant more was most of my questions about Chavez’s “Revolution” had been answered for now and I had seen enough of the ever growing multitudes of social programs.
These last few days in Venezuela have been some of the most revealing about the situation here however.
What has been made clear with these past days of demonstrations for and against the closure of television station RCTV is how complex the situation is here in Venezuela and how much ideologues on both sides try to condense it into idiotically simplified planes.
Where is the blood and fear?
Last month I was in Cobimas, Zulia State at PDVSA, the state oil company, inside their administrative building which is not not far from the lake where oil is drilled.
I’d been waiting over an hour for a press person who was supposedly on lunch.
The receptionist finally asked a man who was an administrator in another department to take me to his office and call someone about my request to interview some of the oil workers.
He did so and informed me I would have to go through a long administrative process before being able to interview anybody. He saw me getting angry at the grossly standard display of bureaucracy. and his hand shot up to cover his name on his PDVSA badge.
“Don’t use my name,” he said. “Personally I have no problem with the United States. I went to school there for a little while. Please don’t use my name.”
Surprised at the outburst I told him I wouldn’t use his name and asked if I could ask a few more questions.
He nodded.
“Is there a lot of bureaucracy at PDVSA?” I asked.
“Yes, too much,” he said.
“Are there dangers for people that aren’t Chavista?”
“Yes, all forms. Oppression. Cuts in services. There have been some people that have worked for PDVSA for twenty-five years and they were fired for not being Chavista. Not many. But it happened as an example. The government controls everything from Caracas. Even the small things.
“There are people that don’t want to join the United Socialist Party,” he added. “But we risk our jobs.”
He was speaking quietly and tensely. It was clear he believed he would lose his job if anybody heard what he was saying.
Fear and Insecurity
There is a great deal of fear and insecurity in Venezuela. On both sides. The opposition think they will be attacked by Chavistas. Wealthy opposition members think they will lose their wealth. Chavistas think Chavez will be overthrown and all the social services and power he has given them will be lost.
Last night the Metropolitan Police were out in force riding two to a motorcycle with shotguns and bags of rubber bullets hunting students who had taken part at a demonstration at the Universidad Catolico.
A few days ago an opposition student was killed in front of the University. She had been walking to a bus when she was hit by a motorcyclist. From the ground she began yelling insults at the driver and a female passenger. Two additional motorcycles joined in circling around the hurt girl before a female passenger, according to newspaper Ultimas Noticias, killed the girl with a .38 caliber revolver.
Demonstrations had been taking place at the University and opposition students blamed Chavistas from a nearby barrio for the murder. In response Chavistas declared the opposition had hired people to kill a student to provoke more demonstrations. The government released a communique to journalists saying homicides in Caracas are common and the murder had not been political. Ultimas Noticias reported this morning that two men and a women had been arrested for the murder.
Local journalists and more neutral students I spoke with agreed the murder had not been political. The area outside the university was dangerous and murders were frequent.
Opposition students however did not see it that way.
They gathered yesterday in front of the University’s gate to march on the National Assembly building in downtown Caracas, a Chavista stronghold.
I had come from there and national guard and police were lined up for blocks ready to stop any march that came. Among the police and national guard there were individuals sitting and waiting, looking serious and angry.
“Those are Chavistas with guns,” said a women I met, who was the daughter of a founder of CECOSESOLA, a cooperative I visited last month.
The implication was that the Chavistas were going to fight along with the police against any opposition march that arrived.
A national guard commander I questioned told me not to worry. “The march is not going to arrive,” he said smugly.
Indeed it wasn’t. The students were blocked outside the University by police who weren’t agreeing to any form of negotiation.
When a strong rain didn’t stop, the students headed back inside the University where they found the metro shut.
There was no way to leave and a rumor began circulating that there were armed Chavistas outside the gates waiting for students.
I attempted to leave through a different exit, but was told not to walk along the fence. “There’s been shooting,” a student told me.
There had been three spaced out gun shots. Students were talking about the Chavistas outside. A girl told me I couldn’t leave because of the danger.She said it with a certain smile that seems to light up the faces of members of the opposition when they feel they have unarguable proof of the insecurity of their country. It wasn’t clear how much people actually believed in the danger outside. People seemed to want to believe in it, if only to feel in solidarity with one another. There were some people panicking by the closed gate of the metro.
Outside the university some students were leaving on buses. Many of the buses had red flags on the outside and I decided to avoid them as, if there were armed groups around, the buses full of students would be easy targets.
On the other side of the freeway passerby informed me all the metro stops in the area were closed.
It was a bad situation for a number of reasons. The rumor of shooting, the area being known for murders in general. As I headed back towards where I thought I could find a safe taxi a squad of police roared up on motorcycles and yelled, “Are you students? Students?”
A policemen leaped off his motorcycle and tried to grab me. I shoved my press credential in his face and told him I was a journalist.
He grabbed my friend Daniel and began searching him.
I told the commander I was going to Communication Ministry and was looking for a taxi.
The commander scrutinized my credentials while the rest of the squad looked on, shotguns at the ready.
“Ok, good. You need a taxi?” the commander said. “He needs a taxi,” he called to the other policemen.
They put their motorcycles in the middle of the road and forcibly stopped the first taxi that came by. They opened the doors for us and said, “Here’s a taxi.”
As we drove through the city, police on motorcycles were everywhere. “They’re out for the students,” the taxi driver said.
Before RCTV was shutdown, Chavez claimed there was a destabilization plan and said, “There are groups that keep thinking that with riots, with Colombian paramilitaries, with rumors and media campaigns against the National Armed Forces that they will destabilize the country, but they won’t do it, we won’t allow it,”
The Metropolitan Police force is known as an autonomous force. Its not clear how much instruction they have from the government on how to handle these demonstrations. Most likely it was merely to keep the opposition demonstrators contained and away from Miraflores.
Amnesty International has criticized the way police’s conduct over the last few days regarding the 180 demonstrators arrested.
Police and jail systems internationally are criticized by Amnesty often. What is disturbing about this instance is that the Venezuelan government knows what to expect from their police force and instead of merely stopping marches as it has been doing with national guard troops in the first few days, they initially allowed the police to fire on opposition demonstrators when they were sitting down and chase them for a day through the neighborhoods of a wealthy part of Caracas with rubber bullets and teargas.
Demonstrators were shot at from motorcycles. A policemen pulled up in front of a cameraman who was filming a demonstrator being beaten by a group of police and shoved him out of the way, grabbed the reporter, turned her around and discharged a shotgun loaded with buck shot into her back.
He began firing at me and another photographer who were running up, forcing us to dive down a set of steps.
The last few days have made clear that the minority not in line with Chavez are not seen by Chavez as a legitimate part of the country.
They are considered to be the enemy despite being Venezuelan citizens.
A massive Chavista march went through wealthy areas today.
A stage was said up at the corner where members of the opposition had begun their marches this past week. “Gringo Go Home. Yankee Go Home,” was the chorus of a song that was played again and again.
It took two and a half hours for the march to pass through Chacaito on its way to Bellas Artes where a statement in solitarity with the nationalization of the telecommunications company CANTV was delivered.
The real message to the opposition was clear however. Chavistas were in the majority and they were ready to protect their president.
A banner flew in Bellas Artes, “Its not RCTV. Its our Oil.”
For them the important thing was that Chavez listened to them, the poor.
That the government station that replaced RCTV played cartoons instead of reporting on the demonstrations, which is exactly what RCTV did during the 2002 coup against Chavez, was not important.
Despite calling on Venezuelans to defend their country from what he sees as a threat from the students, Chavez is here to stay.
He has made the poor masses feel like they are empowered for the first time in Venezuelan history.
