Venezuela: Lies, Damned lies and the Media

“… the newspaper that started to tell the truth now exists to prevent the truth being told.”
(G.K. Chesterton: Orthodoxy, 1908)

Hard to imagine a better example of Chesterton’s barb than the unremitting assault on the current Venezuelan government by much if not all of the Western media. Like parrots, they repeat the critical howls of politicians and pundits whose opinions they might otherwise view with scepticism, among them Donald Trump and Michel Temer, the unelected president of Brazil. Even Pope Francis has come out against Venezuelan President Maduro’s “regime”, but then the Catholic Church has a track record in these matters. It also sided with the Chilean military in the coup against Salvador Allende’s government in 1973.
    No one can credibly dispute that Venezuela is in a mess. Reasons to criticise the ineptness of the Venezuelan administration are not hard to find; though the same could be said of plenty of others - including the ones currently residing in the White House and Downing Street, neither of whom won the popular vote in their respective elections.  Nevertheless, Venezuela is a functioning democracy with an elected president whose term ends in 2018.  Should Maduro stand again,  he can be democratically defenestrated, and there has been no suggestion that the next election will not take place on time.
    Why, therefore, the calls for regime change? Whence the hostility of the international media? Why, above all, is the Venezuelan government being tasked with acts of violence for which the Opposition is largely if not entirely responsible? It is the latter that has been setting fire to public buildings, attacking medical centres, erecting street barricades, destroying or blocking access to polling stations, using molotov cocktails and roadside bombs against police and security personnel, and horrifically burning alive the odd “Chavista” in broad daylight - aggressions that have been caught on camera - mostly by passers-by. 
    Such outrages would be termed ‘acts of terrorism’ in the countries now calling for Maduro’s head; and the perpetrators would be in gaol.   Over 3,000 arrests followed the 2011 riots in England with nearly 1,300 receiving gaol sentences. Politicians and media alike called them “criminals”.  Their more vicious and deadly Venezuelan counterparts, on the other hand, receive billing as heroic “political prisoners” confronting a repressive regime. Notable among these heroes are Opposition leaders Leopoldo López and former Caracas mayor Antonio Ledezma, both currently under house arrest for fomenting street violence - the former having already been tried and convicted in 2015 of responsibility for inciting riots that led to over 40 fatalities.
    Among the most egregious and disappointing purveyors of disinformation on Venezuela is the BBC.  On 29th July, BBC News broadcast a truly virtuoso piece of misrepresentation in which most of the interviewees were juveniles wearing masks, though viewers were also treated to a  smorgasbord of anti-government slogans from Opposition activist María Corina Machado who was a signatory to the attempted coup against Hugo Chavez in 2002 and has worked tirelessly ever since to overthrow his successor - including appealing for US intervention.  BBC Newsnight on August 7th, treated viewers to an interview with Juan Andrés Mejía who was introduced as the leader of “Popular Will”  a Venezuelan political party supposedly “of the left”.  Sr Mejía - a Member of the Venezuelan National Assembly - recited the standard  Opposition line, accusing the Maduro government of murdering and torturing hundreds of civilians, a charge for which no one, anywhere, at any time has been able to offer the least shred of evidence for the simple reason that it’s untrue.
    What the BBC failed to mention is that Mejía’s constituency in Caracas is the wealthiest in the country, that his party was founded not by him but by Leopoldo López, that its raison-d’être was and remains to organise “La Salida” which, in plain English, means toppling the government, and that it is a member of MUD - the Opposition coalition.  In place of host Evan Davis’s usual forensic interrogation, Newsnight’s Venezuelan guest received a green light to pile lie upon falsehood with no other restraint than the time allotted for the interview. 
    On the following morning, BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme - scraping the barrel for Venezuelan pundits - came up with Gabriela Montero, a classical pianist and composer who lives in Barcelona but happens to have been born in Venezuela.  A safe choice, She dutifully trotted out a handful of Opposition clichés of the kind available for a pittance on the newsstands or free of charge over the airwaves and on the Web. Not once has the BBC bothered to interview what are known in Latin America as “el pueblo”, the people - trades unionists, rural workers, the disabled, indigenous peoples  - who make up the bulk of the population and who are all represented in the recently-elected Constituent Assembly.
    Domestically, the assault on Venezuela’s government and the “Bolivarian Revolution” comes from the traditional masters of the country and its economy - the wealthy elite whose younger members have been busy over recent months erecting street barricades and causing mayhem while the elders ramp up the political rhetoric and employ their control of key business sectors to generate shortages of essential goods, notably in the working-class areas of the main cities. Shortages are useful to the Opposition because they are seen as a means of weakening support for the regime. Getting the poorer classes to vote or to act against their own interests is a prime tactic of the neoliberal right. Governments invariably take the blame for popular misfortunes regardless of how they are caused or who may be responsible.
    Venezuela has become a target of international concern for two main reasons.
First, it has the world’s largest oil reserves - currently estimated at 300 billion barrels. Despite the impact of fossil fuels on the global climate, oil deposits of this magnitude give the country a strategic value similar to that of the Middle East. Successive US administrations have therefore looked askance at the efforts of  a ”left-wing regime” under Hugo Chavez and now Nicolas Maduro to strengthen economic and political ties beyond the western hemisphere.  Evidence of those efforts is a surge in Chinese support for the Venezuelan economy in the form of both loans and investment. As recently as June this year, planning minister Ricardo Menendez revealed that high-level discussions were underway to increase further Chinese involvement in Venezuelan agriculture, industry and technological development.
    Second, Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution - were it to succeed - might offer an example that another world is possible and thereby contaminate the opinions of voters in Latin America and beyond. Hence why a push is underway by the local elite in tacit alliance with Western governments and the international media to keep not only Venezuela but Latin-America as a whole within the neoliberal fold.  Last year, a  congressional coup in Brazil removed left-wing President Dilma Roussef from office and installed a right-wing replacement - with no election in prospect. There have been coups against left-wing presidents in Paraguay in 2008 and Honduras in 2009; and a probably fraudulent election in Mexico in 2006 that kept left-wing radical, Andés Manuel López Obrador,  from getting the keys to Los Pinos - the presidential residence. In Chile the left is constrained by a constitution framed in the 1970s under the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet  that makes changes virtually impossible.
    Only Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador and Venezuela remain as hold-outs for the left - of which the latter is by far the most significant for the West. The country is suffering a major assault not just on the Maduro administration but on a political project - the Bolivarian Revolution - that for the first time in Venezuela’s history has given the poor access to health care, education and the prospect of dignified participation in the nation’s economic life. That assault is being orchestrated by the wealthiest sections of Venezuelan society with the overt backing of the United States , the European Union and much of Latin America. Should it succeed, it will be a triumph not for democracy but for neoliberal capitalism, and for government by the one percent. Such is the context of calls from Tories and from UK media for Jeremy Corbyn to condemn President Maduro. Corbyn is right to resist them. Venezuela’s struggle is also ours.

The Ermita de Llutxent

  
    Taizé - my usual room at the Ermita - is now part of a bathroom with double showers and all the necessaries of modernity.  Fifty years ago bathrooms were rudimentary. We showered in the garden, hauling water in buckets from one of the underground cisterns, pouring the cold water over each other and drying ourselves in the early morning sun. Free as nature made us, we bathed naked as mankind must have done before the fall.

    Named after the Community of Brothers in the village of Taizé, the room reflected the austerity of the order - whitewashed walls, a bed, a small wooden desk, a chair and a lamp.  And like them,  it offered spirituality and peace to whoever rested there, a sense that simplicity  and an unceasing openness to truth are the keys not to happiness,  which is a paltry, evanescent  thing, but to leading a productive and faithful life - faithful to the best that human beings can be, which is to serve humanity and to do what we can to safeguard our fragile world.

    Though the room is no more,  the Ermita remains. Externally little has changed. Mediterranean pines now obscure the view to the ruined Moorish castle lower down in the valley, but the stone column topped by a cross still guards the perspective,  and  the rough cobblestones of the forecourt and the heavy wooden doors of the entrance are as they were, unmoved by the passing of time.
    Within, new terracotta floor tiles have mostly replaced the old ones that 250 years of use and the imperceptible but implacable movement of the earth had rendered worn and uneven. Fresh water comes directly from the village below,  so that the cisterns that stored rainwater from the roofs are no longer in use. And the outbuildings that lay across the patio fell down years ago leaving only a façade. S and I slept in one of its rooms (Taizé being too small for a couple) and one night watched amused and startled as a rainstorm surged through one  door, picked up our sandals, and bore them through the lower door into the orchard.

    What remains is what matters: echoing corridors, chambers of rustic simplicity, and a chapel at the heart whose stately virgin enthroned in an intricately-carved retablo, gazes into an atrium lined with eighteenth century tile paintings depicting the victory of the Christians over the Moors; while high above, in the cupola, four stained-glass windows by Alfred Manessier shine with brilliant particoloured light as if from heaven. No one who comes to the Ermita can be in any doubt it is a holy place; but it is also one where for a time artists and writers convened, where conversation round the dinner table in the kitchen sparkled with wit and with the laughter of young men preparing for the priesthood.
    Everyone’s story of the Ermita is different. Mine begins in a farmhouse outside Paris, country home of the Manessier family. S and I, teenagers in the flush of first love, were weekend guests,  thrilled to be in the home of an artist whose works then occupied an entire salon of the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris.  Seated next to me at dinner was a man in his sixties dressed in the black tunic of a village priest.  Portly in the style of a Catholic cleric, he spoke rapid French with careless disregard of grammar and with an accent unmistakably Iberian, but neither defect interfered with his ability to induce laughter in his listeners, or with the sense he gave of  possessing an inquiring, educated and impressive mind. His eyes were kindly, yet piercing and restless as if in constant search for a truth that lay beyond mere vision - the spirit or essence of whatever met his gaze.
    He was introduced to me as “Don Alfonso”, but he told me that his full name was Alfonso Roig Izquierdo, “Don” being a term of respect accorded by general consent in Spain to those considered to deserve it. Roig Izquierdo, his twin surnames, he told me delightedly, meant “Red Left” which coincided with his political views, though he would be grateful if I would avoid mentioning this to the Pope.
    Conversation at table centred on the relationship between art and religion in the modern world - a subject on which Don Alfonso whom I later learned was a renowned teacher and art historian clearly knew a great deal, as did Alfred Manessier who, by that stage in his career, would have assented to being described as an artist of deeply spiritual inspiration. Conscious of my youth and lack of knowledge, I was content to listen, aware that I could add nothing of interest to the discussion. Towards the end of the meal, however, Don Alfonso addressed me directly. “Who,” he asked, “Is your father?”
    I hesitated before answering truthfully that I didn’t know because I had never met him.
    “In that case,” he said, looking directly into my eyes, “I am your father.”
Something in Don Alfonso’s regard, the gentle determination of  his voice as he spoke those words, told me that he meant what he said. And so it proved.
    “You are to visit me in Valencia whenever you can,” he told me as we said our farewells at the end of that magical weekend. “And from now on you can call me Alfonset, the diminutive of Alfons in Valenciano -  Valencia’s version of Catalán.
    In term time, Alfons, lived in the city of Valencia where he taught at the Metropolitan Seminary of Montcada, and the San Carlos School of Fine Arts. During vacations, and especially in the heat of summer, he moved to the Ermita which stands on a hillside overlooking the village of Llutxent and the Albaida Valley. Two hundred metres further up the hill is an abandoned monastery now largely restored, from the grounds of which the ruined Moorish castle remains visible in the middle distance. Terraces of olive, almond, citrus trees and vines descend from the hillsides into the valley - the Moorish system of cultivation designed to retain soil and moisture and never bettered in a region where rain may fall no more than a handful of times a year.
    So for the remainder of my schooldays, and throughout my years at university, I spent part of my vacations in my father’s house, occasionally with S, but more often unaccompanied.
    Men of the cloth in Spain were, by definition, bachelors, and Alfons, who gave little thought to domesticity,  would have been hard put to look after himself were it not for the women of a certain age who in Valencia as in the Ermita, kept house for him, laundered his clothes, and cooked for him and his guests.
    Local clerics, writers and teachers were frequent visitors but many others, especially artists and religious thinkers, came from further afield.  From time to time, Manessier and his wife would drive down from Paris to spend a few weeks at the Ermita; and each day, after breakfast, Alfred would go off into the countryside with his sketchbook  returning in the evening with pages of drawings.  These, at length, he turned into an exhibition of paintings at the Galerie de France in Paris entitled “Terre d’Espagne”.
    A small group of students at the seminary, attracted as much to Alfons’ magnetic personality as to his intellectual brilliance, formed part of a circle of acolytes. They grew to love him as did everyone who knew him well - laughing at his foibles which were many - while seeking his advice and imbibing his wisdom. Most, perhaps all, of these young man suffered from knowing that as trainees for the priesthood, they were preparing for a life of abstinence and would never experience the heaven of a woman’s body - or of a man’s if their desires led in such a direction. In this Alfons could not help them. Scion of an impoverished rural family, he had entered the Church in his youth as a means of obtaining an education. And though I believe he was religious in his own way, he had little time for canonical strictures, and seemed to approve the idea that youngsters such as S and I could spend the night in each other’s arms. So far as I am aware, none of that group are now men of the cloth; for which, I believe, Alfons would have happily taken the blame. One of them now lives at the Ermita with his wife.
    Not that Alfons felt free to voice his ideas within earshot of the local public. The Ermita occupies a role in the religious life of tthe village and the valley. Whoever lives there is by definition guardian of Mary, Mother of the Lord of Consolation, Virgin of the Ermita, a duty that must remain forever untainted by scandal or the least suggestion that unCatholic ideas might ever find expression within its walls. Because those whom Alfons invited to the Ermita were more often than not free thinkers,  he kept apart from village life, though  he threw open the doors of the Ermita on September 8 for the festival of the Virgin when people would come from far and wide to pray and to partake of a feast cooked in the Ermita’s kitchens by local volunteers. On such a day, the Ermita echoed with the sound of prayer in the chapel, and with the excited voices of people preparing and consuming a superabundance of food and wine.
    Otherwise and more familiarly, the sounds of the Ermita were of birdsong and the buzzing of wasps and crickets, footsteps in the corridor, the quiet hum of a discussion in a courtyard; and daily, while she lived, the piercing voice of Señora Felicidad, wife of the previous owner, singing the poetic hymn to  the Virgin of the Ermita in the chapel:
Puix bé, gràcia i salvació
posà Déu en vostra mà
Sigau per a tot cristià
Mare de Consolació

     On most days we dined simply and sparely: bread, watermelon, eggs and wine from the village, figs from the tree outside the kitchen picked in the cool of dawn, prickly pears from the cactus in the orchard, rice grown and dried further down the valley; local produce hewn from the sun-baked terrain by a combination of toil and millennia of accumulated knowledge of how to turn dry, rocky earth into fertile soil. 
    Occasionally, to celebrate the arrival of a guest or as a farewell gesture to a departing one, Alfons would order a paella. This would be no ordinary, common-or-garden dish of the kind available in countless restaurants, but a paella de la montaña of rabbit, chicken, pork and white beans, cooked by Tío Salvador over an open fire in the downstairs kitchen. Thin, wiry, with a white stubble on his chin and a mordant wit,  Tío Salvador was secretive about his methods. He suffered me to watch him on a couple of occasions, and even allowed me to write down his sequence of “moves”; but he refused to reveal his special ingredient, a mixture of ground herbs that imparted a rich yet subtle flavour to the rice, and whose recipe I believe he took to the grave.
    Conversation during meals and in their wake was the seminal communal activity at the Ermita; but activities of the spirit in the stillness of our rooms occupied most of our daylight hours - though for younger members of the community, of whom I was one, the contemplative life sometimes had to give way to duties of a more mundane kind - mainly the harvesting of nature’s gifts from the orchard, especially of almonds, an unpleasant labour  from which we emerged caked in a sweaty congealment of dust, dry leaves and tiny insects.
    The Ermita might appear isolated and even remote to the casual visitor,  but for those privileged to have known the silent refuge of its walls, and shared meals round the kitchen table - Alfons presiding - with artists, writers, priests and peasants, it can’t fail to occupy a special place in their thoughts; though in the end, it is not so much the building we are likely to remember, as the people it evokes, and the spirit it awakens in us.
 I type these words in the room Alfons himself once slept in, on the crude 18th century desk where he wrote his last essays, and beneath a photograph of Miguel Hernandez, the great Valencian poet who died in jail at the hands of General Francisco Franco.
    Once, as a seventeen or eighteen- year old,  I arrived at the Ermita unannounced with my rucksack. It was the evening of 7th of September and the Ermita was full of people organising the annual feast for the following day. Alfons had gone to a meeting and not yet returned, and in his absence I met a hostile reception: the Ermita was full, Alfons was not expecting me, he would be furious at this sudden imposition on his generosity, I would do well to take a bus to Xátiva - the nearest town - where I would find accommodation, and so on. I was on the point of following this severe advice when Alfons showed up. On seeing me, he at once enfolded me in his arms, after which he took a book from his room and before all those present read to me one of  Miguel Hernandez’s most celebrated poems - the Nanas de la Cebolla - composed for the poet’s young son:
….ríete mucho.
Es tu risa en los ojos
la luz del mundo……

….Tu risa me hace libre,
me pone alas…..
Es tu risa la espada
más victoriosa……

….Vencedor de las flores
y las alondras.
Rival del sol.
Porvenir de mis huesos
y de mi amor.