Venezuela a "Banana Republic"? Venezuelan Ambassador Responds to Kristof
By BERNARDO ÁLVAREZ HERRERA, NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF - NY TIMES, November 11th 2010
The Venezuelan ambassador in Washington responds to an article by New York Times writer Nicholas D. Kristof that labelled Venezuela a "banana republic". Below is the response, followed by Kristof's original article.
Re “Our Banana Republic,” by Nicholas D. Kristof (column, Nov. 7):
In an otherwise excellent column about inequality in the United States, Mr. Kristof refers to Venezuela as a “banana republic.” Besides the problem of using such a degrading term — not to mention one so closely linked to foreign imperialism — it does not apply to Venezuela.
The term “banana republic” was coined to refer to small countries largely dependent on agricultural goods, ruled by a small and unaccountable elite and generally servile to American corporate interests.
Venezuela does not fit this billing. Known more for its oil than its agricultural goods, Venezuela is a vibrant democracy, unlike many of the traditional “banana republics” Mr. Kristof may have been thinking of.
On the issue of inequality, though, Venezuela may prove to be an example for the United States. Over the last decade, social programs begun by President Hugo Chávez have brought needed services like education and health to underserved sectors of the population.
Beyond a dramatic drop in poverty from 49 percent to 27 percent from 1999 to 2008, Venezuela has also seen inequality diminish, so much so that the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean ranked it highest for inequality reduction among 12 neighboring countries in the region.
Bernardo Álvarez Herrera
Ambassador of Venezuela
Washington, Nov. 8, 2010
-----
Our Banana Republic
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
In my reporting, I regularly travel to banana republics notorious for their inequality. In some of these plutocracies, the richest 1 percent of the population gobbles up 20 percent of the national pie.
But guess what? You no longer need to travel to distant and dangerous countries to observe such rapacious inequality. We now have it right here at home — and in the aftermath of Tuesday’s election, it may get worse.
The richest 1 percent of Americans now take home almost 24 percent of income, up from almost 9 percent in 1976. As Timothy Noah of Slate noted in an excellent series on inequality, the United States now arguably has a more unequal distribution of wealth than traditional banana republics like Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guyana. (MORE)
http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/5776---------------------------------
What I find interesting about this exchange is that the country with one of the worst rich/poor discrepancies in Latin America--Colombia--where Chiquita International actually does produce bananas, and where Chiquita executives admitted hiring rightwing death squads who murdered trade unionists on Chiquita farms--is not mentioned by Kristoff. His mind leaps to Venezuela, where the leftist government has actually DONE SOMETHING about poverty--drastically reduced it, in fact--but he ignores THE most scandalous U.S. foreign policy situation in the region--a scandal involving...
-- the dire poverty that most Colombians suffer;
--$7 BILLION in U.S. military aid to a government and military with one of the worst human rights records on earth, where thousands of trade unionists, human rights workers, teachers, community activists, journalists, political leftists, peasant farmers and others have been brutally murdered by the Colombian military and its death squads;
--a country where state terror has driven FIVE MILLION peasant farmers from their lands--THE worst human displacement crisis on earth;
--a country where U.S. taxpayer money is being used to help Colombians kill Colombians in a 70-year civil war;
--a country where the cocaine just keeps on flowing;
--a country where the U.S. puppet, Alvaro Uribe, stated that everyone who opposes him is a "terrorist," with Uribe getting honored by the Obama administration with a prestigious appointment to an international legal commission (!) and an academic sinecure at Georgetown U.
But perhaps the most scandalous item of all is that our current U.S. Attorney General, Eric Holder, was the Chiquita executives' lawyer--the one who got them off with a handslap during the Bush Junta, for their death squad activities on their banana farms in Colombia!
Colombia is THE most disreputable, murderous, corrupt U.S.-supported "banana republic" now, or ever. And Kristoff picks on Venezuela, where a remarkable and heartening leftist democracy revolution has taken place. Is this ignorance on Kristoff's part? Has he read too many Simon Romero/New York Slimes hit pieces on the Chavez government to be sentient any more? Or is he fully aware of what he did in this column--slimed Venezuela while ignoring the HUMONGOUS SCANDAL OF COLOMBIA because his uber-rich bosses want a U.S./Colombia "free trade for the rich" agreement and LOVE the war profiteers who are chewing on the bones of leftists in Colombia like the vultures that they are?
In one case, the Colombian military and its death squads hacked up the leftists, while alive, and threw their body parts into mass graves. In another, they lured young men with promises of jobs, murdered them and dressed up their bodies like FARC guerrillas, to up their "body count"--to earn bonuses and to impress U.S. senators. In another, the pollution from up to 2,000 bodies in a mass grave--in a region of particular interest and activity by the USAID and the U.S. military--poisoned the local water supply and sickened local children who drank from it. That's how the mass grave was found.
The list goes on of the most heinous acts by war criminals armed, "trained' and funded by the United States. I am not exaggerating about war profiteer vultures. Some fifty trade unionists have been murdered in Colombia this year alone. Almost 40,000 people have been 'disappeared' over the last decade. And Chiquita International is just ONE U.S. multinational corporation that utilizes this murderous fascist establishment to make money. Drummond Coal, Monsanto, Dyncorp, Blackwater--they're all there, salivating over more "free trade for the rich" that their Pukes in this Diebold U.S. Congress are going to give them.
Kristoff FAILS TO CONNECT THE DOTS between the rich/poor discrepancy in the U.S. and the even worse one in Colombia. He disses
Venezuela--the chief targeted Latin American "enemy" of the fuckers who are screwing us over as well.
"So we face a choice," he write. "Is our economic priority the jobless, or is it zillionaires?" How about those zillionaires at Chiquita, hm--the ones Eric Holder got a sweet deal for, on their death squads? How about the zillionaires at Blackwater--recently "fined" by the U.S. State Department for "unauthorized" "trainings" of "foreign persons" IN COLOMBIA "for use in Iraq and Afghanistan"?
Colombia is one of the chosen countries for more outsourcing of U.S. jobs. Yet they get a pass, and
Venezuela gets slimed as "banana republic"!
I don't know if Kristoff's brain is rattled, or if he is collusive in the propaganda against Venezuela. All I know is that a once great newspaper has become fishwrap on too many issues, with Latin America currently top of the list, displacing the WMDs that weren't in Iraq.
:puke:
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