Chavez’s influence wanes in Latin America

[Bacchus39]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/americas/chavezs-influence-wanes-in-latin-america/2011/05/13/AF2x785G_story.html?wprss=rss_world
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“He’s not flying high like he used to even two years ago,” said Luiz Felipe Lampreia, a former Brazilian foreign minister. “I think he’s losing his capacity to influence people and to lead, even with his own friends.”
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Ever so quietly, some of the Venezuelan populist’s biggest projects have been abandoned or mothballed, or have yet to take flight, including a pipeline from Venezuela to Argentina, a South American development bank, housing, highways and a continental investment fund.
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Opinion polls in Latin America also show that the president’s image has been tarnished as Chavez has resorted to a range of policies his opponents call anti-democratic, including attacking the news media and governing with decree powers. Chavez has also forged ever closer ties to iron-fisted rulers, such as Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

When the group asked people to rate leaders in the Americas, Chavez finished second to last in its 2010 report. Even in Bolivia and Argentina, countries with warm relations with Venezuela, fewer than 35 percent of those polled had a favorable opinion of Chavez. “Evidently, what’s happening with Chavez is he’s not a leader of the region,” Lagos said.

[Bacchus39]

1. more

he new dynamic for Venezuela is a reflection of a convergence of factors that have hampered Chavez’s objective of limiting U.S. influence. President Obama enjoys high approval ratings across Latin America, and most South American leaders are centrists who embrace globalization and trade ties with the United States. Multilateral lenders that Chavez accused of being tools of U.S. imperialism, such as the World Bank, are as active as ever and have lent record amounts across Latin America in recent years.


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This weekend, Ollanta Humala, a nationalist candidate for president in Peru who had been close to Chavez, said in an interview that it had been “an error” to have allied himself with the Venezuelan leader in his unsuccessful 2006 run at the presidency.
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Lula’s successor, though, is Dilma Rousseff, a reserved pragmatist focused on an ambitious domestic agenda. Analysts say Rousseff is well aware of Chavez’s poll numbers in Brazil, where a Pew Research Center study in 2010 showed that 13 percent of Brazilians had confidence in the Venezuelan leader.

Yet it was under Lula that it became clear that the refinery project would move ahead without Venezuela, said Ildo Sauer, a former executive in Brazil’s state-controlled oil company, Petrobras.
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. “He imagined commanding a revolution in all the Americas against the United States.”

[Judi Lynn]

2. The rest of us are very acquainted with Juan Forerograms. Sad.

Even V-Headline carried this stinker:
http://www.vheadline.com/readnews.asp?id=101897

What ELSE would you be getting from Juan Forero, anyway? He wrote like this years ago about Hugo Chavez. BFD.

Sunday, February 15, 2009
Going Nowhere with Juan Forero

This morning Juan Forero was on the anti-Chavez beat for the second day in a row. On Saturday he runs a fine CIA-inspired piece about how anti-democratic the Chavez government and its supporters are. This morning he was beating the drum again, but with a twist. In the piece, we hear Chavez supporters chanting "Oooh, aaah, Chavez no se va!" and Forero claims that it translates to "Oooh, aaah, Chavez is going nowhere!"

My Spanish is not fluent, but it is adequate - and I'm confident that "no se va" never means "going nowhere." An accurate translation would be "Chavez is not going away" or "Chavez is not abandoning (the struggle)."

It's no secret that Juan Forero works very hard to discredit and misinform listeners about the situation in South America, but I was surprised that he would employ such an easily discredited mistranslation to forward his agenda. I mean it's not like the mistranslation of Ahmadinejad's Farsi statement about Israel's Zionist government "vanishing from the pages of time" being stated as "wiping Israel off the map" - where hardly anyone in the US speaks Farsi. There are millions of people in the US who speak Spanish fluently and millions of others who know enough Spanish to catch such a crude mistranslation as Forero employs.

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to matter how inaccurate and misleading Juan Forero's "reporting" for NPR is, he definitely "no se va" - Que lastima (What a pity.)

More:
http://nprcheck.blogspot.com/2009/02/going-nowhere-with-juan-forero.html

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Sunday, December 10, 2006
Just What is it?

http://1.bp.blogspot.com.nyud.net:8090/_U2lvwVLuvc4/RXx3aJCegkI/AAAAAAAAADA/0Wq-BD50LYU/s200/forero.jpg

Which Juan Forero do we believe? The one on November 27, 2006 who broadcast an economist in Venezuela complaining that the Chavez government would be "better off spending its gasoline subsidies to promote mass transit" or yesterday's Forero who noted "all the money the government is spending at home. Venezuela’s government is building subway lines..." Hmm...sounds like mass transit to me!

In yesterday's piece, we hear how "the economic growth has been astounding here since 2003," BUT "many economists and businessmen here say the economy is far from healthy and in fact what it is is schizophrenic – it is one of the world’s fastest growing but it produces few jobs, consumerism is rampant, but few want to invest."

The main thrust of yesterday's piece is to claim that Venezuela's economy is only doing all right because of the "oil boom" -- even though economist Mark Weisbrot has noted "the government has budgeted conservatively to create a cushion against any decline in oil prices. It has based its 2007 budget on an average oil price of $29 a barrel — far below this year's average of $58 a barrel." Forero uses telling phrases that reveal his anti-Chavez bias:

• schizophrenic: describing the economy as such is both offensive to people with schizophrenia and a way of writing off the economic achievements of Venezuela under the Chavez government.
• The Bolivarian bourgeoisie: How Forero describes those profiting from "lucrative" government contracts. The implication is that there is at best hypocrisy in the claims of socialism of the government and perhaps even corruption.
• A fine veneer: how Forero describes the effects of Venezuelan government spending on infrastructure projects. Frankly, I'd be happy for a little veneer of social spending on schools, transportation, and health care here in the USA!

More:
http://nprcheck.blogspot.com/2006/12/what-it-is-is-two-faced.html

~~~
Back when Forero still worked for the NY Times:

NY Times reporter quits over conflict of interest

~snip~
Also last April, New York Times reporter Juan Forero reported that President Chávez had “resigned” when, in fact, Chávez had been kidnapped at gunpoint. Forero did not source his knowingly false claim. Forero, on Apr. 13, wrote a puff piece on dictator-for-a-day Pedro Carmona — installed by a military coup — as Carmona disbanded Congress, the Supreme Court, and the Constitution and sent his shock troops house to house in a round-up of political leaders in which sixty supporters of Chávez were assassinated. Later that day, after the Venezuelan masses took back their country block by block, Carmona fled the national palace and Chávez, the elected president, was restored to office.

Forero — who allowed US Embassy officials to monitor his interviews with mercenary pilots in Colombia, without disclosing that fact in his article — was caught again last month in his unethical pro-coup activities in Venezuela. Narco News Associate Publisher Dan Feder revealed that Forero and LA Times reporter T. Christian Miller had written essentially the same story, interviewing the same two shopkeepers in a wealthy suburb of Caracas, and the same academic “expert” in a story meant to convince readers that a “general strike” was occurring in Venezuela. The LA Times Readers Representative later revealed that Forero and Miller interviewed the shopkeepers together. Neither disclosed that fact.

In many ways, it has been the credibility problem posed by Forero that led to Toro’s hiring last November by the Times, and the importation of Times Mexico Bureau Chief Ginger Thompson to Venezuela last month.

http://www.agrnews.org/issues/210/mediawatch.html

ETC.

[Bacchus39]

3. those are just blog posts from readers. it would be like citing you to refute a story on Chavez

Chavez' influence is waning. he's an asshole. anyway, he still has strong influence over you.

[Judi Lynn]

4. No doubt you're right. If I could just stop watching "Hello, Mr. President."

http://uktv.co.uk.nyud.net:8090/images/310349/27833_little_britain_kenny_craig.jpg http://www.unknownhypnotist.com.nyud.net:8090/images/gianni/Gianni020.jpg
Maybe there's something he does on his tv show to make people go vote for him. Hmmmmm. Could be.

http://danielakawmd.files.wordpress.com.nyud.net:8090/2010/03/hypnosis.jpg

It's important for the guy with the watch to not look at the watch, himself.

[Bacchus39]

5. You don't speak Spanish,you don't even understand what he's saying so you're lucky.

I am sure he can continue to count on your support. how about this, I'll continue to support Obama kind of like most Democrats, not to mention the majority of Latin Americans, and you can be like those who support Chavez, Ahmadinijad, Gaddaffi, are saddened by the death of Osama, and who read Prensa Latina as a "news" source.

[naaman fletcher]

6. Is there something about this story that is incorrect? nt