Here's a good article about Venezuela:
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Imagine, if you can, that a group of military officers in the United States overthrew our elected President, dissolved our elected Congress and Supreme Court, and abolished the Constitution. Now imagine that democracy is restored but the Supreme Court rules that the officers who kidnapped the President and overthrew the government cannot be tried for any crime. That is what happened in Venezuela.
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Personally, I favor an independent judiciary. But Venezuela -- like much of Latin America -- has never had such a thing, and to pretend that it did and is now losing it, is quite misleading. Such exaggerations, many of which appear almost daily in the press, have created an astoundingly false impression of Venezuela among Americans. Most Americans think of the country is some kind of quasi-dictatorship "ruled" by the "authoritarian" Hugo Chavez. In fact President Chavez has considerably less power than our own president.
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Most of the media is explicitly part of the opposition and supported the April 2002 coup. Yet in six years of Chavez' presidency the press has not been censored. And despite the outcry about the recently passed "Law of Social Responsibility in Radio and Television" -- which included some valid criticisms -- it is doubtful that any censorship will occur under the present administration.
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Sadly, the biggest threats to Venezuela's democracy still come from Washington, which has funded and allied itself with the anti-democratic leaders of Venezuela's opposition, including supporters of the failed coup. This funding and support has been acknowledged by the U.S. State Department. The National Endowment for Democracy, which is funded by our Congress, has also funneled millions of dollars to opposition groups. And recently-released documents from the CIA show that the Bush Administration had detailed advanced knowledge of the coup but lied about what happened: the White House tried to convince the press and other countries that it was not a coup at all, but rather a legitimate seizure of power by "pro-democracy" forces.
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Mark Weisbrot is co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, in Washington, DC (www.cepr.net).
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=45&ItemID=6917
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