An upcoming conference on Capitol Hill on May 26th sponsored by Americas Forum has already drawn the wrath of Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro and other ALBA allies, as their state-controlled newspapers have begun to smear the congressmen, panelists and even the human rights victims of their regimes that are scheduled to speak at the conference. Cuba's Ministry of Foreign Affairs actually denounced the event on its website today.
Jean-Guy Allard, a French Canadian conspiracy theorist and internet columnist for Fidel Castro's Granma and other state-controlled media outlets, published an article in the anti-semitic website aporrea.org on May 10th that called Florida congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen a "witch of the capitol." Allard also called the respected author Carlos Alberto Montaner an "intellectual of the CIA" - a favorite accusation of Castro's team of internet propagandists (see an example of a propaganda attack on Montaner here).
Allard, who travelled to Mao's China in 1966 and offered hagiographic praise about the Chinese dictator, is the current personification of what Che Guevara once wrote in his diaries: "A foreign reporter - preferably American - was much more valuable to us...than any military victory. Much more valuable than rural recruits for our guerrilla force, were American media recruits to export our propaganda."
In Hugo Chavez's Venezuela, that personification is Eva Golinger, an American-Venezuelan lawyer who has called herself "a soldier for this revolution." Golinger gained fame among the socialist regimes in Latin America when she wrote the conspiracy book The Chavez Code, a thoroughly discredited paean to Chavez.
The book, launched in Havana, Cuba, achieved a boost when Hugo Chavez's regime purchased thousands of copies and had them distributed to allies throughout the world in several languages. Golinger was later hired by the Chavez regime and reportedly given $3.2 million to edit and promote the state-funded newspaper Correo del Orinoco International, an English language publication whose purpose Golinger described as "the artillery of ideas," referring to a quote by Chavez hero Simon Bolivar.
Last November, when a similar conference was held on Capitol Hill entitled "Danger in the Andes," Chavez held a "contra-cumbre," or counter-conference, in response to attack his critics, and invited Golinger to give the opening speech. Golinger took the opportunity to call on the Chavez-controlled congress to pass legislation to undermine non-governmental organizations in the country that have been critical of the human rights abuses of the Venezuelan regime.
In April 2010, Chávez held a celebration called the "Day of the Bolivarian Militias, the Armed People and the April Revolution," in which had a swearing-in ceremony for 100 young community media activists, calling them "communicational guerrillas." According to Chávez, the purpose was to raise awareness among Venezuelan youth about "media lies" and to "combat the anti-revolution campaign of the opposition-controlled private media."
Observers of Latin America issues can get an idea of the breadth of the propaganda infrastructure that has been set up with government funds from Venezuela by simply doing a Google search of "legitimidad perdida" ("legitimacy lost" in Spanish) and "ros-lehtinen." The resultes reveal the multitude of websites that have been set up by Cuba and Venezuela to "flood the zone" with propaganda so that internet searches turn up mostly favorable results.
In January of 2007, Andres Izarra, the president of the Chavez-backed satellite propaganda network TeleSUR, stated the motive behind Chávez's media strategy, saying, "We have to elaborate a new plan, and the one that we propose is the communicational and informational hegemony of the state."
No comments:
Post a Comment