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national | miscellaneous | news report Tuesday June 04, 2002 23:11 by Paul Kinsella - ATGWU (Strictly Personal Capacity!)! paulkinsella53 at yahoo dot com 53 Lorcan Grove, Santry, Dublin 9, Eire 087-9748511

Online Journalism's Finest Hour!

Online Journalism's Finest Hour Exposed and Reversed a Coup.

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April 15, 2002
A Narco News White Paper
Narco News '02
Authentic Journalism on the "War on Drugs" in Latin America
"The Name of Our Country is América" - Simón Bolívar
Three Days that
Shook the Media

Online Journalism's Finest Hour
Exposed and Reversed a Coup
By Al Giordano
Special to The Narco News Bulletin
The failed coup d'etat against Venezuela marks a turning point not just
for
authentic democracy in our América, but also for authentic journalism.

The remote-control attempt by Washington and commercial interests -
including
various media giants within and outside of Venezuela - to topple the
government
of President Hugo Chávez by force has only made him stronger.

In poetic defiance of all the official and commercial media
declarations to
the contrary, the "Bolivarian Revolution" has survived. On the third
day it
rose again: The Chávez government emerges as more popular than ever,
and Venezuelan
democracy the strongest in América to withstand future authoritarian
ambushes
like the failed plot of these three fateful days.

One of the news agencies that had been so dishonest in recent days,
Associated
Press (AP), reported today a fact that, only hours ago, its reports did
not
even consider as a possibility:

"Never before in modern times has an elected president been overthrown
by military
commanders, his successor inaugurated, and then the ousted leader
returned to
power on the wings of a popular uprising."

The story also enters the history books as a watershed moment in the
Authentic
Journalism Renaissance.

AP, Reuters, the New York Times, and CNN, the worst offenders in the
English-language
media among many others, have had to radically adjust their coverage of
the
events in Venezuela precisely because online journalists worked
overtime in
recent days to break the information blockade and get the true facts to
the
international public.

The same media professionals who cringe at the term "authentic
journalism" are
the ones who, for the sake their own future credibility, ought to pay
close
attention to what has just occurred. For there is going to be hell to
pay over
the professional misconduct by many of them in recent days.

Just as the Venezuelan majority - out-hollered, out-dollared, but not
out-smarted
- called the bluff of its nation's spoiled oligarchy and reclaimed its
right
to choose its own destiny, authentic journalism - in particular, the
rapid response
of independent online journalism - forced the mass media to eat its own
dishonest
words.

Let the banquet begin.

Countdown to a Coup

That an attempted coup d'etat was underway in Venezuela was evident
months ago.

Long before last week's coup began there was a pitched battle to define
its
terms in advance.

After the December 6, 1998 landslide electoral victory by Chávez, New
York Times
reporter Larry Rohter began the charge of the lite brigade, tagging
Chávez as
"the populist demagogue, the authoritarian man." Rohter decried "his
past disregard
for the rule of law." Chávez, Rohter bemoaned, "seems inclined to
govern on
the basis of a mystical bond he claims to have established with
Venezuela's
23 million people." He compared Chávez with "populist dictators of the
past."
Rohter's conclusions about the Chávez presidency were decreed before
Chávez
had served a single day as president.

Rohter's drumbeat of simulation continued right up until the final
hour. As
Narco News was reporting about the unraveling of the coup d'etat ("What
dishonest
spin will the inauthentic journalists place on the story when the
Venezuelan
majority begins to fight to restore its constitutional government?" we
asked,
concluding, "Anything can happen. Anything,") the NY Times' Rohter was
no longer
concerned, as of yesterday, with "disregard for the rule of law" now
that his
own favored coup-masters were abolishing Congress and the Constitution
in Venezuela
and going door to door rounding up political opponents to their putsh.

Rohter even dredged Plan Colombia author Michael Shifter from the
polluted Potomac
to justify the coup: "This provides another formula to solve crises for
countries
that are seen as not being governable," said Shifter, as Rohter chose
to crow:
"Mr. Chávez was a left-wing populist doomed by habitual recklessness."

Now, Mr. Rohter must eat that crow.

But even caught in his anti-democracy bias, he is without remorse. In
today's
Times, Rohter continued in damage-control spin mode: "There were no
obvious
American fingerprints on the plot that unseated Mr. Chávez, unlike
coups in
Guatemala in 1954 or in Chile in 1973," he claimed (in a double deceit,
since
it took years of Freedom of Information Act requests after the
Guatemala and
Chile coups to find those Yanqui fingerprints.)

However, in this age of fast-moving information, we remind: Mr.
Rohter's own
fingerprints on the attempted military coup of 2002 are archived in ink
and
pixels for posterity.

The July 31, 2000 elections in Venezuela - in which Chávez won
reelection by
an even larger landslide margin - were even more upsetting to the
establishment
press. There was, that summer, a wave of official hysteria at the
thought that
all the predictions of Chávez's demise would be proven wrong by the
Venezuelan
electorate. Three days prior, Mary Anastasia O'Grady wrote a piece for
the Wall
Street Journal titled "A Chavez victory will only worsen Venezuela's
problems."
That same day, Brian Latell wrote an article titled "A Disguised
Dictatorship"
for the Washington Post.

And yet the predictions of "authoritarianism" by Chavez in Venezuela
did not
come true. To the contrary, Venezuela, with Chávez at the helm, has
experienced
the most rapid development of human rights, fair and free elections,
and press
freedom of any Latin American nation at any moment in history.

Human Rights Watch, in 2000, cited Venezuela as the only Latin American
country
where human rights had improved. The viciously anti-Chávez Organization
of American
States sent a team of election observers to monitor both the 1998 and
the 2000
elections in Venezuela, and despite all motive to discredit the vote,
was forced
by the facts to conclude that the elections were scrupulously fair.

As for press freedom, Venezuela has stood alone among Latin American
nations:
Not a single journalist has ever been imprisoned under Chávez's watch
(although
the ideologically myopic Committee to Protect Journalists in New York
has complained
that Chávez speeches that have criticized the notoriously corrupt
Venezuelan
media and its financial conflicts-of-interest somehow constituted
threats to
press freedom. CPJ has thus become more concerned with words -- the
very speech
it purports to defend -- than with the real sticks and stones that
break our
bones.)

Meanwhile, as the major media was consistently, and in a knowingly
false manner,
getting the story wrong, the Internet media was reporting the facts.

An English-language online newspaper, Vheadline.com, edited by veteran
journalist
Roy S. Carson, reported the true facts day after day from Venezuela
since 1996.
More on Vheadline.com in a moment: its journalists played a central
role in
recent days to break the information blockade out of Caracas.

For those who have been misled by the simulators' who portray the
Venezuela
conflict as an issue of "left vs. right" (as opposed to what it really
is: democracy
or none), libertarian conservative columnist Justin Raimundo actually
bothered
to read Chávez's speeches and research his government's policy
positions in
January 2001. He concluded:

That Chavez doesn't fit into any of the formerly useful categories of
"right"
and "left" is the source of whatever confusion there is about what he
believes,
but this is due to the myopia of his critics, for the most part, and
not - as
we shall see - any fuzziness in his own thinking

Before Venezuela's 1998 presidential election, the US State Department
denied
Chavez a visa to visit the United States on the grounds - according to
Albright
- that he had once been the leader of a coup, and therefore a criminal
unworthy
of entry.

We wonder if the State Department will now apply its "no coup leaders
allowed"
to the band of oligarchs, military thugs (trained by the School of the
Americas,
like so many Latin American torturers and dictators), and media moguls,
who
were leaders of the failed coup of April 2002. (When he was arrested
and charged
with violating the Constitution on Sunday, the military-installed
dictator-for-a-day
Pedro Carmona was reportedly fleeing from Miraflores Palace en route to
the
U.S. Embassy to seek asylum.)

Narco News, for our part, has reported about Venezuela and offered
media criticism
of the professional simulators for the past two years. On September 18,
2000,
we published "NY Times CIA Apologist Rohter Invades Venezuela
Territory."

On February 1, 2001, we praised Chávez's unprecedented decision to
place a civilian
statesman at the helm of the nation's armed forces, after it was
discovered
that certain corrupt military leaders - from the same faction that
deposed the
elected president at gunpoint last week - were conspiring with
Colombia's vicious
AUC terrorist organization to form paramilitary death squads in
Venezuela. We
warned, more than a year ago, that the Bush administration in cahoots
with rogue
military officials and Colombian paramilitary groups had launched a
plan "to
destabilize the Chávez government from within."

Seven weeks ago, we went way out on a limb (and received no small
amount of
hate mail, as a result, from members of the spoiled brat elite classes
of Venezuela)
for a February 20, 2002 analysis we published by Narco News
correspondent Kim
Alphandary. It was titled: "Venezuela Faces U.S. Coup Plot: Washington
Seeks
End to World's Truest Democracy."

The Pre-Coup Show

In recent weeks, though, the simulators of the mass media controlled
the microphone.

Narco News, Vheadline.com and other reputable online news agencies
warned of
a coup in progress. Those reports were ignored by the commercial press,
and
even by the "alternative" press.

But a whisper did begin among commercial journalists that eventually
grew into
a crescendo of shrieks, planting the seeds to harvest later: If there
was to
be a coup d'etat, it would not be called a coup, but, rather, a
"popular" revolt.

It was on March 19 that there came a decided shift in the message
portrayed
by propagandists who call themselves journalists, led by Juan Forero of
the
New York Times, who was, by now, installed in Caracas. (Narco News,
last year,
reported that Forero allowed U.S. officials in Colombia to monitor his
interviews
with private-sector U.S. mercenaries there, without having disclosed
that fact
in his reports.)

It was no longer sufficient to call Venezuela's president "left-wing"
or point
out his disagreements with Washington over Plan Colombia, OPEC or other
policy
matters.

The big lie, orchestrated and sung in harmony by the mainstream media,
was floated
by Forero of the NY Times on March 19th: That Chávez's "autocratic
style and
left-wing policies have alienated a growing number of people."

"Although he promised a 'revolution' to improve the lives of the poor,
Mr. Ch
vez has instead managed to rankle nearly every sector -- from the
church to
the press to the middle class -- with his combative style, populist
speeches
and dalliances with Fidel Castro of Cuba and the Marxist rebels of
Colombia,"
claimed Forero.

Forero, along with other official "journalists" also began pushing
heavily the
spin that the "military forces" of Venezuela had turned against the
Chávez government.
It was then, in mid-March, that a slow drip of military brass was
trotted out
before the media. Forero quoted one colonel as saying that Chávez "has
said
the military forces were with him. I wanted to tell people they were
not.''

"Mario Ivan Carratu, a retired vice admiral with close contacts in the
military,"
wrote Forero, "said some active-duty officers had spoken of playing a
more aggressive
role. He said a few had even privately spoken of a need to stage a coup
to oust
Mr. Chávez."

''I have been in contact with many active officers, and they are of the
belief
that if society does not organize to take steps, then they are going to
have
to take control,'' said Mr. Carratu.

Forero, true to form, added the now-obviously fictional chestnut that
the dissident
military brass "are well aware that the United States has said it will
not support
a coup."

(As the Washington Post reported on Saturday, there had been a constant
march
of businessmen, media moguls and military officials in and out of the
US Embassy
in Caracas in the days before the coup.)

But this was Forero's story, and he reported:

''The armed forces do not want to gain a place in history with a
coup,'' said
one high-ranking military officer, who asked to remain unidentified.
''If they
want to pass into history, then what they want to do is support civil
society
in its protests.''

From that moment on it was clear to the close observer: A simulation of
"Civil
Society" and "popular revolt" would be staged to "justify" a military
coup d'etat.

The "Revolt" of the Spoiled Brats

By last Tuesday, April 9th, the ducks were all lined up. Forero, again,
led
the media charge when he wrote about the strange plans for a "labor"
strike,
supported by management and the national Chamber of Commerce and
Industry, to
shut down Venezuela's major cash cow industry - that of oil:

''This can only end with the president resigning,'' Humberto Calderon
Berti,
a former minister of energy and mines, told a throng of protesting
executives
from the oil company Petroleos de Venezuela in Caracas. ''All
Venezuelans from
all walks of life, from all social strata, from all the political and
ideological
sectors, must take part in the stoppage. This is about him or us. It is
a choice
between democracy or dictatorship.''

How many "protesting executives" makes a "throng"? It's going to take
years
to disassemble every slight-of-hand piece of rhetoric wielded by the
mainstream
media in trying to make The Revolt of the Spoiled Brats seem like a
"popular
uprising." (See the Q & A with Narco News by journalist Jules Siegel
from our
reports last weekend for details on the ingredients of the "astro-turf"
that
the inauthentic journalists tried to pass off as a grassroots
rebellion.)

Forero's source, the oil executive quoted above, was right about one
thing:
The drama that unfolded would indeed become "a choice between democracy
or dictatorship."

The journalistic crime of the new century was the mass media's
Orwellian misrepresentation
of which side of the conflict represented which D-word.

THURSDAY, APRIL 11, 2002:

DEMOCRACY HELD HOSTAGE, DAY ONE

Last Thursday, April 11, the coup was officially launched.

Forero, by now, had left all pretext of journalism behind to become
Minister
of Propaganda for an illegal coup d'etat that almost turned the clock
back 30
years on democracy in Latin America. He wrote in that morning's edition
of the
New York Times:

"Much of the opposition is rooted in widespread displeasure with Mr.
Chavez's
policies. White-collar workers view him as a left-wing autocrat. Unions
resent
his attempts to impose his control on them."

Forero and the rest of the official media chorus - including AP and
Reuters
upon which most daily newspapers, radio and TV stations rely on for
international
news coverage - did not explore the details of the oil workers union's
real
gripe with the Chavez government: That the union bureaucracy had been
in direct
disobedience of new laws requiring fair and free elections for union
leadership.
Does insisting on free elections constitute "imposing control"? Or does
it constitute
a necessary part of the democratization of a nation?

And what of the other vested interests of the Five TV chains, the
national dailies,
the Catholic Church, the military brass and the Chamber of Commerce and
Industry
who mixed themselves up into a Molotov cocktail of a coup? What of the
role
of the United States? These questions were never asked by the
commercial media,
much less answered.

Coup Central:

The CIA Bunker in Caracas

A report would appear two days later in the daily Panamá América
newspaper that
shed light on how oil union boss Carlos Ortega, the number-two coup
organizer
(among the Venezuelans involved) second only to
oilman-turned-dictator-for-a-day
Pedro Carmona, became head of the oil union and consequently of
Venezuela's
equivalent of the AFL-CIO.

Translated by The Narco News Bulletin:

"Months ago, we warned that the U.S. government had put a plan in march
to topple
Venezuela's president Hugo Chávez. Working with agents of the CIA and
with members
of the military group that the Pentagon maintains in Caracas to
supervise U.S.
arms sales in the region, the strategies from the Potomac joined forces
with
the opponents of the president. Bankers, businessmen and politicians
donated
funds to creat the marches and protest that detonated the crisis. Money
from
the opposition served to influence union elections and the control of
the petroleum
workers union, the most important in Venezuela…"

Narco News has learned that the CIA headquarters for organizing,
distributing
said cash, and engineering the attempted coup d'etat, was the office
known as
the MIL GROUP. That's the name by which the US Military Liason staff in
Embassies
- "usually a repository for fixers and grafters pitching Department of
Defense
sponsored weapons sales to third world satrapies," as one source
colorfully
explained to Narco News - had, according to another well-placed source,
greatly
increased its staff size in the weeks prior to the attempted coup.

We presume the increase in personnel - or individuals posing as
personnel at
the MIL GROUP - was not due to a sudden desire by Washington to sell
more arms
to the Chavez government.

Former National Security Agency officer Wayne Madsen, writing with
Richard M.
Bennett, reveal that the U.S. participation in the failed coup attempt
was not
only financial, but military. Reporting from the National Press
Building in
Washington, they have just blown the roof off of U.S. government
denials of
involvement in the coup with this Intelligence Report:

Under the cover of the COMPTUEX and a Joint Task Force Exercise (JTFEX)
training
exercises in the Caribbean the US Navy provided signals intelligence
and communications
jamming support to the Venezuelan military. Particular focus by US Navy
SIGINT
vessels was on communications to and from the Cuban, Libyan, Iranian,
and Iraqi
diplomatic missions in Caracas. All four countries had expressed
support for
Chavez and the plans for US military and intelligence support for the
coup d'etat
were brought upto date following President Bush's visit to Peru and El
Salvador
in March 2002. The National Security Agency (NSA) supported the coup
using personnel
attached to the US Southern Command's Joint Interagency Task Force East
(JIATF-E)
in Key West, Florida. NSA's Spanish-language linguists and signals
interception
operators in Key West; Sabana Seca on Puerto Rico and the Regional
Security
Operating Centre (RSOC) in Medina, Texas also assisted in providing
communications
intelligence to US military and national command authorities on the
progress
of the coup d'etat.

From eastern Colombia, CIA and US contract military personnel,
ostensibly used
for counter-narcotics operations, stood by to provide logistics support
for
the leading members of the coup. Their activities were centred at the
Marandua
airfield and along the border with Venezuela. Patrol aircraft operating
from
the US Forward Operating Location (FOL) in Manta, Ecuador also provided
intelligence
support for the military move against Chavez. Additional USN vessels on
a training
exercise in the Outer Range of the US Navy's Southern Puerto Rican
Operating
Area also stood by in the event the coup against Chavez faltered, thus
requiring
a military evacuation of US citizens in Venezuela. The ships included
the aircraft
carrier USS George Washington and the destroyers USS Barry, Laboon,
Mahan, and
Arthur W. Radford. Some of the latter vessels reportedly had NSA Direct
Support
Units aboard to provide additional signals intelligence support to US
Special
Operations and intelligence personnel deployed on the ground in close
co-operation
with the Venezuelan Army and along the Colombian side of the border.

The polemic in recent weeks in which the Narco-State government of
Colombia
(again, with NY Timesman Juan Forero as its press agent) accused the
Chávez
government of Venezuela of harboring Colombian rebels now seems
particularly
hypocritical given the confirmation that Colombian territory was used
by US
forces in the failed coup attempt. Also note that the cover for the
anti-democracy
military operation was "counter-narcotics operations" that "provide
logistics
support for the leading members of the coup."

In sum: the effort by US tax dollars to prop up Carlos Ortega as head
of the
oil union was intended, long ago, to provide a "working class" gloss
for the
Revolt of the Spoiled Brats. The oligarchy could not stand the fact
that, for
the first time, Venezuela had become a true democracy for the majority
of its
people who elected Chavez. Nor could it handle the reality that it was
now seen
by the Venezuelan majority for what it was: an oligarchy. So the
corrupt union
boss was brought in to provide a false image of class diversity.

Then the real expense to U.S. taxpayers (something especially timely to
reflect
upon on this date of April 15th) came in the form of a massive US
military and
intelligence operation.

But back to Thursday, for a moment: With the five TV chains running
free advertisements
every ten minutes urging the citizenry to join the march, the 40,000
member
oil workers union, the National Chamber of Commerce and Industry, and
the Catholic
Church hierarchy pulling out all the stops to create the illusion of a
popular
revolt, they only got between 50,000 and 150,000 people into the
streets of
Caracas to protest against Chavez. (Caracas has more than two million
citizens
and Venezuela, 24 million.)

The demonstration, purportedly in support of the business-backed oil
workers
strike, was initially advertised to march to the state oil agency's
offices.

But once the leaders - with the help of the TV stations (upset with
Chavez,
as we reported on Saturday, over having to pay taxes like any other
business
for the first time in their history) - had the crowd assembled, they
switched
the parade route and marched their own lambs to a pre-plotted
slaughter.

The march - puny in size compared to the multitudes that would take to
the streets
to oppose the Coup in coming days - was detoured by the coup plotters
to head
to the presidential palace known as Miraflores, where several thousand
supporters
of the Chavez government were already assembled.

As universally reported by the English-language media - including the
Four Horsemen
of Simulation; AP, Reuters, the NY Times and CNN - shots were fired,
between
10 and 30 people died, and another 100 or so wounded. The question of
where
those shots came from looms explosively.

Eyewitness in Caracas Greg Wilpert reported on Friday in an article for
commondreams.org
- and linked immediately by Narco News - that the majority of killed
and wounded
were Chavez supporters. Wilpert has subsequently reported that, now
that the
Constitutional government of Chavez is restored, he expects the list of
martyrs
to finally be released (interesting, how the coup never released the
names of
the dead), and the list will show that the majority of those killed
were Chavez
supporters. Wilpert also comments that he expects videotapes to be
released
in the coming days that show the true culprits behind the shooting
provocation:
an extreme anti-Chavez group titled "Bandera Roja."

But AP, Reuters, the NY Times, CNN and many other English-language
media sources
reported, without sourcing their claim, that the shots came from the
Chávez
government. They repeated that unsubstantiated speculation as fact over
and
over and over again. And White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer
claimed that
Chavez "ordered" the shootings. All of this will come out in the wash
in the
coming days. Suffice to say, the mainstream media got the story wrong,
intentionally
wrong, to blame violent acts by Chávez opponents on Chávez.

Chávez Never Resigned

The Four Horsemen of Simulation - AP, Reuters, the New York Times and
CNN -
and virtually the entire commercial press reported that Chavez had
"resigned"
from office after the shootings.

All have subsequently been forced to change their stories, because the
clearest
fact that has emerged from this entire drama is that President Chávez
never
resigned.

They did not source their claim. They simply stated it as fact.

Some major media outlets went as far as to invent more extreme
fictions, aimed
at portraying Chávez as a coward and buffoon. On Thursday night, the
Dow Jones
Newswire reported a story titled "Venezuela President Chavez Seen
Leaving Country-Report."
The coup leaders had gone so far as to circulate a lie, repeated
endlessly by
the US press, that Chavez had behaved timidly, and had pled permission
to flee
to another country (many reports presumed it was Cuba.)

The Dow Jones Newswire - the press agency of the Wall Street Journal -
repeated
that headline NINE times before the night was done. Even after
reporting that
Chavez was under arrest in Venezuela, Dow Jones (knowing full well that
local
radio newscasters throughout the U.S. read the headlines aloud the next
morning)
persisted in titling the story: "REPEAT - Venezuela President Chavez
Seen Leaving
Country - Report."

Thursday night was a dark hour for journalism in our América. It's
cynicism
and simulation would only be surpassed by what was to come… on Friday.

FRIDAY, APRIL 12, 2002:

DEMOCRACY HELD HOSTAGE, DAY TWO

New York Times readers awoke on Friday morning to read what should
herald, in
retrospect, Juan Forero's resignation from a career as a so-called
journalist.
Forero wrote:

"Mr. Chavez, 47, a firebrand populist who had said he would remake
Venezuela
to benefit the poor, was obligated to resign in a meeting with three
military
officers about 3 a.m. today…"

Forero was, by now, in full disinformation mode. He claimed that
Chavez, during
his presidency, had "seized control of the legislature," neglecting to
clarify
that Venezuela's electorate voted fair and square, the American way, at
the
ballot box for members of Congress who supported the Bolivarian
Revolution of
Chavez.

On Friday, the military junta that had arrested and imprisoned the
President
at gunpoint without having legally charged him with any crime,
installed national
Chamber of Commerce and Industry chairman, oilman, and number-one coup
leader
Pedro Carmona as "president."

Among Carmona's first acts: He abolished the elected national congress,
disbanded
the constitutionally established Supreme Court, and even changed the
name of
the country from the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela to the plain old
Republic
of Venezuela.

Thus, in the name of stopping an "autocrat," a "dictator," an
"authoritarian,"
a "strongman," and other epithets thrown by Forero and the Horsemen of
Simulation,
the coup installed a real dictator, Pedro Carmona: un-elected, mentally
unstable,
so mercurial as to demand the abolition of Congress, and who began a
house-by-house
witch hunt to round up cabinet members, congressmen and political
leaders in
Venezuela.

''We cannot allow a tyrant to run the Republic of Venezuela,'' said
Navy Vice
Adm. Hector Rafael Ramirez according to Forero. The Admiral was
spouting those
words... at the precise moment that he was installing a tyrant to run
the Republic
of Venezuela.

It was on this day that the owning class of the commercial media reared
its
true face as a vested enemy of democracy.

The Inter-American Press Association, dominated by the oligarch owners
of newspapers
in América whose definition of "press freedom" is their liberty run
their commercial
fiefdoms at maximum political and economic profit, issued a statement
on this
date:

"President Robert J. Cox said today that political developments in
Venezuela
demonstrate to nations throughout the world that there can be no true
democracy
without free speech and press freedom."

As with Forero's inverted dialectic of "democracy or dictatorship," the
IAPA
press release was positively Orwellian. Repeating its prior complaints
that
Chávez's "belligerent and intolerant attitude towards journalists and
the news
media" (read: the President's speeches criticizing the simulation by a
media
that serves only the wealthy and denies voice to the majority) somehow
constituted
interference with press freedom, the IAPA showed its true fangs in
endorsing
a military dictatorship over a democratically elected government.

"This is a classic example for the new government headed by Pedro
Carmona, which
hopefully will turn things around, respect freedom of the press and
encourage
the independence of the judiciary, and thus, ensure restoration of true
democracy,"
Cox added.

Cox and his group of Inauthentic Journalists inverted the question of
the day.
In declaring "there can be no true democracy without free speech and
press freedom,"
it forgot the inverse: There can be no free speech and press freedom
without
true democracy."

The IAPA lost all the illusory credibility it had with that savage
endorsement
of a military coup. The IAPA, instead of defending democratic values,
became
part of the coup.

As Mexican newspaper publisher and editor Mario Menéndez Rodríguez -
the founder
of the term "authentic journalism," the most experienced American
journalist
covering revolutions and counter-revolutions in this hemisphere, and
our victorious
co-defendant in the New York Supreme Court decision that established
First Amendment
rights for online journalists - said, "You will know the true character
of a
journalist by how he behaves during a crisis."

IAPA President Robert J. Cox - like many others - revealed his true
character
in these Three Days that Shook the Media. In a meritocracy he would be
immediately
demoted to beat reporter to learn the ropes all over again. We
recommend that
he and the others like him who turned their backs on the most important
value
of any free society - the protection of electoral democracy over
military imposed
dictatorship - go back to square one. Cox and the others can begin by
reading
our 24 Coup Questions for Journalists, and by doing the gumshoe work to
answer
those questions. After all, he'll have the time now: nothing he does as
IAPA
boss will have any credibility from this date forward.

In these Friday hours, the situation seemed hopeless. Absolute Power
had strangled
democracy in our América, and the commercial media had become
handmaiden to
a military junta.

And then, miraculously, the cavalry arrived.

The Counter-Coup

by Authentic Journalism

Then, on Friday night, what history will call "the counter-coup by
authentic
journalism" began, as the Vheadline.com online newspaper and its editor
Roy
S. Carson, news editor Patrick J. O'Donoghue and 14 reporters
throughout Venezuela
began to break the information blockade.

Among many authentic journalists who turned the tide, Carson deserves
the democratic
medal of valor. At 11 a.m. on Thursday, before the coup occurred, his
Vheadline.com
website had gone into the shop for maintenance. When it rains it pours:
Carson
woke up Friday morning recovering from pre-ocular surgery he had
received on
Thursday, but upon learning of the coup he rose from his bed to change
the history
of América. His website was inoperative, but Carson, undaunted, began
filing
email alerts which were published by Narco News, Indy Media, and many
others
of the Authentic Journalism Renaissance.

At 7:30 on Friday night, Vheadline.com translated and distributed, via
email
the first decrees of the military-installed regime of oilman Pedro
Carmona.

The global distribution of the "Transitional Junta Decree" on the
Internet erased,
in one fell swoop, all the fictions repeated in the mass media about
who was
the real dictator:

Caracas, Friday, April 12, 2002 -- 7:30 p.m.

Article 1 - Pedro Carmona Estanga is designated president of the
Republic of
Venezuela.

Article 2 - The name of the Republic of Venezuela is re-established.

Article 3 - Principal and substitute legislators of the National
Assembly (AN)
are suspended from their posts…

The decree also delayed new presidential elections until up to a year
from now
and stated:

"The President in Cabinet will be able to remove and transitionally
designate
the officials of national, state and municipal agencies to guarantee
institutional
democracy and the adequate functioning of the stated… The
reorganization of
public agencies is decreed for the purpose of regaining their autonomy
and independence
and to ensure a peaceful and democratic transition, "thus dismissing
from posts
illegitimately held by the president and magistrates of the Supreme
Tribunal
of Justice (TSJ), Comptroller, Attorney General, OfficialOmbudsman and
members
of the National Electoral College (CNE)."

The decree also suspended 48 laws passed Constitutionally by the Chavez
government
and Congress in 2001

Dictatorship vs. Democracy, indeed.

The Vheadline.com archives of its email alerts from April 11th to 13th
is now
online (the website was back in action by Saturday afternoon) at:

http://www.vheadline.com/p1

The updates are archived in reverse chronological order (in other
words, for
a blow-by-blow account, scroll from the bottom up). Historians of the
coup,
and scholars of the Authentic Journalism Renaissance, will consult
those Vheadline.com
archives for years to come.

Then came Saturday, and the turning of the tide.

SATURDAY, APRIL 13, 2002:

Collapse of a Coup

While New York Times readers awoke to a puff piece by Juan Forero about
the
new dictator - titled, incredulously, "Manager and Conciliator - Pedro
Carmona
Estanga" - in which Forero repeated the lie that Chavez "was forced to
resign,"
the independent online media had begun to take back the microphone.

Among the factors that, in retrospect, caused news consumers from
throughout
the world to turn toward online news sources was that the official
reports by
Forero, AP, Reuters, CNN and others had become so obviously one-sided.
Indeed,
they had a gloating quality about what they errantly called Chávez's
downfall.
And the Times and others committed the faux pas of arrogance: They
underestimated
the public and overestimated its capacity to swallow their Selling of a
Dictator
- Carmona - as a legitimate "president."

Forero wrote:

''Carmona is not a mega-industrialist in his own right,'' a political
consultant,
Eric Ekvall, said. ''Carmona is a man who's always worked in and been
involved
in the business sector, but always as a manager. He's not one of the
landed
elite, with his own fortune, his own bank.''

(Here in the Narco Newsroom, we thought Forero's trotting out of Ekvall
was
shameless, though predictable: Ekvall - father of the former Miss
Venezuela
and an eccentric species of political consultant who is hostile to
basic democratic
values - had been one of the readers who had sent us hate mail after
our February
20th report predicting the coup. He raged at us, and at author Kim
Alphandary,
and mocked our description of Alphandary as an authentic journalist.
And now,
during the coup, here he was, on the pages of the New York Times doing
spin-control
for an authoritarian dictator and a coup that seven weeks ago he swore
would
never happen, trying to portray the sleazy oilman Carmona as some kind
of humble
man of the people.)

While Forero and other English-language commercial reporters were
relying on
Embassy sources, oligarchs like Ekvall, and the slanted Venezuelan TV
"coverage"
of events, Vheadline.com and its team of reporters was driving a stake
through
the official censorship.

At 1:50 p.m. on Saturday, Vheadline.com broke the story that the
Speaker of
the National Assembly had rejected the dictator Carmona's decree
abolishing
the elected legislative branch of government (the "abolished"
legislators later
announced that come Sunday, they would hold a formal session anyway).
Moments
later, Vheadline.com reported that protests had erupted in the slums of
Caracas
against the military-installed dictatorship. (A polemic would later
ensue because
the five big TV chains of Venezuela had made a concerted decision to
not report
demonstrations against the coup; Vheadline.com was getting its
information directly
from the streets.)

Later that afternoon, Vheadline.com translated a statement by the major
human
rights organizations of Venezuela condemning the coup and the illegal
arrests
of elected and political leaders by the Carmona dictatorship.

And so it went: 4:38 p.m., disturbances break out in the popular
neighborhoods
of the capital. 4:56 p.m., a military junta leader admits on the radio
that
Chávez never resigned. 6:40 p.m. "Two national dailies and a private TV
station
have imposed an absolute news blackout."

And, the most crucial turning point of all: rank-and-file soldiers and
officers
at the nation's largest Army Base in Maracay reject the military junta
and begin
the counter-coup (Maracay is the base where Venezuela's F16 fighter
planes are
hangared, and a nervous Washington began worrying about the oil fields
that
supply 15 percent of the United States' imported oil.)

In the streets of virtually every city and town in Venezuela, the poor,
as Ch
vez had predicted the day before the coup, "came down from the hills."

The ocean of bodies placed itself between the dictatorship and history.
Carmona's
troops began firing upon crowds indiscriminately, the very behavior it
had accused
the Chávez government of undertaking in creating a pretext for the
military
coup. Morgues and hospitals filled with the dead and wounded civilians.
Rank-and-file
soldiers throughout the country broke ranks with the brass, reclaimed
the presidential
palace for the Bolivarian Revolution, and forced the high military
commanders
to begin to backpedal from their imposition of Carmona.

"Oh, how the poor love each other," John Reed wrote in his early 20th
century
classic, "Ten Days That Shook The World." The poor majority of
Venezuela, unseen
and unheard by the English-language media, blacked-out by the five TV
stations
of the oligarchs in Venezuela, had come forward to make a lie out of
months
of disinformation by the establishment media, which had claimed that
Chavez
had lost popular support.

And is this not the story of our times? A media so concerned with
pandering
to wealthy consumers in order to draw even wealthier advertisers that
it has
forgotten the very motive for the First Amendment protections it
enjoys: That
in democracy, all voices must be heard.

And all ears must be able to hear those voices. And all eyes must be
able to
see: Is that not the stated mission of the news media?

Millions of people around the world have read Narco News, but we never
forget
that each reading is by one set of eyes at a time. The eyes of
journalist Mari
Ranut in the island nation of Trinidad and Tobago - just seven miles
from the
Venezuela coast, in the Caribbean sea - were looking for information as
these
events were unfolding. Unsatisfied by the news blackout of the
commercial Venezuelan
oligarch-controlled media, and the inauthentic reporting of the
English-language
media, she turned to the Internet, and found her way to these pages.
Her newspaper,
Trinicenter.com, like so many other online publications, helped turn
one slingshot
into a thousand stones fired from all directions until the Goliath lie
- "Ch
vez resigned" - fell to earth with a thud heard 'round the world.
Authentic
Journalist Mari Ranut analyzed what had just occured:

Were it not for independent Internet news sources the developing story
in Venezuela
would not have been made public. Without the Internet Vanguards, the
coup in
Venezuela and the coup of information would have gone unchecked or
buried below
the prejudices of many with the attitude of "Another Central American
Coup,
what's new".

For 48 hours the mainstream media e.g. BBC, CNN gave very little news
about
the grassroots support for Chávez that had taken to the street
demanding his
reinstatement. They did not keep the public updated as to the fact that
there
were three changes in leadership. Instead they tried to hammer home
that Ch
vez (the Democratically elected leader) 'resigned', a resignation that
they
did not confirm as Chávez was not allowed media access. A resignation
at the
barrel of a gun cannot be considered valid. This was another clear case
of distorted
propaganda...

Now that the independent Internet medias have done their duty to inform
the
public, the mainstream media has no choice now but to start bringing
out the
bits and pieces they have been hiding. Suddenly they are showing the
Pro-Ch
vez supporters on the streets demanding his re-instatement and as we
can see
it is not hundreds but thousands, many thousands more than they were
showing
that called for his removal...

The lessons of the hypocrisy of the American and other European Powers
are being
learnt quickly because the Internet is proving to be the largest
pressroom ever
established. The U.S. cannot shut down all the websites in the World at
once;
they may bomb independent media buildings or support their big
businesses in
gobbling up these smaller media, but the small non-commercial activists
Websites
are the real challenge.

The Internet shows you do not need a building that can be bombed or any
easily
identifiable structure to provide alternative news and views. You just
need
a computer, a phone line and information, and guess what, you don't
have to
own it. Just check your local library or Internet cafe.

The coup in Venezuela has been foiled with the aid of small independent
media
outlets in support of the rights of ordinary people. People must always
remember
this.

The fledgling movement of Authentic Journalism - above all, online
journalism
- broke the information blockade and refused to allow the simulation to
continue.

The Bolivarian Revolution of Venezuela's poor majority has won back
more, so
much more, than its own country. It has delivered Washington's policy
of simulation
against democracy its first major defeat, and the dominoes have only
begun to
fall.

But perhaps even more significantly, the people of Venezuela created
the conditions
under which Authentic Journalism has now wrestled the microphone from a
discredited
commercial mass media.

No victory is final. As journalist Bill Vann notes, "An armed uprising
that
failed preceded the September 1973 military coup that brought down the
Popular Unity government of Salvador Allende and inaugurated General
Augusto
Pinochet’s reign of terror against the Chilean working class. That
abortive
action, just like the recent move against Chavez, showed how vulnerable
the
government was to a coup. It also provided a dress rehearsal for a real
confrontation
with the masses and allowed the principal figures in the military to
determine
which units could be relied upon and which could not."

But what we have today is a fighting chance that democracy in América
did not
have in 1973: the now-demonstrated ability to rise up with a thousand
informational
slingshots and take down the big lie.

This is not a story about "new technology," but, rather, about people,
human
beings, journalists, authentic journalists... Not just Narco News, or
Vheadline.com,
or the now-online intelligence report by a courageous former National
Security
Agency officer, but most importantly a decentralized slingshot army -
you know
who you are - that now has the microphone and will never give it up to
the commercially-driven
usurpers of democracy again.

The revolution has taken back the media palace, too.

Welcome, kind readers, to the 21st Century. Like the dawn of an
authentic sun,
we come from below.

It's morning in América. Oh, this little light of ours…

Al Giordano, journalist, reports from Latin America.

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