Time To Move Beyond The Pointless Rhetoric

I would honestly love to move on from debating Hugo Chavez, or rather the pointless rhetoric and mud-slinging that follows him in his wake. It seems to me that this constant war of words between his supporters and opponents is getting to the extent that it blinds all serious analysis of what is actually going on policy-wise in Venezuela. Whether or not Chavez’s “Bolivarian Revolution” represents a credible, sustainable alternative of development Latin America? Notably last weeks' spat between Chavez and Spain's King Juan Carlos at the Ibero-American Summit in Chile seems to have dominated the news media outlets, much more so than say anything that was actually covered at the Ibero-American summit itself. "Por que no te calles" has seemingly taken on extraordinary levels of popularity, becoming a ring-tone hit alongside becoming the new the unofficial anti-Chavez slogan.

A media-war is brewing, but then again it always has done with regards to Venezuela, ever since the pivotal role the local media had in ousting of Hugo Chavez from power in the 2002 coup d'é·tat. Is their media bias for or against Chavez? Well in response to an earlier post I wrote on the student protests against Chavez I came across a document (student demonstrations in Venezuela) sent out by the Venezuelan Embassy in the US highlighting how those protests had been misrepresented in the press and basically saying how the whole event had been exploited by the mainstream media (as clueless blogger like myself) as evidence of government repression of students opposed to the government. Also that media reports had failed to report the many positive steps the Venezuelan government has taken to increase the level of university education in the country - university students now number 774,000 , an almost doubling of the number of students since 1998.

As I said it's hard to know what to believe really, when all that we hear is the latest Chavez rant. Opinions become so polarized and based on so much senseless rhetoric, all of which does little to defuse the situation and actual attempts to understand what is going on in Venezuela behind the headlines. Hopefully throughout the course of my current Master's degree we'll actually be able to tackle this topic in a seriuos academic way. So I'll keep you posted.