The Revolution will not be Televised
Over New Year's weekend I was in San Francisco and saw that The Revolution will not be Televised was screening. It didn't fit into our schedule and I was bummed to miss it, but things turned out for the best and I got to see both the film and a lively debate last night in Cambridge.

The film shows a Chavez who is a dedicated servant of his country's lower class, who enjoys loyal support from his officials and the poorer people. We see thousands of notes written to Chavez, asking his help with personal and community problems. It is also striking how seriously the poor have embraced the new constitution; everyone seems to have a copy and know it by heart. In contrast, the elites and the media they control (including all television channels other than the one owned by the state) are shown to be almost rabid in their contempt for Chavez, his policies, and his supporters. We see a neighborhood meeting of the wealthy, who are instructed to keep an eye on their servants as they may be sympathetic to Chavez, and are encouraged to learn how to use handguns and to expect that their use will soon be necessary. The elite-led opposition looks even worse when it stages its military coup, in which Chavez is made to surrender from his palace to prevent it from being bombed by the military. The newly-installed elites - primarily older white men, in contrast to the diversity of Chavez' officials - are shown celebrating as they officially dissolve the national assembly, supreme court, and other democratic institutions.

As is indicated by the title, one theme of the film is the commercial media's complicity in the coup. After Chavez supporters have marched through the streets and inspired the palace guard to take the coup leaders into custody, we see Chavez' officials, inside the retaken palace, watching a commercial channel interview one of the escaped coup leaders, who insists that everything is under control and that the palace is still controlled by the new government. The US government is shown to be on the side of the coup as well - we see a clip of Colin Powell praising it as a victory for democracy.

After the film was over, a lively discussion ensued. The first to speak was a woman who identified herself as a middle-class member of the opposition. She argued that many in the opposition are sympathetic to Chavez' goals of building a fairer and more democratic society, but don't believe that Chavez is capable of achieving those goals. Others pointed out that it was very strange that someone interested in fairness and democracy would side with the wealthy elites who had engineered a military coup against a democratically elected leader.

A number of claims were made by opposition members about inaccuracies in the film, but even if all these claims were true, the basic conclusions of the film remain. Certainly the situation in Venezuela is far more complicated than is depicted in the film (no surprise there!), but I certainly did not hear anything to make me think that there was any moral justification for the coup, or that the elites who lead the anti-Chavez opposition have anything in mind but a return to the corrupt looting of the country that their predecessors have engaged in.

Some resources for further reading: the Chavez-critical Caracas Chronicles (see at least the hilarious autobiography of the writer) and the Chavez-supporting Venezuela Analysis. As one of the top five oil producers in the world, access to Venezuelan resources is high on the US list of priorities; at the same time, Venezuela has the potential to be one of the biggest victories for grassroots democracy anywhere in the world. For these reasons it seems rather important to keep our eyes on what happens there, and what the US government does or does not do to shape the situation.

Update: some reasons to suspect CIA involvement in the coup, along with more background.
[/media]