Chile and Bolivia Reports Expose Western Media’s Rank Hypocrisy

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From Venezuela and made by Venezuelan Chavistas
Chileâs anti-neoliberal rebellion is entering its third week, and the brutal crackdown continues. Hard-right President Sebastian PiĂąera and his generals have effectively decreed the countryâs oligarch-dominated democracy out of existence by sending soldiers into the streets to kill, maim and torture their own people.
And, for the most part, the Western corporate media blackout persists unabated.
October 25âs historic 1.2 millionâperson march in Santiagoâthe largest since the end of the dictatorshipâhas forced some outlets to begin to acknowledge state violence. But corporate journalists continue to largely overlook the PiĂąera governmentâs mounting atrocities.
As I examined recently for FAIR (10/23/19), this behavior contrasts remarkably with the corporate mediaâs unanimous backing of regime change in Venezuela, endorsing insurrectionary protests and vilifying Nicolas Maduro as a âdictatorâ (FAIR.org, 4/11/19).
This media bias in favor of PiĂąeraâs hardline neoliberal administration must also be juxtaposed with the unfolding coverage of anti-government protests in Bolivia. In yet another case of self-serving hypocrisy, US corporate media have moved to revoke left-wing President Evo Moralesâ democratic credentials after his recent re-election.
Lies of OmissionÂ
By October 21, the news had broken in the Chilean press that Ecuadorian national Romario Veloz, 26, had been shot dead by state security forces while taking part in a protest in northern Chile the previous evening.
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Over half a dozen people had already been killed since the protests began on October 16, and at least 1,420 detained at the time, according to Chileâs National Human Rights Institute (known in Spanish as INDH). Graphic videos of abhorrent state repression were already circulating widely on social media.
One might expect such glaring atrocities to spark attention from supposedly reputable international news outlets like the New York Times. It hasnât.
A Times article published on October 21, headlined âWhat You Need to Know About the Unrest in Chile,â made no mention whatsoever of the mounting allegations of egregious human rights violations.
The articleâs author, Times Southern Cone chief Ernesto LondoĂąo, was quite busy that evening tweeting about anti-government protestsânot in Chile, but in a country he does not technically cover, Bolivia, whose protests had yet to cause any reported deaths.
Boliviaâs US-backed opposition had just taken to the streets, crying fraud after the October 20 presidential elections that saw Morales win by the necessary ten-point margin to avoid a run-off. The controversy centers on a 24-hour delay in the quick count reporting of results by Boliviaâs electoral tribunal, but according to CEPRâs Mark Weisbrot (10/22/19), preliminary analysis of publicly available data from over 34,000 voting tables âshows no evidence of irregularity.â
LondoĂąo tweeted a graphic video of a bloodied university president âreportedly struck by tear gasâ during a protestâsomething he has yet to do in the case of Chile, despite the abundance of appalling footage.
In an article on the results (New York Times, 10/21/19), the reporter repeats the âdamningâ allegations of possible fraud by the OAS observer mission, which, he said, âraised the prospect that a victory by Mr. Morales would be regarded by the international community as illegitimate.â
LondoĂąo failed to note that the OAS has presented no hard evidenceâstatistical or otherwiseâto justify its âdeep concernâ over the supposedly âinexplicableâ reversal in the preliminary results that gave Morales the needed edge. Nor did he make mention of the OASâs ignominious track record of politicized electoral interference, or of the fact that the regional body is currently headed by a conspiracy theorist who has claimed in CIA fashion that Venezuela and Cuba are fomenting mass anti-neoliberal protests in Ecuador, Chile and Colombia. Notwithstanding this blatant bias, Morales has authorized the OAS to carry out an audit of the election results, which the opposition has revealingly opted to boycott.
The Times reporter crucially omits the fact that Morales has long enjoyed overwhelming support in the countryside, where vote tallies are generally delayed, with rural citizens frequently traveling significant distances to cast their ballots. In fact, of the 106,925 new votes counted in Cochabamba by October 22, Morales won by 52.2 percent to his rivalâs 35.4 percent.
Lacking a smoking gun, LondoĂąo instead turns to public perceptions to substantiate the fraud allegations. âThe accusations of fraud created a widespread sense that the president or his allies had worked behind the scenes to rig the vote,â he notes.
It would appear that the New York Times is only concerned about popular opinion when it happens to coincide with Western establishment wisdom. LondoĂąo cited no such âwidespread senseâ in Chilean society that President PiĂąera is a Pinochet-style butcher whom a majority thinks should resign and call early elections.
This kind of shoddy reporting is anything but accidental, given that Evo Morales, unlike Sebastian PiĂąera, is no friend of Washington. As the USâs local allies have repeatedly tried to overthrow Boliviaâs indigenous president, LondoĂąo is therefore permitted to slander Moralesâ democratic record with impunity.
âCritics say [Morales] has become increasingly authoritarian, accusing him of abusing his influence over the judicial system to intimidate or sideline political rivals,â he writes, declining to cite any actual critics, in a thinly veiled enunciation of his paperâs editorial line.
This nakedly biased journalism, demonizing Washingtonâs foes and covering for its clients, is very much par for the course.
Venezuela Redux
The evidence-free fraud allegations against Evo Morales form part of a now familiar script employed repeatedly against Venezuela.
Last year, the Trump administration and its hard-right opposition proxies preemptively refused to recognize the results of Venezuelaâs presidential election, despite opposition candidate Henri Falcon reaching an agreement on electoral guarantees with the government. Falcon, at the time the highest-polling opposition figure, according to widely cited anti-government pollster Datanalisis, was reportedly threatened with sanctions by Washington for daring to defy the US-backed boycott.
On election day, Maduro won an overwhelming victory over a divided opposition whose main parties opted to abstain rather than risk losing to a diminished but still highly mobilized Chavista bloc.
The opposition cried fraudâas they had done in virtually every election they lost over the past two decadesâwithout proffering any proof of vote rigging. Under Venezuelaâs automated electoral system, witnesses from all political parties must sign off on vote tallies in each polling center, which are randomly subject to a hot audit the same day, rendering fraud immediately evident.
The corporate media dutifully played its part, going on to recite the baseless fraud claims ad nauseam up through the present, effectively delegitimizing the election and paving the way for the current coup effort (FAIR.org, 5/23/18).
In Bolivia, Lisa Farthing has reported for NACLA (10/24/19) that opposition candidate Carlos Mesaâs Citizenâs Community alliance likewise began predicting fraud even before the voting began.
Meanwhile, the US State Department, which has refrained from making any statement on the brutal crackdown in Chile, was quick to weigh in, accusing the electoral tribunal of attempting to âsubvert Boliviaâs democracy.â
Like clockwork, the Western media began pumping out headlines casting the elections as illegitimate. âBolivia Polls: Morales Claims Victory Amid Fraud Claims,â reported the BBC (10/24/19), while CNN (10/23/19) wrote, âTensions Boil Over in Bolivia as Protesters Claim Presidential Election Was Rigged.â âShadow Hangs Over Bolivian Elections as Morales Scores First-Round Win,â announced Reuters (10/24/19).
Unlike in Chile, where mass demonstrations against military rule have been portrayed as irrationally âviolentâ (Financial Times, 10/28/19; CBC, 10/25/19; NPR, 10/22/19), Boliviaâs right-wing protests are presented as justifiable âangerâ (CBS, 10/25/19; BBC, 10/22/19; New York Times, 10/25/19) at an âauthoritarianâ government (Reuters, 10/27/19, Miami Herald, 10/25/19, Washington Post, 10/22/19).
Such coverage would be unthinkable in a Western country, where one would hope that a political opposition that refused to recognize election results and proceeded to torch ruling-party offices would be condemned across the media spectrum.
Staying the Criminal Course
The scale and staying power of Chileâs anti-neoliberal rebellion has nevertheless forced some corporate outlets to make amendments to their narrative portraying the PiĂąera government as âineptâ or âincompetentâ (FAIR.org, 10/23/19) rather than illegitimate or criminal.
Bloomberg (10/30/19) and the Guardian (10/27/19) were among the few to report on the 160 people who have suffered eye injuries, including at least 26 blinded in one eye, due to authorities firing of 9-millimeter rubber-coated lead bullets at demonstratorsâ heads.
Similarly, Bloomberg (10/30/19) and AP (published in Time, 10/29/19) were rare outlets that referred to the savage repression as a âcrackdown.â Bloomberg (10/30/19) went as far as to compare the mass protests to the â1988 plebiscite that ended the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.â
That AP article is typical of the recent corporate media backpedaling. While acknowledging in the 12th paragraph that the military is engaging in a âcrackdownâ that has left âdozens partially blinded,â the authors spent the first four paragraphs describing the âlootingâ and âattacksâ allegedly carried out by protesters, implicitly rationalizing the stateâs repression.
AP joins the vast majority of Western media in ignoring the INDHâs appalling statistics concerning the widespread criminality of Chilean state security forces. According to the body, as of November 4, 1,659 people have been hospitalized for injuries, including 40 shot with live ammunition, 473 wounded by buckshot and 305 by unidentified firearms.
The INDH has filed 181 lawsuits against state bodies so far, among them 133 for torture and 19 for sexual violence, including two cases of alleged rape.
For the most part, the op-ed pages of major Western newspapers continue to ignore or whitewash the crimes of the PiĂąera government.
A rare exception is a hard-hitting Washington Post op-ed (10/29/19) by Rodrigo Espinoza Troncoso and Michael Wilson Becerril, denouncing the stateâs âbrutal repressionâ and pointing to Chileâs anti-democratic, Pinochet-crafted constitution as the problem.
Most outlets have churned out a steady stream of âthink piecesâ blaming âinequalityâ for the protests, and calling on PiĂąera to address it (New York Times, 10/25/19; Washington Post, 10/29/19; Guardian, 10/30/19; Financial Times, 10/28/19). Others dispute that inequality is even a structural problem, chiding Chilean protesters for not appreciating the âsuccessâ of Chileâs neoliberal model (Bloomberg, 10/30/19; Miami Herald, 10/23/19).
To date, no corporate outlets have referred to PiĂąera as âauthoritarianâ or a âdictator,â as they have done repeatedly in the case of Venezuelaâs Maduro (FAIR.org, 4/11/19) and increasingly Boliviaâs Morales. No Western newspaper has published an editorial demanding their government pressure PiĂąera to end the military crackdown and relinquish power.
The coverage of Chileâs uprising proves once again that criminality on the part of Western states and their clients is perfectly palatable to corporate journalists whose atrocity, Michael Parenti observes, is always âagainst the truth.â
Featured image: For several weeks, Chileans have taken to the streets to protest their neoliberal government. (Screen shot / YouTube)
Lucas Koerner is a journalist and political analyst based in Caracas, Venezuela. He currently serves on the editorial board of Venezuelanalysis.
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