Carlos Londoño, Colombian journalist known as "the London Latino" on his UK based Latino News site, sent me an email this morning, with a copy of a short letter to the editor at the Guardian of London, preceded by a provocative commentary by Londoño:

"Who does not agree with the following letter does not accept the democratic system we wish to protect"-----

Dictators and freedom

Wednesday March 10, 2004
The Guardian

I was detained in Chile under Pinochet for almost two years. No charges, no tribunal, no recourse to the legal system (Judges accuse Blunkett, March 9). Some people were tried by military tribunals, in secret. Governments around the world which use such methods are labelled dictatorships. Why do we allow the US and the UK to do the same thing?

Abelardo Clariana-Piga
Southampton

------

This meme arrived as I was thinking this morning about the successful US-sponsored coup d'etat in these weeks in Haiti, and about what was different between it and the situation in Venezuela two years ago when the pro-democracy forces beat back the coup within three days.

There are "objective conditions" that distinguish the two situations, mainly:

Organizational (the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela is better organized than Lavalas in Haiti)…

Material (more resources at stake in oil-rich Venezuela, making it harder for events to slip under the global radar there), and…

Mediatic (the single biggest difference between the Haiti and Venezuela coups was that in one country – in Venezuela – there was a well-established Community Media that was ready to take on the fight, even 'til death, against the violent coup machine, including against the dishonest Commercial Media, and in the other country – in Haiti – there was not).

I thought that maybe at the next Narco News School of Authentic Journalism session, in South America, in July and August (details coming next week), I should convene a "situations room" and pull in the likes Blanca Eekhout in Caracas, Luis Gómez in La Paz, Dennis Bernstein in San Francisco (who sleeplessly, on the radio, called a coup a coup in Haiti last month and has been more on top of the situation than any other journalist from afar), and others who have been involved, journalism-wise, in the counter-coups. There – I am thinking out loud, please chime in with your own thoughts – we would not only analyze what occured in Haiti, and in Venezuela, and also in distinct situations, like Bolivia last October, when popular movements toppled an instutionalized coup-type government in a short time, but specifically and painstakingly analyze the question of "what does an authentic journalist do in these moments, and how."

Oh, just looking at the roster, we've got experienced war reporters like Jeremy Bigwood, and current correspondents who went through Haiti like Reed Lindsay, and others on our faculty who can be helpful with this war room and the construction of a realistic scenario or model to test real-time responses over what to do in coup crisis as authentic journalists.

Heavens, the RAND corporation already has its situations rooms and studies of Netwar. Somebody over in Washington is reading that shit because one thing they did "right" from a fascist point of view was the successful causing of Haiti's President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to be incomunicado during the most heated hours of the coup. The sequestering of Aristide to the Central African Republic was what could be called, in gallows humor, the political play of the week: it determined a lot of how the rest of the storyline went. We have to be ready for that – and worse – the next time they try a coup against an elected government in Latin America, which, now emboldened by their Haiti adventure, they will probably attempt soon.

The Haiti coup, more than being military or the result of a simulated "rebel" band of paramilitaries, was a media show.

And let's be honest: we – the authentic journalists – got our clocks cleaned.

We weren't ready.

The bad guys won.

A lot of how they won was in the terms they propagated through the wire services and Commercial Media, and by causing some slow-class types to adopt their terminology about "democracy" and "dictatorship," etc.

In any case, as readers here know, I don't like to lose. And in this case, I don't accept the defeat as permanent. So the question is, how to push back, and how to, next time, not be in a position to be pushed.

Okay, I've set the table. Comment.

Permalink: www.bigleftoutside.com/archives/000375.php