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<h1><b>I Can't Believe It's Not Human Rights
Watch!</b></h1><font size=3>September 25th 2008, by Elizabeth Ferrari -
OpEdNews <br><br>
As Americans, we operate from a position of privileged naivete, a kind of
concrete operational thinking: we believe things are what they are called
especially when it comes to public life. If someone reads us a bill
called "No Child Left Behind", we go ahead and assume it will
help children. If an act named the "Help America Vote Act"
passes, we expect that our elections just got better. The Heritage
Foundation is surely an organization that has something to do with
colonial hardiness and a can-do spirit. There is nothing more sad than we
are when we learn, against all reason, that NCLB is a hijacking of our
schools by privateers or that HAVA makes our elections vastly more
vulnerable or that The Heritage Foundation is a right wing propaganda
mill that is every day finding better ways to funnel our tax money into
corporate wallets with a nakedness that Lady Godiva could only aspire to.
<br><br>
So, when we read in the American press that two officials from Human
Rights Watch have been booted out of Venezuela, our first thought will
not be, "what did they do". It won't be. We expect people who
work for Human Rights Watch to, well, watch human rights. They have a web
site and everything, just like Amnesty International and the
International Red Cross. And maybe that kind of optimism, that positive
expectation, has its value in these difficult days. But it's misplaced if
one is trying to understand what is going on in Venezuela, in Latin
America and in our relationships with both as the Bush administration is
shaping them. Or, misshaping them. <br><br>
Human Rights Watch is not a merely group of concerned citizens monitoring
human rights any more than the Heritage Foundation is a think tank that
seeks to preserve traditional American values, despite their website's
claim. Their board and donors come from the bedrock of the US political
power establishment. So, there's that. <br><br>
And then, there's the matter of our intelligence services hanging out in
NGOs. (I suppose, our overseas operatives can't <i>all</i> work at the
local embassy.) A friend of mine from El Salvador reminds me that during
the war, a planeful of "humanitarian workers" was shot down and
apparently, somehow it was full of US government operatives instead. It
was shot down close to the capital and Rolando believes it was the
government, not the guerillas, that shot it down. The government had had
enough of the "Peace Corps" meddling with their affairs, allies
or not. The few survivors of the crash were executed on the spot, it was
later determined. Guerillas didn't operate that close to San Salvador
during the war, so this was a terrible case of a US client state sending
back a message to Washington. <br><br>
More recently, as Amy Goodman has reported, arriving Peace Corps
volunteers and young visiting scholars were solicited to spy for our
government when they went to be briefed at our embassy in Bolivia. They
were there for a welcome to the country and instead, they were told to
spy on Venezuelans and on Cubans. It must be very upsetting to believe
you are in Bolivia to work on hunger or to write a study on literacy and
then to have your own Ambassador direct you to violate the trust of the
very people you look forward to working with. These kids hadn't even
unpacked before they were enlisted to violate international law.
<br><br>
Regardless, they were caught up in the Bush administration machinations
that last week resulted in our ambassadors to Bolivia and to Venezuela
being asked to leave. There is evidence that the Bush government has been
backing the white separatists in Bolivia, the same ones that went on a
genocidal rampage recently. The latest coup plot discovered in Venezuela,
at the same moment as the uprising in Bolivia, came with a taped
discussion of American support. <br><br>
In short, the Bush government has accelerated its attempts to destabilize
democracy both in Bolivia and in Venezuela in the last two weeks and,
they got caught. It was into this already turbulent, even deadly,
landscape that Jose Miguel Vivanco of Human Rights Watch decided to
release his 10 year review of Venezuela <i>five months early</i>.
<br><br>
There is nothing in this new report that is new, let alone so urgent that
it justified an early release by <i>five months</i>. Vivanco repeats past
criticism of the Chavez government regarding the judiciary, the media and
labor unions and his critique doesn't bear inspection. These are old
chestnuts. Vivanco's blustering about the judiciary has been debunked;
it's exactly how FDR rehabilitated a stacked Supreme Court. Vivanco's
support for the Uribe government, which leads the world in murdering
labor organizers, disqualifies him from commenting <i>ever again</i> on
the state of Venezuela's official relations with labor unions. His
championing of RCTV, who tried to get Chavez killed during the 2002 coup
they hosted in their studio, has been rebutted by F.A.I.R. and condemned
by leading intellectuals around the world. <br><br>
It's an easy matter to determine that Mr. Vivanco has a pattern of
sticking his oar into Venezuelan internal affairs at politically
sensitive times. All you have to do is look for a vote any time during
his tenure in that country and his name comes up in the press. Wilkinson,
his deputy, is less overtly partisan. His work combines the color of a
travelogue with the mannerisms of an academic writer. But, his core
positions on Venezuela seem to be identical to Vivanco's if his February
2008 article in The Nation is any indication. The same discredited
complaints are trotted out with nothing new to recommend them and they
are awash in a romanticized pessimism that would astonish community
organizers in Caracas. <br><br>
Vivanco's pattern of disruptions are, of course, nowhere in the two
spammed articles that reported his expulsion from Venezuela over the
weekend. But, the American press seems to trust the Bush government and
its adjuncts with all things Venezuelan and has once again simply passed
on and proliferated the official story. I wish my betters in the press
corpse would wake up and smell the disinformation. Last November, they
printed the story that the Venezuelan referendum would not have election
monitors. They knew because the State Department said so. That turned out
to be embarrassingly wrong: the NAACP and National Lawyers' Guild were on
the job by invitation.. More recently, they forwarded the story that one
or more captured FARC laptops - that survived US-guided direct bombing
hits as miraculously as a hijacker's passport - contained damning emails
from Chavez proving he was funding the guerillas. Greg Palast made short
work of that rumor but the bureaus never turned a hair. They were on to
reporting without any self-consciousness at all that Venezuela and
Bolivia were not doing their part in the War on Drugs. Their sources were
Bush administration "officials" who apparently forget at their
convenience that the world's largest suppliers of drugs, Colombia and
Afghanistan, are both American client states. <br><br>
So on Friday, the talking point was: Chavez has expelled two human rights
workers. That these two men have been more active in critiquing Chavez
politically than in observing the steadily improving state of human
rights in Venezuela never caused the smallest ripple in the coverage.
These HRW representatives have repeatedly timed their critiques to
coincide with Bush administration attacks on the Chavez government at
sensitive moments. Nobody in the media seems to be noticing that they
have done exactly what they have been accused of by the Chavez
government, of meddling in Venezuela's internal affairs, although anyone
with a search engine and an hour to search has access to that
information. The coverage hasn't once ruffled the cover. <br><br>
It's saddening to find that Human Rights Watch is not exempt from the
long history of US government "tampering by NGO". Human Rights
Watch has allowed Mr. Vivanco to so misconstrue and overstep his mission
in Venezuela that the organization itself has lost credibility and a
great deal of good will. The decisions HRW makes going forward will
determine if that organization is ever able to recover the good name it
has so casually sacrificed in service of an openly political agenda and
in the last chaotic, destructive days of the Bush disaster. <br><br>
There is, though, a sort of wonderful image floating around the internet
-- a direct result of the last few weeks of the war on democracy in Latin
America, as John Pilger calls it. It is a long rather than tall
photograph of twelve Latin American leaders flanking Evo Morales, showing
their support for him during this last violent attack on his goverment by
the Bush Government and the interests Bush fronts. Mr. Chavez is off to
the left, waving but not asking for focus. President Morales is in the
center, smiling quietly. I've never seen such a strong show of solidarity
among democratic Latin American leaders in my lifetime. When you look at
this photograph, you can't help but think of that Obama campaign slogan:
Not this time. <br><br>
Maybe the good people at Human Rights Watch should take a look. <br><br>
<br><br>
<i>Elizabeth Ferrari is a San Francisco author and activist.</i> <br>
Source:<br>
<a href="http://www.opednews.com/articles/I-Can-t-Believe-It-s-Not-H-by-Elizabeth-Ferrari-080922-709.html">
OpEdNews <br><br>
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