But back to Thursday, for a moment: With the five TV chains running free advertisements every ten minutes urging the citizenry to join the march, the 40,000 member oil workers union, the National Chamber of Commerce and Industry, and the Catholic Church hierarchy pulling out all the stops to create the illusion of a popular revolt, they only got between 50,000 and 150,000 people into the streets of Caracas to protest against Chavez. (Caracas has more than two million citizens and Venezuela, 24 million.)
The demonstration, purportedly in support of the business-backed oil workers strike, was initially advertised to march to the state oil agency's offices.
But once the leaders - with the help of the TV stations (upset with Chavez, as we reported on Saturday, over having to pay taxes like any other business for the first time in their history) - had the crowd assembled, they switched the parade route and marched their own lambs to a pre-plotted slaughter.
The march - puny in size compared to the multitudes that would take to the streets to oppose the Coup in coming days - was detoured by the coup plotters to head to the presidential palace known as Miraflores, where several thousand supporters of the Chavez government were already assembled.
As universally reported by the English-language media - including the Four Horsemen of Simulation; AP, Reuters, the NY Times and CNN - shots were fired, between 10 and 30 people died, and another 100 or so wounded. The question of where those shots came from looms explosively.
Eyewitness in Caracas Greg Wilpert reported on Friday in an article for commondreams.org - and linked immediately by Narco News - that the majority of killed and wounded were Chavez supporters. Wilpert has subsequently reported that, now that the Constitutional government of Chavez is restored, he expects the list of martyrs to finally be released (interesting, how the coup never released the names of the dead), and the list will show that the majority of those killed were Chavez supporters. Wilpert also comments that he expects videotapes to be released in the coming days that show the true culprits behind the shooting provocation: an extreme anti-Chavez group titled "Bandera Roja."
But AP, Reuters, the NY Times, CNN and many other English-language media sources reported, without sourcing their claim, that the shots came from the Chávez government. They repeated that unsubstantiated speculation as fact over and over and over again. And White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer claimed that Chavez "ordered" the shootings. All of this will come out in the wash in the coming days. Suffice to say, the mainstream media got the story wrong, intentionally wrong, to blame violent acts by Chávez opponents on Chávez.
Chávez Never Resigned
The Four Horsemen of Simulation - AP, Reuters, the New York Times and CNN - and virtually the entire commercial press reported that Chavez had "resigned" from office after the shootings.
All have subsequently been forced to change their stories, because the clearest fact that has emerged from this entire drama is that President Chávez never resigned.
They did not source their claim. They simply stated it as fact.
Some major media outlets went as far as to invent more extreme fictions, aimed at portraying Chávez as a coward and buffoon. On Thursday night, the Dow Jones Newswire reported a story titled "Venezuela President Chavez Seen Leaving Country-Report." The coup leaders had gone so far as to circulate a lie, repeated endlessly by the US press, that Chavez had behaved timidly, and had pled permission to flee to another country (many reports presumed it was Cuba.)
The Dow Jones Newswire - the press agency of the Wall Street Journal - repeated that headline NINE times before the night was done. Even after reporting that Chavez was under arrest in Venezuela, Dow Jones (knowing full well that local radio newscasters throughout the U.S. read the headlines aloud the next morning) persisted in titling the story: "REPEAT - Venezuela President Chavez Seen Leaving Country - Report."
Thursday night was a dark hour for journalism in our América. It's cynicism and simulation would only be surpassed by what was to come… on Friday.
FRIDAY, APRIL 12, 2002:
DEMOCRACY HELD HOSTAGE, DAY TWO
New York Times readers awoke on Friday morning to read what should herald, in retrospect, Juan Forero's resignation from a career as a so-called journalist. Forero wrote:
"Mr. Chavez, 47, a firebrand populist who had said he would remake Venezuela to benefit the poor, was obligated to resign in a meeting with three military officers about 3 a.m. today…"
Forero was, by now, in full disinformation mode. He claimed that Chavez, during his presidency, had "seized control of the legislature," neglecting to clarify that Venezuela's electorate voted fair and square, the American way, at the ballot box for members of Congress who supported the Bolivarian Revolution of Chavez.
On Friday, the military junta that had arrested and imprisoned the President at gunpoint without having legally charged him with any crime, installed national Chamber of Commerce and Industry chairman, oilman, and number-one coup leader Pedro Carmona as "president."
Among Carmona's first acts: He abolished the elected national congress, disbanded the constitutionally established Supreme Court, and even changed the name of the country from the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela to the plain old Republic of Venezuela.
Thus, in the name of stopping an "autocrat," a "dictator," an "authoritarian," a "strongman," and other epithets thrown by Forero and the Horsemen of Simulation, the coup installed a real dictator, Pedro Carmona: un-elected, mentally unstable, so mercurial as to demand the abolition of Congress, and who began a house-by-house witch hunt to round up cabinet members, congressmen and political leaders in Venezuela.
''We cannot allow a tyrant to run the Republic of Venezuela,'' said Navy Vice Adm. Hector Rafael Ramirez according to Forero. The Admiral was spouting those words... at the precise moment that he was installing a tyrant to run the Republic of Venezuela.
It was on this day that the owning class of the commercial media reared its true face as a vested enemy of democracy.
The Inter-American Press Association, dominated by the oligarch owners of newspapers in América whose definition of "press freedom" is their liberty run their commercial fiefdoms at maximum political and economic profit, issued a statement on this date:
"President Robert J. Cox said today that political developments in Venezuela demonstrate to nations throughout the world that there can be no true democracy without free speech and press freedom."
As with Forero's inverted dialectic of "democracy or dictatorship," the IAPA press release was positively Orwellian. Repeating its prior complaints that Chávez's "belligerent and intolerant attitude towards journalists and the news media" (read: the President's speeches criticizing the simulation by a media that serves only the wealthy and denies voice to the majority) somehow constituted interference with press freedom, the IAPA showed its true fangs in endorsing a military dictatorship over a democratically elected government.
"This is a classic example for the new government headed by Pedro Carmona, which hopefully will turn things around, respect freedom of the press and encourage the independence of the judiciary, and thus, ensure restoration of true democracy," Cox added.
Cox and his group of Inauthentic Journalists inverted the question of the day. In declaring "there can be no true democracy without free speech and press freedom," it forgot the inverse: There can be no free speech and press freedom without true democracy."
The IAPA lost all the illusory credibility it had with that savage endorsement of a military coup. The IAPA, instead of defending democratic values, became part of the coup.
As Mexican newspaper publisher and editor Mario Menéndez Rodríguez - the founder of the term "authentic journalism," the most experienced American journalist covering revolutions and counter-revolutions in this hemisphere, and our victorious co-defendant in the New York Supreme Court decision that established First Amendment rights for online journalists - said, "You will know the true character of a journalist by how he behaves during a crisis."
IAPA President Robert J. Cox - like many others - revealed his true character in these Three Days that Shook the Media. In a meritocracy he would be immediately demoted to beat reporter to learn the ropes all over again. We recommend that he and the others like him who turned their backs on the most important value of any free society - the protection of electoral democracy over military imposed dictatorship - go back to square one. Cox and the others can begin by reading our 24 Coup Questions for Journalists, and by doing the gumshoe work to answer those questions. After all, he'll have the time now: nothing he does as IAPA boss will have any credibility from this date forward.
In these Friday hours, the situation seemed hopeless. Absolute Power had strangled democracy in our América, and the commercial media had become handmaiden to a military junta.
And then, miraculously, the cavalry arrived.
The Counter-Coup
by Authentic Journalism
Then, on Friday night, what history will call "the counter-coup by authentic journalism" began, as the Vheadline.com online newspaper and its editor Roy S. Carson, news editor Patrick J. O'Donoghue and 14 reporters throughout Venezuela began to break the information blockade.
Among many authentic journalists who turned the tide, Carson deserves the democratic medal of valor. At 11 a.m. on Thursday, before the coup occurred, his Vheadline.com website had gone into the shop for maintenance. When it rains it pours: Carson woke up Friday morning recovering from pre-ocular surgery he had received on Thursday, but upon learning of the coup he rose from his bed to change the history of América. His website was inoperative, but Carson, undaunted, began filing email alerts which were published by Narco News, Indy Media, and many others of the Authentic Journalism Renaissance.
At 7:30 on Friday night, Vheadline.com translated and distributed, via email the first decrees of the military-installed regime of oilman Pedro Carmona.
The global distribution of the "Transitional Junta Decree" on the Internet erased, in one fell swoop, all the fictions repeated in the mass media about who was the real dictator:
Caracas, Friday, April 12, 2002 -- 7:30 p.m.
Article 1 - Pedro Carmona Estanga is designated president of the Republic of Venezuela.
Article 2 - The name of the Republic of Venezuela is re-established.
Article 3 - Principal and substitute legislators of the National Assembly (AN) are suspended from their posts…
The decree also delayed new presidential elections until up to a year from now and stated:
"The President in Cabinet will be able to remove and transitionally designate the officials of national, state and municipal agencies to guarantee institutional democracy and the adequate functioning of the stated… The reorganization of public agencies is decreed for the purpose of regaining their autonomy and independence and to ensure a peaceful and democratic transition, "thus dismissing from posts illegitimately held by the president and magistrates of the Supreme Tribunal of Justice (TSJ), Comptroller, Attorney General, OfficialOmbudsman and members of the National Electoral College (CNE)."
The decree also suspended 48 laws passed Constitutionally by the Chavez government and Congress in 2001
Dictatorship vs. Democracy, indeed.
The Vheadline.com archives of its email alerts from April 11th to 13th is now online (the website was back in action by Saturday afternoon) at:
http://www.vheadline.com/p1
The updates are archived in reverse chronological order (in other words, for a blow-by-blow account, scroll from the bottom up). Historians of the coup, and scholars of the Authentic Journalism Renaissance, will consult those Vheadline.com archives for years to come.
Then came Saturday, and the turning of the tide.
SATURDAY, APRIL 13, 2002:
Collapse of a Coup
While New York Times readers awoke to a puff piece by Juan Forero about the new dictator - titled, incredulously, "Manager and Conciliator - Pedro Carmona Estanga" - in which Forero repeated the lie that Chavez "was forced to resign," the independent online media had begun to take back the microphone.
Among the factors that, in retrospect, caused news consumers from throughout the world to turn toward online news sources was that the official reports by Forero, AP, Reuters, CNN and others had become so obviously one-sided. Indeed, they had a gloating quality about what they errantly called Chávez's downfall. And the Times and others committed the faux pas of arrogance: They underestimated the public and overestimated its capacity to swallow their Selling of a Dictator - Carmona - as a legitimate "president."
Forero wrote:
''Carmona is not a mega-industrialist in his own right,'' a political consultant, Eric Ekvall, said. ''Carmona is a man who's always worked in and been involved in the business sector, but always as a manager. He's not one of the landed elite, with his own fortune, his own bank.''
(Here in the Narco Newsroom, we thought Forero's trotting out of Ekvall was shameless, though predictable: Ekvall - father of the former Miss Venezuela and an eccentric species of political consultant who is hostile to basic democratic values - had been one of the readers who had sent us hate mail after our February 20th report predicting the coup. He raged at us, and at author Kim Alphandary, and mocked our description of Alphandary as an authentic journalist. And now, during the coup, here he was, on the pages of the New York Times doing spin-control for an authoritarian dictator and a coup that seven weeks ago he swore would never happen, trying to portray the sleazy oilman Carmona as some kind of humble man of the people.)
While Forero and other English-language commercial reporters were relying on Embassy sources, oligarchs like Ekvall, and the slanted Venezuelan TV "coverage" of events, Vheadline.com and its team of reporters was driving a stake through the official censorship.
At 1:50 p.m. on Saturday, Vheadline.com broke the story that the Speaker of the National Assembly had rejected the dictator Carmona's decree abolishing the elected legislative branch of government (the "abolished" legislators later announced that come Sunday, they would hold a formal session anyway). Moments later, Vheadline.com reported that protests had erupted in the slums of Caracas against the military-installed dictatorship. (A polemic would later ensue because the five big TV chains of Venezuela had made a concerted decision to not report demonstrations against the coup; Vheadline.com was getting its information directly from the streets.)
Later that afternoon, Vheadline.com translated a statement by the major human rights organizations of Venezuela condemning the coup and the illegal arrests of elected and political leaders by the Carmona dictatorship.
And so it went: 4:38 p.m., disturbances break out in the popular neighborhoods of the capital. 4:56 p.m., a military junta leader admits on the radio that Chávez never resigned. 6:40 p.m. "Two national dailies and a private TV station have imposed an absolute news blackout."
And, the most crucial turning point of all: rank-and-file soldiers and officers at the nation's largest Army Base in Maracay reject the military junta and begin the counter-coup (Maracay is the base where Venezuela's F16 fighter planes are hangared, and a nervous Washington began worrying about the oil fields that supply 15 percent of the United States' imported oil.)
In the streets of virtually every city and town in Venezuela, the poor, as Chávez had predicted the day before the coup, "came down from the hills."
The ocean of bodies placed itself between the dictatorship and history. Carmona's troops began firing upon crowds indiscriminately, the very behavior it had accused the Chávez government of undertaking in creating a pretext for the military coup. Morgues and hospitals filled with the dead and wounded civilians. Rank-and-file soldiers throughout the country broke ranks with the brass, reclaimed the presidential palace for the Bolivarian Revolution, and forced the high military commanders to begin to backpedal from their imposition of Carmona.
"Oh, how the poor love each other," John Reed wrote in his early 20th century classic, "Ten Days That Shook The World." The poor majority of Venezuela, unseen and unheard by the English-language media, blacked-out by the five TV stations of the oligarchs in Venezuela, had come forward to make a lie out of months of disinformation by the establishment media, which had claimed that Chavez had lost popular support.
