Proverbial

An uncle of mine, a Worker’s Party (PT) loyalist and pretty much what you’d call a rabid leftist, sends me yet another diatribe by a communist against Brazil’s “neoliberal” MSM. The author, Ronaldo Carmona, is a member in Brazil’s Communist Party’s (PCdoB) International Relations Comission, and writes for the party’s website, Vermelho.org (which translates to Red.org). He complains about how the media depicts Mercosul’s current status, and Venezuela’s president Hugo Chávez’s disruptive antics:

The big media’s editorial line, almost armoured in its ideology, is rabidly neoliberal. Some overexcited, despite their profession, lose their composure, like FHC’s [former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso] ex-chancellor, Luiz Felipe Lampreia, who goes so far as charging the Venezuelan president with having “a good dose of mental unbalance” in an article for Estadão“.

According to mr. Carmona, if one were to follow the goings-on at the current Mercosul summit, in Rio de Janeiro, through this “neoliberal media” - namely newspapers like O Estado de S. Paulo, Folha de S. Paulo and O Globo -, it would seem like the economic block is currently in a state of “terminal crisis, profoundly fractured, threatened by Hugo Chávez, in a war that puts everyone against each other”. A notion he says is the exact opposite of the truth.

Mr. Chávez has recently presented - and was given initial approval by the country’s legislature - a proposal he says is crucial to the socialist reform in Venezuela, where he’d be allowed to rule by decree for up to a year and a half, on a series of national issues. When US State Secretary Condoleeza Rice said this was a bit odd for a democracy, it prompted the Venezuelan president to tell gringos to “go to hell“. That after having said George W. Bush was the devil during a speech in the UN.

He also played a pivotal role in Bolivia’s decision to charge more for gas sold to Brazil, after nationalizing the country’s gas industry, then dominated by Brazil’s state-owned Petrobras. A decision that not only is the exact opposite of what a free-trade economic block should stand for, but one that was used to put pressure in president Lula’s administration during the latest presidential election, calling for negotiations to be mediated by Brazilian diplomats and government aides, instead of Petrobras’ technocrats.

And after all that, this is the sort (.br) of bad press Hugo Chávez gets in the Brazilian traditional newspapers:

It is easy to qualify Chávez as a dinosaur, retrograde, populist and buffoon in a world that’s inexorably moving towards globalization; where the “market” is a huge club ready to crush economies that dare break rank.

The massive internationalization of markets and the adoption of ever more homogeneous rules and laws has that effect: every country’s or multinational organization’s space to maneuver is extremely limited by this rules regime.

Chávez’s Venezuela has been seeking to be an exception in this monolithic universe, for the despair of Venezuela’s more wealthy and internationalized neighbours.

And that is a CRITIQUE of Chávez. Fernando Canzian is trying to show how Brazilians, in their eternal struggle with globalization, could have ended up electing some similar version of a caudillo, instead of a rather tame and market-oriented 21st-century Lula.

Oh, this evil neoliberal media and their hidden agenda:

In fact, this is a central point to the advance of our people’s social conscience: notwithstanding having lost presidential elections in South America, above all programatically [nopes, according to the dictionary, that word doesn't exist in Portuguese, either], neoliberals, supported by the big media, try to kick and scream their way back into the game. They thus pretend to impose their platform - which consists, mainly, of abandoning the project of an independent South American pole, afilliating itself to the hemispheric project of US hegemony.

I know that a communist is, by definition, anachronistic, and that I probably shouldn’t waste my time rebutting their disparate view of the world. But the timing of such an attack on the country’s media and Chávez’s message to the gringos was just too good to pass. And it should also serve as an example of the sort of rationale that’s been getting traction in this country, where a PCdoB congressman is the Speaker of the House (and a congresswoman is the most voted in her State).