Henrique Capriles: The Prefabricated Leader
Henrique Capriles: The Prefabricated Leader
By Ronald Muñoz – Ciudad CCS, May 19th 2013
Never before in the history of Venezuela has a politician been so promoted and supported by the media as Henrique Capriles has been, and now more than ever. Never before has a politician received so much coverage, and such fawning attention from the media, especially given that we are talking about someone who isn’t even president.
If we were to look to the past we would find Rómulo Betancout, Rafael Caldera, and Carlos Andrés Pérez—all presidents with great media influence. But they were already president when they received so much coverage and still it was not even comparable to what Henrique Capriles receives today.
The fact that the press gives so much coverage to someone who isn’t even the president is unprecedented in our country. Not even in the case of famous opposition leaders of the past like “Tigre” Eduardo Fernández or the very Caldera and Carlos Andrés Pérez before they were presidents, has so much attention been given to a candidate.
Every single day the businessman Capriles appears in national and international media. Only those who are very naïve could believe that someone with so much support is an “independent” politician.
In the case of President Chavez, he didn’t get nearly as much attention from the media when he was a rising leader and presidential candidate. And when he did it was always with a certain slant, from an angle that attacked, criminalized and delegitimized his struggles and his ideas. Chavez couldn’t dream of having the media be so openly servile when he was candidate or when he was president.
Even the politicians named above, like Caldera or Carlos Andrés Pérez, who had a lot of support from the media, always had some journalists that were critical. But with Capriles, those same media outlets won’t even touch him with a rose petal.
Capriles the “leader”
Objectively speaking, Henrique Capriles as a politician is rather mediocre: he is not a good speaker, he is not a great leader, he is not politically well-educated, he does not have a clear political platform, and he has little charisma. His rhetoric focuses on the daily problems of average Venezuelans, assuring that he can solve them, but without ever saying how. With so few real abilities, it is obvious that without his money and the media’s support he would not go anywhere as a political leader.
The fact that the media and the international press have converted such a mediocre politician into the “leader” of a large part of the Venezuelan population is something that should be studied by sociologists and marketing experts alike.
Conscious of the limitations of their candidate, ever since the 2012 elections the rightwing leadership has prohibited him from speaking openly with any media outlet that is not completely supportive of his candidacy: in other words, no community, alternative, leftist, or state media in any part of the world, no media that is not “normal” for the communication logic of big capital. On the other hand, Capriles speaks freely to any journalist or media outlet that is at the service of big capital. He speaks freely because he knows that they will never ask him an incisive question.
In his most recent campaign, Capriles’ fear of incisive questions was so great that he invented a new technique as far as electoral campaigns go: the “private” press conference. These are press conferences where only media that are supportive of his candidacy are allowed to enter. Every journalist that attends these “private” press conferences knows that the state media is not allowed to enter, and that no one can ask incisive questions, but not one of those journalists and none of the media outlets where they work has said anything about this censorship occurring among those who supposedly support democracy.
Lately, not only Capriles but also high up members of his campaign like Carlos Ocariz, mayor of Sucre municipality, have taken to ignoring any questions from reporters that they do not like, no matter how polite. But in spite of all this, they are presented by the private media, domestic and internationally, as being the bearers of democracy. If this kind of censorship can occur while they are in the opposition, we can only imagine what would happen if they were in power.
A Political Birth Bought And Paid For
Henrique Capriles does not come from a background of grassroots party leadership or community activism. Far from representing a “new kind of politics”, Capriles represents the exact same kind of politics that existed before, or perhaps even worse because he is disguised as something else.
He began his political career with an obvious political negotiation in the heart of the social-democratic party Copei, a party that nominated him as a representative in Congress for the state of Zulia. From there he was elected to represent a state in which he had never lived before, and above hundreds of regional leaders from a party that had had previous governors from Zulia. But Copei preferred to run the son of a business leader and disparage the merits of so many local leaders.
With the backing of Copei, as a Congressman he immediately became the president of the Congress, as the old political system attempted to recover its losses from the hurricane that Chavez’s new leadership represented. In this way, the young businessman-made-politician rapidly took over one of the most important posts in the Fourth Republic [as the pre-Chavez era from 1958-1999 is known]. With enough financial backing anyone can be elected to any post.
However, as president of Congress, Henrique Capriles did not hesitate to throw Copei to one side, declaring that he “does not respond to political pressures from any party”. It is very easy to say something like that when you’ve already been elected, and much easier when you have an economic empire backing you.
That is how the rightwing creates their prefabricated politicians.
The Communicational Strategy of the Parallel Government
The strategy underway on the part of big capital, its political actors and its media outlets in Venezuela is that of a parallel government. With the argument that Capriles lost by a very narrow margin, and therefore the country is divided in “two halves”, Capriles doesn’t receive the media coverage that he should as the governor of Miranda, or as a defeated candidate, but rather he is treated by the media as if he were the very president of the country. Whatever he says, whatever interview he does, whatever comment he makes on Twitter, it is immediately covered by all the private media that are constantly waiting to report on everything he does or says.
Instead of having a equitable distribution of the news priorities, this posture by the media is clearly a strategy of aggression against our country. There have been recent cases such as Calderón in Mexico with a narrow victory over López Obrador, or that of Bush over Al Gore in the United States. In both cases the defeated candidates were given media coverage for the first few days after the elections, but afterwards they were treated as everyday politicians again, receiving little media coverage. Only here in Venezuela do they keep giving more coverage to the losing candidate than they give to the very President.
Translation by Chris Carlson for Venezuelanalysis.com
Source: Ciudad CCS
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/ This work is licensed under a Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives Creative Commons license
http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/9422
= new reply since forum marked as read
about sources.
This OP is an important one and it's about corporate media creation of candidates to serve corporate interests. It is not about Chavez. And this bullshit about Chavez becoming rich has been thrown in here as a distraction. What does it have to do with the OP? Absolutely nothing.
This OP reminds me of the corporate media worship of Ronald Reagan, a truly evil man who supported the genocidal slaughter of TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND Mayan villagers in Guatemala; conducted an illegal war--a war forbidden by Congress--on Nicaragua, in which thousands of innocent people were murdered; committed treason by negotiating with Iranian hostage-takers when Jimmy Carter was president; deregulated U.S. savings and loan institutions which then looted the savings of millions of workers and middle class savers; threw out the progressive tax and re-wrote the tax code to favor the rich; threw out the "Fairness Doctrine"--one of the best laws passed in the early 1950s, which was designed to prevent exactly what this article is describing about Capriles--gross corporate media UNFAIRNESS--and began the destruction of the "New Deal" which we are seeing the conclusion of today, with the attacks on Social Security and other anti-poverty programs; Reagan also initiated the attacks on our educational system and the privatization and destruction of "the commons," which today we see in the corporate privatization of the very counting our votes!
This evil bastard began his political career as governor of California--and where did he come from? A rotten and failed ACTOR involved in McCarthyite purges against leftists in Hollywood! A nothing man. A Nowhere Man. A cipher. He also began the looting and destruction of California, the most progressive state in the nation, and was singularly responsible for creating a massive homeless population, something that had never been seen before in California--by emptying the state hospitals and dumping tens of thousands of helpless people onto the streets!
The corporate media created this talentless, arrogant, empty-souled, FAKE politician as front man for a corporate/war profiteer junta against the most potentially influential democracy on earth. It was precisely to rein in and destroy everything that was good about our country, that this bastard was foisted upon us and paraded before us as "charismatic" and "telegenic" and blameless amidst some of the worst scandals of the last century.
Capriles has that same vacancy about him--a nothing man transformed by the corporate media into the front man for the Great Looting.
It is tempting to say that THIS is the main problem that we and others face, who believe in democracy and fairness and a decent society: the delusionary, brainwashing powers of the corporate media. I think it is a major problem among many having to do with transglobal corporate/war profiteer power. It is perhaps the most visible problem, which may be why a lot of people think it's the main problem. But where--at one angle--to attack transglobal corporate/ war profiteer power is a real question to me. In THIS country, the privatized, 'TRADE SECRET' voting machines largely owned and controlled by a far rightwing-connected corporate (ES&S, which bought out Diebold) are such a fundamental problem--control of the very counting of our votes--that I think we need to start there.
Venezuela doesn't have this problem. They have honest, transparent vote counting, largely due to the Chavez government's strong support of honest, transparent vote counting. (THEY are the ones who invited the Carter Center and other election groups into Venezuela to create an honest, transparent system and to monitor elections.) Venezuela's main problem is the monopolistic corporate media, as very well illustrated in this OP. It was also well-illustrated by the 2002 coup d'etat attempt, which was media driven. (It has been called "the first media coup"--although I'd nominate the Reagan coup as "the first media coup."
An example of how bad the transglobal corporate media is was their campaign to portray Chavez as anti-free speech WITHOUT EVER MENTIONING that the corporate media in Venezuela actively colluded on kidnapping the elected president and suspending the constitution, the courts, the legislature and all civil rights, and, during the course of that coup attempt, BANNING THE MEMBERS OF CHAVEZ'S CABINET FROM TELEVISION!
"Free speech" for the coupsters and for no one else--not even the elected government!
I completely support Chavez's actions to rein them in. Those actions were totally justified and probably too mild! You cannot have the corporate media running coup d'etats! They have no right to do so. In fact, they have no "right" at all to use the public airwaves. In every democracy on earth, that is a privilege not a "right," and it is LICENSED and regulated IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST.
Jeez.
Anyway, we have what I think is a worse problem--though I think both the Reagan and Bush Jr. juntas were media-driven coup d'etats. The problem of the "TRADE SECRET" voting machines.
We NEED this discussion--where to begin? Regular people in the U.S. are increasingly aware of multiple grave crises in our political sphere, government and society. Venezuelans--and other South Americans--are way ahead of us on this realization. They were hit with "shock and awe" economics a decade before we were, and one of their major actions in response was to do the hard, civic work necessary to create honest elections. THAT is how it was possible for people like Lula da Silva, Evo Morales, Nestor Kirchner, Rafael Correa and Hugo Chavez to get elected, and for instance, for Dilma Rousseff to succeed Lula da Silva in Brazil and for Nicolas Maduro to succeed Chavez. South America is in the midst of a "New Deal" for its people first of all due to election reform.
Their OTHER problem--corporate media monopolies engaged in corporate brainwashing and coup attempts--has not been successfully addressed, obviously. But some efforts have been made along "Fairness Doctrine" lines. These efforts are ONLY POSSIBLE because the election systems are producing civic-minded leaders--leftists, real democrats, leaders who attend to the "common good."
Looking back at the history of the "Fairness Doctrine" here, it's quite interesting to note that the law was originally promulgated amidst a general consensus that radio/TV broadcasting power was potentially coup d'etat power, and that providing the public with a variety of opinion on important public issues was vital to democracy, especially in the broadcast media, with its power to control debate. An additional concern was that political candidates have the right to answer broadcaster attacks.
Reagan dismantled this entire architecture of fairness. The shibboleth argument that "fairness" limits "free speech" was used to insure corporate MONOPOLY of speech in the most intrusive media--TV and radio. Neither a newspaper nor a book nor a news magazine nor the Internet intrudes on your attention. You have to choose to access them and make a mental effort to read them (or view Internet offerings). Radio and TV, on the other hand, are intrusive and pervasive. They are "on" continually in millions of homes and cars. And try to "spin the dial" on radio and TV stations to find an objective news source or leftist opinion, and you will come up nearly blank. The most intrusive media is now totally dominated by rightwing, corporate/war profiteer-supporting viewpoints.
This is fascism. There is no other way to describe it. Fascists SHUT OTHER PEOPLE UP. They do not want discussion. They want OBEDIENCE--and seek it by outright torture and murder, as we have seen in Latin America, and by "Big Lie" propaganda to control what people think and what is thinkable.
Our Republicans are now fascists, in direct service to our Corporate rulers. This was not the case pre-Reagan but it is now. And our Democrats are not much better. Capriles is a sort of meld of the two. His core support is fascist (and violent) and the corporate media has allowed him to cover that up with a very false veneer of niceness and cleverly vague populist statements. His entire image is a lie, like Reagan.
In Venezuela, they have an alternative of real democrats, the chavistas, who are much like our "New Dealers" of old. We don't have that alternative here, as yet--at least as to elected leaders. We can't have it, because they will not be permitted to be elected. We do have the potential for a chavista-type movement--a resurgence of socialist balance in relation to capital, for a fair and decent society. But we need to reclaim our election system for the majority to make any progress on policy. In fact, I think our society is in more danger of disintegrating into open and bloody class warfare than Venezuela's, precisely because there is no hope that progressive leaders can be elected here.
-------------
(Note: Here is a good description of Fairness Doctrine history:
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0212-03.htm
He's such a fraud. First, he tried the "messenger of the Apocalypse" style. When he realized people preferred the so-called "chaos" to him, he tried to pose as a "Bolivarian". That didn't work again, and he tried to pull the "Lulista". And failed. Again.
They will probably just dismiss him now and bring another puppet for the middle-term referendum. The "light at the end of the tunnel" proved to be another thing...
