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the first name which caught my attention, as the ones preceding it in the article by "parajournalist" Phil Gunson didn't relate to Hugo Chavez. Here's a very quick grab from google on Alfredo Keller, a supposed "polster:" The first factor that calls the polls into question is the well-known political partisanship of the polling firms’ directors, Jose Antonio Gil Yepes of Datanalisis and Alfredo Keller of Keller and Associates.
In a recent e-mail interchange, The Los Angeles Times’ correspondent T. Christian Miller acknowledged that the two pollsters are “pretty anti-Chavez,” but he defends their credibility on grounds that "both do door to door polling, to get the poorest of poor represented in their surveys, and also balance for things like gender and region." Miller’s defense of Keller and Gil Yepes is very questionable in view of contrary evidence. However, before presenting this contrary evidence, we would like to point out the problems with the two pollsters’ political partisanship.
Datanalisis' Pollster: Chavez "has to be killed"
Gil Yepes and Keller are not merely “anti-Chavez”; they are openly and virulently anti-Chavez. In a July 8 article in the Los Angeles Times, Miller describes Gil Yepes as a man of “Venezuela’s elite” who “moves in circles of money, power and influence” and “was educated in top U.S. schools.”
It’s certainly shocking that the LA Times quoted Gil Yepes saying that Chavez “has to be killed.”
But it is even more shocking that the LA Times and other commercial media continued to use Gil Yepes’ polling “results” after his homicidal fantasies leaped out of the closet through the pages of last July’s LA Times.
According to T. Christian Miller of the LA Times, Gil Yepes saw an assassination as the only way out of the “political crisis surrounding President Hugo Chavez.” Gil Yepes has since claimed that his quote was taken out of context, and that he was only making reference to an oft-expressed sentiment among Chavez’s opposition.
But let’s look at the full context as reported by the LA Times:
Jose Antonio Gil is among Venezuela's elite.
He moves in circles of money, power and influence. He was educated in top U.S. schools. He heads of one of the country's most prestigious polling firms.
And he can see only one way out of the political crisis surrounding President Hugo Chavez.
"He has to be killed," he said, using his finger to stab the table in his office far above this capital's filthy streets. "He has to be killed."
One need look no further than Datanalisis’ website to find the kind of blatant political partisanship that one normally does not associate with respectable polling operations. For example, in Datanalisis’ summary of a July 2002 report, the polling firm absurdly characterizes the current political conflict as one between the government (“el oficialismo”) and “the rest of the country.”
Despite the preposterousness of this portrayal, it is nevertheless an appropriate demonstration of the deep-seated class hatred by a large segment of Venezuela’s business-led opposition, which prefers to pretend that thousands of poor and working-class Chavez supporters do not exist.
When a massive pro-government demonstration in Caracas on October 13 showed that a good portion of “the rest of the country” supported Chavez, the editorial board of Venezuela’s elite-controlled newspaper El Nacional was incensed. El Nacional, which commissions and publishes polls by Datanalisis, disparagingly referred to Chavez’s supporters as “lumpen” who were lured from the country’s interior with “a piece of bread and some rum” to “come and cheer the great con man of the nation.”
As the Venezuelan anthropologist Johnny Alarcón Puentes points out, the terms "lumpen, rabble hordes, drunks, riff-raff and mobs are only some of the epithets foisted by the wealthy on citizens of dark skin, on street merchants, on workers, on the indigenous and on all those who live in slums or modest neighborhoods and dare raise their voice against the powerful.”
Thus, from the warped perspective of much of the opposition, Datanalisis’ contention that "the rest of the country" opposes Chavez makes sense. Since elites are the people that “matter,” and those of less privilege can be reduced to virtual sub-human status, poor and working-class Chavez supporters do not qualify as part of “the rest of the country.”
Alfredo Keller's "Fight to the Death"
As with Gil Yepes, there is good reason to believe that the pollster Alfredo Keller has come to advocate a violent solution to Venezuela's current political conflict. In Keller's recent letter published by PetroleumWorld.com, he describes the current political standoff as “a fight to the death for power between two counter-posed ideological forces: an authoritarian socialism with a spirit of revenge against a democracy that is open to the market.”
The charge of authoritarianism against Chavez is weak, and is especially hypocritical coming from the likes of Keller.
Here is a country, wracked by unrest, provocation, sabotage and calls for political assassination, a country that suffered a 48-hour military coup last April, where the television media and commercial dailies routinely exhort the public to violence, but the Chávez administration has not arrested or imprisoned a single journalist or opposition leader.
In fact, Chavez often comes under friendly criticism from the left for being too soft on his opposition. Cuban President Fidel Castro recently remarked, "If I have something to regret, it's his excessive generosity and kindness." Castro continued:
"In what country could there be a coup and then have all the perpetrators meet in a plaza to spend 50 days agitating through television networks, proposing another coup? Not in any country in the world. I believe that there is not a more democratic, more law abiding, more tolerant, more generous man than Hugo Chavez."
The authoritarian label is more applicable to Keller than to Chavez. After anti-Chavez Generals led a short-lived coup d'etat against the Venezuelan President and turned over power to businessman Pedro Carmona and his entourage of right-wing ministers, Keller called the coup "a de facto referendum". As Carmona announced the dissolution of Venezuela's democratically-ratified constitution and democratically-elected congress, Keller peddled the lie that the April 11 opposition march on the Miraflores Presidential Palace had forced Chavez to resign.
(snip)
The real concern for Keller and his avaricious cohorts in the opposition is the "structure of power" that Chavez and his supporters have erected. Steve Ellner, a historian who lives in Venezuela and specializes in the country's labor movement, has pointed out that Chavez's reforms, which include agrarian reform and severance benefits for workers, "have strongly favored labor at the expense of business." Some of these reforms are enshrined in the country's new constitution, which was democratically ratified by the electorate in 2000. The majority of political representatives in the country's new unicameral congress support the reforms.
(snip/...) http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=2985~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~If you have followed news on Venezuela, you'll recognize the first polster's name immediately. Vicious anti-Chavist. Looks as if the one in your article is cut from the same cloth. The "opposition" deals with the polsters it knows will give them the info. they want. I presume the same applies here, with sociopathic right-wingers clutching their own polsters close to their hearts, and passing that garbage off as the god's truth. |
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