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RICHARD GOTT, BLACK AGENDA - [Venezuelan] university students from
privileged backgrounds have been pitched against newly enfranchised
young people from the impoverished shantytowns, beneficiaries of the
increased oil royalties spent on higher education projects for the poor.
These separate groups never meet, but both sides occupy their familiar
battleground within the city, one in the leafy squares of eastern
Caracas, the other in the narrow and teeming streets in the west. This
symbolic battle will become ever more familiar in Latin America in the
years ahead: rich against poor, white against brown and black, immigrant
settlers against indigenous peoples, privileged minorities against the
great mass of the population. . .
Ostensibly the argument is about the media, and the government's
decision not to renew the broadcasting license of a prominent station,
Radio Caracas Television, and to hand its frequencies to a newly
established state channel. . . [But]the debate in Venezuela has less to
do with the alleged absence of freedom of expression than with a
perennially tricky issue locally referred to as "exclusion", a shorthand
term for "race" and "racism". RCTV was not just a politically
reactionary organization which supported the 2002 coup attempt against a
democratically elected government - it was also a white supremacist
channel. Its staff and presenters, in a country largely of black and
indigenous descent, were uniformly white, as were the protagonists of
its soap operas and the advertisements it carried. It was "colonial"
television, reflecting the desires and ambitions of an external power.
At the final, close-down party of RCTV last month, those most in view on
the screen were long-haired and pulchritudinous young blondes. . . To
watch a Venezuelan commercial station (and several still survive) is to
imagine that you have been transported to the US. Everything is based on
a modern, urban and industrialized society, remote from the experience
of most Venezuelans. . .
The new state-funded channels (and there are several of them too, plus
innumerable community radio stations) are doing something completely
different, and unusual in the competitive world of commercial
television. Their programs look as though they are taking place in
Venezuela, and they display the cross-section of the population to be
seen on cross-country buses or on the Caracas metro. . .
Blanca Eekhout, the head of Vive TV, the government's cultural channel,
launched two years ago, coined the slogan "Don't watch television, make
it". Classes in film-making have been set up all over the country. Lil
RodrÃguez, an Afro-Venezuelan journalist and the boss of TVES, the
channel that replaces RCTV, claims that it will become "a useful space
for rescuing those values that other models of television always ignore,
especially our Afro-heritage". With time, the excluded will find a voice
within the mainstream.
Little of this is under discussion in the dialogue of the deaf on the
streets of Caracas. For the protesting university students, the argument
about the media is just one more stick with which to hit out against the
ever-popular Chavez. Yet as they mourn the loss of their favorite soap
operas, they are already aware that their eventual loss may be more
substantial. As children of the oligarchy, they might have expected soon
to run the country. Now fresh faces are emerging from the shantytowns to
challenge them, a new class educating itself at speed and planning to
seize their birthright.
http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=
view&id=246&Itemid=41
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RICHARD GOTT, BLACK AGENDA - [Venezuelan] university students from
privileged backgrounds have been pitched against newly enfranchised
young people from the impoverished shantytowns, beneficiaries of the
increased oil royalties spent on higher education projects for the poor.
These separate groups never meet, but both sides occupy their familiar
battleground within the city, one in the leafy squares of eastern
Caracas, the other in the narrow and teeming streets in the west. This
symbolic battle will become ever more familiar in Latin America in the
years ahead: rich against poor, white against brown and black, immigrant
settlers against indigenous peoples, privileged minorities against the
great mass of the population. . .
Ostensibly the argument is about the media, and the government's
decision not to renew the broadcasting license of a prominent station,
Radio Caracas Television, and to hand its frequencies to a newly
established state channel. . . [But]the debate in Venezuela has less to
do with the alleged absence of freedom of expression than with a
perennially tricky issue locally referred to as "exclusion", a shorthand
term for "race" and "racism". RCTV was not just a politically
reactionary organization which supported the 2002 coup attempt against a
democratically elected government - it was also a white supremacist
channel. Its staff and presenters, in a country largely of black and
indigenous descent, were uniformly white, as were the protagonists of
its soap operas and the advertisements it carried. It was "colonial"
television, reflecting the desires and ambitions of an external power.
At the final, close-down party of RCTV last month, those most in view on
the screen were long-haired and pulchritudinous young blondes. . . To
watch a Venezuelan commercial station (and several still survive) is to
imagine that you have been transported to the US. Everything is based on
a modern, urban and industrialized society, remote from the experience
of most Venezuelans. . .
The new state-funded channels (and there are several of them too, plus
innumerable community radio stations) are doing something completely
different, and unusual in the competitive world of commercial
television. Their programs look as though they are taking place in
Venezuela, and they display the cross-section of the population to be
seen on cross-country buses or on the Caracas metro. . .
Blanca Eekhout, the head of Vive TV, the government's cultural channel,
launched two years ago, coined the slogan "Don't watch television, make
it". Classes in film-making have been set up all over the country. Lil
RodrÃguez, an Afro-Venezuelan journalist and the boss of TVES, the
channel that replaces RCTV, claims that it will become "a useful space
for rescuing those values that other models of television always ignore,
especially our Afro-heritage". With time, the excluded will find a voice
within the mainstream.
Little of this is under discussion in the dialogue of the deaf on the
streets of Caracas. For the protesting university students, the argument
about the media is just one more stick with which to hit out against the
ever-popular Chavez. Yet as they mourn the loss of their favorite soap
operas, they are already aware that their eventual loss may be more
substantial. As children of the oligarchy, they might have expected soon
to run the country. Now fresh faces are emerging from the shantytowns to
challenge them, a new class educating itself at speed and planning to
seize their birthright.
http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=
view&id=246&Itemid=41
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