opinion

Head of Human Rights Watch responds to criticism of Venezuela report
by Kenneth Roth

The following letter was sent by the Executive Director of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, in response to an open letter signed by scores of analysts of US-Venezuelan relations, criticizing findings by HRW’s Americas Director, José Miguel Vivanco. In originally releasing the Vivanco letter, the Council on Hemispheric Affairs took the organization to task over its highly critical report on the human rights situation in Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela, which was authored by Vivanco. In his letter of response, Roth rebuts the weaknesses that more than 100 scholars and experts in the field identified in HRW’s report and aggressively defends his organization’s, as well as Vivanco’s, methods and findings. As with the original letter, COHA is distributing Roth’s reply to its mailing list without comment, and welcomes any thoughtful responses or observations.

COHA Staff

Kenneth Roth’s response is below:

I am writing in response to your letter concerning our recent report, “A Decade Under Chavez: Political Intolerance and Lost Opportunities for Advancing Human Rights in Venezuela.” Since your names appear on the press release that accompanied the letter, I am assuming that you were involved in drafting the document and asking others to sign it. I hope that you will share our response with the other authors and signatories.

Your letter contains dramatic allegations regarding the content of the report and the motives of those who wrote it. You claim that the report “does not meet even the most minimal standards of scholarship, impartiality, accuracy, or credibility.” You claim that it relies excessively on opposition sources, that it makes sweeping allegations without factual support, and that it ignores and even endorses unlawful efforts to undermine the government. You also claim that the report was “politically motivated,” and you offer as proof a newspaper quotation of our Americas director, José Miguel Vivanco.

Human Rights Watch takes criticism of this nature very seriously. Our ability to effectively promote human rights around the globe depends in large measure on the credibility of our reporting. We have therefore reviewed your letter with great care, examining each of your claims to determine whether the problems you identify are real and warrant further attention.

After a careful review, we have found that the allegations in your letter do not stand up to scrutiny. The issues covered in our report have been thoroughly researched and the substantive findings are based on a wide range of diverse and credible sources. In seeking to prove otherwise, you have misrepresented both the substance and the source material of the report. You have criticized us for making arguments that we have not made. You have taken our words out of context (including the quotation you attribute to Mr. Vivanco) and distorted their meanings in order to make your points.

The human rights problems we have documented in Venezuela are very real and deserve serious attention. By disseminating unfounded allegations regarding our report, your letter provides little more than an unhelpful distraction, which, as I will discuss further below, can only serve to undermine legitimate efforts to promote human rights in Venezuela.

Unreliable sources?

One of your main allegations is that our report suffers from an “overwhelming reliance” on “opposition sources.” Specifically you claim that the report “depends heavily” on three newspapers aligned with the opposition (El Universal, El Nacional, and Tal Cual) and one nongovernmental organization (Súmate). This allegation has no merit.

One simple way to gauge what sources we relied on is to examine the footnotes. The report contains 754 of them. Of these, only 88 cite material drawn from one of those three newspapers, and only 50 do so without providing another corroborating source. Only 10 footnotes cite material published or reproduced by Súmate. In other words, only 6.6 percent of the material cited in the report comes exclusively from these newspapers, and 1.3 percent from Súmate. That is a total of 8 percent of our citations, which hardly suggests an “overwhelming reliance.”

What you omit from your letter is any consideration of the other 92 percent of the citations found in our report. These citations refer to information from a wide array of publications, as well as actors of all political persuasions, including government officials, state entities, international rights monitoring bodies (such as the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the International Labor Organization), judges, prosecutors, jurists, pro-government and independent journalists, community radio broadcasters, scholars, and trade unionists, among others.

Of course, proportions of footnotes tell only part of the story. The more important part is the fact that our authors did a painstaking and rigorous job investigating all the issues in the report, seeking out multiple and diverse sources, corroborating the information wherever possible, and providing extensive citations so that readers would be able to evaluate the strength of each piece of evidence in the document.

Human Rights Watch understands full well the importance of being judicious when marshaling source material, especially when it involves sources that could very well be biased. This is particularly true when we work in a political environment as polarized as Venezuela’s. However, we also know, based on our years of covering Venezuela, that there are instances in which the opposition sources you mention --- just like government and pro-government sources --- can reasonably be relied upon to provide relevant facts. (Clearly you yourselves agree with this last point, given that you base one of your letter’s principal allegations on a single quotation attributed to El Universal.)

Your letter highlights a single footnote that you would consider to be unacceptable under any circumstances. That footnote cites an online article posted by an opposition blogger who is vehemently anti-Chávez and has published offensive commentary in the past. What you do not mention, however, is that this citation is for an assertion that is entirely uncontroversial and in no way critical of the government. The footnote backs the sentence: “The designers of the Maisanta program justified the program as an effort to democratize access to information.” What you may not have realized is that the citation does not refer to anything written by the blogger, but rather to a photo image reproduced in his article that shows the actual text of the Maisanta software (in which its designers present their justification for their program). To claim, as you do, that this footnote is evidence of a “deep political prejudice” is simply far-fetched.

Unsubstantiated findings?

Another one of your main accusations is that our report “makes sweeping allegations that are not backed up by supporting facts or in some cases even logical arguments.” Yet this sweeping allegation is itself unsubstantiated.

The primary example you use to attempt to back this accusation is our conclusion that discrimination on political grounds has been a defining feature of the Chávez presidency. To make your point, you isolate a single case of a woman purportedly denied medicines on political grounds, and claim falsely that it is the “only alleged instance of discrimination in government services cited in the entire 230-page report.” We actually provide three such cases that we documented ourselves, while also referencing a 2005 report by the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights that concluded, on the basis of hundreds of cases of alleged discrimination, that a “new discriminatory pattern” in the awarding of “work and public services” had emerged in Venezuela.

Moreover, our report presents the examples involving public services as just one facet of a much broader pattern of political discrimination. Chapter 2 of the report, which introduces the theme of political discrimination, provides a detailed analysis of six illustrative cases, and the subsequent chapters on the media, organized labor and civil society document a wide range of additional cases that have affected tens of thousands of union members, many journalists, and some of the country’s leading human rights advocates, among others.

In addition to ignoring the scope of the discrimination cases analyzed in the report, you also ignore the multiple public statements by government officials that further substantiate our findings. These include various instances in which top officials --- including President Chávez --- openly endorse political discrimination against government opponents. To take one example, the report describes how shortly before the 2006 presidential election, the energy minister and president of the state oil company, Rafael Ramírez, told employees that anyone who did not support Chávez should leave their jobs. “We removed 19,500 enemies of the country from this business and we are ready to go on doing it,” Ramírez warned. Rather than refute this discriminatory threat, Chávez endorsed it on national TV, urging Ramírez to “repeat it one hundred times a day” and calling upon all oil workers and military personnel to “go away to Miami” if they were not “with the revolution.”

Your letter also complains that “the report does not show, or even attempt to show, that political discrimination either increased under the current government (as compared to past governments), or is more of a problem in Venezuela than in any other country in the world.” This is true: we don’t. In fact, the report clearly states that discrimination was a major problem in Venezuela under previous governments, citing a 1993 Human Rights Watch (then Americas Watch) report in which we also highlighted the problem. We credit the Chávez government for “uproot[ing] the established system of political discrimination” that it inherited in 1999. The problem is that, after 2002, the government replaced the old forms of discrimination with new ones of its own. It is not our view --- and certainly not the view of international human rights law --- that a government should be immune from criticism for a human rights problem just because a similar problem existed under previous governments, or exists presently in other countries.

The reason we conclude that political discrimination is one “defining feature” of the Chávez government is because it occurs in a wide range of areas, affects large numbers of people, and has been openly endorsed by top officials, including the president himself.

Endorsing the political opposition?

Your letter repeatedly suggests that our report endorses the interests and tactics of the opposition, including the illegal and undemocratic efforts by some of its members to oust President Chávez. These allegations are based on blatant misrepresentations of what the report actually says. Here are some examples (in italics) from your letter:

* “The report implies that public employees, in this case oil workers should have the right to strike for the overthrow of an elected government; we do not support that view.”

The report says nothing of the kind. On the contrary, it clearly states that the internationally-protected right of workers to strike does not extend to strikes that have purely political aims (such as ousting an elected president). However, in the case in question (in which some 18,000 PDVSA employees were summarily fired and then blacklisted after a 3-month oil stoppage), the International Labor Organization (ILO) determined that the strike, while motivated in large part by political aims, had also encompassed a set of demands about the government’s economic policies. As such, it fell within the scope of legitimate strike activity which is protected under international law.

The report also clearly states that the government was justified in taking steps to limit the damage of the strike and to hold individual strikers accountable for their direct involvement in criminal acts such as sabotage and conspiracy --- provided that those steps were consistent with international labor rights protections and due process guarantees.

* “Yet this report cites the denial of RCTV’s broadcast license renewal as a simple, and indeed its primary, example of the Venezuelan government’s alleged attack on free speech. It does not seem to matter to the authors that the station had participated in a military coup and other attempts to topple the government and would not receive a broadcast license in any democratic country.”

The report does not disregard the serious allegations that RCTV participated actively in the 2002 coup. On the contrary, it highlights those allegations and clearly states that the government is fully justified in seeking accountability for those individuals who participated in the coup, or any other illegal efforts to topple a democratically elected president. However, we also maintain that the government, when seeking to promote accountability, must respect basic due process guarantees. This is a core principle that undergirds the rule of law in every democracy, including Venezuela’s.

Nor does the report present the RCTV case as a “simple” example. On the contrary, it devotes substantial space (12 pages) to analyzing the intricacies of the case. The Venezuelan government was under no obligation to renew RCTV’s concession. The problem in this case was that President Chávez himself justified the non-renewal as a response to alleged criminal activity, without giving RCTV an opportunity to defend itself against the charges (a due process violation). Moreover, as the report demonstrates, it was clear that the real reason the government was denying a renewal to RCTV --- while simultaneously granting one to another station that was allegedly just as implicated in the coup --- was because of RCTV’s anti-government programming (an act of political discrimination).

* “Yet the government is reproached for ‘having significantly shifted the balance of the media in the government’s favor’ by creating pro-government TV stations since the 2002 coup. Do the authors consider this type of media monopoly to be more protective of human rights than a media that is still dominated by the opposition but also presents some other sources of information?”

The report in no way indicates a preference for media monopolies. On the contrary, it commends the Chávez government for actively contributing to “a dramatic increase in the number of licensed community radio and television outlets in recent years, which has given new opportunities for public expression to residents of many poor communities in Venezuela.”

Nor does the report reproach the government for increasing the number of pro-government media outlets. It simply sets out what has happened as part of the factual description of the current media environment. What it objects to is how the government has violated international norms on freedom of expression by expanding the scope and severity of “incitement,” “insult,” and criminal defamation laws, created powerful incentives for critics to engage in self-censorship, and abused its control of broadcasting frequencies to threaten and punish stations with overtly critical programming.

We do believe that governments should encourage greater pluralism in the media. What we don’t accept is the argument that they must disregard international free speech norms in order to do so.

Political bias?

The main allegation of your letter is that our report was “politically motivated.” You offer as your primary evidence a partial quotation extracted from a full-page interview published by El Universal in which Mr. Vivanco says: “We did the report because we wanted to demonstrate to the world that Venezuela is not a model for anyone…” You claim that this quote shows Mr. Vivanco acknowledged that our report was “politically motivated.”

But the only way one can sustain this claim is by ignoring the rest of that interview and, most importantly, the argument laid out in our report. Both make perfectly clear that, when we speak of Venezuela as a “model,” we are referring to the human rights practices analyzed in our report. Our concern is not with what parties or politicians win elections, but rather that problematic rights practices will be replicated elsewhere.

Human Rights Watch works on more than 70 countries and routinely criticizes governments of all political persuasions. Yet, given our limited resources, and given our overarching goal of strengthening human rights norms at a global level, we often focus special attention on countries that we believe are more likely to be viewed as role models by others. That is why, for instance, when I wrote the main essay of our 2006 World Report on torture, I focused special attention on the United States. As I put it then, this was “not because it is the worst violator but because it is the most influential.”

Venezuela is clearly among the most influential countries in Latin America today. There are multiple reasons for this. One is that President Chávez has used his personal charisma and vast oil resources to establish himself as a leading figure in regional politics. Another is that his government has embraced the banner of “participatory” democracy, an idea which has attracted the attention and, in some cases, the admiration of people in countries throughout the region. As a result, President Chávez’s approach to democratic rule has come to be regarded as a model by many.

Human Rights Watch believes, as we state in the report, that promoting more inclusive forms of democracy in Venezuela and throughout the region is a “vital and ambitious aim.” Yet we also believe that this aim cannot be achieved so long as the independence of key democratic institutions, such as the judiciary, the media, organized labor, and civil society, are compromised.

When President Chávez came to office a decade ago, he inherited a democratic system whose institutions were already deeply compromised. His first major accomplishment, the ratification of the 1999 Constitution, opened an historic opportunity for the country to overhaul its political institutions, shore up the rule of law, and advance the protection of human rights. Our report argues that this historic opportunity has been largely squandered. Since the failed coup of 2002 (which was the most dramatic recent setback for Venezuelan democracy), the Chávez government has effectively eliminated any meaningful judicial check on the presidency, strengthened the state’s power to curb press freedoms while abusing its regulatory power to threaten and punish critical media outlets, systematically violated workers’ basic right to freedom of association, and actively sought to discredit the valuable work of local human rights advocates.

So long as the Chávez government continues to flout the human rights principles enshrined in its own constitution, we believe Venezuela will not achieve real and sustained progress toward strengthening its democracy --- and will not serve as a useful model for other countries in the region.

An unhelpful distraction

The last time I felt compelled to write you, Mr. Wilpert, was after your Web site disseminated a defamatory article about my colleague, Mr. Vivanco. That article claimed that Vivanco had been a functionary and public apologist of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. This was a particularly noxious smear given that Vivanco is a Chilean lawyer who has devoted his entire career to promoting human rights in his country and throughout the region. It was a completely false and easily refutable allegation. This time you, along with Mr. Tinker Salas, Mr. Grandin, and others, have sought to disseminate less extreme but equally spurious allegations regarding Mr. Vivanco and Human Rights Watch.

These new allegations echo those that the Chávez government has itself employed to divert attention from the country’s human rights problems. As we document in the report, President Chávez and his supporters routinely seek to deflect criticism by accusing their critics of harboring ulterior political motives and being complicit in efforts to topple the government. For example, local rights defenders who have pressed for reforms in the country’s notoriously inhumane prisons have repeatedly been denounced by top Chávez officials, who accuse them of conspiring to “destabilize the country.” When prison inmates went on hunger strike last March, the then interior and justice minister publicly suggested that these rights advocates had incited the strike under orders from Washington. More recently, when the highly respected Venezuelan nongovernmental organization PROVEA raised the issue of prison conditions in its annual report (which it released on December 9), the current interior and justice minister declared on national TV that they were “liars” who were “paid in dollars” and should have had shoes thrown at them when they presented their findings. The health minister meanwhile questioned the timing of PROVEA’s report, claiming it was intended to undermine the government’s efforts to reform the constitution to allow Chávez’s indefinite reelection. (PROVEA has been releasing its annual report on or around the same date, International Human Rights Day, for more than a decade.)

In our own case, Human Rights Watch has been subject to all sorts of charges about ulterior political motives in response to our reporting on Venezuela. In fact, the first time we heard the smear about Mr. Vivanco’s supposed ties to Pinochet was when the Chávez government invented it to distract attention from our public criticism of their court-packing scheme in 2004. The most recent time the Chávez government employed these tactics against us was last September when its security agents forcibly detained my colleagues and summarily expelled them from the country.

At Human Rights Watch we are accustomed to having our reports provoke angry reactions. We are routinely subject to baseless allegations regarding our findings, our sources, and our motives. In Latin America, these attacks come most frequently in response to our work on Colombia. Just two months ago, for example, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe publicly accused Mr. Vivanco of being “an accomplice of the FARC” after he released a report in Bogotá. Typically, the aim of these attacks is to bully us into retracting our criticisms and watering down our findings. I firmly believe that the credibility which Human Rights Watch now enjoys around the globe is due in large measure to the fact that we have never backed down in the face of such bullying.

I would like to take at face value your own professed concern for promoting accurate reporting on human rights in Venezuela. But I do not see how disseminating a grossly inaccurate depiction of our report can possibly contribute to that goal. Given what’s at stake in Venezuela today, I think your letter is an unhelpful distraction. If anything, its unfounded allegations will only contribute to the climate of political intolerance that currently exists in the country, undercutting local efforts to promote democratic pluralism and greater respect for basic human rights.

Again, I hope you will share this response with the other authors of your letter and, in particular, the people you invited to sign it. I would also ask that you provide them with a link to our report so they can acquire a more accurate understanding of its contents.

Sincerely,

* * *

Grandin, Tinker-Salas and Wilpert respond
to Roth’s riposte on Venezuelan human rights

Below is the latest communication regarding charges being exchanged by a group of Latin American scholars and the staff of Human Rights Watch concerning alleged derelictions by the Venezuelan administration of Hugo Chavez. This response to Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth was sent to Roth and members of the Human Rights Watch Board of Directors last evening. The letter is a response to Roth’s letter which answered criticisms of HRW’s report on Venezuela, A Decade Under Chávez: Political Intolerance and Lost Opportunities for Advancing Human Rights in Venezuela, in an open letter signed by 118 experts on Latin America.

We want to thank Mr. Roth for his December 29 letter in response to our December 16 letter, signed by more than 100 scholars who specialize in Latin America, criticizing your report, “A Decade Under Chávez: Political Intolerance and Lost Opportunities for Advancing Human Rights in Venezuela.”

We note that Mr. Roth did not answer a number of the criticisms contained in our original letter, all of which demonstrate serious prejudice and exaggeration in the HRW report on Venezuela. We encourage everyone to read all three letters --- (our letter to the HRW Board, Kenneth Roth’s response, and this letter) with references to the original report --- and decide whether the criticisms are valid and whether they were answered in Mr. Roth’s response.

We will address the substantive points raised by your response below, in order of importance.

(1) Mr. Roth writes: “Another one of your main accusations is that our report makes sweeping allegations that are not backed up by supporting facts or in some cases even logical arguments. . .

“The primary example you use to attempt to back this accusation is our conclusion that discrimination on political grounds has been a defining feature of the Chávez presidency. To make your point, you isolate a single case of a woman purportedly denied medicines on political grounds, and claim falsely that it is the only alleged instance of discrimination in government services cited in the entire 230-page report. We actually provide three such cases that we documented ourselves, while also referencing a 2005 report by the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights that concluded, on the basis of hundreds of cases of alleged discrimination, that a new discriminatory pattern in the awarding of work and public services had emerged in Venezuela.”

Our response:

First, let’s clarify what is at stake here. Imagine that a human rights organization issued a report claiming that the Bush Administration has discriminated against political opponents among people who applied for Medicaid, food stamps, and other federal government entitlement programs. Now imagine that the only evidence they provided for this claim consisted of one allegation by the nephew of someone who applied for Medicare benefits, and possibly two other similar allegations. No one would take such a report seriously. But that is exactly what Mr. Roth is defending with regard to HRW’s report on Venezuela.

We could not find the other two cases of alleged discrimination that Mr. Roth refers to above. However it should be clear to anyone who knows arithmetic that the difference between one and three allegations of discrimination in a set of programs that has served millions of people is not significant.

As for the 2005 report by the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights cited by Mr. Roth, it contains no documented cases, nor does it refer to any documented cases, of even alleged discrimination in the provision of government services.¹

Thus, the HRW report neither provides nor cites any significant evidence for its sweeping generalization that “Citizens who exercised their right to call for the referendum --- invoking one of the new participatory mechanisms championed by Chávez during the drafting of the 1999 Constitution --- were threatened with retaliation and blacklisted from some government jobs and services.” (p. 10, italics added).

As we noted in our original letter, “This is outrageous and completely indefensible.”

If there were no other errors in the entire HRW report, this one enormously important unsubstantiated allegation would justify everything that we said with regard to the report not meeting “minimal standards of scholarship, impartiality, accuracy, or credibility.”

It is clear from his response that Mr. Roth has not taken this matter seriously. We therefore renew our appeal to the Board of Directors of Human Rights Watch to intervene and correct this report.

(2) Mr. Roth takes issue with our claim that José Miguel Vivanco, the HRW report’s lead author, demonstrated a political motive when he told the press, “We did the report because we wanted to demonstrate to the world that Venezuela is not a model for anyone…”

Roth accuses us of having “taken our words out of context (including the quotation you attribute to Mr. Vivanco) and distorted their meanings . . .” He states that “the only way one can sustain this claim is by ignoring the rest of that interview and, most importantly, the argument laid out in our report. Both make perfectly clear that, when we speak of Venezuela as a model, we are referring to the human rights practices analyzed in our report.”

Our response:

This is not true, as can be seen by simply reading the interview. Mr. Vivanco states in the interview “…pues el presidente Chávez presenta a Venezuela como un modelo que puede ser adoptado por la región. Hay todo un esfuerzo propagandístico para promover el modelo de Venezuela y hay algunos países que lo están tomando en serio.”² It is clear that Mr. Vivanco is referring to Venezuela as a political model; otherwise the sentence makes no sense (why would Chávez present “human rights practices” as a model?).

Mr. Vivanco’s above statement is also inaccurate; while Chávez has put himself forward as a leader with respect to such international objectives as his goal of a more “multi-polar world,” he has repeatedly rejected the idea that Venezuela itself should serve as a model for other countries, insisting that each country must find its own path. This has helped him to claim as allies countries as diverse as Brazil, Honduras, Chile and Ecuador.

The full interview contains further evidence of prejudice. Mr. Vivanco paints an overwhelmingly negative and exaggerated picture of Venezuelan democracy, even more than in the report. It is also one that does not conform to the opinion of Venezuelans themselves. In opinion polls conducted by the respected Chilean pollster Latinobarómetro, Venezuela has consistently ranked among the highest in Latin America in terms of citizen satisfaction with the state of their democracy and government.³ We reference these polls not to rebut specific findings in the report, but to question HRW’s unrelenting portrayal of Venezuela as a country in which democracy has steadily diminished.

In 230 pages, A Decade Under Chávez occasionally acknowledges some important advances in social rights, political participation, and democratization of public debate that has taken place in Venezuela over the last decade. But the thrust of its narrative, reinforced by Mr. Vivanco’s interview and Mr. Roth’s response to our original letter, present a one-sided account, describing Venezuela as a country where, in Mr. Vivanco’s words, the democratic deficit hasn’t diminished but on the contrary has deepened in recent years.⁴

Another rhetorical strategy deployed by Mr. Vivanco in the interview that reinforces an impression of political bias is his equation of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez with Colombian President Álvaro Uribe. Mr. Vivanco says that when it comes to public debate “Uribe mantiene un grado de descalificación y agresión similar al de Chávez.”⁵

According to HRW’s own reporting, Colombia is the most repressive country in the hemisphere. Over 40 trade unionists were killed in 2008, and over 460 have been murdered since Uribe took office in 2002.⁶ Just last month, Colombian soldiers killed the husband of an indigenous rights leader, and an Afro-Colombian rights leader was murdered in October.

With what credible standard can Mr. Vivanco compare the state of the public debate in Venezuela and Colombia? There is not even an opposition media in Colombia remotely comparable to that which prevails in Venezuela, and journalists who are denounced by President Uribe have had to flee the country after being threatened by death squads.⁷

As we noted in our original letter, Mr. Vivanco’s statement with regard to HRW’s motivation for the report is a clear expression of political animus and should be retracted. There is no excuse for it, and it diminishes HRW’s credibility.

Mr. Roth also writes that “given our limited resources, and given our overarching goal of strengthening human rights norms at a global level, we often focus special attention on countries that we believe are more likely to be viewed as role models by others. . . Venezuela is clearly among the most influential countries in Latin America today.”

We find this explanation implausible. Venezuela’s government is the number one enemy of the US State Department in this hemisphere, and practically the world. Its president is constantly demonized by not only the US government and foreign policy establishment but also the major media. We find it difficult to believe that Mr. Vivanco’s political statements or the intense focus of HRW on Venezuela (see below) are motivated by a concern that Venezuela might influence some leftists or that its errors or weaknesses in the area of human rights, which are no worse than those of other countries in the hemisphere, are something to emulate.

Since Mr. Roth has raised the question of how HRW allocates its scarce resources we would like to ask why it did so remarkably little when, in March 2004, the democratically elected government of Haiti was overthrown in a coup, its officials jailed and its supporters murdered by the thousands.⁸ The coup was supported and indeed instigated by agencies of the US government,⁹ which by bringing about a cut-off of all international aid to the constitutional government of Haiti, guaranteed that it would be overthrown.¹⁰ In addition to the atrocities committed by the coup government, it would seem that Washington’s denial of the Haitian people’s right to freely elect their government, and the hardships to which the Haitian people were subjected to by the US-led funding cut-off are major human rights violations.

Yet Human Rights Watch --- unlike, for example, the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights,¹¹ has not even considered how Washington’s actions, such as through the aid cut-off, might have resulted in considerable harm to people in Haiti (or also contribute to the destabilization and overthrow of Haiti’s elected government). None of these violations or atrocities --- by far the worst in the hemisphere outside of Colombia --- prompted HRW to produce even one report comparable to the reports it has produced attacking the government of Venezuela since Chávez’s took office. The atrocities in Haiti did not prompt Human Rights Watch to hold major press conferences, publish op-eds in the Washington Post, or undertake any of the other high profile media or lobbying campaigns that it has taken against the government of Venezuela. This was true even while prominent members and supporters of Haiti’s constitutional government were being held in jail as political prisoners.

We are well aware that HRW is independent of the US government and has been critical of Washington and allied human rights violators such as the government of Colombia. But it would be naïve to assume that its research agenda and actions are completely insulated from any political influence.

(3) Mr. Roth also contests our criticism of the report’s biggest and most important allegation of discrimination in employment --- that of the PDVSA workers fired for the 2002-2003 oil strike.

As we said in our letter,

“The report implies that public employees, in this case oil workers should have the right to strike for the overthrow of an elected government; we do not support that view. It is especially dubious when that group of employees makes up less than one percent of the labor force, and is using its control over a strategic resource --- oil revenues made up nearly half of government revenues and 80 percent of export earnings --- to cripple the economy and thereby reverse the result of democratic elections. The view that such a strike is ‘a legitimate strike’ is not, to our knowledge, held by any democratic government in the world.”

But most importantly with regard to the credibility of the HRW report, it is profoundly misleading for the authors to argue that “political discrimination is a defining feature” of a government that is not willing to risk the continuing employment of people who have carried out such a strike.

Mr. Roth counters by following the HRW report in citing the ILO determination that the strike was a “legitimate strike.” As independent scholars and researchers, we do not accept “proof by authority.” Neither should HRW. It is up to HRW to show why this strike, which was overtly aimed at toppling the government, was a “legitimate strike.” HRW has failed to do so. The fact that the striking managers and workers at PDVSA had other goals besides toppling the government does not make this strike legitimate.

Of course Mr. Roth’s argument that there should have been more due process in the decision-making with regard to dismissals is a valid point. Like most developing countries, Venezuela suffers from weaknesses in due process and the rule of law in general. However this is a separate issue and does not convert workers who crippled the economy in an attempt to overthrow the government into innocent victims of political discrimination.

Mr. Roth writes: “One of your main allegations is that our report suffers from an overwhelming reliance on opposition sources. Specifically you claim that the report depends heavily on three newspapers aligned with the opposition (El Universal, El Nacional, and Tal Cual) and one nongovernmental organization (Súmate). This allegation has no merit.

“One simple way to gauge what sources we relied on is to examine the footnotes. The report contains 754 of them. Of these, only 88 cite material drawn from one of those three newspapers, and only 50 do so without providing another corroborating source. Only 10 footnotes cite material published or reproduced by Súmate. In other words, only 6.6 percent of the material cited in the report comes exclusively from these newspapers, and 1.3 percent from Súmate. That is a total of 8 percent of our citations, which hardly suggests an overwhelming reliance.”

Our response:

These numbers are meaningless for assessing the report’s reliance on opposition sources. There are indeed 794 footnotes, but most of them are footnotes to constitutions, laws, conventions, and legal, historical, and other arguments that have no bearing on the question of whether the allegations made by HRW in the report are true.

If we look at the sources for the chapter on political discrimination, for example, the ones that actually are related to the facts or allegations that the report is trying to establish, we find that out of about 70 sources, 45 of these --- or 64 percent --- are opposition. About 35, or half, are from the sources mentioned above: El Universal, El Nacional, Tal Cual, and Súmate.

It is therefore correct to say that the report relies heavily on opposition sources, a number of whom are known for fabricating material and allegations against the Venezuelan government.¹² Furthermore, the report is misleading with regard to the nature of these sources, not clearly identifying the opposition sources as such, while referring to one of the most balanced newspapers in the country as “pro-government.” As we pointed out in our original letter, this is further evidence of the authors’ bias and/or lack of knowledge of Venezuela.

(4) Mr. Roth also takes issue with our criticism of the HRW report’s treatment of the case of RCTV.

He writes:

“The Venezuelan government was under no obligation to renew RCTV’s concession. The problem in this case was that President Chávez himself justified the non-renewal as a response to alleged criminal activity, without giving RCTV an opportunity to defend itself against the charges (a due process violation). Moreover, as the report demonstrates, it was clear that the real reason the government was denying a renewal to RCTV– while simultaneously granting one to another station that was allegedly just as implicated in the coup– was because of RCTV’s anti-government programming (an act of political discrimination).”

Our response:

Again, the due process complaint is a valid one; it would be better if Venezuelan law (which pre-dates Chávez) provided for hearings and other procedural guarantees with regard to the decision on whether to renew a broadcast license. But this is a separate question as to whether the denial of RCTV’s license renewal was a violation of free speech, or whether the Venezuelan government is using its authority over broadcast licenses to restrict freedom of expression. The HRW report answers both of these questions in the affirmative,¹³ but it does not provide any convincing evidence that this true.

Roth’s argument (and that of the report) is that other TV stations also played an active role in the coup but had their licenses renewed, and that therefore the denial of RCTV’s license is “an act of political discrimination” and an attempt to proscribe criticism of the government.

But this does not follow logically. Broadcast TV and radio stations in Venezuela are free to criticize the government as much as they want, without fear of losing their broadcast licenses. As in the US and other democracies, however, they cannot become political actors, and still expect from the government a license for a monopoly over a public broadcast frequency. In fact, as we explained in our original letter, the opposition media in Venezuela has more freedom to be political actors, for example in election campaigns, than do their counterparts in the United States. By making it appear as though the Venezuelan government is using its control over broadcast licenses to restrict the media more than is the case in the United States or other democracies, HRW engages in a very serious misrepresentation of the reality of freedom of expression in Venezuela.

For example, the HRW report states as though it were a fact:

“In the most notorious case, the government refused to renew the license of the opposition television station RCTV in May 2007 because of its obstinate refusal to soften its editorial line.”

And again, that the government used “its regulatory power in a discriminatory and punitive manner against a channel because of its critical coverage of Chávez and his government.”

But in addition to its active participation in the coup, RCTV distinguished itself by consistently being a political actor in ways that are not allowed in the United States or other democratic countries, for broadcast licensees. (In the United States even cable TV outlets are subject to restrictions with regard to election campaigns, that Venezuelan media are not bound by.) HRW’s statement of “fact” is thus grossly misleading --- this is much different from having “critical coverage of Chávez and his government,” which is the norm in the Venezuelan media.

The HRW report also misrepresents the state of the Venezuelan media in other ways. For example, it says:

“…he [Chávez] has since significantly shifted the balance of the mass media in the government’s favor. This shift has been accomplished, not by promoting more plural media, but by stacking the deck against critical opposition outlets while advancing state-funded media that represent the views only of Chávez’s supporters.”

This is a serious misrepresentation, which gives the impression that the state-run media are encroaching on freedom of speech, rather than acting as a necessary counter-balance to what would otherwise be a right-wing media monopoly. But buried in the footnotes (footnote 184, p.74; footnote 181, p.73) we find that the state TV stations referred to above actually reach a very small audience. If the numbers provided by HRW are accurate, all three broadcast state TV channels combined have a smaller audience than that of RCTV’s current (cable) audience.

Mr. Roth contests our criticisms by pointing to the HRW report’s discussion of the expansion of community media. It is true that the report’s treatment of the community media is fair and balanced, unlike its treatment of the courts, the major media, and labor --- which are laced with prejudice and exaggeration. It reads like it was written by a different person than the rest of the report. However, it does not make up for the distortions in the report’s treatment of the major media.

Mr. Roth also engages in an ad hominem attack on one of our signers, because an article that contained a false charge against José Miguel Vivanco was posted on a web site that he edits. We do not see the relevance of this point. The web site, Venezuelanalysis.com, immediately corrected the error --- which was not of their own writing --- as soon as they were informed of it.

Finally, we are disappointed that Mr. Roth has chosen to stonewall against valid and serious criticisms, with a smokescreen of rhetoric, and not even respond to the most obvious points. We would welcome the opportunity to publicly debate these concerns with Mr. Roth or any other representative of Human Rights Watch. We therefore once again appeal to the Board of Directors to intervene and correct this report. We also would be glad to meet with members of the Board to discuss our concerns further, and we would be glad to hear your opinions on this matter.

Sincerely,

Notes

[1] This is the paragraph from the 2005 IACR report cited by HRW in its report: 331. The Commission notes that the discriminatory acts of the State against persons who have an ideology or political opinion different from whatever administration is in office may take on more subtle indirect forms which at times may be more effective for deterring criticism or for exercising coercion that leads to a change of position, at least in public, resulting in greater apparent alignment with the positions of the governing party. The Commission finds that dismissing employees and obstructing access to social benefits, among other measures, to punish those persons who express their voice of dissent from the administration are violations of human rights and should be subject to generalized censure, and should be investigated.

[2] In English: “…because President Chávez presents Venezuela as a model that can be adopted by the region. There is an entire propaganda effort to promote the Venezuelan model and there are some countries that are taking the idea seriously.” From El Universal, “Venezuela no es modelo para nadie,” September 21, 2008. Accessed January 9, 2009. http://deportes.eluniversal.com/2008/09/21/pol_art_venezuela-no-es-mod_1057172.shtml. Since El Universal is not necessarily a reliable source, we confirmed that this quote from Mr. Vivanco was accurate.

[3] See The Economist, “Democracy and the downturn,” November 13, 2008. Accessed January 9, 2009. http://www.economist.com/world/americas/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12607297

[4] El Universal, “Venezuela no es modelo para nadie,” September 21, 2008.

[5] In English: “Uribe maintains a degree of condemnation and aggression similar to that of Chávez.” Ibid.

[6] See Juan Forero, “Unionists’ Murders Cloud Prospects for Colombia Trade Pact,” The Washington Post, April 10, 2007. Accessed January 10, 2009. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/09/AR2007040901250_pf.html. Forero notes “400 union members killed since President Álvaro Uribe took office in 2002.” In addition to the 40 killed in 2008, at least 26 were murdered in 2007, as Uribe himself admitted in an interview with The Washington Post (”A conversation with Álvaro Uribe,” April 20, 2008).

[7] Mark Fitzgerald, “El Nuevo Herald reporter flees Colombia after ‘threats’ from President,” Editor & Publisher. October 5, 2007

[8] See, e.g., Thomas Griffin, Haiti: Human Rights Investigation, November 11-21, 2004 (Center for the Study of Human Rights, University of Miami School of Law, 2005), available at http://www.law.miami.edu/cfshr/index.php

[9] Walt Bogdanich and Jenny Nordberg, “Mixed US Signals Helped Tilt Haiti Toward Chaos,” The New York Times, January 29, 2006.

[10] Jeffrey Sachs , “From His First Day in Office, Bush Was Ousting Aristide,” Los Angeles Times, March 4, 2004.

[11] See Center for Human Rights and Global Justice (CHRGJ), Partners In Health (PIH), the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center (RFK Center, since renamed the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights), and Zanmi Lasante, Wòch nan Soley: The Denial of the Right to Water in Haiti, June 2008: “Although the United States has a long and well-documented history of this kind of interference in Haiti’s political and economic matters, one of the most egregious examples of malfeasance by the United States in recent years was its actions to block potentially lifesaving loans to Haiti by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB),” page iii, and “What emerges in this chapter is a high level of strategic interference by US personnel to stall the disbursement of these loans indefinitely in order to use them as leverage for political change.” page. 2. Accessed January 10, 2008. http://www.rfkmemorial.org/human_rights/080730_HaitiRighttoWater_FINAL.pdf

[12] Mr. Roth criticizes us for calling attention to the report’s citation of an opposition blogger arguing that the material for which he is cited is true. We mentioned this citation only in passing, mainly to show that authors’ unfamiliarity with sources in Venezuela, or they probably would not have cited someone with no credibility.

[13] See Human Rights Watch, A Decade Under Chávez, pp 34, 60, 67-68, 108, 110-117.