Venezuela SA
Homepage
Special Report
Lights! Camera! Revolución!
By Mac Margolis | NEWSWEEK
Like Mussolini and Stalin before him, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez has erected his very own movie studio. Welcome to Hugowood.
In the balding foothills just east of Caracas, a sprawling glass-and-concrete structure bakes in the equatorial sun. The bleached façade and tinted windows have the look of a strip mall or generic suburban office block. But La Villa del Cine — "Cinemaville" — is the headquarters for Hugo Chávez's latest campaign in the struggle for Latin America's hearts and minds: a state-owned film studio that's the Venezuelan strongman's answer to what he denounces as the "tyranny" of Hollywood. His loyalists hail it as a "platform" to "revolutionize consciousness." Many Venezuelans just call it Hugowood.
It's only 18 miles from downtown, but the drive there turns out to be a two-and-a-half-hour ordeal. With state-subsidized gasoline at a petropopulist 17 cents a gallon, the entire nation of 27 million seems to be on the road this morning. President Chávez, known to his devotees as Comandante Hugo, has called upon people across Latin America to rise up in the name of the 19th-century independence hero Simón Bolivar, break the shackles of neoliberalism, and join the fight for "21st-century socialism." To that end he courts Hizbullah and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is stockpiling Russian-made fighter jets and tanks, and has given aid and comfort to Colombian narcoguerrillas. But stuck in traffic outside the capital, you have to wonder why anyone believes his rhetoric. No one in Venezuela will ever make it to the Bolivarian revolution on time.
Cinemaville is a similarly hollow threat. Just inside the studio gates, a man-made canal leads to an artificial stream and lakebed—but there was no water in them when I visited recently. Indoors, the corridors and edit bays are vacant except for one or two stray techies in jeans and tennis shoes. Rows of sewing machines lie idle under dust covers in the costume atelier. An electrical fire earlier this year knocked out most of the studio's work-stations, forcing producers, editors, seamstresses, carpenters, and engineers to relocate. "Here is Studio 1. Six to eight different film sets can fit in here," a perky Cinemaville PR aide chirps, opening the door to an empty warehouse.
Like most everything else in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Cinemaville was built to be noticed but not scrutinized. Chávez has a habit of inaugurating partly completed projects for the cameras and then losing interest in them. His leadership style is the stuff of cinema, replete with red berets, — camouflage-clad citizen militias, and gale-force stump speeches. But few Venezuelans would be surprised if this project turns out like so many others—impulsive, exorbitant, overstated, and ultimately cast aside. Reputable filmmakers keep their distance if they can afford to. Others grit their teeth. "Because they need the money, and because Chávez has plenty of it, filmmakers are a highly blackmailable class," says Fernando Rodríguez, an art critic for the Caracas paper Tal Cual. "I wouldn't have anything to do with the Villa if I could," a noted Venezuelan director told me, and then asked not to be named. >>> Go to Full Story >>>
Chávez Fans Push to Remove Legacies of U.S. Capitalism — Golf Courses
By SIMON ROMERO | The New York Times
President Hugo Chávez's political movement has found a new target: golf.
After a brief tirade against the sport by the president on national television last month, pro-Chávez officials have moved in recent weeks to shut down two of the country's best-known golf courses, in Maracay, a city of military garrisons near here, and in the coastal city of Caraballeda. "Let's leave this clear," Mr. Chávez said during a live broadcast of his Sunday television program. "Golf is a bourgeois sport," he said, repeating the word "bourgeois" as if he were swallowing castor oil. Then he went on, mocking the use of golf carts as a practice illustrating the sport's laziness.
The government's broad nationalizations and asset seizures have gone far beyond the oil industry to include coffee roasters, cattle ranches and tomato-processing plants. If the golf course closings go forward, the number of courses shut down in the last three years will be about nine, said Julio L. Torres, director of the Venezuelan Golf Federation. A project on Margarita Island, designed by the American architect Robert Trent Jones Jr. and intended to be South America's top course, was halted because of financial problems.
Most of the closed courses are in oil regions, near Maracaibo in western Venezuela and in Monagas State, in the east, and were initially built for Americans working in the oil industry. Mr. Chávez’s purge of dissidents from the national oil company focused suspicion on the golf courses, which were seen as bastions of the old elite. A housing shortage has also pushed the government's hand, Mr. Chávez said last month, when he questioned why Maracay had so many slums while the golf course and the grounds of the state-owned Hotel Maracay, a decaying modernist gem built in the 1950s, stretch over about 74 acres of coveted real estate. "Just so some little group of the bourgeois and the petit-bourgeois can go and play golf," he said during his television program. >>> Go to Full Story >>>
New Evidence of Venezuelan Aid for Colombian Rebels
By SIMON ROMERO | The New York Times
Despite repeated denials by President Hugo Chávez, Venezuelan officials have continued to assist commanders of Colombia’s largest rebel group, helping them arrange weapons deals in Venezuela and even obtain identity cards to move with ease on Venezuelan soil, according to computer material captured from the rebels in recent months and under review by Western intelligence agencies.
The materials point to detailed collaborations between the guerrillas and high-ranking military and intelligence officials in Mr. Chávez's government as recently as several weeks ago, countering the president's frequent statements that his administration does not assist the rebels. "We do not protect them," he said in late July.
The new evidence — drawn from computer material captured from the rebels, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC — comes at a low point for ties between Venezuela and Colombia. Mr. Chávez froze diplomatic relations in late July, chafing at assertions by Colombia's government that Swedish rocket launchers sold to Venezuela ended up in the hands of the FARC. Venezuela's reaction was also fueled by Colombia's plans to increase American troop levels there. "Colombia's government is trying to build a case in the media against our country that serves its own political agenda," said Bernardo Álvarez, Venezuela's ambassador in Washington, describing the latest intelligence information as "noncorroborated."
Mr. Chávez has disputed claims of his government's collaboration with the rebels since Colombian forces raided a FARC encampment in Ecuador last year. During the raid, Colombian commandos obtained the computers of a FARC commander with encrypted e-mail messages that described a history of close ties between Mr. Chávez's government and the rebel group, which has long crossed over into Venezuelan territory for refuge. The newest communications, circulated among the seven members of the FARC's secretariat, suggest that little has changed with Venezuela’s assistance since the raid. The New York Times obtained a copy of the computer material from an intelligence agency that is analyzing it. >>> Go to Full Story >>>
