Venezuela wrestles over truth of bombing claims

Posted on Wednesday, 04.24.13

Venezuela wrestles over truth of bombing claims
By VIVIAN SEQUERA and MICHAEL WEISSENSTEIN
Associated Press

CARACAS, Venezuela -- Hours after barely winning Venezuela's
presidential election, the ruling party started to flood state media
with accusations that opposition provocateurs were firebombing Cuban-run
neighborhood health clinics across the country in revenge.

More than a week later, a national dispute is raging as the opposition
wages a remarkably successful media counteroffensive showing the claims
to be seriously exaggerated and in some cases entirely false. With
meticulously dated amateur photos of undamaged clinics, opposition
supporters have vividly illustrated how cellphone cameras, Twitter and
Facebook can help even the playing field against a government that came
to dominate broadcast media during the late Hugo Chavez's 14-year
presidency.

The fight is fueling tension in a country that's deeply polarized and
almost exactly divided between supporters of the government and an
opposition that claims the April 14 election was stolen. The chief of
national prisons, Iris Varela, declared Tuesday that she was preparing a
cell for opposition candidate Henrique Capriles for allegedly directing
the purported clinic attacks and other violence against government
buildings and supporters.

Chavez had a history of making claims he never substantiated, denouncing
dozens of alleged assassination plots before succumbing to cancer in
March. His heir, Nicolas Maduro, has shown himself prone to even more
grave accusations, including repeatedly claiming in the week before his
election that Salvadoran and Colombian mercenaries had entered Venezuela
to wreak havoc. The government hasn't presented any evidence to back up
those claims.

Tinedo Guia, president of Venezuela's largest journalists association,
said the government does not appear to fully grasp that people
distrustful of state-controlled media can increasingly rely on
Internet-driven grassroots reporting.

Internet use in Venezuela soared from 4.6 percent of the population in
2001 to 40.2 percent in 2011, according to the World Bank. Mobile phone
subscriptions more than doubled from 47 per 100 people to 98 per 100
between 2005 and 2010, and the number of mobile phones with Internet
access plans grew from less than 1 per 100 people to more than 25 per
100 people over the same period.

"It's evident they are mistaken in thinking the people are stupid," Guia
said of the government.

Health ministry officials did not respond to requests for comment but
other government ministers have alleged the clinics were repaired faster
than the damage could be documented. Some accused skeptics of
questioning the government's claims simply because they opposed the
ruling Chavista movement.

Information Minister Ernesto Villegas wrote last week on Twitter that
"the media and non-governmental organizations are uniting in complicity
with the attacks on doctors and patients."

On April 16, two days after the election, Maduro announced that an
unspecified number of Comprehensive Diagnostic Medical Centers had been
burned by thugs operating on direct orders from Capriles. Information
Minister Ernesto Villegas said eight clinics had been attacked. The
number grew in subsequent accountings by government officials, with
then-Health Minister Eugenia Sader saying by Saturday that 25 clinics
had been burned. She was replaced in a Cabinet shuffle this week.

But no sooner had the first accusations been made than Capriles
supporters rushed to at least five of the clinics and took photos of
their undamaged facades. Amateur photographers were careful to hold up
editions of that morning's newspaper so there would be no doubt the
images were captured after the purported attacks. Then they posted the
photographs on Twitter and Facebook.

The images spread quickly and were published in opposition newspapers
such as El Nacional and El Universal. A website that specializes in
political satire, Chiguire Bipolar, posted an article headlined "Maduro
denounces the opposition's burning, repair, painting and resupplying of
11 Comprehensive Diagnostic Medical Centers." It was tweeted at least
4,200 times and posted even more frequently on Facebook.

Despite earlier insistence from some officials that the damage couldn't
be documented, a government-linked group published 10 photos Wednesday
that it said revealed evidence of the attacks on public buildings, most
showing minor damage to the interiors, such as scorch marks on walls or
a splintered wooden door. One exterior shot showed several streaks of
fire damage above a white building, another revealing minor burns along
the bottom of a health clinic sign on an otherwise untouched wall.

The 561 clinics opened by Chavez are a potent symbol of Venezuela's
effort to alleviate deep poverty by transforming the country with the
world's largest oil reserves into a socialist economy with deep ties to
Cuba. Under an agreement between Chavez and Cuba's Fidel Castro,
thousands of Cuban doctors have moved to slums and remote villages to
attend to the poor. Venezuela, meanwhile, props up Cuba with billions of
dollars in oil.

Cuban government officials did not immediately respond to a request for
comment, but Communist Party newspaper Granma reported last week that
island doctors would continue their work in Venezuela despite what it
called "aggressive protests" at some Cuban-run health facilities. Granma
said no one had been hurt, and did not mention any damage.

Cuban state-run news agency AIN later said clinics had taken
precautionary security measures due to "provocative actions by some
people." AIN added that more than 32,000 medical workers are currently
serving in Cuba's medical mission to Venezuela, which observed its
10-year anniversary this year.

During the campaign, Capriles had indicated he wanted to end subsidized
oil aid to Cuba, saying he no longer wanted to "give" the resource.

The purported burning of the Cuban-run clinics, in turn, became "the
perfect symbolic vehicle for the government's case against the
opposition," which officials have attempted to portray as
"antidemocratic, inhumane, and as a threat to the social policy gains of
recent years," said David Smilde, a Venezuela expert at the University
of Georgia.

Provea, an independent group that is one of Venezuela's most prominent
human rights organizations, compiled images of the five unharmed clinics
and included them in an April 18 report that cast deep doubt on the
government claims.

"No clinic in the country showed signs of having been burned or
vandalized to the intensity suggested in the allegations so widely
distributed by official media and high-ranking government spokesmen,"
the brief report said.

In an unintended echo of the parody article, Gabriela Ramirez,
Venezuela's top official charged with investigating human rights
violations, said Saturday that an unspecified number of clinics had
indeed been hit by firebombs but were repaired overnight a day after the
April 14 election.

Maduro mentioned at least two allegedly burned clinics in the capital's
Baruta district by name. Ramirez said on April 20 that one in the
southwestern state Barinas had been 90 percent burned.

AP reporters visited one of the Baruta clinics on April 16 and one in
Barinas the next day and found no visible signs of fire or smoke damage
on their facades. Neighbors of both clinics said they had not seen
either damaged.

Villegas, the information minister, accused Provea of calling the
government's claims into question solely because the group's director
secretly opposes the government and the Chavista movement, a charge
director Marino Alvarado denies.

"This type of behavior stimulates the fascists," Villegas said. "I'm
very surprised how anti-Chavez sentiment has completely taken hold of him."

Alvarado, the head of Provea, noted how Chavez once accused Provea of
lying about rights violations by military personnel following deadly
1999 mudslides that killed thousands in the coastal state of Vargas,
then acknowledged weeks later that activists had been right and called
for an investigation that found bodies had been tossed into an unmarked
grave.

He suggested that authorities should try to regain lost credibility by
admitting they were mistaken or misinformed about the purported clinic
attacks.

"We hope this government has the capacity to correct its position on the
accusations," Alvarado said.

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Associated Press writers Christopher Toothaker, Frank Bajak and Jorge
Rueda in Caracas and Peter Orsi in Havana contributed to this report.

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Vivian Sequera on Twitter: http://twitter.com/VivianSequera

Michael Weissenstein on Twitter: http://twitter.com/mweissenstein

http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/04/24/v-fullstory/3362372/venezuela-wrestles-over-truth.html