by JOE EMERSBERGER
HBO Max began streaming a documentary on September 15: A La Calle (“To the Street”). It portrays US-backed opposition leaders in Venezuela as pro-democracy heroes battling a brutal dictatorship—a total reversal of the truth. A Daily Beast article (9/13/21) promoting the film is headlined “Capturing Venezuela’s Descent Into Socialist Hell,” which succinctly conveys the film’s slant, and suggests why it found a big corporate platform like HBO Max, a subsidiary of AT&T‘s WarnerMedia.
From the trailer alone, it’s obvious that A La Calle depicts Venezuelan opposition leader Leopoldo López as a noble democrat. That’s outrageous.
Legacy of violent coup attempts
López, a former oil industry executive, was one of the perpetrators of a US-backed coup in 2002 that briefly ousted the democratically elected president at the time, Hugo Chávez. A dictatorship under business executive Pedro Carmona killed 60 protesters during the two days it was in power. (Another 19 people, half of them Chavistas, were killed in violent confrontations just before the coup.) López—along with another prominent politician, Henrique Capriles—led the kidnapping of a Chávez government minister while Carmona was in power. López appeared on local TV, proudly saying that he had briefed “President Carmona” about the kidnapping.
Several months later, López backed a second major coup attempt, the opposition-led sabotage of the oil industry that supplied almost all Venezuela’s export revenue. The coup attempts against Chávez drove the poverty rate to over 60% by early 2003.
López supported violent protests again in 2013 after the candidate he backed, Capriles, refused to accept his loss to President Nicolás Maduro in the first presidential election after Hugo Chávez’s death. Later that year, López criticized Capriles for calling off the protests, saying they should have continued until Maduro was ousted. When Capriles called off the protests, they had already left nine people dead, all supporters of Maduro.
López initiated protests early in 2014 that led to 43 deaths: Half of them strongly indicate the responsibility of his supporters. It was only after leading that fourth US-backed effort to oust the elected Venezuelan government that López finally went to jail.
Not excusing but ignoring crimes
I watched the whole documentary, curious to see how exactly the film would whitewash all the coup attempts López was involved with, and how it would deny the violence his supporters and allies perpetrated over the past 20 years.
I also wondered how the film would excuse murderous US economic sanctions on Venezuela—acts of war that have been linked to the deaths of tens of thousands of Venezuelans by the end of 2018 alone. By 2021, US sanctions, which have been relentlessly intensified since 2019, reduced Venezuela’s government revenue by 99%, according to UN special investigator Alena Douhan.
I expected to see bad arguments justifying all these crimes. Instead, the documentary edited them out of existence completely. None of these things were mentioned even once: nothing about the US-backed coup attempts prior to 2014, nothing about devastating economic warfare the US has inflicted on Venezuela since 2017.
Venezuelan economist Ricardo Hausmann and Tamara Taraciuk (deputy Americas director of Human Rights Watch) deserve special attention for the mendacity of the statements they made.
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