All news is local. Following the deadly U.S. raid to pluck President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, out of Venezuela, local news organizations reported on the reaction in their communities. This morning I’m taking a look at how three of the outlets that Ellen Clegg and I profile in our book, “What Works in Community News,” are handling the news.
“‘A Huge Step Towards Change, Hopefully A Positive One,’” by Tom Breen, the New Haven Independent.
Jose Lara, a Venezuelan expat living in West Haven, Connecticut, told Breen he was hopeful that Maduro’s arrest would lead to better days for his home country. “I’m feeling excited,” Lara said at a gathering outside New Haven City Hall. Breen writes:
Like Lara, many who showed up on Saturday night were optimistic that this time is different.
“Excitement, first and foremost,” Laura Almeyda said when asked how she is feeling today. Also, “confusion. Uncertainty. But hope. We’re faithful and joyful. This is a huge step towards change, hopefully a positive one.”
Breen observes, though, that others, such as U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., are warning that Trump’s action was “a fundamental violation of the Constitution” that could lead to “endless conflict.” And he links to another indy digital outlet in Connecticut, CT News Junkie, where Karla Ciaglo reports on the (mostly) negative reaction from Democratic officials and left-leaning activist groups.
“Venezuelans in Memphis feel euphoria now that ‘nightmare’ is over — but dreams for future uneasy” (reg. req.), by Jody Callahan, The Daily Memphian.
As with the New Haven Independent, The Daily Memphian — supplemented with coverage by The Associated Press — focuses on the Venezuelan diaspora community in Memphis, Tennessee. Here’s part of the Memphian story:
“We have been dreaming of these days for so long. We have been hopeful of a day when we see [these leaders] out of the country and really democracy back in our country,” said Daniel Bastardo Blanco, who works in communications in Memphis. “We remain incredibly hopeful that freedom is about to restart in our country.”
But Venezuelan natives living in Memphis also said that their euphoria was also mixed with fear for friends and relatives still living in the South American country, where some citizens were killed in the strikes, as well as tremendous uncertainty about what happens next.
“It was a little bit of a shock,” said Pedro Velasquez, whose family runs nonprofit medical clinics in both Memphis and Venezuela. “As I read about how it was executed, and that there weren’t as many civilian casualties, that it was more localized and over in 20-30 minutes, it sort of made me breathe a little easier.”
“Hundreds march through Minneapolis to protest U.S. attack on Venezuela” (reg. req.), by Kyeland Jackson, The Minnesota Star Tribune.
Jackson leads with Andrew Josefchak of the Minnesota Peace Action Coalition and a left-wing supporter of the Maduro government, who joined with more than 200 others to protest Trump’s action on Satuday. “The peace movement in this country, in Minneapolis at least, wasn’t going to let that [military action] go by without organizing an emergency demonstration against it to show that people in the U.S. don’t want this,” Josefchak was quoted as saying. “They don’t want war.”
The Strib also quotes Democratic opponents of Trump’s action like U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar and Republican supporters like U.S. Rep. Tom Emmer. And we hear from a Venezuelan expat who supports the raid despite concerns about her mother’s safety:
Soleil Ramirez watched footage of explosions across Caracas moments after the strike began, worrying for her mother, who lives near a military base.
Ramirez, chef and owner of the Crasqui restaurant in St. Paul, said her mother is fine — and the military operation was reason to celebrate.
“Let us celebrate this victory because we haven’t been celebrating anything in the last 26 years,” she said.
A note on the photo: NC Newsline, which covers North Carolina, is part of States Newsroom, a network of 50 nonprofit news outlets covering politics and public policy. Its journalism is available for republication under a Creative Commons license. Ellen and I recently hosted publisher and CEO Chris Fitzsimon on our “What Works” podcast.
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Per usual in such coverage, the broader, longer historical sweep is missing. I remember from the late ’60s a photo of Nelson Rockefeller angrily boarding a jet after Venezuelans shouted at him, “Yankee go home!” My very quick historical review suggests this came about because Rockefeller was playing a major role in promoting supermarkets in Venezuela, in part because they’d be more efficient in food pricing and distribution than the traditional bodegas, but also because he saw displacing the bodegas stood as obviating political organization and the “threat of leftists and Communists” in Venezuela and elsewhere in South America.
Now much more needs to be explicated here, but it all fits the pattern of US meddling, intervention, to suit its ideological and economic purposes, not for the welfare and respect of sovereignty and political preferences of the indigenous population. Hand in hand with that is support from mostly the haves in those nations who would profit handsomely by aligning with the US capitalists.
Now Rockefeller’s project goes back to around the late 1940s, if I have my facts right. These newspaper analyses go back what, a decade? And how about discussion of US opposition to Hugo Chavez, and then when he died, the oil market collapsed putting Venezuela in dire economic straits, and then Maduro did a hard turn to the right, did the US seek to ameliorate or exploit the suffering?
There’s a lot more to understanding this situation and the symbolism of the US violating international and its own Constitutional law in the aggression in Venezuela.