Capturing the high ground: live history to celebrate!
Marking a critical turning point

Oaxaca, Monday, December 23, 2002

Friends (and a few "enemies" who got onto my list along the way):

      The tide is turning, finally, after all the years that Latin Americans
(including the Indians of Latin America) have suffered at the hands of the
wealthy classes of many countries.

      These past few weeks mark a turning point. The ordinary people of
Venezuela, those who have struggled all their lives to merely subsist, are
right now defeating all efforts of the United States and its wealthy,
corrupt Venezuelan compradors to destroy Venezuelan democracy. This
astounding historic turn is being documented thoroughly and passionately by
Venezuelan popular media.

      For gringos like me whose Spanish is at best halting, Al Giordano's
Narco News website
                         http://www.narconews.com/
offers a wide-open window on the thrilling developments there. In his
interview by the San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center
                         http://sf.indymedia.org/
on December 20, he said,

      " . . . we (and that "we" includes IndyMedia) have an enormous network
of friends and allies on the ground there [in Venezuela] who are the ones
Venezuelans proudly call Community Journalists. The independent media
movement in Venezuela is the most advanced in the hemisphere, probably in
the world. There are 25 Community TV and Radio stations in Venezuela, many
of which began as "pirate stations," one dating back to the 1960s, that were
legalized under the Bolivarian Constitution of 1999. Their movement also
includes important print and Internet publications.

      "The Popular Revolutionary Assembly has one of the best online centers
of information I've ever seen. It's at:
                           http://www.aporrea.org
It updates every hour or more often, for 24 hours a day. In recent days it
has been invaluable. Anyone who has been reading the Aporrea site for the
past two weeks has witnessed, time and time again, how the people from the
grassroots are leading and pushing Chávez to resist the coup, not vice
versa."

      Al's interview is also a powerful indictment of the false portrayal of
Venezuelan reality regularly dished up by the commercial media in that
country and in the U.S. to try to promote a coup against the constitutional
and highly popular government of Hugo Chávez.

      But his interview transcends the living moment of history, pointing
towards fulfillment of the much-touted information revolution. The entire
interview is such an inspiration that I've posted it on my website. It's at:
http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/Strategy/Discussion/2002-12-20Gior
dano.html
All good wishes for the holidays, and for the year ahead.
George