I have been grappling with news coming out of Venezuela over the past few weeks and months. I want to know what's going on right now, but none of the reporting seems very reliable.
I am not familiar personally with Venezuela. I've never been there, and only followed its politics and history from afar over the past decade or so. But there is something about mainstream US media reports of dying babies and shuttered factories that seems too simplistic, an air of reporters parachuted in and fed what their fixer/translator thinks they want to hear. Again, I can't say if their reporting accurately represents the picture in Venezuela right now, since I'm not there, but I have had many experiences in Colombia or Haiti in which I read foreign news coverage of complex situations that I am directly knowledgeable of, and find the coverage to be totally off the mark. The Venezuela stories I read from the NYT and other sources of record reek to me of just such slipshod reporting.
But I can't get a nuanced picture elsewhere, since most reporting that departs from this mainstream mold is patently, explicitly partisan, from sources like Venezuela's public news network or different leftist solidarity networks.
Luckily, I recently ran across this article, originally appearing in the Nation, that seemed to me to offer a much more complex, believable, and nonpartisan reading of the current crisis in Venezuela. I hope you'll enjoy it too. It is an analysis as of someone really trying to understand a situation, rather than trying to strike a victory for one political agenda or another.
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