As Venezuelan strike continues, don't be misled by stereotypes

The e-mailed message about the 3-week-old strike that is paralyzing Venezuela and is driving up world oil prices was addressed ''to foreign correspondents'' and had an air of urgency about it.

''Dangerous stereotypes about Venezuela,'' read the headline. The fist paragraph said, ``I'm seriously concerned about the constant use of stereotypes by some of you in the foreign media.''

The writer was Ana Julia Jatar, a Venezuelan academic with Harvard University's Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, and an often passionate supporter of liberal causes on Spanish-language television shows.

She was referring, among others, to the coverage of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN, she told me in a later telephone interview.

In her message, she asked foreign reporters not to fall into the following stereotypes:

• First stereotype: that Venezuela's crisis is a clash between the traditional elite, headed by the Fedecamaras business association, and the poor, led by President Hugo Chávez.

Venezuela is one of the Latin American countries with the greatest social mobility, in part because of the volatility of oil resources, Jatar wrote. Changes in oil prices have made and destroyed fortunes overnight. Immigrants in Venezuela have prospered in record times. The president of Fedecamaras, for instance, was born in Spain and began working as a truck driver at age 17, making his way up to his present position.

In addition, the anti-Chávez strike is led by Venezuela's biggest labor union, and the latest polls show that 70 percent of Venezuelans now oppose Chávez.

Considering that about 70 percent of Venezuela's population is poor, the polls suggest that a majority of the poor are opposing Chávez.

• Second stereotype: Venezuela's crisis is a product of a white-versus-black ethnic confrontation, in which the white elite is opposing the Chávez government, largely made up of dark-skinned officials.

''Nothing is farther from the truth,'' Jatar says. ''Ethnic divisions are not part of the Venezuelan crisis.'' In fact, opposition leaders Manuel Cova, Enrique Medina Goméz and Claudio Fermín are dark-skinned, while Chávez's two top aides, Vice President Diosdado Cabello and Defense Minister José Vicente Rangel, are white, she adds.

• Third stereotype: that the armed forces are members of the rightist elite. ''The Armed Forces, as well as the PDVSA state oil company, have been important mechanisms of social mobility. President Chávez is the best example,'' Jatar wrote, referring to Chávez's working-class background.

• Fourth stereotype: that the opposition wants a coup d'état. ''Coup plotters use tanks and troops. They don't organize themselves to collect more than 2 million signatures for a petition asking for early elections,'' Jatar wrote. ``The true story is that despite having been elected, Chávez has broken the constitution and the law on many occasions.''

Chávez, who has stated that representative democracy ''is a farce,'' faces more than a dozen corruption and human rights accusations from the opposition in Venezuelan courts, including charges that he mismanaged millions of dollars from an economic stabilization fund and that his ''Bolivarian Circle'' militias were responsible for the killings of 19 people who were participating in an April 11 opposition march, she added.

Does this mean that we should support some opposition leaders' demands that Chávez resign immediately, or a coup d'état? I don't think so, and -- judging from what I heard from Jatar -- neither does she. Anything even closely resembling a coup would not only turn Chávez into a victim but would set a terrible precedent for Latin America's democracies.

But Chávez critics have the right to demand -- within the law -- that their recently collected two million signatures be accepted as a legal step toward early elections.

That's certainly more democratic than the attempt at a coup d'état Chávez led in 1992, his later glorification of that bloody uprising, or the gradual militarization of his government.

Recent opposition street protests have gathered more than one million people, according to press reports. That's probably 10 times the number of people who participated in the protests that toppled recent presidents in Argentina and Ecuador. To be sure, neither of the latter two countries' presidents was as inept as Chávez, who has managed the unthinkable: despite a rise in oil prices, Venezuela's economy has fallen by at least 7 percent this year, and there are as many as 2.5 million more poor in the country than when he took office.

Conclusion: Venezuelan opposition leaders who want to oust Chávez by circumventing Venezuela's laws should be condemned by the international community.

But Venezuelan opposition leaders who are pursuing constitutional ways to vote the region's most incompetent president out of office should be applauded.