LYING ABOUT VENEZUELA IN OTTAWA: “VAMOS A CONTAR MENTIRAS”

Lascaris, the "star"
of the panel lying about Venezuela

From left to right: Ávalos, Lascaris, Saint-Vil and Peter:
preparing to lie about Venezuela

This Saturday, March 23rd, the group “Hand-off Venezuela” from Ottawa-Gatineau, with the support of the Public Service Alliance of Canada, organized a panel under the title “Manufacturing Consent to A Coup in Venezuela”. The panel was composed by the lawyer and journalist Dimitri Lascaris from Real News Network, Jean Saint-Vil, a Haitian-Canadian activist, and Laura Ávalos, a Canadian-Salvadorian who has been very active in the so-called “chavista” movement in Canada. The panel was moderated by Peter (I could not record his family name), who is the leader of the “Hand-Off Venezuela” in the Ottawa-Gatineau region.

The “star” of the event was Lascaris, who spent one week in Caracas from February 1st until the 8th. He acknowledged that he does not speak Spanish (he relied on a local fixer for the translation). He also said that he could not go to the shanty towns (the barrios) because of lack of security (the local fixer refused to go to the poor areas). He stayed at a four-star hotel in Altamira area, where all the international correspondents stayed. He claimed that he did not receive any payment from the Maduro regime, not even to cover his expenses to travel or while in Venezuela.

He gave some background information about the country that was – at least from the point of view of any objective observer – very biased. For example, he presented two photos of the members of the National Assembly: one with the members of the ruling party PSUV, and another showing the representatives from the democratic opposition forces. He said that it was clear that the photo from the PSUV showed the “majority” of Venezuelans who are coloured and mestizos, while the picture from the opposition showed mainly white people (i.e. the “minority” of Venezuelans).  Lascaris played the racial card many times during his presentation, implying always that the democratic movement against Chávez and Maduro was mainly composed of some kind of “white supremacists” trying to impose the interests of a minority to a large majority of coloured/mestizos/black Venezuelans.

The Haitian-Canadian Saint-Vil played exactly the same card, repeating ad-nauseam during his presentation that “white Venezuelans” were trying to destroy the “legacy of Hugo Chávez” that empowered black Venezuelans and helped them to overcome poverty and marginalization.

Coming back to Lascaris’ presentation, he repeated several of the lies of the Maduro propaganda: Guaidó is “self-proclaimed,”Maduro won a “fair election with 68% of the votes” in May 2018, the current economic crisis is mainly due to the “US embargo” and the fall of oil prices in the international market, that Venezuela has a wonderful constitution that protects the environment, the rights of the indigenous peoples, and all kinds of “chavista” fantasies. He attended a couple of demonstrations while in Caracas: one from the democratic forces in support of Guaidó, and another one in the Avenida Bolívar of those supporting Maduro. Lascaris said that he saw two peaceful demonstrations, that no police nor military blocked people of neither side, etc. He painted a picture of almost “Swiss order and peace”, forgetting to mention that the Maduro police and military killed 240 young men during the protests in 2017 and 2014, that they arrested more than 3000 people, almost 1000 civilians were the subject of “military trials” (something that is unconstitutional and violated their human rights).

Lascaris forgot to mention the 900 political prisoners who are currently in Venezuela jails without proper due judiciary process (a judicial power completely controlled by Maduro and his allies of the executive branch), the 300 military officers who are in jail because they expressed their disagreement with Chavez’s and Maduro’s policies that transformed the Armed Forces into a corrupt political party with weapons (some of these military have been the subject of torture as documented by recent videos showed in the Organization of America States). He also forgot to say something about the environmental devastation that is taking place right now in the south of Venezuela, in the so-called Arco Minero del Oricono (the Orinoco Mining Belt), with “legal” and illegal  exploitation of gold, coltan and diamond in disregard of any universal standard of ecological or human rights protection. He forgot to mention as well the killing of Amerindian Pemon people just a few weeks ago by the National Guard and the Maduro’s paramilitary called “colectivos.”

Lascaris claimed that he is an experienced journalist, but during his presentation, he showed lack of rigour and lack of basic journalistic skills. He said repeatedly that he was “not an expert in Venezuela,”but he did not do the basic job of a good journalist: check the facts about Venezuela, look at background information, do some research before going to the country, try to go beyond the stereotypical interviews and testimonials. He did not do anything that is required from a decent journalist. But he is not a journalist. He is a propagandist. That’s why he did not “know” about the killings of young opposition members in 2014 or 2017, he did not mention the killing of the Pemon people, he did not know that almost 4 million Venezuelans have fled the country because of poverty, diseases and starvation, he did not say a word about the destruction of the national oil company Pdvsa, or the massive corruption since Chávez was in power and continued under Maduro, and all the other facts that Lascaris did not find relevant during his short visit to Venezuela. Not even he mentioned, because he is not aware of it, I am sure, that union leaders from the government-owned corporations of Guayana in the south of Venezuela, have been murdered or jailed by the Maduro regime (and this panel was taking place in the building of a Canadian union and was supported by the public employees’ union). But I repeat: he is not a journalist, he is an agent of Maduro’s propaganda.

Regarding the other two presentations there is not much to say. Monsieur Saint-Vil made a parallel analysis between the situation in Haiti under Jean-Bertrand Aristide and Maduro. He played the racial card, talking about “black Venezuelans” (who supported Chávez and supposedly now support Maduro) being exploited by the “white opposition” (it seems that this guy never saw a picture of Guaidó and other opposition leaders, but they don’t care about the facts). Laura Ávalos, who tried to be “objective”, was not very well informed about the history of Venezuela or even recent facts. For example, she did not know that Venezuelan democracy played a pivotal role in the peace negotiations in El Salvador through the Contadora group in the 90s (her family is from El Salvador). She did not know either that the current Canadian aid of $55 million is going to help the Venezuelan refuges in Brazil who are in the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) camps located in Boavista. But she claimed that she was “very well informed” about the crisis in Venezuela. OK, yes I “believed” Laura.

Two additional comments about this particular event of lies about the crisis in Venezuela. First, the panel did not have any Venezuelan. They pretended to tell the “truth” about Venezuela without any Venezuelan in the panel. Fortunately, some Venezuelans were in the room to present the facts and debunk the lies of the panellists. Second, the racial card was played during the event until the extreme, including the hysterical position of some attendees who shout at me, because I have to “renounce to my white privilege” if I want to really understand what is happening in Venezuela. The person who came shouting at me with this “inverse racist” remark did not like that I responded to her in French (and she is French, according to her own confession). A truly surreal experience. A final note (more surreal). Don, a Canadian chavista activist, told me that he cannot believe at all that the “Cubans” have any influence in Venezuela, that they don’t control the military or have intelligence services in the country. That was the summit of craziness. That’s what ideology can do to your brain.

Being a Sephardi Moroccan Venezuelan Canadian Jew: A case of multiple identities

Everybody is obsessed with identity these days. People look deeper to find their roots. They have their DNAs checked by ancestry.com or geni.com to find out their genetics mix (because we are all the result of a mix –there is no “racial” purity fortunately – but we – the humanity - seem to come from the same parents, as shown by a recent study published in Science journal). There is identity politics and its subdivisions: gender, religious, language politics. Certainly we, Jews, have been obsessed with our identity, either from within but mainly from outside, particularly when those who wanted to destroy us had a supposedly “clear” answer to the question “Who is a Jew?” I won’t try to answer this question – I prefer to leave it as an open question -. Instead I propose to explore the multiples dimensions of identity, and I will try to do so with the case I think I know the better, my own case as a Sephardi Moroccan Venezuelan Canadian Jew.

The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges said in a lecture about James Joyce and the Irish culture –  he was quoting the Norwegian-American sociologist Thorstein Veblen – that the intellectual pre-eminence of Jews in modern Europe was mainly due to the fact that the Jews in the Western world were dealing with a culture that was not theirs, a culture to which they did not profess any “loyalty” (here I am quoting Borges), a culture that they could approach without superstitions, and in many occasions, with a revolutionary aim.  Without pretending to answer the question Who is a Jew, I can say - based on Borges and Veblen’s points of view – that we are is this double and even ambiguous position in society that allows us to have a look at the same from inside and from outside, with a certain detachment, but also with a certain nostalgia or saudade (as the Portuguese say).

I will explore today two dimensions of this multiple Sephardic Moroccan Venezuelan Canadian Jewish being: the language (or the languages I should say), and what I call the “painful identity”.

The languages

It always seemed to me that the title of the first volume of the memoirs of the Literature Nobel Laureate Elias Canetti, The Tongue Set Free (that could be translated alternately in French as La langue sauvée), referred to the German, the language in which this Sephardic Jew born in Bulgaria wrote his books. Canetti himself explains the title in the first chapter of his memoirs, based on a childhood memory in which a man, the lover of his nanny, threatened to cut off his tongue. The absolved tongue (langue in French or lengua in Spanish) represents the physical organ that the writer "saved" from that man's razor that, with that intimidating gesture, ensured the child's silence (Tomás Eloy Martínez preferred to call this book La lengua salvada or The Saved Tongue/Language). But in the field of interpretations, we could say that Canetti "saved" and "acquitted" the German, the language of the Nazi executioners, as a gesture of reaffirmation and victory. One of his other languages ​​was Ladino (he also spoke French and English), which he called the "language of the kitchen" (la lengua de la cocina), a language that he learned as a child from his mother, a proud Sephardic Jew who thought that her Spanish origins gave them a certain aristocratic character.

I was born in Tangier, Morocco. My parents were born in Tetouan, a small city near Tangier. They are the daughter and son of tetaunis, Jews descendants of those expelled from Spain in 1492. It is probably that my ancestors (Nahon, Serfaty, Laredo, Israel, Abudarham) came to Tetouan from the town of Naon in Oviedo, and Granada, and it is also very probably that they arrived in Morocco at the same time that the moors expelled from Andalusia.

There was an important cultural difference between these two groups of expelled people, or “megorashim” as we say in Hebrew.  The moors kept their language (the Arab) and continued to develop a culture and institutions in their language.  But we, the Sephardic Jews had a particular link with Spain, the Spanish language. Isolated from the rest of the world, those Jews kept this language as a treasure with a mix of nostalgia and pride. The romances, a form of poetry born in Spain that we assimilated and kept in the form of folk songs, express very well this feeling of nostalgia, of homesick, of the cities, the landscapes, the flavours, the music of this country that did not like us, a country that meant also suffering, death and destruction for the Jewish people. This is a strange love affair, a love affair that has the language as its most precious object. That’s why my grandmother sung and even today we sing romances like this one: “En la ciudad de Toledo, en la ciudad de Granada, vivía un mancebo que Diego León se llama …” (in the city of Toledo, in the city of Granada, used to live a young man called Diego León). 

The Spanish was also a mean to express our religious life. There is something in the judeo-español, our particular form of ancient Spanish called Haketía mixed with Hebrew and Arab, that communicates an extra dimension to the prayers and texts of our tradition. A good example of this is the Pesach Hagadah. For me is very important that after saying in Aramaic “Ha lahma hanya di ahalu abahatana dearha demisrayim…”, to recite the judeo-español translation, that is more than a translation, a text that captures the very essence of Pesach as Zeman Herutenu, the Time of our Liberation. And I read as my grandfather and my father did every Seder: “Este es el pan de la aflicción que comieron nuestros padres en tierra de Egipto. Todo el que tenga hambre que venga y coma…”. 

We moved to Venezuela when I was six years old, in 1968. The Spanish language, the language we cherished, this treasure we carry everywhere we go, helped us to make the connection with this wonderful and now troubled country where the Spanish is spoken with the flavour (el sabor) of the people from the Caribbean. In some way, we never felt like strangers in this new land. As my mother said when she saw for the first time the Venezuelans in the La Guaira Port: “It seems that we never left Tangier”. The Mediterranean, the Caribbean, the Moroccans, the Venezuelans, these mestizos peoples, and the experience, so common to us in our history of wandering people, of hybrid cultures, of being a people among the peoples.

But there is a Jewish language that transcends the Ashkenazi / Sephardic division, and that communicates something that is uniquely Jewish beyond the language through which is conveyed, either Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino, French or English. There is a scene from Seinfeld that summarizes for me what could be the "Jewish language" par excellence. Jerry's father, who is spending a few days in New York, calls a friend in South Florida (where the old American and Canadian Jews go to retire), who reacts to the unexpected call by asking with a very Jewish cry: " Who died?". The call was not to announce the death of anyone, but to ask a favor. But in the Jewish code "Who died?" says a lot about that way we Jews talk, no matter our origins and languages.

The Seinfeld scene, which reflects the interaction between two typically American Jews, and probably Ashkenazi New Yorkers, could have been perfectly played by two Moroccan or Turkish Jews. The Jewish code, fed by a series of common imaginaries that make up the Jewish thinking and feeling, has a certain universality that even overcomes the barriers of time. In some passages of the Bible and the Talmud, to mention two canonical texts of Judaism, we already find some passages that could have been written by Woody Allen, the Marx brothers or Larry David. For example, in an exchange between the sages around the story of the Tower of Babel collected in the Midrash (legends or stories that complement the biblical narrative) is told, describing the fact that God "came down" to see the construction of the tower, the following: "Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai says: this represents one of the ten descents mentioned by the Torah (made by the Holy One, Blessed be He, to the Earth). 'That the sons of man had built'. Oh well, and what they would have said, Rabbi Berechia exclaimed, that they were the children of a donkey or a camel!"

Going back to Borges and Velben, we can say that the Jewish language, embedded in the languages of our many diasporas, has this duality of memory and irony, and if you want cynicism, that connects us with the past and also provides us with the necessary critical look about the world and the human beings.

Painful identity

Another universal Jewish experience is what I call the “painful identity.” Identity is not purely positive affirmation, it is also conflict or “déchirement” as we say in French. The expression “painful identity” came to my mind when Daniel Shoer Roth, now a journalist in Miami's The New Herald, told me a very revealing anecdote of the twists and turns of Jewishness. A few years ago, Daniel wrote a book about five great Jewish-Venezuelan journalists: Gustavo Arnstein, Alicia Freilich, Paulina Gamus, Carlos Guerón and Sofía Imber. One day a renowned Venezuelan editor and columnist, whose name I won’t disclose, complained to Daniel because he had not included him in the book. Daniel answered with surprise: "I never thought you would consider yourself as a Jew." But identity is a changing and deeply emotional thing. Who knows if this editor and columnist, who at another time in his life chose to avoid identification with the Jews, over the years felt a need to express his Jewishness.

As you know, Spain passed a law two years ago to give the Spanish citizenship to the descendants of the Jews expelled in 1492. I don’t know how many Sephardic Jews have applied for the citizenship, but I do know that many Venezuelans who were barely aware of their Jewish origins have applied to become Spaniards. Individuals bearing the names Maduro (yes, Maduro as the current Venezuelan president), Capriles (as the leader of Venezuelan democratic opposition), De Sola, Ricardo, Mendoza, Benatuil, Curiel, Nunes, from families that long time ago assimilated and became Catholics, remembered suddenly that their ancestors came to Venezuela via Curaçao, from where they arrived as Spanish-Portuguese Dutch Jews, the same families that in the XVII Century arrived to New Amsterdam (today New York) and founded the Congregation Shearith Israel, the Spanish-Portuguese synagogue, in 1654. And these Venezuelans found suddenly their Sephardic connection to obtain the Spanish citizenship to flee the hell that is Venezuela today, the country with the highest inflation rate in the world (14,000 per cent projected for this year, according to the FMI), crime out of control, and scarcity of medications and food.

Another case of “painful identity” that I documented in an article I co-wrote with my friend Néstor Garrido, is the one of Venezuelans who converted to Judaism and decided to move to Israel amidst this horrible crisis. As in many other countries in Latin America (Peru, Colombia, Bolivia), former Evangelical Venezuelans converted to Judaism and decided to make aliah, but they have faced many hurdles, some internal (there is no Israeli consulate in Venezuela because president Hugo Chávez broke diplomatic relations with Israel) and some external (they also faced some problems associated with the politics of conversion in Israel). 

The Jewish community in Venezuela is facing something that we have seen in other once prosperous and vibrant communities in Morocco, Egypt, Lebanon, Poland or Germany. They are in the process of decline in the middle of a terrible crisis that is affecting all Venezuelans without distinction of religion or origin. I won’t say that the community is facing antisemitism, but the anti-Israeli politics of the current regime has certainly introduced the “Jewish question” into the public sphere, in a country that welcome the Jews after the war and where Jewish institutions (schools, synagogues, social and sport centers, museums) flourished. I would like to mention specially the important role that the Centro de Estudios Sefardíes de Caracas (the Center of Sephardic Studies in Caracas) has played in the diffusion of our Sephardic heritage through conferences, concerts, recordings, books and the journal Maguén-Escudo.

But I don’t want to finish this presentation on a negative note. I want to highlight many of the positive things of the Venezuelan Jewish community, its contributions to science and arts, and its achievements in promoting and enriching our Sephardic legacy. For example, the only Venezuelan Nobel Prize of Medicine is the Sephardi Baruch Benacerraf, whose family migrated to Venezuela from Tetouan, Morocco. Or the case of the filmmaker Margot Benacerraf who won the Critics Prize at the Festival of Cannes for her movie Araya. Or the wonderful novel by Isaac Chocrón, Rómpase en caso de incendio (Break in case of fire), where a Venezuelan Jew returns to Morocco looking for his multiple identities; the recordings of Esther Rofé where she sings the wonderful Spanish romances that we cherished so much; the liturgical recordings of Moisés Serfaty; the translation into modern Spanish of the Haftaroth by Rafael Encaoua and David Suisa; the Letter (La carta) that Lucy Garzón wrote in Haketía, a wonderful piece of Jewish humor; the Sephardic Week Festival organized by Moisés Garzón, Jacob Carciente, Amram Cohén, Abraham Botbol, Abraham Levy, Isaac Benarroch, Aquiba Benarroch Lasry, Miriam Harrar, Priscilla Abecasis, Alberto Moryusef, among many others. I can go on and on mentioning many other accomplishments. I just want to thank Limmud Ottawa for giving the opportunity to talk about this community that is facing today many challenges, but is always fighting to keep alive nuestro corazón judío, our Jewish heart. Gracias.

*Talk presented at Limmud Ottawa on March 18, 2018.

Correcting Professor Lisa North: Chavismo has destroyed Venezuela

Venezuelans looking for food in trash bags: the legacy of chavismo (Photo: AFP)

I wrote a letter to the Editor in response to Professor Lisa North's article in The Hill Times of Ottawa. Professor North said in her article that “…Venezuela’s much touted pre-Chávez democratic history and economic development patterns were deeply flawed. Precisely because today’s problems are rooted not only in recent but in past decades of corruption, mismanagement, and rights violations (albeit of different kinds), regime change will not solve them. It may even make them worse if widespread violence breaks out in the current situation of acute polarization between pro-government forces and a divided opposition that has not been able provide a unified or credible leadership that might enjoy widespread popular support.”

Here is my letter to the Editor:

LETTER TO THE EDITOR

Chavismo has destroyed Venezuela

PUBLISHED :Wednesday, Nov. 15, 2017 12:00 AM

Re: “Roots of Venezuela’s crisis run deeper than Chávez, Maduro” (The Hill Times, Nov. 8, p. 18). An op-ed about Venezuela by Liisa North, professor emeritus of political science at York University, repeated some of the half-truths and lies that President Nicolás Maduro’s regime reiterates ad nauseam. Her argument is that the 40 years of democracy that preceded the election of Hugo Chávez as president were not that different from the current nightmare that afflicts Venezuelans.

A majority of Venezuelans elected Mr. Chávez in 1998, rejecting the two-party system that prevailed in the country since the previous dictatorship was toppled in 1958. But the 40 years of the civilian republic were not the dark times depicted by Prof. North.
Corruption was certainly present, but it never had the same scope as the current corruption. It’s also true that towards of the end of the ‘70s, the Venezuelan economy started to show some signs of decline, but the mismanagement never grew to the current catastrophic levels.

The policies of the Maduro regime, following the same populist prescriptions instituted by Mr. Chávez, have caused the free fall of the economy: deep recession in the last four years, hyperinflation rising to three digits, maxi-devaluation of the currency, and the destruction of the national oil company PDVSA.

But the main problem with Prof. North’s text is that she forgot to mention the current tragedy that Venezuelans are facing. They are living a humanitarian crisis. Hunger is a real problem. Malnutrition among the poor, particularly children, has been widely documented. Venezuelans are also dying or suffering because they don’t have access to medication and basic medical services.
She forgot to say that in four months of protests against the Maduro regime, more than 100 people have been killed; or that there are almost 500 political prisoners, many of them civilians submitted, illegally, to trials in military courts. She did not say that the political police of the government, Sebin, does not comply with judges ordering the release of prisoners, and extorts them and their families, asking for large sums of money in United States dollars to “buy” their freedom. She also didn’t say that the poor are enslaved through the CLAP system, a perverse program of social control through the distribution of food bags. She forgot to say that crime is out of control. More than 20,000 people are murdered each year. Prisons have become the paradise of criminals, under the control of gang leaders, thanks to the complicity of government officials.

The main political challenge of the democratic opposition is to rebuild its leadership and propose a consensual vision that will appeal to Venezuelans.

In the meantime, the international community and Canada should maintain the pressure on the Maduro regime to restore democracy, the respect of the constitution, and human rights.

Isaac Nahón-Serfaty
Venezuelan journalist and associate professor
University of Ottawa
Ottawa, Ont.

Cuéntame algo: Espectro y Cuatro

El espectro entra por la puerta...

Episodio que hace el contraste entre el invierno de Ottawa y el caos del tráfico en la tropical localidad de Petare en Caracas (Venezuela). La música del episodio es de Fernando Marconi (disco Chronos). El tema de la serie es de Isaac Nahón. Lo pueden escuchar haciendo click aquí.