The Oh, Hello and

Welcome to Behind the News. My name is Doug Henwood.

Two guests today and moments the historian Alejandro Velasco will sort

fact from fiction about what's been going on in Venezuela. And at the bottom the hour, the political

scientist Jessica Blatt reveals the origins of her discipline in racism and xenophobia in the late 19th

and early 20th centuries. First, Venezuela. Every day we hear of some horror

afflicting that country, be it food shortages or political violence. Mainstream

sources quickly convert this news into sermons on the failure of socialism and the wisdom of the capitalist way.

What's been going on and why? To answer that question, I asked Alejandro Velosko,

associate professor of modern Latin America at NYU, an editor of Nackla's

report on the Americas.

One reads a awful lot of dire things coming into Venezuela in the mainstream media.

The mainstream media has never been very friendly towards the Chavez

Revolution, but how much of this is true?

If there are rampant poverty and shortages of basic goods and political chaos, what's really going on in the ground?

It is true and to some extent some of the reports are falling short.

I think what the reports are failing to capture in terms of the increase in poverty in terms of the increasing numbers of Venezuelans of all social sectors leaving

Venezuela, whereas before is primarily middle and upper classes now it includes popular sectors where, you know, going across the border to Colombia and to Brazil.

What the reporting is missing is a sense of the longer kind of structural causes that are leading to this moment and so instead

it's sort of all being branded as a failure of socialism in a kind of very easy

narrative that

Chaos and Venezuela have been which is that you know the Chavez government and since the

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