SF IMC Interviews Al Giordano on Venezuela, the media, and [fake] anarchism : SF Indymedia makes some comments about the racist reporting in Venezuela:

Al Giordano: There's something very racist in the reporting of simulators like the British journalist Phil Gunson, a freelance mercenary who has published knowingly false stories recently in Newsweek/MSNBC, the Christian Science Monitor and the daily newspaper of coup-plotters everywhere, the Miami Herald. There's something positively sleazy about this guy and his work. I observed him in action down in Venezuela during a presidential press conference - him and this little clique of boy reporters from England and the U.S., and their snobby superiority complex, who would be more comfortable with Chávez as their gardener than as president of an oil-rich nation of 24 million people.

You can see the frustration on their faces of having to report on this dark-skinned hawk-nosed soldier who is smarter and more popular than they are... In fact, if anything, he's very suave and smooth, which is why his five-hour live TV shows every Sunday - "Alo Presidente!" - are the most popular or at least one of the most popular programs in the country. Whole families gather every Sunday to watch the show, on which he takes live phone calls.

And about an anarchist website:

Al Giordano: I think the post by these so-called "anarchists," and their timing, is a cowardly act of aggression against the progress of all Latin American social movements right now. If Venezuela falls to a U.S. coup, it's going to turn the clock back 30 years in the entire hemisphere. We'll be right back in Santiago de Chile, September 11, 1973. Pinochet rounded up and shot all the anarchists, too, you know. Remember that the Chile coup led to Operation Condor and military dictatorship terror in Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil, and Bolivia among other places. The cancer spread all the way to Mexico. THAT is what is being attempted right now. The people whining about Chávez today are like those who whined about Allende in the early 70s...

The watch had previously blogged on racist opposition to Chavez.

He is Venezuela's first multiracial president and is called "Negro" (nigger) by his detractors because of his African-Indigenous features. Behind the enemies of Venezuela and Hugo Chavez are very large sums of money being spent to destroy the dreams of the people who historically have been discriminated against because of race, economic ideas, etc. ...

Sixty percent of the population of Venezuela are people of African descent. The others are Mestizos of Indigenous and European descent and Indigenous...