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Hugo Chavez in a scene from Inside the Revolution |
Hugo Chavez – folk hero or enemy of ‘democracy’?
SOME years ago, while film-maker Pablo Navarrete was living in Venezuela, he was horrified at the apparent lackadaisical approach of the mainstream media towards South America.
He discovered it was not unusual for stringers from foreign papers to not speak any Spanish, or for their reports to favour tales of drug lords’ dying hippos rather than dying Honduran pro-democracy demonstrators.
For 31-year-old Navarrete, whose parents were both imprisoned and tortured by the Pinochet regime in Chile (the reason Navarrete speaks with an English accent and grew up in London), it cemented something in his mind. He wanted to commit to film something serious about the continent.
While working for renowned journalist John Pilger a few years ago in Venezuela, he developed an affinity for the place and last November he returned to turn the cameras on the people living in the barrios, the living quarters of the poor that ring the outer circles of the country’s capital, Caracas.
Usually regarded as dangerous – Venezuela’s own middle and upper classes wouldn’t set foot in the slums for fear of murder and muggings – Navarrete says he made very good friends out there and never had any trouble. “It probably helped that I wasn’t blond and that I spoke Spanish,” he concedes, but other than that he really cannot understand why the rest of the world’s media seem so determined to shun the place.
His film, Inside the Revolution: A journey into the heart of Venezuela, filmed during the build up to the anniversary of president Hugo Chavez’s 10 years in power, seeks to unravel some of the myths that have built up around the man and his presidency.
Why, for example, is Chavez so loathed abroad and yet seen as a folk hero at home? Why did London mayor Ken Livingstone sign a deal with him in 2007 to run the city’s public transport on Venezuelan oil – only for newly-elected Boris Johnson to rip it up a year later?
Just what is it about the man that so offends the UK and America – whose government (under George W Bush) went even further and declared him an enemy of democracy – when he has been democratically elected three times?
Navarrete insists he hasn’t shied away from asking tough questions of the former military man’s apparent cult of personality, and claims he has raked an unforgiving eye over his policies. But fundamentally, he argues, at least he is asking questions – something the rest of the world’s media seem too lazy to do.
CHARLOTTE CHAMBERS
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