Wakievelli's Ponderings: House of Cards

In rights discourses, the emphasis placed on certain types of rights at the expense of others may make all the difference between an actor being a rights protector and a rights abuser. In turn, the decisions as to which rights are prioritized by certain actors do not exist in a vacuum. Rather they are influenced by the political and ideological preferences of actors as well as the dominant discourses through which they are constituted. Freedom Houses’ 2006 annual country report on Venezuela illustrates this well. The NGO’s report, which emphasizes the continuous erosion of rights and freedoms in Venezuela, prioritises certain types of negative political rights that cast Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in a negative light, while ignoring positive social and economic rights that would, if included in a rights analyses, portray him more positively. The effect is a utilization of rights discourses that internalises the interests of American policy objectives, an process that itself takes place though an internalization of dominant North American discourses and ideologies. In short, a discourse on rights becomes, whether consciously or unconsciously, a political tool as much as it is a humanitarian issue.

In the report Freedom House operationalizes the concepts of freedom and rights by giving absolute primacy to negative political rights at the expense of all other conceptions of rights. For instance, they note that Chavez has “strengthened the presidency, introducing a unicameral National Assembly” designed to maximize his political control (“Venezuela: 2006”, 2006). They focus on the use of state patronage to gain political support, as “once-dominant parties have seen their bases erode as Chavez uses state resources to ensure loyalty” (“Venezuela: 2006”,2006). They warn that his national Assembly has granted him “fast-track” powers designed to maximize the law making power of the executive, while he has also increased his party’s control over members of the Supreme Court (“Venezuela: 2006”,2006). They similarly blast Chavez’ “stranglehold on the economy” noting that Chavez has failed to “free” his country from “excessive bureaucratic regulations” that harm the private sector (“Venezuela: 2006”,2006). While many, if not all, of these observations are important and troublesome for those concerned about the state of rights in Venezuela, it is important that all of these observations focus on political and economic negative rights (that is, freedom from government interference) that portray Chavez in a bad light.. While an important part of any definition of rights, the obsession with this aspect of the concept completely ignores other rights that, if considered, would likely balance out Freedom House’s negative interpretation of the state of rights in Venezuela.

While such special attention is made to Chavez’ policies which Freedom House states impinge upon rights and freedoms, virtually no attention is paid to the programs of the Chavez government that could be seen as improving other types of rights. For instance, the Chavez government has used the profits from Venezuela’s sizeable oil wealth to invest in a variety of social programs. Among these are programs designed to provide poor Venezuelan citizens with education and medical service, both of which have traditionally been out of the reach of Venezuela’s poor majority (“Alternatives”, 2006). Both universal education and medical care are both guaranteed rights under the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (“United Nations”,1990, pg. 202). Hence one would expect programs designed to guarantee these rights to the majority of the population for the first time in Venezuelan history to at least figure in an independent assessment of the country’s recent rights record. However, while paragraphs are used to describe the variety of political rights violations under Chavez, Freedom house only says of these programs that “while fending off his opponents with legal maneuvers and intimidation tactics, Chavez introduced bold program of government social service initiatives, including urban health care and literacy programs, many with direct support from the Cuban government” (“Venezuela: 2006”,2006). Not only are these programs virtually ignored in the rights assessment, they are tied (by placing them in the same sentence) to government “intimidation” and Cuban (and therefore dictatorial) influence. Hence, instead of figuring positively in Venezuela’s rights assessment, the attempt is made to portray the exact opposite.

Similarly, Freedom House notes that “in 2005, the expropriation of large, idle landholdings and industrial installations was accompanied by the creation of tens of thousands of rural and urban cooperatives, many of which received government seed money” (“Venezuela: 2006”,2006). Venezuela is a land of massive polarization of wealth, with a small percentage of the country controlling a disproportionate amount of the wealth and industry of the nation (“Venezuela ratifies”, BBC News, 2004). In this context, any attempt to guarantee social and economic rights to it’s citizens would likely involve some kind of wealth and land redistribution of the kind described by Freedom House. An argument could be made that programs such as these help to guarantee a kinds of rights for the first time in Venezuelan history, for instance, the right to fair employment, also guaranteed by the United Nations (“United Nations, 1990, pg. 202). However, Freedom House uses these programs as evidence that “protection of private property”, a negative right, “is also weak” (“Venezuela: 2006”,2006). Once again we see that providing positive rights for Venezuelans – access to healthcare, education, employment, etc - do not even figure in the analyses of the report. A focus on these rights would necessitate portraying Chavez in a positive light, or at least tempering their criticism. Instead, by focusing on only certain types of rights while ignoring others, Freedom House is able to confidently and unequivocally say that rights and freedoms have decreased in Chavez’ Venezuela.

Of course, the operationalisation of rights and freedoms in the Freedom House study is one that internalizes the objectives and values of U.S. foreign policy in the region. The U.S. government has made no secret of it’s active displeasure with Chavez, and Chavez has vocally returned the favor in a variety of national, regional, and international forums(Hakim, 2006, pp. 44-48). By supporting naitonalisation of key industries, obstructing attempts at hemisphere wide free trade, actively pursuing closer relations with China, discouraging American investment, and allying itself with Cuba, Chavez has become public enemy number one for the U.S. in Latin America (Hakim, 2006, pp. 44-48). In a more general sense, any leader advocating a regional socialist revolution would be more than likely to offend American officials, at least in an ideological sense. And Freedom House has crafted a report that seems to take the debate on rights in Venezuala form a deicedly pro-American perspective. The very first sentence of the report notes that “President Hugo Chavez continued promoting his anti-U.S., anti-free trade, policies while stressing his close ties to Cuba and left-wing groups” (“Venezuela: 2006”,2006). In a report ostensibly concerned with rights, it is Chavez’ anti-U.S., anti-trade, and pro-Cuba policies take center stage from the very first sentence. Meanwhile, Chavez is criticized for putting restrictions on domestic groups that take money from the U.S. government funded National Endowment for Democracy, though Freedom House repeatedly looks disdainfully on parallel cooperation between Venezuelan civil society and the Cuban government(“Venezuela: 2006”,2006). Meanwhile, other features of the report blast Chavez for keeping up barriers to foreign investment, a frequent complaint made by the American government against socialist leaders (“Venezuela: 2006”,2006).

That the operationalisation and application of the concepts of rights and freedoms results in such a pro-American/anti-Chavez bias does not require any conspiratorial collusion between Freedom House and the U.S. government. Freedom House is a prominent, mainstream American NGO. As a collection of American educated mainstream academics, it is perfectly reasonable that they have internalized some of the dominant ideologies and discourses of their nation. One of these is the belief that political rights and free-market economics are essential components of human freedom, and that positive rights indicators (education, health care, employment opportunities, economic equality, etc) are either secondary in importance or, worse, are socialistic and therefore antithetical to freedom and rights. Indeed Freedom House’s website notes that its central mission is to “promote human rights, democracy, [and] market economics”, as though the first and second phenomenon were structurally linked with the third (italics added) (“About us”, 2006). Another dominant discourse in American academia is that America’s global leadership is an essential catalyst for democratization and institutionalization of human rights. Once an organization assumes this to be true, there will be a tendency to assume that any country that vocally and openly opposes the interests of the United States is, by definition, anti-freedom. The Freedom house website illustrates that they have internalized this assumption as well, stating that their “diverse Board of Trustees is united in the view that American leadership in international affairs is essential to the cause of human rights and freedom” (“About us”, 2006). Once this is assumed, it is perfectly logical that Freedom House would look at Chavez, an open opponent of American foreign policy, as inherently opposed to Freedom. His failings in the political sphere (troubling to be sure) are focused on and amplified, while his strengths in providing rights such as access to education and healthcare are ignored. It is a simple case of the dangers of deductive reasoning- starting with an assumed premise and then unconsciously (or consciously) selecting the facts to suit that premise.

Regardless of the methods used to internalize American interests, what is important to remember is that rights discourses, while ostensibly humanitarian, have the tendency to become easily politicized. In a world in which a nation’s legitimacy is more and more frequently measured by it’s adherence to rights, nations and organizations will define rights in ways that validate their own ideological, political, and commercial interests. A mainstream American NGO can be expected, to at least a certain degree, to internalize mainstream American values. The political and ideological preferences of certain actors are more than likely to reproduce themselves in the rights discourse they utilize. Which rights are important (and which are not), which actors are rights abusers (and which are rights protectors), and other important decisions and assumptions are inevitably affected by these factors.