VENEZUELA 2002-3

 

Although no violent antisemitic acts were committed in Venezuela in 2002, there was a great deal of virulent antisemitic propaganda, including classical manifestations of antisemitism. The period of the coup against President Hugo Chavez and its aftermath were marked by antisemitic expressions by political groups close to official circles, as well as in the independent media. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict also served as a pretext for such expressions.

 

The Jewish community

The Jewish population continues to decline as a result of the severe instability in the country. There are probably no more than 15,000 Jews remaining, down from 20,000 before the current crisis, out of a total population of close to 22 million. Most of the Jews live in the capital Caracas, while the second largest community is located in Maracaíbo. The Confederación de Asociaciones Israelitas de Venezuela (CAIV) embraces four organizations: Asociación Israelita de Venezuela (Sephardi), Unión Israelita de Caracas (Ashkenazi), the Zionist Organization and B’nai B’rith. All but one of the 15 synagogues are Orthodox and over 75 percent of school-age children attend Jewish schools. The community publishes the newspaper Nuevo Mundo Israelita. In recent years poverty levels have soared to 80 percent and the middle and upper middle classes that account for the great majority of the Jewish community have been especially hard hit as their assets erode.

 

political Background

Venezuela witnessed a tumultuous year in 2002. President of the Republic Hugo Chavez was deposed in a coup in April, but he resumed his post after a few days. Chavez claimed the coup was aimed at expelling Venezuela from OPEC, of which it is the only non-Arab member (see below).

In an interview to the Arab TV al-Jazira network, Chavez blamed “other countries” for the coup, without specifying any names. He added that some of the weapons used in the coup were not issued to the Venezuelan army, reinforcing evidence that it was instigated by foreign agents.

Some leftist groups identified with Chavez also suggested that the coup was the work of foreign countries, among them Israel. The popular, pro-Chavez Ultimas Noticias (25 April), for example, published a proclamation of the FBL (Fuerza Bolivariana de Liberacíon) stating that it was a “fascist coup aimed at changing the direction of the political revolutionary process of the country.” Moreover, they claimed, the CIA and the Israeli Mossad were subversive forces acting to overthrow the Chavez regime.

           

EXTREMIST GROUPS

Right- and Left-Wing Groups

There has been an increase in numbers and membership of antisemitic radical left groups, which find some support among the lower classes. The most violent groups are Tupamaros and Carapaicas, with a total membership of some 20,000.

Radical right antisemitic groups are very small and without significant influence. Nueva Sociedad Venezolana (NSV), which calls itself the neo-Nazi movement, is based in Montalban, Caracas. The NSV disseminates neo-Nazi, anti-Zionist and antisemitic propaganda through its website libreopinion.com, and maintains links with similar groups in Latin America as well as in Spain, Portugal and Italy. A second small neo-Nazi group, Movimiento Patria Nueva, Partido Nacional Socialista Venezolano (PNSV), is also centered on an Internet site, where it calls, inter alia, for the deposal of the Hugo Chavez government.

Both the radical right and the radical left are ardent supporters of the Palestinian cause and vehemently anti-Israel, anti-Jewish, anti-American and anti-globalization.

 

Islamist Groups

Since 1994 there has been evidence of radical Muslim groups operating in various areas of Venezuela, in particular in the free port of Margarita Island where a large Arab colony engages in commerce. After the attacks of 11 September 2001, there were several warnings about the presence on the island of groups sympathetic to terrorist organizations in the Middle East.

The independent, privately-owned weekly Quinto Dia (12 July), for example, suggested possible links between the far left FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), which have a base in Venezuela, the IRA, Hamas and Hizballah, and stated that according to Venezuelan intelligence, ties also exist with terrorist groups such as the Indonesian El Gamma Iji, Islamic Jihad and al-Qa‘ida. “Maybe these organizations have begun to spread in South America to the Middle East communities of Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil,” it suggested. “The east cost of Venezuela is [already] under their control.”

Ibeyisse Pacheco in his column “In Confidence” in the leading, privately-owned newspaper El Nacional (7 June), reported that on 31 May a meeting was held in Valencia, Spain, at which Middle East agents discussed possible strategies that might be used by Latin America against the US and Israel. They mentioned National Assembly Deputy Tarek William Saab and Abdel Elsabayar, both of Arab origin, as representatives of a friendly Venezuelan government. In her column in El Nacional (9 Oct.), Marianella Salazar claimed that the US had denied a visa to Tarek William Saab, because he allegedly disrupted the legal process against three Arab members of Hamas and Hizballah who were suspected of participating in the 1994 bombing of the AMIA community building in Buenos Aires. They arrived at Margarita Island in November 1999 from Colombia, were arrested by the Venezuelan military on 7 July 2002, and subsequently released.

 

ANTISEMITIC ACTIVITIES

Although no violent antisemitic activities were recorded, there was a great deal of antisemitic propaganda, including classical manifestations of antisemitism, mostly arising from the situation in Venezuela but also in response to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

 

Blaming the Jews and Israel for the Political Crisis in Venezuela

The period of the coup and its aftermath were marked by antisemitic manifestations. The official state Venezuelan channel Venezolana de Television noted, for example, that Pedro Carmona, who was acting president during the interim period, was “going to rule together with the Jews.” Viewers of the Venezuelan TV program “In Confidence” (29 May), which discussed Venezuela’s socio-economic problems, called in to attack guest Rabbi Pynchas Brener with remarks such as “We know that all the Jews were with the dictator Carmona.”

A retired army officer, who leads a group of reservists in support of Chavez made antisemitic references on the privately-owned Venezuelan radio station Exitos 1090. On 5 September, Lieutenant Guillermo Gonzalez, of the Association of Reservists, accused parliamentary deputies and provincial governors (such as Paulina Gamus, Henrique Capriles Radonski and Leopoldo Lopez) of being of Jewish descent, and charged the entire Jewish community with conspiring against the government. He added that Jewish businessmen had also aided this alleged conspiracy. It should be noted that this was the first antisemitic attack by a member or former member of Venezuela’s armed forces.

Deputy Angel Landaeta, from the left-wing MVR (Movimiento Quinta República), accused Pedro Carmona, in the political committee of the National Assembly on 2 May, of having intended, during his interim presidency, to conduct a “Sharon operation,” in order to do “what the Jews are doing in Palestine”; that is, in order to eliminate all the population that is not with them, “they simply kill them.”

 

Antisemitic Manifestations and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Some “Chavismo” ideologists and supporters are known to have antisemitic leanings. Francisco Mieres, a close confidant of Chavez, wrote in his column in the left-wing periodical La Razon (16 June) that “the Semitic banks” were among the enemies of the “Bolivarian revolution,” as the Chavez government is called. A pro-Chavez demonstration which took place on 30 June demonstrated the pro-Palestinian position of the government and its supporters. Participants wore t-shirts with inscriptions such as: “Jerusalem will be ours” and “Israel out, solidarity with the Palestinian cause.”

Classical antisemitic canards related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict appeared in two publications. La Razon (24 March) published an article by Salomon Benshimol, stating that during Holy Week Christians recall the most cowardly and treacherous act ever committed in the history of humanity: the death of Jesus Christ instigated by the Jews. This could only have been the act of a cowardly people with the complicity of its leadership, and an insecure governor who due to his fear of the Jewish people refused to recognize the innocence of the most just person on earth.

Quinto Dia published a letter of a reader who criticized Rabbi Pynchas Brener because he said that Palestinian mothers should not accept the death of their children as an alternative way to get a nation. Toplak asked: “Is it not through death that God and the Chosen People try to resolve every question with that mixture of history and mythology that is the Old Testament?... Is it not a retrogressive step that a rabbi in a Catholic country addresses thus Palestinian mothers?”

Presenting opposing views on the conflict, El Nacional (20 Jan.) published two articles, one by Muslim doctor and university professor Shamsud Ali. Ali applied a list of classical stereotypes to Jews. He said they were a deicidal people, criminals, barbarians, exploiters of the poor, lacking identification with the place where they were born, racists and unfaithful to their country. He also denied the Jewish people’s right to the land of Israel.

The independent TV channel CMT re-broadcast on 9 February a program called “Prisma” first aired by Global TV of Maracaibo, with the participation of Dr. Kaleb Yorde, a representative of the Arab community of Maracaibo. Speaking about the creation of the State of Israel, he claimed that the Jews killed Palestinians in order to benefit their own people and to get land.

Several pieces in the press questioned or even negated the legitimacy of the State of Israel. In interviews to Ultimas Noticias (31 March), both Franklin González, director of the School of International Studies at the Universidad Central de Venezuela, and Tarek William Saab, a deputy from the Chavez party to the National Assembly, complained that the UN was a disappointment to the Palestinians, and that “the roots of the conflict lay in the creation of the State of Israel, in 1947.”

Comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany have been common since the outbreak of the second intifada. Ted Cordova-Claure, a Venezuelan journalist in the US, published an article in the privately-owned, pro-democracy Tal Cual (2 April) equating Sharon and Hitler and referring to the perpetrators of attacks on the civilian Palestinian population as “the Jews.”

Alfredo Hernandez Torres, a journalist for the popular regional newspaper Frontera (26 April), expressed understanding for suicide bombers, since “Sharon displays more hate than the Nazis had for the Jews.” He referred to the Israeli prime minister as “the beast Sharon,” who was aided by “the real Devil – the US” – but was more brutal, citing as proof the “genocide in Jenin... which would have embarrassed even insensitive Hitler.”  

The mainstream El Universal (25 April) alleged that Sharon was perpetrating a real holocaust on the Palestinians, and if this was not a holocaust, “there is no other word in the dictionary” to describe this extermination of the Palestinian people. Maria de los Angeles Serrano wrote an editorial in El Nacional (18 May) stating: “The Jews of the modern, strong State of Israel, are today strangulating, deporting, placing under closure and killing the Palestinian people with the same enthusiasm as that of their persecutors, the Nazis.”

References to the Holocaust also appeared in cartoons, such as one published in Ultimas Noticias, where the caption read: “A holocaust is what Sharon is doing to the Palestinians.”

Well-known journalist Cesar Miguel Rondon on a broadcast of the prestigious Union Radio Noticias (19 Aug.), said that a picture of an Israeli soldier pointing a gun at a Palestinian girl reminded him of the famous picture of the Nazi officer aiming a gun at a Jewish child.

Several well-known Latin American writers, whose influence extends continent-wide, published articles in a similar vein in the Venezuelan press. Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, in El Nacional (15 April), blamed Sharon’s dogmatic policy toward the Palestinian people on his ferocious ultra-nationalist radicalism. He added that “if he continued the mad logic” of his beliefs, he could decide on the extermination of all the Palestinians.”

Prestigious Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano, who resides in Mexico, wrote in El Nacional (17 April) that while many associate “Palestinian” with “terrorism,” this label is never applied to the Israeli military forces. For more than a century the Palestinians had been condemned to pay with their land and blood for European antisemitism and for “a Holocaust they [the Palestinians] did not commit.”

 

RESPONSES TO ANTISEMITISM

In response to a flood of venomous anti-Israel and antisemitic letters to the editor to Venezuela’s leading newspaper El Nacional during 2002, CAIV wrote a letter of protest to the paper demanding that it cease publishing them. The newspaper responded that the letters were not antisemitic and that the editors had to allow equal opportunities to state opinions, even if the paper did not identify with them. It should be noted that some of the letters were full of traditional antisemitic stereotypes, such as: “The Jews are a materialistic sect with a religious cover”; “The Jews killed Jesus”; “The Jews are hypocrites”; “The Jews are using the Holocaust trauma in order to get what they want”; and “Nazi-Zionists.” A handful of writers (Shamsud Alí; Douglas Saab, M. C. Valecillos and Nicolás Piquer) was responsible for many of these letters.