Behind the New York Times' hatchet job on Oliver Stone's "South of the Border"
Trailer for South of the Border.
By Oliver Stone, Mark Weisbrot and Tariq Ali
[The following letter was sent to The New York Times.]
June 27, 2010 -- South of the Border -- The New York Times' Larry Rohter attacks our film, South of the Border, for “mistakes, misstatements and missing details”. But a close examination of the details reveals that the mistakes, misstatements and missing details are his own, and that the film is factually accurate.
We will document this for each one of his attacks. We then show that there is evidence of animus and conflict of interest, in his attempt to discredit the film. Finally, we ask that you consider the many factual errors in Rohter’s attacks, outlined below, and the pervasive evidence of animus and conflict of interest in his attempt to discredit the film; and we ask that The New York Times publish a full correction for these numerous mistakes.
1) Accusing the film of “misinformation”, Rohter writes that, “A flight from Caracas to La Paz, Bolivia, flies mostly over the Amazon, not the Andes...” But the narration does not say that the flight is “mostly” over the Andes, just that it flies over the Andes, which is true. (Source: Google Earth).
2) Also in the category of “misinformation”, Rohter writes “the United States does not ‘import more oil from Venezuela than any other OPEC nation,’ a distinction that has belonged to Saudi Arabia during the period 2004-10.”
The quote cited by Rohter here was spoken in the film by an oil industry analyst, Phil Flynn, who appears for about 30 seconds in a clip from US broadcast TV. It turns out that Rohter is mistaken, and Flynn is correct. Flynn is speaking in April 2002 (which is clear in the film), so it is wrong for Rohter to cite data from 2004-2010. If we look at data from 1997-2001, which is the relevant data for Flynn’s comment, Flynn is correct. Venezuela leads all OPEC countries, including Saudi Arabia, for oil imports in the US over this period. (Source: US Energy Information Agency for Venezuela and Saudi Arabia.)
3) Rohter tries to discredit the film’s very brief description of the 1998 Venezuelan presidential race:
As South of the Border portrays it, Mr. Chávez’s main opponent in his initial run for president in 1998 was “a 6-foot-1-inch blond former Miss Universe” named Irene Sáez, and thus “the contest becomes known as the Beauty and the Beast” election.
But Mr. Chávez’s main opponent then was not Ms. Sáez, who finished third, with less than 3 percent of the vote. It was Henrique Salas Romer, a bland former state governor who won 40 percent of the vote.
Rohter’s criticism is misleading. The description of the presidential race in the film, cited by Rohter, is from Bart Jones, who was covering Venezuela for the Associated Press from Caracas at the time. The description is accurate, despite the final results. For most of the race, which began in 1997, Irene Sáez was indeed Chavez’s main opponent, and the contest was reported as “Beauty and the Beast”. In the six months before the election, she began to fade and Salas Romer picked up support; his 40 per cent showing was largely the result of a late decision of both COPEI and AD (the two biggest political parties in Venezuela at the time, which had ruled the country for four decades) to throw their support behind him. (See, for example, this 2008 article from BBC, which describes the race as in the film, and does not even mention Salas Romer: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7767417.stm.) Rohter’s description makes it seem like Saéz was a minor candidate, which is absurd.
4) Rohter tries to frame the film’s treatment of the 2002 coup in Venezuela as a “conspiracy theory”. He writes:
Like Mr. Stone’s take on the Kennedy assassination, this section of South of the Border hinges on the identity of a sniper or snipers who may or may not have been part of a larger conspiracy.
This description of the film is completely false. The film makes no statement on the identity of the snipers nor does it present any theory of a “larger conspiracy” with any snipers. Rather, the film makes two points about the coup: (1) That the Venezuelan media (and this was repeated by US and other international media) manipulated film footage to make it look as if a group of Chavez supporters with guns had shot the 19 people killed on the day of the coup. This manipulation of the film footage is demonstrated very clearly in the film, and therefore does not “[rely] heavily on the account of Gregory Wilpert” as Rohter also falsely alleges. The footage speaks for itself. (2) The United States government was involved in the coup (see http://southoftheborderdoc.com/2002-venezuela-coup/ and below).
Ironically, it is Rohter who relies on conspiracy theories, citing one dubious account in particular that he argues we should have included in the film.
5) Rohter accuses us of “bend[ing] facts and omit[ting] information” on Argentina, for allowing “Mr. Kirchner and his successor — and wife — Cristina Fernández de Kirchner to claim that “we began a different policy than before”.
In reality, Mr. Kirchner’s presidential predecessor, Eduardo Duhalde, and Mr. Duhalde’s finance minister, Roberto Lavagna, were the architects of that policy shift and the subsequent economic recovery, which began while Mr. Kirchner was still the obscure governor of a small province in Patagonia.
This criticism is somewhat obscure and perhaps ridiculous. The Kirchners were in the presidency for five out of the six years of Argentina’s remarkable economic recovery, in which the economy grew by 63 per cent. Some of the policies that allowed for that recovery began in 2002, and others began in 2003, and even later. What exactly are the “bent facts” and “omitted information” here?
6) Rohter tries to make an issue out of the fact that the logo of Human Rights Watch appears for a couple of seconds on the screen, during a discussion of Washington’s double standards on human rights. The film doesn’t say or imply anything about HRW. Most importantly, in his interview with Rohter, HRW’s Americas director José Miguel Vivanco backs up exactly what the film does say, that there is a double standard in the US that focuses on allegations of human rights abuses in Venezuela while ignoring or downplaying far graver, far more numerous, and better substantiated allegations, about human rights abuses in Colombia: “It’s true that many of Chávez’s fiercest critics in Washington have turned a blind eye to Colombia’s appalling human rights record”, says Vivanco.
7) Rohter attacks co-writer Tariq Ali for saying, “The government [of Bolivia] decided to sell the water supply of Cochabamba to Bechtel, a US corporation.” Rohter writes: “In reality, the government did not sell the water supply: it granted a consortium that included Bechtel a 40-year management concession ...”
Rohter is really reaching here. “Selling the water supply” to private interests is a fair description of what happened here, about as good for practical purposes as “granting a 40-year management concession”. The companies got control over the city’s water supply and the revenue that can be gained from selling it.
Rohter’s animus and conflict of interest
We gave Rohter an enormous amount of factual information to back up the main points of the film. He not only ignored the main points of the film, but in the quotes he selected for the article, he picked only quotes that were not fact related that could be used to illustrate what he considered the director’s and co-authors' bias. This is not ethical journalism; in fact it is questionable whether it is journalism at all.
For example, Rohter was presented with detailed and documentary evidence of the United States’ involvement in the 2002 coup. (See http://southoftheborderdoc.com/2002-venezuela-coup.) This was a major point in the film, and was backed up in the film by testimony from then Washington Post foreign editor Scott Wilson, who covered the coup from Caracas. In our conversations with Rohter, he simply dismissed all of this evidence out of hand, and nothing about it appears in the article.
Rohter should have disclosed his own conflict of interest in this review. The film criticises the New York Times for its editorial board’s endorsement of the military coup of April 11, 2002, against the democratically elected government of Venezuela, which was embarrassing to the Times. Moreover, Rohter himself wrote an article on April 12, 2002, that went even further than the Times’ endorsement of the coup:
Neither the overthrow of Mr. Chavez, a former army colonel, nor of Mr. Mahuad two years ago can be classified as a conventional Latin American military coup. The armed forces did not actually take power on Thursday. It was the ousted president’s supporters who appear to have been responsible for deaths that numbered barely 12 rather than hundreds or thousands, and political rights and guarantees were restored rather than suspended. – Larry Rohter, New York Times, April 12, 2002
These allegations that the coup was not a coup – not only by Rohter — prompted a rebuttal by Rohter’s colleague at the New York Times, Tim Weiner, who wrote a Sunday Week in Review piece two days later entitled “A Coup By Any Other Name” (New York Times, April 14, 2002).
Unlike the NYT editorial board, which issued a grudging retraction of their pro-coup stance a few days later (included in our film), Rohter seems to have clung to the right-wing fantasies about the coup. It is not surprising that someone who supports the military overthrow of a democratically elected government would not like a documentary like this one, which celebrates the triumphs of electoral democracy in South America over the last decade.
But he should have at least informed his readers that the New York Times’ was under fire in this documentary, and also about his own reporting: in 1999 and 2000 he covered Venezuela for the Times, writing numerous anti-Chavez news reports. The media’s biased and distorted reporting on Latin America is a major theme of the documentary, one which Rohter also conveniently ignores in is 1665-word attempt to discredit the film.
We spent hours with Rohter over the course of two days and gave him all the information he asked for, even though his hostility was clear from the outset. But he was determined to present his narrative of intrepid reporter exposing sloppy filmmaking. The result is a very dishonest attempt to discredit the film by portraying it as factually inaccurate — using false and misleading statements, out-of-context, selective quotations from interviews with the director and writers, and ad hominem attacks. The Times should apologise for having published it.
[The article first appeared at the South of the Border website.]
New York Times to Oliver Stone: It’s CHA-vez, Not sha-VEZ
By Gregory Wilpert
June 29, 2010 -- Venezuelanalysis.com -- It is truly amazing how a long-time Latin America correspondent who accuses Oliver Stone’s recently released documentary South of the Border of “mistakes, misstatements and missing details” manages to get practically every single statement of his own wrong, misstated, or lacking in detail. This is all the more amazing, considering that the filmmakers and I spoke to Rohter at length last week and provided him with the plenty of information to back up the film’s points, which he chose to ignore.
Not only are there the numerous errors that Oliver Stone, Tariq Ali, and Mark Weisbrot point out in their letter to the New York Times (having to do with presidential candidate Irene Sáez, flying over the Andes to get to La Paz, Venezuela’s oil exports to the United States -- see above article), here are a few more problems that their letter did not go into.
First of all, Rohter chastises Stone for not disclosing that I — who appears for about a minute in the documentary — am married to Carol Delgado, Venezuela’s consul general to New York, nor my affiliation with the mostly pro-Chávez website Venezuelanalysis.com. While these “affiliations” are correct, I question if they are actually the most relevant disclosures, given the testimony I provide in the film.
In the documentary I make brief comments on only two issues, on what I witnessed during the April 2002 coup attempt and on what many “analysts” of Venezuela have said about the role of Venezuela’s private mass media, that it openly supports the opposition and subverts the government. These are both issues I have written about extensively and consistently since April 2002, about six years before my wife was appointed consul in early 2008. My first articles on the coup are available online here and here. I published my fullest account of the coup in April 2007 here, while my wife was still a mid-level PDVSA [Venezuela's state oil company] employee. Also, my book, Changing Venezuela by Taking Power was published in September 2007, also before we moved to New York.
So, if Oliver Stone should have mentioned disclosures in the few seconds that I appear on the screen, then perhaps he should also have mentioned other relevant points. I can just see it, a full disclosure caption that reads: “Gregory Wilpert, adjunct professor of political science at Brooklyn College, co-founder of the mostly pro-Chávez Venezuelanalysis.com, married to Venezuela’s pro-Chávez Consul General, but witnessed and reported on coup-related events six years before his wife’s appointment and one and a half years before the founding of Venezuelanalysis.com.” I think such a caption would probably have been long enough to cover my face.
Second, Rohter’s article suggests that Stone should have known that one of the buildings from which demonstrators were shot at during the coup (known as “La Nacional”) belonged to the pro-Chávez mayor’s office. First, while this is true, this building is not even mentioned in the documentary. Second, if Rohter was really interested in providing more detail, he should also have mentioned that nine opposition-affiliated police officers were sentenced to lengthy prison terms for having participated in the occupation of this building and for having shot at demonstrators or for having given the order to do so (further discussion of metropolitan police involvement in the coup can be found here and here). According to evidence presented at the officers’ trial, opposition-affiliated police shot at demonstrators from this building. I provided Rohter with this information and suggested to him to read about it in my articles about the coup.
Rohter also says that Stone should have mentioned the hard-line opposition versions of the coup, as described in the film X-Ray of a Lie and in the Brian Nelson book, The Silence and the Scorpion. In short, Rohter is arguing that Stone should have taken this opposition version of the coup seriously, which claims (as Nelson and X-Ray of a Lie do) that the coup was not really a coup, even when it is commonly accepted both in Venezuela and around the world that it was indeed a coup. Rohter clearly still believes it was not a coup, also because he never retracted his New York Times, April 12, 2002 statement that, “The armed forces did not actually take power on Thursday. It was the ousted president’s supporters who appear to have been responsible for deaths that numbered barely 12 rather than hundreds or thousands, and political rights and guarantees were restored rather than suspended.”
The bottom line is, even though Rohter brings up three arguments to cast doubt on the Stone documentary’s version of the coup (failure to mention the hard-line opposition account, my potential bias as a witness and government control over a building from which people were shot), he is unable to raise a single point in the Stone documentary’s coup discussion that is misstated or false.
Rohter then goes on to attempt to question several other points made in the film, such as the Kirchners’ role in Argentina’s economic success and the privatisation of Bolivia’s water system. As Stone, Ali, and Weisbrot argue [see above], none of these points hold any water, let alone validity. Perhaps this is to be expected from a journalist who in 2004 wrote an article, with hardly any evidence, alleging that Brazil’s president Lula da Silva is an alcoholic.
I guess the one place where one can say that Rohter is correct, where Stone indeed made a “mistake or misstatement”, is on the pronunciation of Chávez’s name. It is pronounced CHA-vez, not sha-VEZ. Gringos should really get that right.
The gloves are off; New York Times is determined to destroy Oliver Stone
By Nikolas Kozloff
June 29, 2010 -- Buzz Flash via Venezuelanalysis.com -- On June 26, the New York Times published not one but two critical articles about director Oliver Stone’s latest documentary, South of the Border, about the tectonic political changes occurring in South America. Stone, who is known for such popular hits as Wall Street and Platoon, made his film based on interviews with leaders such as Raul Castro of Cuba and Hugo Chávez of Venezuela.
In his movie, Stone takes the New York Times and the mainstream media to task for their shoddy coverage of Latin America and demonisation of Hugo Chávez, someone who Stone openly sympathises with.
Going for a knockout, the Times hit Stone with a one-two punch. First up was film critic Steven Holden, who in a rather sarcastic review called South of the Border “shallow” and “naïvely idealistic”. Unusually, the Times then continued its hatchet job on Stone by publishing another lengthy article in its movie section, this time penned by veteran Latin America correspondent Larry Rohter.
In his piece, Rohter accuses Stone of numerous mistakes, mistatements and missing details. I don’t think the points which Rohter raises are terribly earth-shattering, though I imagine script writers Tariq Ali and Marc Weisbrot will respond in short order [see above].
For me, the wider point here has to do with political agendas. At one point, Rohter takes Stone to task for not disclosing the various biases of his sources. In his film, Stone relies on commentary from leftist observers of Venezuela, including Greg Wilpert, a long-time editor of Venezuelanalysis, a web site providing sympathetic coverage of the Chávez government.
The site was set up with donations from the Venezuelan government and Wilpert’s wife is Chávez’s consul-general in New York [as long as we are talking disclosure: before it became, in my view, too identified with the Chávez government I personally wrote many articles for the site].
Rohter does Venezuela
Rohter’s point is fair enough, but he is hypocritical for not disclosing his own particular bias. Far from a removed film critic, Rohter is an establishment reporter with a political axe to grind against the South American left.
In 1998, when Chávez was first elected, the journalist described the political shakeup thus:
All across Latin America, presidents and party leaders are looking over their shoulders. With his landslide victory in Venezuela’s presidential election on December 6, Hugo Chávez has revived an all-too-familiar specter that the region’s ruling elite thought they had safely interred: that of the populist demagogue, the authoritarian man on horseback known as the caudillo.
Four years later in April 2002, Santiago-based Rohter expressed satisfaction over Chávez’s forcible removal by the Venezuelan opposition. “Chávez was a left-wing populist doomed by habitual recklessness”, Rohter wrote, adding that the Venezuelan leader’s fall could not “be classified as a conventional Latin American military coup”.
Later, when Chávez was returned to power and the short-lived coup government discredited, Rohter reversed himself and actually used the word “coup” in a story about recent political developments in Venezuela. If his readers had any doubts about the true intentions of the Bush administration, Rohter assured them that “there were no obvious American fingerprints on the plot that unseated Mr. Chávez”.
Three years later, Rohter was at it again, this time writing that Chávez was “stridently anti-American”. Chávez on the other hand said it wasn’t true, arguing that reporters were confusing his distaste for the Bush administration with anti-Americanism.
In its magazine Extra! media watchdog group FAIR shrewdly wrote, “If dislike for the current administration is anti-American, doesn’t that make tens of millions of Americans ‘anti-American’? Moreover, by the media logic that calls Chávez ‘anti-American’, shouldn’t the Bush administration, whose distaste for Chávez moved it to support his ouster by an anti-democratic coup, be called ‘anti-Venezuelan?’”
New York Times correspondent: From Colombia to Brazil
In his film, Stone points out that the mainstream media has, more often than not, demonised Chávez while giving a free pass to horrible human rights violations committed in neighbouring Colombia, a key US ally in the region.
In his attack on South of the Border, Rohter doesn’t address that allegation squarely, but continues to hark on human rights violations in Venezuela. What Rohter fails to disclose however is that he has provided sympathetic coverage to right-wing paramilitaries in Colombia.
Indeed, as FAIR’s Extra! noted in its May/June 2000 edition, “when Carlos Castaño, leader of the Colombian United Self-Defense, the most notorious paramilitary group in Colombia, appeared on Colombian television and revealed the extent to which his own group was involved in the drug business, it hardly merited a passing word in the US media. The New York Times’ Larry Rohter wrote a story about Castaño’s `grilling' on Colombian TV (3/12/00) that skirted the drug issue altogether.”
FAIR goes on to note, “Rohter’s report stands in stark contrast to a Reuters story about the same appearance (3/2/00), which led with the admission: ‘The leader of Colombia's right-wing paramilitary death squads has publicly admitted the drug trade finances most of the bloodletting committed by his ruthless militia force.’ Castaño also explained that ‘drug trafficking and drug traffickers probably finance 70 percent’ of his total operations, another fact that the New York Times apparently found less important than the opinions of a waitress and a local magazine columnist, who felt that Castaño had undergone a ‘surprising metamorphosis.’ If Castaño’s intent was to present a ‘human’ face to the world, the New York Times at least seemed happy to help.”
Perhaps Rohter was also irked by Stone’s sympathetic portrait of Brazilian leader and Chávez ally Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. In an explosive 2004 article, Rohter suggested that Lula had a drinking problem, and that the issue had become a “national concern” in Brazil. In a furor, the authorities suspended Rohter’s visa. When Rohter’s lawyers wrote a letter asserting that the reporter meant no offence, the Brazilian authorities restored the visa.
Brazilian media stood up for Rohter’s right to write, but was uniformly critical of the New York Times’ article. Speaking with US Nation Public Radio’s Bob Garfield, Brazilian journalist Antonio Brasil remarked, “One thing is to say anything about a president … and his possible drinking habits. It's another thing when he says that the Brazilians were concerned... Most people say that was not … true. His sources and evaluation in terms of putting together the story would represent … sloppy journalism.”
Brasil added, “You cannot forget that this is a completely new government. In Brazil this is a Socialist … government for the very first time. Lula is from the Worker's Party, and they are very sensitive of any comment, especially coming from America.”
In response, Garfield asked Brasil how local journalists could conflate the interests of the US government with the New York Times. “You have to think [about] the whole situation of embedded journalists”, Brasil said. The journalist added that he was concerned about the Jayson Blair scandal at the New York Times, remarking that “maybe the standards are not … high.”
Perhaps, the New York Times is simply hitting back at Stone in a tit-for-tat. In South of the Border, the Hollywood director interviews a Times editor who admits to the paper’s lacklustre coverage of Venezuela. I wondered how Stone got the Times man to talk on camera, and whether there was ever an official or explicit line about how to cover the Chávez story. Whatever the case, the paper’s old Latin American hand Rohter certainly got the word: then as now.
Louis Proyect reviews `South of the Border'
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2010/06/22/south-of-the-border/
By Louis Proyect
With a screenplay co-written by Tariq Ali and Mark Weisbrot, Oliver Stone’s South of the Border promised to be a good movie. I am pleased to announce that it is much better than I expected and a must-see for people knowledgeable about the Latin American left as well as those who only get their information from CNN. Indeed, part of the pleasure of watching the movie is seeing the talking heads at Fox and CNN get exposed as the lying idiots that they are. The movie opens with three dorks from Fox discussing Hugo Chavez’s “drug problem”, which is described as starting his mornings with cocoa. You can’t make this shit up.
The movie consists of footage from television and old newsreels, largely intended to demonstrate the willingness of the media to serve State Department ambitions, as well as interviews with key Latin American leaders. It dawned on me during Oliver Stone’s sit-down with Ecuador’s Rafael Correa that I have never seen him interviewed on American television, nor were Argentina’s Kirchners, Bolivia’s Evo Morales, or Cuba’s Raul Castro ever given a moment on “Sixty Minutes” or any other news show. By allowing them to speak for themselves, Stone breaks a news embargo that is almost as vicious as that Cuba faces on the economic front.
About half the movie is devoted to Venezuela and provides a bird’s eye view of the roots and dynamic of the Bolivarian revolution. Hugo Chavez serves as a guide to these events in some very moving as well as comical moments. He recounts being on an island surrounded by his captors just after the 2002 coup, when a bishop arrives to demand that a letter of resignation be signed. By this point, Chavez has learned that the coup has failed and informs the bishop of that fact who thereupon decides to fly back to Caracas with Chavez on a military helicopter, all the while stating his happiness with the turn of events. In this anecdote, the Latin American church is exposed for its opportunist role but without the usual anti-clerical rhetoric. Chavez is too smart for that.
All in all, the time spent with Chavez is pure entertainment. He is the most unlikely president in all of Latin American history. He grew up in a mud shack and has an obvious affinity with the slum dwellers that are the base of his presidency. He appears to genuinely enjoy coming in contact with the people who are genuinely determining the country’s future, unlike the typical politician who sees them as potential votes and nothing else.
After Venezuela, Stone’s next stop is Bolivia where he meets with Evo Morales who gives him some coca (not cocoa!) to help him fight off nausea and fatigue brought on by the high altitudes.
Perhaps the most interesting moments, at least for me, are those spent with the Kirchners of Argentina. Néstor Carlos Kirchner was president from 2003 to 2007 and has been succeeded by his wife Cristina. They are witty and urbane like most Argentinians I have known throughout my life, plus they provide some insights into the thinking of the more progressive wing of Peronism, a current that has obviously influenced Hugo Chavez. At one point, Cristina Kirchner sends an aide into a nearby room to bring back a photo that she is proud of. After a moment or two, before the aide has returned, she turns to Oliver Stone and asks “what makes men so slow?” Priceless.
It turns out that the photo was Hugo Chavez, Néstor Carlos Kirchner, Lula and Fidel Castro in a group portrait. It is a sign of the times that the heads of Venezuela, Argentina and Brazil are proud to be photographed with American imperialism’s most hated enemy. What the movie reflects more than anything else is the tidal wave that is sweeping Latin America. While it might not result in the immediate overthrow of capitalism in the countries that are part of this change, it does make it a lot easier for country following that path to resist American domination. Arguably, if the Sandinista revolution had triumphed today rather than in 1979, when Reaganism was triumphant, it might have had a chance for survival. For this reason alone, it is a mistake to sneer at the Latin American left for not living up to Bolshevik norms.
Just a word or two about the technical details of how this film was made, a subject becoming more interesting to me as I entertain notions of doing my own documentary some day. The legendary Albert Maysles served as a cameraman. Now 84, Maysles is best known for movies about popular culture (Gimme Shelter) and eccentrics (Grey Gardens). Considering his advanced age, my first impulse was to wonder why he would endure the hardship of filming on location in a place like Bolivia with its high altitude. And then I remembered what a 92 year old Harry Magdoff told Michael Lebowitz: “If I was only in my 80s again, I’d be down in Venezuela.”
Stone used a bare-bones film crew that shot with two Sony Z-7U HD cameras, costing less than $6000 each. In keeping with the relaxed and DIY character of South of the Border, which often feels like a home movie, there is no attempt made to hide the cameras or the mikes. Despite the film’s modest means, it is more successful than any of Oliver Stone’s recent movies. Good work all round for Tariq Ali, Mark Weisbrot and Oliver Stone.