Blame the Peasants!


Abstract:
If you want a beautiful example of rhetorical bias in reporting, check out this article from the New York Times. It does a great job of completely glossing over any class issues in Bolivia. I found it while searching for news on the miner suicide bombing which happened back in April.

Body:
Check out this line: "angry that the plan would have benefited Chile, a historic enemy that snatched Bolivia's coastline in a war 121 years ago, protesters rose up against President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, forcing his resignation in October after protests killed about 60 people."

In other words: "Those crazy protesters! See how they impede economic progress for their short-sighted and stupid historical grudges. It wasn't anger at selling off a national resource that could be used to help the poor. It was the Chileans." I will admit, anger toward Chile is palpable there. But the simplistic way the writer puts the sentence together glosses over any class issues. Not only that, "protests" (not actual human persons, and certainly not police) killed 60 people.

The article is laced with economic and social ideology, but it clearly reflects a traditional colonialist attitude: "Those uneducated poor people don't have the sense to allow rich non-Bolivians to sell off a national resource. Don't they know a rising tide lifts all boats? And their solutions are so backwards! -

"The centerpiece of Bolivia's new energy policy is an $800 million plan to revive Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales Bolivianos, or YPFB, a notoriously inefficient and corrupt government-run company that was largely privatized in the mid-1990's. "

I would think recent history in the U.S. would show that energy companies don't have to be government-run to be corrupt. The sentence implies the threat of greater corruption - and I would think that may be probable. But together with the overall tone of the article, it doesn't take much to figure out the author's economic philosophy. "Free" markets are the solution to Bolivia's poverty, and will keep the buying and selling of natural gas honest.

Here's another gem. I'll highlight the good bit:

"Investment in the oil and gas industry has fallen from $680 million in 1998 to $160 million last year and is expected to be lower still this year, said Carlos Alberto López, a former vice minister of energy and now a lobbyist for foreign energy companies."

It seems that this is the way we tell stories. Very seldom do we ask why people do what they do, and we don't bother to understand the larger issues that operate beyond our own immediate interests in property and growth.

As I said before, I don't presume to know the solution for Bolivia's problems, any more than I would presume to know the solution to ours. But I do know that the indigenous groups have more reasons to mistrust those in power than simple hatred of Chileans.

Posted: Thu - July 29, 2004 at 10:49 AM           |

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