US Media Erase Years of Chavismo's Gains

[Judi Lynn]

FEBRUARY 20, 2019

GREGORY SHUPAK

Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution, which took off with the election of President Hugo Chávez in December 1998, frequently and even quite recently received praise for its social gains from the United Nations, international humanitarian organizations and economists. This aspect of the country’s story has been almost entirely written out of media coverage of the effort to overthrow the Venezuelan government by the US, Canada and their right-wing partners in Venezuela and the region.



Malnutrition in children under five was one of several social
indicators that improved dramatically in Venezuela following
the election of Hugo Chávez in 1999.
(Source: Instituto Nacional de Nutrición/CEPR)

Under Chávez, poverty in Venezuela was cut by more than a third, and extreme poverty by 57 percent (CEPR, 3/7/13). (These declines were even steeper if measured from the depths of the opposition-led oil strike, designed to force Chávez out by wrecking the economy.)

In June 2013, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) included Venezuela in a group of 18 nations that that had cut their number of hungry people by half in the preceding 20 years, 14 of which were governed by Chavismo: The FAO said that Venezuela reduced the number of people suffering from malnutrition from 13.5 percent of the population in 1990–92 to less than 5 percent of the population in 2010–12; the FAO credited government-run supermarket networks and nutrition programs created by Chávez.

Three months later, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination said that it “welcomes the social development measures, programs and plans that include indigenous peoples and people of African descent, which have helped to combat structural racial discrimination” in the country. The committee also noted that it

welcomes the progress made by the [Venezuelan government] in the area of education and its efforts to reduce illiteracy, as a result of which it was declared an “illiteracy-free territory” by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in October 2005.

More:
https://fair.org/home/us-media-erase-years-of-chavismos-gains/

[Igel]

1. Since it's February 21, 2013, I see your point.

Otherwise somebody's erased 6 years of actual time.

The past may be prolog, but the past is not present. Nor future. Nor even the future progressive, much less the future perfect.

Note that the rest of the world, lacking the glory that was Chavismo, showed
https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwiK_q6Kks7gAhWpGDQIHWHhBTkQjRx6BAgBEAU&url=https%3A%2F%2Fdata.unicef.org%2Ftopic%2Fnutrition%2Fmalnutrition%2F&psig=AOvVaw3_64sV9KeO6YuIIWfyqFk_&ust=1550883612392785