Por qué no les calan? Hugo Chávez’s Re-election in Venezuela and the Decline of Western Hegemony in the Americas

Abstract

On October 7, 2012, Hugo Chávez was comfortably re-elected president of Venezuela. Just days before the vote the impression given by major international print media was that the vote was a close-run thing, an assessment which proved to be at best optimistic. We argue that Western media coverage of the election in Venezuela was designed to skew the result towards the opposition and that these efforts singularly failed. The conclusions of our analysis are, first, that the “propaganda” model advanced by Chomsky is now faltering in the Americas and, second, that the region is acting in manner that is increasingly free of influence from the US. Venezuela thus stands as a case of the citizenry of a country actively and independently asserting its political agency despite clear attempts to redirect its thinking and decision-making