Oliver Stone still doesn’t get it
By Larry Rohter
Larry Rohter graduated from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, specializing in history, economics, and political science. He also holds a master’s degree from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, where he focused on Modern Chinese History and Politics. From 1977 to 2008, he mainly served as a foreign correspondent in Latin America and Asia, first for Newsweek and then for The New York Times, where he now works as a culture reporter. He is the author of “Deu no New York Times” (2008: Objetiva), a best-seller in Portuguese in Brazil, and “Brazil on the Rise,” set to be published on September 1st by Palgrave Macmillan.
A month ago, I incurred the wrath of Oliver Stone for stating the obvious in an article I wrote. His new film, South of the Border, which presents itself as a “documentary” about Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez and a group of supposedly sympathetic South American colleagues, is riddled with errors, misrepresentations, fabrications, and fraudulent statistics that make it useless except as an example of exaggerated propaganda. During the screening I attended, I counted more than two dozen claims that were demonstrably incorrect, but due to space limitations, I chose to focus on just a few.
Stone’s response was swift. While he admitted and apologized for several of his errors in a couple of interviews I conducted before submitting my fact-checking article, he reversed course as soon as my article appeared, circulating a counter-claim and simultaneously launching a smear campaign against me and my work with the help of solidarity groups and pro-Chávez websites. According to them, I’m a CIA agent, coup advocate, racist, “tool of corporate media,” reactionary, and defender of rapacious multinationals. One “solidarity” website even suggested I should be murdered, and I suppose if I had looked deep enough, they would have accused me of hitting my wife.
This is all nonsense, of course, a distraction tactic meant to divert attention away from further discussion on the numerous flaws in Stone’s film. The same goes for the written claims full of indisputable falsehoods that Stone and his two screenwriters, Mark Weisbrot and Tariq Ali, sent to various news organizations and websites, including HNN. I don’t intend to bore readers with a point-by-point rebuttal of Stone’s letter here. However, it is worth examining some of their most egregious errors and misleading claims, as they reveal how he and his associates think and operate.
In my original article, for example, I highlighted the film’s false claim that “the United States imports more oil from Venezuela than any other OPEC nation.” In reality, that distinction has long belonged to Saudi Arabia. Instead of admitting their error, Stone and especially Weisbrot, who as the lead screenwriter is responsible for the majority of the more glaring mistakes, have shifted their positions multiple times, trying to redefine which years should be considered and whether the standard of measurement should be “oil,” as stated in the film, or “oil and derivatives,” their fallback position.
None of this sleight-of-hand changes the final outcome. No matter how Stone and Weisbrot try to manipulate the figures, they remain incorrect. Here are the official statistics comparing U.S. oil imports from Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, compiled by the U.S. Department of Energy and expressed in thousands of barrels, for each year since Hugo Chávez came to power in 1999:
YEAR S. Arabia Venezuela
1999 506,272 419,893
2000 557,569 447,736
2001 588,075 471,243
2002 554,500 438,270
2003 629,820 431,704
2004 547,125 474,531
2005 527,287 452,914
2006 519,236 417,001
2007 528,189 419,180
2008 550,276 380,419
2009 360,934 352,278
Weisbrot is an economist, not a historian, and apparently not very good at it. He’s either so incompetent that he can’t read a simple table or he’s deliberately manipulating the numbers. The latter seems more likely, as renowned economists have chastised him for such errors in the past. For instance, Francisco Rodríguez, a Venezuelan who once served as chief economist for the Venezuelan Congress and now teaches at Wesleyan University, has written a scathing article titled “How Not to Defend the Revolution: Mark Weisbrot and the Misinterpretation of Venezuelan Evidence.” In it, he points out that “Weisbrot’s critiques are generally invalid, as they rely on a misreading of the evidence or on using severely biased indicators,” which is exactly the problem here.
Faced with what is irrefutable evidence, Weisbrot now tries to argue that his mistake is “irrelevant” or inconsequential. This is also false, for at least two reasons. First, this effort to bend, twist, and distort irrefutable oil statistics indicates a reckless disregard for facts that is much broader and, indeed, permeates all of South of the Border. If Stone, Weisbrot, and Ali cannot even get the simplest details correct, why should any moviegoer or academic believe any of their other claims?
More importantly, the notion of Venezuela as the top OPEC oil source for the U.S. is a fundamental element in one of the larger, more important arguments made by Stone, Weisbrot, and Ali. In the film, Hugo Chávez is quoted as saying, while speaking in the third person: “The coup against Hugo Chávez had a motive, oil. First, Chávez, oil. Secondly, Saddam, Iraq.” Stone backs and promotes this idea by stating on-screen that “the same strategy applied in Iraq was applied to uprisings in South America.”
In reality, the reasons for the April 2002 coup that briefly overthrew Chávez remain a topic of intense dispute even today. Opposition groups and Venezuelan military officials argue that they acted because Chávez was unlawfully consolidating power and could have ordered troops and his own supporters to shoot at unarmed demonstrators. In an effort to shift focus away from that counter-argument and viewers who have not followed Chávez’s rise, fall, and resurrection, Stone and Weisbrot have had to inflate Venezuela’s diminishing global significance as an oil producer.
A second leg of this same argument is that Chávez angered the U.S. and the oil industry because under him, “the government took control of the oil industry for the first time,” a phrase Stone repeats more than once in the film. This is also false. Venezuela nationalized the oil industry in 1976 when Carlos Andrés Pérez was president and merged all foreign-owned companies into a single state entity. But Chávez despises Pérez, who imprisoned him after Chávez’s failed coup attempt in 1992, and never passes up an opportunity to undermine his image or attack him. As faithful stenographers of Chávez, Stone and Weisbrot simply parrot Chávez’s argument without bothering to verify whether it’s true. It isn’t.
South of the Border is filled with other errors and misinformation like this, but Stone and Weisbrot refuse to acknowledge them. They continue to insist, for example, that Chávez’s main opponent in the 1998 election was not Henrique Salas Romer, the former governor who received 40 percent of the vote, but Irene Sáez, the beauty queen who garnered only 3 percent. According to that odd and novel standard, George Bush’s main opponent in the 2000 election wasn’t Al Gore but Ralph Nader, and Ronald Reagan’s main opponent in the 1980 election wasn’t Jimmy Carter but John Anderson. Their defense references early 1997 when Chávez and Sáez were the only prominent candidates. But the election was held in December 1998, not January 1997, and they never mention Salas Romer at any point, thereby giving viewers the false impression that the election was from beginning to end a contest between “the beauty and the beast.” As far as they’re concerned, Salas Romer simply does not exist, but, well, never let facts get in the way of a good story.
Speaking of Jimmy Carter, it’s worth mentioning that the nonpartisan international election monitoring commission he headed issued an official assessment of the 1998 voting that aligns perfectly with mine and completely contradicts the characterization that Stone, Weisbrot, and Ali have concocted in South of the Border. It is ridiculous at this late date for the three of them to be trying to rewrite history and challenge an assessment backed by all participants in the 1998 elections, including Hugo Chávez himself. Here’s the relevant passage from the Carter Center report:
“The leading candidate, according to recent polls, was Lieutenant Colonel Hugo Chávez, a charismatic populist of 44 years who was the most fervent in his commitment to make drastic changes in the political system. His chief rival was Henrique Salas Romer, a Yale graduate who also promised to change the existing political structure.
Chávez had led a failed coup attempt against the incumbent government in 1992, was imprisoned, never tried, and then released by President Caldera. He seemed to appeal to a poorer electorate than Salas and was feared by the elite establishment, although he still enjoyed some support from the business community.
The other candidates appeared to be well behind in the polls, including Irene Saez (the ex-Miss Universe backed by the COPEI party) and Luis Alfaro (77-year-old leader of the Democratic Action Party).
In their letter to HNN and other websites, Stone and company complain that “Rohter was presented with detailed documentary evidence of U.S. involvement in the 2002 coup” against Chávez, which they describe as “an important point in the film” that has gone unreported in the mainstream press. They complain that “I simply dismissed all this evidence without further ado, and nothing appears about it in the article.” This is false. In reality, I thoroughly examined their “evidence” and found that the document cited by Stone, Weisbrot, and Ali as principal proof of their argument actually contradicts and undermines what they have to say. Thus, their claim is misleading and false, at least based on the “evidence” they provide, which is why this topic was not mentioned in my original article.
However, I’m fully willing to have that debate now, because it speaks volumes about how Stone, and especially Weisbrot, continually attempt to mislead the unsuspecting viewer. In the film, an image of a cover page from a U.S. government document briefly appears on screen while discussing the April 2002 coup. When I asked Weisbrot about it, he said it was a State Department study acknowledging its “involvement” in the coup. He specifically pointed to this passage: “NED (the National Endowment for Democracy), the Department of Defense (DOD), and other U.S. assistance programs were involved in supporting efforts to oust the Chávez government.”
However, upon closer examination, it becomes clear that Weisbrot is selectively quoting, simply cherry-picking parts of the document to fit his theory, which otherwise would have no support, and omitting sections that do not fit. Here’s the full statement of the State Department’s review of policy towards Venezuela during the period of November 2001 to April 2002 from which Weisbrot cites: The Office of the Inspector General “found no evidence that U.S. assistance programs to Venezuela, including those funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), were incompatible with U.S. laws or policies. While it is clear that NED, the DOD, and other U.S. assistance programs provided training, institutional development, and other types of support to individuals and organizations believed to be actively involved in the brief ousting of the Chávez government, we found no evidence that this support contributed directly, or was intended to contribute, to that event.”
At another point, the same review of the State Department policy also explicitly addresses Stone and Weisbrot’s argument that the U.S. government was “involved” in the coup and outright rejects it. Stone and Weisbrot, however, do not cite any portion of this section of the document, and I think I know why. They are engaged in the old practice that Latin Americans call “selling a cat as a hare,” or “selling a cat as hare,” and simply will not produce any evidence that reveals their theory is based on manipulation of facts. But this is what the very same State Department study that Weisbrot cites as the basis for this “main point of the film” actually has to say:
4. “Did opponents of the Chávez government, if any, who met with embassy or Department officials seek or request support from the U.S. government for actions aimed at ousting or undermining that government? If so, what was the response of embassy or Department officials to such requests? How were such responses conveyed, orally or in writing?
Taking the question of whether, in such meetings, Chávez opponents sought help from the embassy or Department to overthrow or undermine the Chávez government through undemocratic or unconstitutional means, the answer is no.
Instead, Chávez opponents would inform their U.S. interlocutors of their objectives, intentions, and/or plans (or, more often, those of others). U.S. officials consistently responded to such statements with expressions opposing any effort to overthrow or undermine the government of Chávez through undemocratic and unconstitutional means. These responses were conveyed orally.
Weisbrot clearly needs to go back to the dictionary and look up the meaning of “involve.” Does he provide any evidence that the United States was “drawn in as a partner or participant” in the coup? He doesn’t. Instead, he suggests a nebulous standard that, if applied in other situations, would work like this: if I teach a finance course and a year after that course concludes, one of my former students robs a bank, in some way I am “involved” in the robbery. This is not only ridiculous; it’s dishonest.
The second half of South of the Border deals with a group of South American presidents who, according to Stone, are cut from the same cloth as Chávez and are part of a movement led by Chávez “that is moving away from the IMF and U.S. economic controls.” But here again, Stone, Weisbrot, and Ali are playing fast and loose with the facts. Their treatment of each of the six countries they examine is full of errors and misrepresentations, but I will limit myself to the one subject they were most dismissive about in Stone’s letter to HNN: the attempted privatization of the water supply in Cochabamba, Bolivia.
In my original article, I pointed out that, contrary to Tariq Ali’s assertion, the Bolivian government did not “sell the Cochabamba water supply to Bechtel, an American corporation,” nor did it pass a law making “illegal for poor people to go on rooftops and collect rainwater in containers.” In reality, the government awarded a forty-year management concession to a consortium that included Bechtel, in exchange for capital injections to expand and improve water service.
Tariq Ali argues that I’m “really reaching” because “for all practical purposes” there’s no essential distinction between owning a company and having a contract to manage it on behalf of its owner. This makes no sense. One of the foundations of any civilized society is the rule of law, which includes explicit definitions of ownership of property and other assets. When you rent a car from a dealership, you do not own the car. When you rent an apartment from a landlord, you do not own the apartment. It’s as simple as that, and when a government grants you the right to manage a water company, you do not own the company. The government does and can terminate the arrangement if the managers fail to meet the contract, which is what happened in Cochabamba. In the real world, anyone who tries to argue that “for all practical purposes” there’s no difference between a lease and a sale would be ridiculed out of court. I guess it’s no surprise that Tariq Ali, an editor for New Left Review who describes himself as a former Trotskyist, is confused about concepts of private ownership, but is that Stone and Weisbrot’s excuse?
When I asked Tariq Ali for the source of his information about the failed water privatization in Cochabamba, he said he heard about it from Bolivian activists at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil. I was about to ask Ali, who is actually a historian and should know better, why he hadn’t bothered to verify the facts when Oliver Stone burst into the conversation impatiently to complain that I was trying to kill him. But history is about nuance, and the devil is in the details. However, Stone is not interested in facts or nuance: he just wants to tell a story, even if it’s wildly inaccurate, that will draw viewers into the theater.
President Obama recently spoke about those suffering from what he called “willful blindness,” who cannot recognize or admit facts that cannot be questioned, and instead weave elaborate fantasies based on cherished beliefs they cannot abandon. He was talking about North Korea and perhaps also indirectly about Tea Party types who think he’s a socialist born in Kenya. But Stone, Weisbrot, and Tariq Ali suffer from this same disease, and their willful blindness has fatally infected South of the Border. They can attack me as much as they want, and I suspect they’ll continue doing so, but that’s just a smoke screen. Nothing, including insults and slurs, can change the facts, one of which is that they’ve created a biased and dishonest film whose arguments collapse under the slightest scrutiny.