In 2005, Venezuela became an official Territory Free of Illiteracy. A massively funded government literacy drive achieved, in just over a year, what decades of neoliberal neglect had failed to deliver: a country where every single person knows how to read.
It’s the kind of story of radical inclusiveness and progressive zeal that has earned the government of Hugo Chávez wide admiration — even from those who might blanch at its heavy-handed approach to civil liberties. There’s just one problem: the government’s claim is verifiably false.
Preliminary results from the 2011 census published by the government’s own National Statistics Institute show that, as of last year, 95.1 percent of Venezuelans can read and write, just 1.5 percentage point higher than a decade earlier. The findings confirm what critics have claimed all along: that the government’s 2005 drive had little effect on the nation’s literacy rate, which has continued to creep up in line with long-term trends, as older people who never had formal education pass away and are replaced by better-schooled generations.
Tucked away in the inside pages of an obscure census report — well out of public view — the findings have barely reverberated in Venezuela’s public sphere. Instead, a massive, multiyear propaganda campaign has continued to tout the government’s final victory over the scourge of illiteracy. Shouted from the rafters, repeated again and again on state TV, state radio, the state news agency, state-sponsored billboards and countless Chávez speeches, the claim that Venezuela is now a Territory Free of Illiteracy has gained the perception of Official Truth, the kind of thing that Venezuelans can’t question without being suspected of ideological deviation.
Nor is this an isolated incident: the Chávez propaganda machine has proved impressively adept at creating these sorts of fictional facts and repeating them ad nauseam until they become so familiar that most people stop asking whether they make any sense to begin with.
One favorite recent addition to the genre is the government’s claim that its outpatient-clinic network has “saved over two million lives” in the nine years since it was founded. That’s a gloriously incoherent claim in a country where fewer than 150,000 people die each year of all causes. Even if Chávez’s outpatient clinics could somehow stop all deaths, it would take at least 13 years to save two million lives!
What’s terrifying is how little it seems to matter that so many Chavista propaganda claims fail to stand up to even minimal scrutiny. In fine Orwellian fashion, the Venezuelan government has perfected a wickedly effective mechanism for the manufacture of truth. Here, the government’s explicit policy goal of establishing Communicational Hegemony over the airwavesreally comes into its own: as dissenting voices become more and more marginalized from the national conversation, it becomes easier and easier to establish increasingly unmoored propaganda claims as unassailable Official Truth.
As Venezuela approaches a surprisingly competitive presidential election on Oct. 7, the ease with which propaganda gets enshrined as truth is getting increasingly worrisome. A government that has found it costless to lie so brazenly on so many topics for so many years will have little restraint on election day if it suddenly finds a need to fiddle with the vote tally.
Given Venezuela’s highly secure voting system, it would be difficult to steal the election without leaving clear traces, but that might not matter to a government that has honed the skill of turning fiction into fact.
**Francisco Toro blogs about the Chávez era at CaracasChronicles.com.
