Students, faculty and Platteville community members attended an open discussion about the current crisis in Venezuela on April 23 at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville, which was sponsored by Students for Peace and Justice.

Melissa Gormley, Richard Waugh and Mark Evenson held presentations about historical and current issues related to the current crisis.

Gormley, a history professor at UW-Platteville, presented a short history regarding the relations between the United States and Latin America.

At the beginning of her presentation, Gormley discussed the history of America’s relations with different Latin American countries, such as Nicaragua and Guatemala, discussing different periods of action from the 1940s to the present.

Also, Gormley talked about the United States’ involvement in the overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz, following policies that would have removed land rights from the United Fruit Company, which involved the work of many U.S. business workers.

Though Arbenz had been popularly elected, the United States staged a public relations campaign in order to make the situation appear as if the Soviet Union was selling Guatemala arms.

Professor Gormley also mentioned that the U.S. continued to intervene in Latin America throughout the 20th century and during the 1980s; this created a backlash against the U.S.

Furthermore, Gormley mentioned that the U.S. had some involvement in Venezuela and became part of the failed coup d’état against Hugo Chávez in 2002.

Waugh, a geography professor at UW-Platteville, provided some additional insight into the class and ethnic issues that may play prominent roles in the current crisis.

He identified the different ethnic groups in Latin America, further illustrating that there are people of direct European descent, African descent and Asian descent, as well as mixed ethnicities between the different races, such as Mestizo, a mix between European and Indigenous, Mulatto, a mix between European and African and Zambo, a mix between African and Indigenous.

Professor Waugh mentioned that some of the issues potentially originated from the fact that Hugo Chávez is Zambo and his successor Nicolás Maduro is Mestizo, suggesting that most other Venezuelan presidents have been of direct European descent.

Part of the current situation in Venezuela stemmed from Maduro’s opponent, a man of European descent who called the election false.

Also, Waugh stated that a class issue has potentially become an important factor, telling the audience that Chávez wanted to build schools and clinics for the rural poor with the intent of using the money that Venezuela made from oil in order to initiate internal social development.

Though Chávez originally had plans to help the country, his presidency became more authoritarian when he had the constitution changed so he could serve successive terms in office.

Evenson, a Spanish professor at UW-Platteville, stated that a majority of news that Americans are exposed to regarding the crisis in Venezuela is skewed, and many journalists are using press releases rather than actual stories, which offer a misleading picture of the crisis.

Evenson also provided the audience with additional history regarding the misleading information about the events in Latin America presented by the media in the United States.

Evenson and Gormley mentioned the attempted coup in 2002, signifying that other Latin American countries expressed anger towards the U.S. for their involvement and later realized that it was a terrible idea.

Although much of what was discussed during the presentations appeared to accuse the upper and middle classes of protesting in order to protect their wealth from a possible socialist government, Evenson eventually clarified that both sides of the conflict have had demonstrations.

As a response to the discussion held by David Rowley, a history professor at UW-Platteville, an audience member asked, “What should America do? Support democracy or revolution?”

Part of the reason that the current Venezuelan crisis is difficult to understand is because most revolutions are led by the poor or oppressed rather than those in a higher position, and this situation seems to be the opposite.

“When we think of Latin America, we’ve always thought of revolution as being leftist,” Gormley said. In this case, the revolution is against the left; one of the professors referred to it as a “counter-revolution.” After the presentations, audience members were provided with different perspectives from which to further analyze the current situation in Venezuela.