Hugo Chavez, the, erm, colourful socialist leader of Venezuela, has suffered a blow of sorts in the country’s parliamentary elections this week, with the Opposition Democratic Union taking 64 seats so far in the country’s 167 seat parliament.

With counting continuing, (there were four seats still up for grabs at time of publication) the Opposition may take 67 seats — at which point they will have a sufficient vote to block Chavez’s ability, as President, to govern through executive regulation. Chavez’s PSUV gained 95 of the 165 parliamentary seats, with several going to minor parties, and reserved seats for indigenous peoples.

The gains by the Opposition were largely expected, since their absence from parliament was due to a boycott of the 2004 election.

However, the Opposition’s result was stronger than the Chavistas had hoped would be the case. Indeed it’s possible that they gained a majority of the vote — possibly up to 52% — the disparity between vote and seat numbers due to a rural weighting introduced by Chavez.

Comrade Ugo was upbeat about the result, saying that “it has been a great election day and we have obtained a solid victory: enough to continue deepening Bolivarian and democratic socialism. We need to continue strengthening the revolution!”

Meanwhile, Opposition leader Ramón Guillermo Aveledo also confirmed that the election had been a fair one, saying it had been a “fantastic” day for the country.

Should the Opposition gain more than 67 of the 165-seat parliament, they will gain the ability to block the two-thirds majority that Chavez needs to govern by executive rule — and make it difficult for him to project towards a third term in 2012.

As expected, there was a heavy swing against Chavez in the cities, even among lower-income areas — although the poorest slums still support the PSUV. But huge levels of crime and a perceived lack of response to such has cut into Chavez’s support in the cities.

One thing is certain — whatever the final result, nothing will change in the mainstream Western press’ reporting on Venezuela, which remains one of the most self-parodically biased farragos of slanted nonsense in the history of non-news.

There’s two ways the mainstream media reports Venezuela in the West — one is to simply lie about it, and paint it as a quasi-Soviet basket case, and the other, more subtle, approach is to rationally and at great length discuss its problems, and pass silently over its achievements. Any number of examples of the first can be seen on the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, but take a recent example of the second approach from the Financial Times.

In an article entitled “Bolivarian Bravado”, the authors spend two thousand words discussing Venezuela’s foreign affairs, its single quarter of recession this year (falsely forecast as ongoing by the IMF), its inflation, a scandal of undelivered subsidised food, and his “emotional” bond with the poor. The entirety of Venezuelan social programs is dealt with thusly:

“Gregory Wilpert, editor of pro-Chávez website Venezuelanalysis.com, emphasises that many have benefited from the government-run social programs.”

Even a near invisible acknowledgement of social progress has to tagged as coming from a “pro-Chavez” source.

The facts, that these untold numbers of articles never feature are these: in 1998, poverty in Venezuela was at 43%. It is now at 28%. Of that, extreme poverty — actual starvation, mainly in rural areas — has fallen from 25% to 10%. Access to clean water has risen from 80% to 95%, infant mortality has nearly halved from 22/thousand in 98, to 13/thousand. Four million people have graduated from the various education missions providing free training and tuition at all levels, and literacy levels surpassed the US several years ago. Even those still below the poverty line do better, as the subsidised food allows for 1500+ calories per day and protein levels sufficient for full development.

Yet throughout this, the economy has been managed better than its predecessors — public debt has been reduced from 35% of GDP in 1997 to 15% now. And Chavez’s inflation rate of 30%, compares favourably to the average of 50% in the decade before 1998, when Presidents Perez and Caldera (the latter reluctantly) applied IMF remedies to the oil-rich country’s structural problems. Indeed, part of the delay in pushing forward with Chavez’s reforms came from the need to pay down the IMF debt — the problem presented as a solution to itself, as ever.

In watching more than a decade of Venezuela reporting, I have time and again marvelled at the capacity of a fixed mindset to reproduce itself endlessly. I don’t think anyone stands over the journalists who dutifully turn out this dope and tell them what to say — it’s a combination of one-dimensional university economics courses, incuriosity and sheer inertia. In the Wall Street Journal or the Economist — the latter’s writings on Venezuela could fill an entire file on the rich mechanisms of mental repression and denial — it is probably a more complex mix of reflex thinking, and a conscious determination that there shall be no suggestion of alternatives to the dominant model, at a time when the dominant model is barely wheezing along under its own steam.

What undergirds it all, of course, is a simple lack of concern about the global poor, and whether they live or die. The global food supply disruptions that have been going on for the past four years, largely a product of speculation, and the destruction of local sources through the imposition of “free” trade, will, it is estimated, foreshorten or wholly blight the lives of up to one hundred million people. One hundred million. Yet it can be wholly subsumed into the theory of free markets as nothing more than “necessary measures”.

In that respect, neoliberalism is the new Stalinism, shucked of political kitsch, but inheriting the earlier movement’s use of an abstract development model to nullify the human cost of progress.

The manifold problems and shortcomings of the Chavez era don’t even get a look-in — for many of them are from the left, and to do so would require some enumeration of Chavez’s actual achievements. What must be denied above all in coverage of Venezuela is that the lives of the poor have been made central to the business of the state as an ethical and political imperative.