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Action Alert

NYT Hypes Venezuelan Threat
Comparison of 'arms spending' doesn't include all arms spending

3/2/07

A February 25 report in the New York Times on Venezuela's international arms purchases ("Venezuela Spending on Arms Soars to World's Top Ranks") used selective information and an alarmist tone to suggest that Venezuela's military spending was a potential threat to regional stability.

Reporter Simon Romero's alarming lead read, "Venezuela's arms spending has climbed to more than $4 billion in the past two years, transforming the nation into Latin America's largest weapons buyer and placing it ahead of other major purchasers in international arms markets like Pakistan and Iran." By putting Venezuela in the company of Pakistan and Iran—whose military programs have attracted global suspicion—the report was clearly intended to stir alarm and frighten readers about Venezuela's military designs.

But there are several problems with this piece. First of all, as the article reveals further down, it was based on information provided by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency. The Pentagon has a well-earned credibility problem when it comes to making intelligence claims about the threats posed by official enemies, and the fact that it was the source of the article's assertions should have been mentioned in the lead.

The article also used a confusing and highly misleading measure of arms expenditures. When it uses the phrase "Venezuela's arms spending," it does not mean the amount Venezuela spends on arms, but the amount that it spends buying arms from other countries. If one is interested in the military threat posed by a particular country, its total spending on its military is a more relevant statistic; indeed, all other things being equal, a country that has to buy most of its weapons from overseas might be seen as less of a threat than a country with a large domestic arms industry.

But it's clear why the Defense Intelligence Agency would stress overseas arms purchases as a gauge of Venezuela's military potential: When one looks at the more comprehensive figure of total military spending, Venezuela does not seem to constitute much of a threat at all. In Latin America, according to figures compiled by the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation, Argentina spends almost twice as much on its military as Venezuela, Colombia spends more than three times as much, and Brazil spends about 12 times as much.

Iran and Pakistan, whose overseas arms purchases the Times compares to Venezuela's, spend much more on their military overall than Venezuela does as well. The United States, as the world's biggest miltary power, has a military budget roughly 500 times the size of Venezuela. None of this crucial context made it into Romero's piece, though the article does note, in the 19th of 26 paragraphs, that Brazil's army is far larger than Venezuela's.

But the article may be inaccurate as well as misleading. Though the article claimed that Venezuela's $4 billion in arms purchases over the last two years eclipsed Pakistan's weapons spending, the Times reported just a few months ago (11/11/06) that Pakistan had "placed a $5 billion order for advanced F-16 jets made by the Lockheed Martin Corporation." Pakistan would seem to have outspent Venezuela on the international arms market in a single deal with the American company. In the February 25 piece, Romero cited an estimate from the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency that claimed Pakistan had spent just $3 billion over the past two years, which is obviously at odds with the Times' report from November, which was also based on Pentagon data.

The Times' numbers on Venezuelan military spending don't seem to add up, either. The article reported that Venezuela's total military budget was $1.3 billion in 2004, "the last year for which comparative data were immediately available." (This is slightly more than the figure given by the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation.) It also said that Venezuela's overseas arms spending was $4.3 billion over the past two years, and that it was up 12.5 percent in 2006. That would mean the country bought slightly more than $2 billion in weapons abroad in 2005.

Given that Venezuela spends at least some portion of its military budget domestically, this would imply a huge increase in military spending between 2004 and 2005--at least 50 percent, and perhaps more than doubling. Such a remarkable jump is hard to believe, particularly without Romero and his DIA sources calling attention to it, and raises doubts about the credibility of the article's entire premise.

ACTION:
Please contact New York Times public editor and ask him to look into the article's omission of crucial context and apparent contradiction with other New York Times reporting.

CONTACT:
New York Times
Byron Calame, Public Editor
Email:  public@nytimes.com
Phone: 212-556-7652