Talk:Colectivo (Venezuela)

A tricky topic

I have not been editting Wikipedia long enough to know if there is a particular word or phrase for this particular type of complaint, but it feels to me that this is a troublesome topic for an article: 'colectivo' is an extemely "loaded" term, most often used in a pejorative sense (despite the fact that secondary new sources have attempted to define it). I quote the following advice to international human right groups:

In reference to the presence of possible “armed collectives” who the media has presented as a kind of shock troop or special police, we must be very clear. Generalizations do not lead to solutions in any conflict, and just as we recognize that not all the student protests are violent nor all their participants extremists, we must offer a clean and straightforward look at what the colectivos are and the role they have played.

Over the past three decades, many revolutionaries have maintained that an armed struggle is imperative in Venezuela. Hugo Chavez was emphatically against this notion during his presidency and repeatedly warned any armed groups, no matter if they were his supporters, that they were placing themselves on the margin of the law and must assume the consequences. Nicolas Maduro has equally condemned the presence of armed civilians harassing recent protestors, and put out a warrant for the arrest of any who have been linked to violence.

It’s important to note that for many, the colectivos are synonymous with community organizing… NOT with violence. The image of the colectivo as a primarily male reactionary group of rebels on motorcycles is a product of the media, and could be no farther from the truth. The criminalization of these community collectives is similar to the way the neighborhood Bolivarian Circles were attacked and their image was distorted after the 2002 coup against Chavez. These are the kinds of organizations that have characterized the participatory aspect of Venezuela’s democracy, and to typecast them as terrorist groups is to overlook some leading examples of the power of grassroots organizing.

Riothero (talk) 05:29, 27 March 2014 (UTC)

Taking a Venezuelanalysis column at face value would cause more neutrality problems than it solves. Venezuelanalysis is not a reliable source. bobrayner (talk) 10:34, 27 March 2014 (UTC)

I am not citing VA as a source for anything other than as something representative of my thoughts and concerns with regard to the use of the term 'colectivo'. I hope you understand that. Riothero (talk) 11:45, 27 March 2014 (UTC)

I will work on the article, time permitting. I simply wished to state my views here regarding what I consider to be problematic usage of the term.Riothero (talk) 11:50, 27 March 2014 (UTC)

Why isn't VA a reliable source? And if it isn't, then what is?

For instance, Human Rights Watch would usually be thought of as neutral. But this article exaggerates the extent of human rights abuses by government forces and ignores the express condemnation of these individuals by those in charge, and the investigation of abuses during this period. It calls the government "authoritarian" for arresting protesters, but the protesters themselves are abusing human rights. And there is no mention of this. So why is HRW reliable but not VA?

Huffington Post article contains numerous ridiculous statements, and I only read the first two paragraphs: "A brutal government crackdown on protests has already left at least 15 dead" - this is an absurd sentence given that there was no "brutal crackdown", and there is no evidence that any government forces left 15 people dead. Nobody would even assert that.

These two sources are not in keeping with established facts that are agreed upon by both sides. What part of the VA article contradicts uncontested facts?

There are sentences in this wikipedia article that are completely ridiculous. The authorities permit colectivos to rape people? Poor people are afraid to protest due to colectivos? I find that hard to believe. There have been many protesters in Venezuela over the years, few casualties attributed to the colectivos, and they are hardly likely to be able to target lower-class individuals amidst thousands of people. And that isn't relevant to the 2014 protests.

Additionally, the quotes from government officials at the end of that section are misleading, since they may not be necessarily referring to murderous collectivos, but the unarmed social groups who have been involved in cleaning up the mess of the guarimberos. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.0.233.166 (talk) 19:48, 3 April 2014 (UTC)

I completely agree with this.

It's ridiculous to throw out VA on claims of it being unreliable yet accept western sources that are very much biased, presenting a distorted view. 2A02:2F0E:3013:9100:C78:83B7:CB63:2F99 (talk) 12:53, 28 August 2023 (UTC)

I am trying to find more about the topic. I knew this was going to stir up a few things when I introduced it but all of the information is purely from the sources. I will need help from other users. This article has already been brought up on Venezuelanalysis and I really did not want it to go this far. I just wanted to bring the term to light since its usage has been common in the past few months.-- ZiaLater (talk) 17:37, 5 April 2014 (UTC)

POV

Added the NPOV tag. The claim that there are government supporters in Venezuela who have been violent is very controversial at the least. All the sources cited are very recent, and are from media corporations known to consistently report about Venezuela and the government in a negative light. At the recent Organization of American States discussions on Venezuela, the overwhelming majority of delegates had a very different view of the reasons for the violence in Venezuela. The article is biased. Pgan002 (talk) 20:17, 4 April 2014 (UTC)

Looks better now. Pgan002 (talk) 12:02, 8 April 2014 (UTC)

Robert Serra

?? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Riothero (talk • contribs) 22:18, 12 October 2014 (UTC)

I'll change the title of the section. Sources connect the incidents but the title should be something else.--ZiaLater (talk) 00:44, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

The incidents are not related. Stop pushing your POV.--Riothero (talk) 01:25, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

Since when have you become a reliable source? Some sources relate the two and it has been mentioned and properly attributed.--ZiaLater (talk) 01:48, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

“El Che venezolano”

The idea that Humberto López, a Che Guevara impersonator, is the "leader of the colectivos" is preposterous. I cannot find any reliable source that confirms this.--Riothero (talk) 01:24, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

Second hit for the search "El Che" (with marks) on Google. http://www.el-nacional.com/sucesos/Che-venezolano-colectivos-pie-guerra_0_497950249.html Venezuelan "El Che": The colectivos are in war footing quote from El Nacional - "The leader of the pro-government groups reacted regarding Cicpc attacks between officials and armed groups". Really? --ZiaLater (talk) 01:54, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

Yes. That is the source you have provided. I am asking you for a reliable source to confirm this. (He is leader "of the pro-government groups"? Really, which ones? All of them?) ----Riothero (talk) 09:21, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

Go blog somewhere. This is getting ridiculous.--ZiaLater (talk) 10:34, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

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Colectivos oppose Norway dialog

• Los paramilitares más violentos desconfían de Maduro porque iba a «venderlos» en la negociación de Oslo (ABC)--MaoGo (talk) 00:41, 27 May 2019 (UTC)

This Article is Very Troubling

I might be grasping at straws here but at the very least this article needs to be completely reorganized. It takes so much info at face value and then makes unfortunate and extremely inappropriate editorializing in the introduction, not even putting it in a "criticism" section. I know this ideal is ultimately unachievable but this article should at least appear to be neutral.

Caglob (talk) 17:52, 19 January 2020 (UTC)

Please provide specific sections that might be improved. For the "criticism" section, please provide references so we can discuss its relevance.--MaoGo (talk) 20:17, 19 January 2020 (UTC)

Caglob Criticism sections are discouraged, and not the way to organize articles; all views should be worked together seamlessly-- separating criticism is usually a POV organization. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:37, 14 November 2023 (UTC)

I second this. This entire article lacks a neutral point of view. It presents as fact the assertion that legal community associations (e.g., consejos comunales) are part of a cohesive whole with pro-government factions of organized crime, without an discussion of how controversial this is within Venezuela or evidence that this is the case. For example, the introduction and InfoBox for this article assert that colectivos are both engaged in criminal activity and receiving funding from the Venezuelan government. These assertions may in fact be true about the specific organizations which they concern, and are (usually) backed up with sources. But saying that a specific pro-government group receives government funding, or that another is engaged in criminal activity, is not the same as saying that "the colectivos" receive funding or engage in crime. The overly broad attribution of actions specific groups are responsible for is one way that this article takes a clear and non-neutral point of view. At the very least, it is necessary to clarify throughout the article exactly who is being referred to. The introduction needs to give specific examples of organizations considered colectivos and whether there is any controversy over the inclusion of a specific group. SilverStar54 (talk) 00:19, 8 July 2021 (UTC)

I'm sorry: while I understand the concern that concepts can be mixed up, there are other articles that draw this distinction, and the definition of "colectivos" as armed group is quite well documented, from the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights to Venezuela's International Fact-Finding Mission. As MaoGo mentioned, there should be more specific points before tagging the article, particularly with the amount of content and references it has. I'm removing the tag accordingly. --NoonIcarus (talk) 17:50, 8 September 2021 (UTC)

That's why they are frequently called DISinfoboxes.

We do need to see some sources to back SilverStar54's and Caglob's concerns and statements; if anything, according to all sources I read, colectivos under Maduro have become even less of what they started out as, and more violent (that is, armed) and with more control over communities via crime (that is, Madura-era colectivos vs. Chavez-era).

I listed very briefly some sources below (most recent found in scholarly sources, and some other recent news sources), which probably show that the 2021 question list above might be dated; we have to follow sources. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 03:51, 14 November 2023 (UTC)

@Caglob and SilverStar54: Has the article improved since you raised these concerns? I’ve been trying to clean up Venezuelan articles since there have been some issues, some of them long-standing and ignored. Let me know your thoughts.--WMrapids (talk) 20:02, 13 November 2023 (UTC)

There have been some real improvements! Thank you for your hard work.

There's still a few issues that I see. The first is that there is a lot of inflammatory language. Phrases like that colectivos "terrorize those who disagree with them" should not receive such high billing in the article and should be attributed to the person who said them. Other claims need further clarification. What does it mean that colectivos are "controlling about 10% of Venezuelan cities"?

The term colectivo has also gone through major shift in usage over time. As alluded to in the intro's second paragraph, the term literally just refers to any sort of community organization with a shared purpose. It would highly illuminating to add some sentences summarizing the history section of the article to the second paragraph, explaining how the colectivos became involved with the Chavista movement and how the term acquired its present-day connotations.

Finally, as a general note, we Wikipedia editors need to recognize that many English-language media outlets throw their editorial standards out the window when discussing Latin America. We need to exercise caution when citing their claims, especially about geopolitical rivals of the United States. Articles with titles like "Maduro’s Masked Thugs Unleash Terror Along the Venezuelan Border" should not be treated as dispassionate analyses of the situation. SilverStar54 (talk) 23:37, 13 November 2023 (UTC)

SilverStar54 ... It's interesting that Bloomberg (normally a high quality source) is questioned here, but then I've seen them go off similarly in other Venezuela topics, but in the pro-Maduro direction, so their lack of "dispassionate analyses" wrt Venezuela may be something to note going forward.

On the text and source you question, here is how I used and attributed the source:

In 2019, Bloomberg says they are associated with extrajudicial killings and terrorizing those who disagree with them

and this is what it got changed to a year ago:

They commit extrajudicial killings and terrorize those who disagree with them, with impunity

-- statement of fact, WikiVoice, hyped, no attribution. Why I periodically leave Venezuela editing; you can end up with the highest edit count on crap you didn't write. But once again, Wikipedia:Who Wrote That? has been broken on this page, so I can't easily go back and find everything else introduced that may need work.

What is it that you don't understand about colectivos are "controlling about 10% of Venezuelan cities"? It seems straightforward to me. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:30, 14 November 2023 (UTC)

To be clear I didn't mean to attack Bloomberg specifically; there's a general problem of bad journalism when it comes to Western media outlets reporting on LA.

Your original sentence is much better. It's a shame that there are editors intent on giving Venezuela pages a POV slant.

Does "10%" mean 1 out of every 10 cities, or one tenth of each city? And more importantly, what is exactly is meant by "control"? The mafia, political machines, and popular mass organizations can all "control" a city, but they do it in very different ways. And what exactly do they control in these places? I doubt they control literally everything, so some clarification on how they exercise their power (over politics? over government? over the drug trade? over organized crime?) would be helpful. SilverStar54 (talk) 01:49, 14 November 2023 (UTC)

One out of every ten cities, as I read the source. The control is in the context of "As the groups became more powerful, they exerted their own influence independent of the government, most notably in controlling organized crime like drug trafficking in Caracas barrios." That's dated to New York Times 2017, but there are more and recent sources supporting this today, and sources could be updated-- to a stronger and broader extent (as Colectivos control food distribution and health care in some areas now, so it could more specific, and also entire portions of Caracas should be mentioned that have become lawless since I first worked on this article years ago).

I don't have time for cleaning this up and rewriting; with the Who Wrote That tool consistently broken on Venezuelan articles by large edits that move and rewrite big chunks of text all at once, the opportunity to use it to highlight what might need attention (eg, the edit above) is obliterated, and for all the work, including never-ending secretarial clean up (formatting, citations, Manual of style cleanup, etc), one comes along a few years later to lather-rinse-repeat. If I get a window of time to seek out more recent sources, then it might be worth the rewrite, but cleaning up old damage here, not worth it, since newer sources are needed now anyway. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 02:45, 14 November 2023 (UTC)

@SilverStar54: You can take a look at my recent edits and see if there are some improvements. The information about drug trafficking and other criminal related activity was undue in the introduction, so it was removed and can be elaborated upon in the body. As for the three mentions of the opposition designating them as "terrorist organizations", it was reduced down to two since such accusation have a lot of weight and it was previously undue. Any other suggestions? Thanks for your help, it's good to have another pair of eyes on Venezuelan topics.--WMrapids (talk) 01:23, 15 November 2023 (UTC)

This entire series of edits suggest that you're not reading recent or scholarly sources, for example those listed below; that kind of editing exchanges one problem for another, and necessitates further cleanup. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 01:48, 15 November 2023 (UTC)

Then we will clean it up, but the long-standing POV and undue issues that have been ignored must be fixed. My recommendation would be separating the article in sections to describe both social colectivos and armed colectivos. That would help alleviate some balancing issues. WMrapids (talk) 01:51, 15 November 2023 (UTC)

As an example, do you think this attribution aligns with the source list below (and the scores of other sources that could be listed if I hadn't focused on scholarly)?

• During the government of Chávez's successor, Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan opposition and human rights groups said that some colectivos participated in political violence.

SandyGeorgia (Talk) 01:52, 15 November 2023 (UTC)

The removal of the 2007 UCV and 2009 Globovisión attacks sections is likewise unjustified. I have added sources to help with verification. Please remember that colectivos were known as "Bolivarian Circles" in its early years. --NoonIcarus (talk) 09:12, 15 November 2023 (UTC)

Addressing the article's problems correctly could involve several things.

• Read sources before engaging in rapid-fire editing. A good deal of the recent editing removed DUE content entirely, rather than improved it to reflect the sources as well as the newer ones. Text that had been altered to poorly reflect sources, but nevertheless is DUE per new sources, was removed rather than addressed. That is, recent editing exchanged one POV problem for another. That modern-day colectivos are extra-legal enforcement branches for Maduro, engaging in illegal activities, is indisputable per sources. Even if poorly attributed and organized, the "stable" version more accurately reflected due weight than the version where the POV was introduced and tagged.
• One of the biggest reasons I stopped trying to improve this article is the (typical for Venezuelan content) poor structure. As we see so often, it is built by WP:PROSELINE, and when the article was first created, it was done that way as a (POV) means of tracking pro-chavismo activity. We now have sources -- including recent scholarly ones -- that better discuss the development. The article organization is so poor that it's hard to fix things or figure out where to place new content. If we were following sources we have now, we wouldn't have a timeline which we use to drop in every mention of colectivos; we'd have an organization that reflects how Colectivos have evolved to become what they are today (armed enforcement for Maduro). That history would be divided according to the way scholarly sources treat the topic by:
  1. History Pre-Chavez
  2. Early Chavez administration
  3. Chavez 2002 to 2012
  4. Since Maduro administration 2013
• Edits like this, as explained above, are problematic. With the Wikipedia: Who Wrote That? (WWT) tool, one could easily locate everything else written here by ElCaraqueno1 for review. Without WWT, one has to invest hours in stepping back through the article diff by diff. I'm not willing to invest that kind of time again if editing is to again not be done in a collaborative fashion. This is at least the third Venezuelan article (that I know of) where WWT has been broken after WMrapids's editing, so I am going to have to go back to Village Pump Technical to find the thread where the developers were contacted to see if there is anything else that can be done. I suspect it is a combination of two factors: the (crappy) visual editor, and WMrapids's edits do so much at once that WWT can't track it. It would be helpful if, instead of add, remove, change, move and rewrite were all done in one edit, there were instead broken into smaller components, separating those activities.
• Then, rather than correcting and updating to newer sources, we get the opposite: a series of wholesale deletions of content that is DUE and reflected in recent scholarly sources, but is removed rather than relocated or rewritten. Written correctly, this is certainly DUE content according to a multitude of sources, and the fastest route to correcting that content is not via wholesale removing it. A read of recent sources indicates, in fact, attributing to Bloomberg may no longer be necessary, as the criminal activity of modern-day colectivos is supported by a preponderance of sources.
• Then, new POV attribution problems were introduced to the lead (it is by no means only "opposition" that acknowledges modern colectivo activity.
• And then, because all of that was done sub-optimally, changing one POV issue for another POV issue, we end up back at the version before these edits began.

Perhaps discussion and talk collaboration and time invested in reading and discussing the sources, old and new, on talk before rapid-fire changes would be more effective. "We will clean it up" implies others are willing to have to continually do this kind of non-collaborative and very times-consuming editing; "nosotros es mucha gente", as the saying goes in Spanish, and I'm not. Particularly not when this kind of editing breaks the WWT tool, and I can't even easily locate edits that need to be looked at. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 12:54, 15 November 2023 (UTC)

And now edit warring again, without discussion (it's not neutral, it's not optimal, and it doesn't reflect what was discussed on talk). I'm going to unwatch for a while, as this kind of editing predominating my watchlist gives me a headache. If consensual and collaborative discussion takes over here, or my opinion is needed, please do ping me back. Else, I'll drop in when I don't have a headache to see if edit warring continues as the ineffective method of writing an article. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:43, 15 November 2023 (UTC)

Just as reference, the article's version when the section was started was the following: [1] --NoonIcarus (talk) 09:08, 15 November 2023 (UTC)

NoonIcarus you made need to find a source that Colectivos were once called Bolivarian Circles, as all editors here may not know the full history. It's not hard to find; someone just has to invest the time (it may be in one of the sources I list below). If the article structure were better organized thematically, it would become more apparent how and where to work that in. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:43, 15 November 2023 (UTC)

Sources

Just a few recent (I pulled only the recent scholarly sources in English-- did not take time yet to search in Spanish or books):

• McCarthy-Jones 2021
• Tremaria 2022
• Corrales 2020
• Hanson 2022
• Insight Crime 2023
• BBC 2019
• Infobae 2023
• Infobae 2020
• Vice 2019 (adding because it's a source WMrapids likes)

SandyGeorgia (Talk) 03:37, 14 November 2023 (UTC)