[Marxism] Mission Accomplished in Haiti. Onward to Venezuela?

[Walter Lippmann <walterlx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

(Excellent commentary on the obvious links which
connect the Haitian and the Venezuelan processes.

(The links between Haiti and Venezuela are more
apparent than one might immediately think since
the racial aspects of this play an additional role in
addition to Washington's desire to overthrow their
two governments. The two governments were at
once extremely different in origins, but also had
important common traits. They were politically
progressive, far more so than either the regimes
which preceded them, and the candidates which
were poised to replace them. Both maintained
friendly diplomatic and economic ties to Cuba.

(Aristide is a black man overthrown by the white
United States government. Chavez is a mulatto
who was briefly replaced by a member of the
white ruling class of Venezuela. These are some
of the background reasons why Danny Glover
and Randall Robinson have been so active in
solidarity with both Venezuale and with President
Aristide in Haiti. That is why the Congressional
Black Caucus in the United States has spoken out
so strongly in Aristide's defense. Meanwhile, the
US media has been beating the drumbeats in an
assassination attempt on Aristide's character.
It's another chapter in blaming the victim politics.)


Walter Lippmann, CubaNews list

http://www.counterpunch.org/nimmo03062004.html

March 6 / 7, 2004

Mission Accomplished in Haiti
Onward to Venezuela?
By KURT NIMMO


Hugo Chavez, in no uncertain terms, has warned the Bushites he will use the oil 
weapon against the United States if Bush attacks Venezuela, America's 
fourth-largest oil exporter.

"[I]f Mr. Bush is possessed with the madness of trying to blockade Venezuela, 
or worse for them, to invade Venezuela in response to the desperate song of his 
lackeys... sadly not a drop of petroleum will come to them from Venezuela," 
Hugo Chavez recently told supporters, according to AFP/Reuters.

Is Chavez paranoid?

Hardly.

Recall the CIA attempted coup against him in 2002.

How do we know the CIA engineered the failed coup? "Same way we know that the 
sun will rise tomorrow morning," writes Bill Blum, former State Department 
employee. "That's what it's always done and there's no reason to think that 
tomorrow morning will be any different."

The problem is, for the Bush administration, Chavez is not part of the 
neoliberal New World Global plan. "I consider myself a humanist, and a humanist 
has to be anti-neoliberal," Chavez has said.

Moreover, Chavez considers himself a bolivariano, that is to say he takes 
inspiration from the Carta de Jamaica and the Discurso de Angostura, texts 
written by Simon Bolivar, called El Liberator because he kicked the Spaniards 
out of Bolivia, Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela. In addition to 
fighting against foreign invasion and economic domination, Bolivar's 
philosophy, as practiced by Chavez, translates into land redistribution for the 
poor and an increase of oil income for the government.

In other words, less money for Bush's Big Oil buddies and more for the people 
of Venezuela.

It doesn't help Chavez also sells oil to Cuba, visited Saddam Hussein, and 
sacked the upper management of Petroleos de Venezuela, the nation's oil 
company, infamous for its corruption.

But what really rankles Bush and Big Oil is the fact their CIA-engineered coup 
d'etat on April 12, 2002 did not stick.

Unlike the seemingly effortless removal of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti, 
getting rid of Chavez will not be easy.

In the short time Chavez was held at a prison on the Venezuelan Caribbean 
island of Orchila after the CIA-sponsored coup in April, 2002, Fedecamaras 
business lackey and oil executive Pedro Carmona dissolved the National 
Assembly, voided the 1999 Constitution introduced under Chavez and approved by 
popular vote in a national referendum, fired Supreme Court justices, repealed 
laws that gave the government control of the economy, and handed control of 
Petroleos de Venezuela over to Gen. Guaicaipuro Lameda, an active military 
officer.

As Philip Reeker, US State Department spokesman, said at the time, "We want to 
see a return to democracy" in Venezuela.

For Bush, the State Department, and the CIA, voiding constitutions approved by 
popular vote is the only "democracy" the third world should expect. As a prime 
example of Bush's grotesque version of democracy, look no further than Iraq 
where an American proconsul and a gaggle of handpicked lackeys rule and popular 
elections become more and more remote by the day.

No doubt the Americans would feel more at home with another Perez Jimenez, the 
brutal army captain, virulent anti-communist, and self-appointed dictator of 
Venezuela who did such an effective job eliminating progressive reforms that 
Eisenhower gave him the Legion of Merit.

"The anti-Chavistas don't equate democracy with voting," writes Greg Palast, 
who interviewed Chavez in 2002. "With 80 per cent of Venezuela's population at 
or below the poverty level, elections are not attractive to the protesting 
financiers. Chavez had won the election in 1998 with a crushing 58 per cent of 
the popular vote and that was unlikely to change except at gunpoint." Bush, the 
IMF, and Venezuela's ruling elite are nostalgic for the days when the notorious 
embezzler of public funds, Carlos Andres Perez, and Accion Democratica ruled. 
In 1989, Perez sent the military to slaughter 1,000 workers and poor people 
from the cerros, or shantytowns, for the audacity of protesting against an IMF 
austerity plan.

Following the slaughter, IMF Managing Director Michael Camdessus wrote to Perez 
and said he was "profoundly moved" by the loss of life but said the IMF was 
convinced "that the economic policies were well-conceived." No word if 
Camdessus was "profoundly moved" by the further impoverishment of pensioners 
and the poor for the sake of US creditors holding Venezuela's debt.

Chavez blamed the CIA for the failed coup, and for good reason: Charles S. 
Shapiro, the US ambassador in Caracas and former Deputy Chief of Mission at the 
US embassy in Chile at the time of the CIA-sponsored coup against Salvador 
Allende, admitted that military training camps for Venezuelan opposition forces 
are currently being run in Florida. For some reason the Ministry of Homeland 
Security does not seem to mind.

If it walks and talks like the CIA, good chance it is the CIA.

"On January 29, 2003, The U.S. daily, the Wall Street Journal, published an 
editorial revealing the existence of terrorist training camps in Florida," 
writes CasaVenezuela editor Dozthor Zurlent. "Rodolfo Frometa, a Cuban, and 
former Army Captain Luis Eduardo Garcia, a Venezuelan, are named in the article 
as the leaders of the paramilitary coalition formed by the 'F-4 Commandos' and 
'The Venezuelan Patriotic Junta.' Garcia, a former Captain, was one of the 
leaders of the defeated coup against democratically elected president Hugo 
Chavez Frias in Venezuela in April 2002."

Florida is where the CIA's Task Force WH-4, Branch 4 of the Western Hemisphere 
Division, set up training camps for the failed Bay of Pigs covert operation 
against Cuba.

According to Shapiro, plotting the overthrow of Venezuela's democratically 
elected government "is not necessarily a crime," especially when that country 
has a whole lot of mighty fine sweet crude and a leader with funny ideas about 
empowering poor negro y indio folk.

Bush and the bankers have a little problem. Globalization is taking heat all 
over Central and South America, from Bolivia to Chiapas. Opposition to the 
FTAA, a sort of NAFTA on steroids, is nearly universal. In October, Bolivians 
brought down neoliberal President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada. "All governments 
in Latin America, even those most solicitous of the United States, know they 
are negotiating the FTAA with a loaded and angry popular movement cocked at 
their political heads," writes David Moberg for In These Times.

For the Bushites, though, "loaded and angry" popular movements are not the 
problem; under brutal enough conditions, those movements can be stifled.

The problem is Hugo Chavez.

They blame him not only for the fall of Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, but also for 
funding Colombia's FARC and ELN. Moreover, they say Chavez is conspiring with 
Fidel Castro and offering sanctuary for "European leftists, retired East 
European intelligence officers and activists from countries on the U.S. list of 
state sponsors of terrorism," as the AP hysterically reported in January. The 
Bush Ministry of Disinformation, U.S. News & World Report division, would have 
us believe "Middle Eastern terrorist groups" are operating "support cells" in 
Venezuela and elsewhere in the Andean region.

As investigative journalist Jeremy Bigwood discovered through an FIOA request, 
the National Endowment for Democracy, a well-documented CIA front, has backed 
anti-Chavez projects and recall referendums in Venezuela.

The documents Bigwood made public reveal ties between the US embassy in Caracas 
and Chavez's opposition, that is to say the ruling elite and business interests 
pushing Washington's neoliberal agenda. Add to this the CIA-esque training 
camps in Florida run by Rodolfo Frometa and Captain Luis Eduardo Garcia, and it 
becomes obvious what the game plan is -- ousting the democratically elected 
leader of Venezuela and installing an obsequious lackey, such as Carlos Andres 
Perez, a true-blue servant for neoliberalism and the Wall Street loan sharks.

No wonder Chavez called Bush an "asshole."

Kurt Nimmo is a photographer and multimedia developer in Las Cruces, New 
Mexico. Visit his excellent no holds barred blog at 
www.kurtnimmo.com/blogger.html . Nimmo is a contributor to Cockburn and St. 
Clair's, The Politics of Anti-Semitism. A collection of his essays for 
CounterPunch, Another Day in the Empire, is now available from Dandelion Books.

He can be reached at: nimmo@xxxxxxxxxx







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