[Marxism] Colombia Senate demands OAS action against Venezuela

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

http://www.vheadline.com/readnews.asp?id=17569


BREAKING NEWS

EXCLUSIVE: USA-backed Colombian
invasion of Venezuela imminent?

VHeadline.com correspondent Philip Stinard
reports: On April 13, the Colombian senate
approved a resolution proposed by Senator Enrique
Gomez Hurtado that condemns the "dictatorial regime"
of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez Frias and calls
for the Organization of American States to apply the
Interamerican Democratic Charter to Venezuela.

According to Article 21 of the Charter "In the event
of an unconstitutional alteration of the constitutional
regime that seriously impairs the democratic order in
a member state, any member state or the Secretary
General may request the immediate convocation of
the Permanent Council to undertake a collective
assessment of the situation and to take such decisions
as it deems appropriate."

What is meant by "such decisions" is not specified
in the Charter, but it is generally accepted to include
all actions up to and including military intervention
by OAS states, including the United States.

Immediate responses to the Colombian senate
resolution from both the Colombian and
Venezuelan governments were swift in coming.

Two official responses were released by Colombian
governmental bodies.

The first response came from Colombia's Delegation
to the Andean Parliament, which stated that the views
expressed by the Colombian senate are not necessarily
those of the Colombian government and people, and
that the decision to invoke the Democratic Charter is
in the hands of Colombian President Alvaro Uribe
Velez. Then, in a paragraph that is edited out of most
news reports, the Colombian Delegation calls upon
the Venezuelan government to find an "exit" to their
situation, which is a more mildly worded version of
the Colombian senate resolution that they supposedly
condemned. This response was hardly reassuring to
the Chavez government.

A second response came from the Colombian Ministry of
Foreign Relations, which repeated the same points made
by the Colombian Andean Parliament Delegation, but left
out the overt criticism of Venezuela leveled by the first communication.

This communication met with a more favorable response
from various representatives of the Chavez government
(among them Venezuelan Minister of Foreign Affairs
(MRE) Jesus Arnaldo Perez and Venezuelan OAS
Ambassador Jorge Valero), and these representatives
consider the Colombian senate resolution to be null and
void.

One fact that is overlooked by Chavez government
representatives in their responses is that only one OAS
member state needs to make a request to invoke the
Democratic Charter in order for the OAS Permanent
Council to consider the request ... it takes a two thirds
vote of the OAS General Assembly to suspend a member
state from the OAS, which is considered the ultimate
sanction.

The most notable Venezuelan response to the
Colombian resolution came from Jose Vicente Rangel,
Executive Vice President of Venezuela, who made the
astute observation, "Senator Gomez Hurtado's proposal
has as its bases the United States government's campaign
against Venezuela and the geo-strategic development of
Plan Colombia."
Rangel's statement also makes note of the fact that the
original Spanish version of Proposition 249 is written
in bad Spanish, with misspellings and grammatical
errors that are uncharacteristic of the normally high
standards of Colombian jurisprudence. Rangel proposes
that the proposition could have been "inspired and edited
by the Venezuelan coup leaders in exile in Bogota, Pedro
Carmona [exiled FEDECAMARAS president] and [.]
Daniel Romero, spokesman of the de facto government
the 12th of April [2002]."

However, others take a more sinister view...

Some Colombian social and political leaders [Temor
por guerra entre Colombia y Venezuela, New Colombian
News Agency] point to the recent presence in Colombia
of US Congressman Lincoln Diaz Balart ... cheerleader
for the right-wing Cuban exile community in
Florida... as possibly having an influence in the drafting
of this document.

Venezuelan National Assembly (AN) deputy Tarek William
Saab characterized the Colombian resolution as a "vile
pamphlet" which, besides being poorly written, appears as
though it could have originally been written in English by the
US State Department.

When asked by the Venezuelan press about the resolution,
US Ambassador to Venezuela Charles S. Shapiro is quoted
as saying "I don't have an appreciation at this time of the
agreement approved by the Colombian Senate . the idea that
this resolution from the Colombian parliament has anything
to do with the United States is untrue."

Hollow words, coming from the US Ambassador who was
implicated by taped police radio conversations in the April
11, 2002 massacre at Llaguno Bridge during the early hours
of the coup.

What could be behind the Colombian senate resolution?

Many point to US policy in Colombia under the program
Plan Colombia. Even mainstream Latin American history
books (e.g. A History of Latin America, by Keen and
Haynes, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 2004) state that Plan
Colombia is not so much about US anti-drug policy as it
is about securing the Colombian oil industry that had been
under attack by leftist guerrillas. Besides outsourcing the
task of taking back control of guerrilla-controlled areas to
paramilitary
death squads responsible for the slaughter of
hundreds, perhaps thousands, of innocents, and providing
juicy multimillion dollar contracts to US companies such as Monsanto and
DynCorp, there have been few visible accomplishments for Plan Colombia.

It is not inconceivable that part of Plan Colombia would
be to destabilize and overthrow the Chavez government
and install puppet leaders to make US access to Venezuelan petroleum
resources easier and cheaper.

Perhaps it is to this end that the Colombian government
has purchased forty AMX-30 tanks from Spain with US
assistance. And, knowing how US covert operations have
been conducted in the past, it is quite possible that the
US has great interest in testing and observing how much
support the Chavez government has by, for instance,
sending its surrogates to attack the hospital in Monagas
State and watching the community response. This could
also extend to observing the Venezuelan diplomatic
response to the (intentional?) provocation produced by
the Colombian senate resolution.

Is a US-backed invasion of Venezuela by Colombia
imminent?

Perhaps. The one person who has remained conspicuously
silent on this issue is Colombian President Alvaro Uribe,
who holds the keys to this situation.

The Venezuelan National Assembly passed a resolution
on April 15 condemning the Colombian senate resolution.
Among other things, the resolution calls upon President
Uribe to "speak to the issue of this anti-Venezuelan
agreement."

We are all waiting for President Uribe's response...


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