PressWatch for April 25, 2002

The failed CIA Coup in Venezuela


By now you've heard the official story: An unpopular
dictator, Hugo Chavez, who had praised Osama Bin Laden, was
confronted by an angry mob who demanded an end to his undemocratic rule in
Venezuela.

His troops opened fireon the crowd, provoking the disciplined and
principled military to force him to resign his office. His State
media tried to pretend that nothing was happening, but the democratic
media showed that he was lying as they ran his statements on split
screens showing what was really happening. Later, due to pressure
from questionable governments, he was restored to office, where he faces
bad feelings due to his dictatorial actions.

Every sentence of the official story, however, is a lie.

Before there was Hugo Chavez, there was the CIA . The CIA is a secret
war and secret police organization. Its annual budget is well in
excess of $30 billion. The Congress members who approve its budget
are not allowed to see what the budget is for. It has
deposed dozens of governments, using techniques ranging from
propaganda and assassination to torture and anticivilian warfare.
One of its greatest accomplishments in terms of black propaganda
is convincing the American public that it is primarily a spy organization.

The CIA has used many techniques in its history of
antidemocratic warfare. In Iran, in the mid-1950s, it stepped in
when the Iranians made the mistake of electing a certain Mr. Mossadegh.
Mossadegh fulfilled his election promises by nationalizing the
oil industry in Iran. The oil profits had previously been
designated only for the profits of British Petroleum. Now BP had to
share. The CIA brought in the son of the Nazi sympathizer Shah, took
over the media in order to confuse and demoralize the population, and
installed the new Shah after a tank battle. The Shah reversed the
economic justic measures of Mossadegh, and instituted an iron rule
with the aid of the CIA-trained murderers and torturers in the SAVAK
organization. SAVAK torture dungeons spread across the country. This is
why Iranians still refer to the US as "the great Satan." It's a
justifiable summary of their experience with the USA.
Some people seem to think that this sort of thing
makes a great story, that it shows a sort of broad-shouldered derring-do.

I think it's grotesque and cowardly for a superpower to use
deception and violence to get its way. US citizens tend to overlook, too,
the fact that the Iranians really do own the mineral rights to their
country, and for that matter they have the right to select their own
government. The labor of their citizens belongs to the laborers there.

It never belonged to the CIA, nor to the corporations that move
in like vampire pirates and suck the land dry of value and beauty.
That is true of all countries and all peoples, isn't it? Why would
that wealth belong to American corporations first? Racial superiority?

Guatemalans made a similar mistake in the '50s: they
elected a government that had the audacity to apply a minor tax
to United Fruit Company. They even went as far as to say that
when United Fruit wasn't using some of the vast tracts of land
that they owned, the people could live on it.

Hell hath no fury like a corporation
checked, and the CIA stepped in to replace the
government, using much the same formula.
Corporate radio broadcasts assured
the Guatemalan population that their elected government was corrupt.
The CIA's hand-picked man took power in a coup. Washington
congratulated the dictator as a welcome change. New dictators appeared
as often as the CIA or their own whims dictated. Guatemala's climb
toward civilized egalitarianism plunged into the CIA death-squad crevasse.

Wherever US corporate interests have been challenged,
the CIA has stepped in to insure a steady stream of profits.
Sometimes that means mowing down a third of the population, as was the case
in Indonesia in 1975, when the CIA provided aircraft and napalm
along with troop training and tanks. The CIA personally tortured
thousands of Vietnamese to death under the Phoenix program, the
better to maintain order in South Vietnam, where US
multinationals thirsted for oil, tin, rubber, rice, and cheap labor.

But the operations aren't always as spectacular as Vietnam or
Afghanistan. Sometimes the target can be knocked off with a combination of
clandestine organizing and funding, a little propaganda here, a
little bombing there, and with maybe a little well-aimed viciousness
at the right moment. That would be the case in 1973 with Chile,
where the elected government of Salvador Allende was replaced by the
CIA's favorite, Mr. Pinochet. Allende had been talking about some
basic reforms that would have retained some of the wealth that Alcoa
Aluminum and ITT had been shipping out of the country. Allende man
died along with democracy in Chile. A CIA cable from the period,
printed in a Guardian article by Greg Palast, reveals the CIA agenda: "Re:
coup. Activities to include propaganda, black operations,
disinformation, or anything else your imagination can conjure."

To paraphrase
Henry Kissinger, 'we can't afford to let a country go communist due to
the foolishness of its own people.'


Into this frame comes Hugo Chavez, elected in
Venezuela by a 60% margin. Chavez saw that Venezuelans were needlessly poor in
a nation that produced a major proportion of the world's oil. He
took measures to correct the situation. Why should Venezuelans watch
all that wealth be exported while their classrooms did without books
and their graveyards filled with the uncared-for and unfed?
Chavez introduced legislation that nearly doubled the puny royalties
that the multinationals paid for Venezuelan oil. "This is a
liberating law,"Chavez said, " because it breaks the chains that have
bound us for so many years." "This is a law for the poor." You can
see that the poor man was doomed from the start.

Chavez didn't stop there. He visited Cuba and made an
offer to Fidel: Send us some teachers and doctors, and we'll send you
some oil. Meanwhile, the rich started plotting against Chavez.
As of the beginning of this year, the Venezuelan people get a
51% stake in all new Venezuelan oil development. One might argue: Why
shouldn't thepeople have a cut of the oil profits? But that's not
the sort of argument that you make where the rich can hear. And
Chavez infuriated them still further by cutting a deal with Venezuelan
indigenous peoples, guaranteeing their autonomy in regions where
the mighty gas pipelines pass. Obviously something had to be done.


The team was in place and began the long-practiced
CIA tango. CIA money was doubtless funneled to minor
henchmen in order to buy demonstrators. The media--TV this time,
since we're past the age of radio--beat the drums of dissent,
saying that Chavez was corrupt, Chavez was finished. A "General Strike"
without workers was announced on the TV stations owned by Otto Reich's
confidante, Gustavo Cisneros. It failed miserably, but the
corporate media repeated close-up clips of protesting crowds and
shuttered shops, to make people believe that all was lost, that most
people supported the coup. One particularly effective technique was
showing governmentannouncements of the failure of the strike while
showing pictures thatseemed to say the opposite.

On April 12th, the crowd approached the buildings of
the Venezuelan government in Caracas. much to the irritation of the
numerous supporters of the popularly elected Hugo Chavez.
Snipers, including a US citizen, probably a right-wing ex-Cuban, opened
fire on Chavez supporters. They had the advantage of a freeway
overpass controlled by the anti-Chavez Caracas police. Some Chavez
supporters lay in thestreets in their own blood. Some fired back at the
snipers--and some were good shots. Thugs supporting the would-be
dictator, oil magnate Pedro Carmona, rushed into the Presidential
Palace and spirited Hugo Chavez off to Fort Tiuna, where,
according to AFP, his involuntary entourage was met by US Army Lieutenant
Colonel James Rodgers.

So Pedro Carmona strolled before the TV cameras,
wearing the Presidential sash that had been ordered weeks before,
and began his masters' business. Chavez, he said, had resigned
voluntarily.

In forty-eight hours he had revoked forty-nine laws that
had riled the oil companies, forty-nine laws that had guaranteed
some relief of poverty for working Venezuelans. The New York Times
and official Washington trumpeted their relief and joy at the
disposal of Mr. Chavez. Certain intimations appeared in the US
corporate-owned press that Chavez was skulking off to Cuba.

Yet within forty-eight hours Pedro Carmona's reign had
ended. Venezuelan popular organizations had recovered from
the initial shock and had spread the word about what had really
happened at the Presidential Palace. A detachment of paratroopers,
responding to the indignation of the Venezuelans, fired up their
helicopters and stormed the fort where Chavez was being held for a
most uncertain fate. Colonel Rodgers, USA, was deprived of his
quarry. The New York Times sputtered.

There is little doubt now of the fact that the CIA set up the
attempted overthrow of the elected government of
Venezuela. Members of the Venezuelan Parliament, notably Juan
Barreto, PedroCarrenyo and Jorge Rondon, have presented recordings
of the voices of the coup plotters, naming the Americans involved.
The American sniper is in custody. Even Newsweek has reported that
the American Embassy, read the CIA, knew of what was happening
weeks beforehand -- how could they not, since their man Eliot Abrams,
convicted criminal and CIA liaison, was in charge of the whole shebang.


The outcome is still uncertain. Will the CIA simply
assassinate Chavez? Is another coup in the offing? Will there be
a Panama-style invasion, in which Chavez' suporters can look forward
to being burned alive like the supporters of Noreiga in El Chorrilo?
Or can Venezuelans look forward to a new era in which their
oil wealth is spread to every citizen?

Certainly, nothing has changed here in the US.
Consider the quotes of official Washington, of Secretary of State Colin
Powell, who said Sunday, "I know of no basis for a report that we were
trying to get Chavez out....We support democracy, we support the
community of democracy that exists in our hemisphere." And this
gem from the President appointed by the right-wing cabal of the
Supreme Court, George Walker Bush, who claims that he told the
Venezuelan coup plotters "we support democracy and did not support any
extra-constitutional action."


What, extra-constitutional action? Us?