[Peace-discuss] Venezuela

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Thanks to Phil Stinard, AWARE has been as well informed as anyone in the
US public about the situation in Venezuela, an October Surprise candidate.
Here's a summary from Alex Cockburn, which exposes the traditionally
nefarious role played by US liberals.  --CGE]

	June 26/27, 2004
	Venezuela: the Gang's All Here
	Replay of Chile and Nicaragua?
	By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

You can set your watch by it. The minute some halfway decent government in
Latin America begins to reverse the order of things and give the have-nots
a break from the grind of poverty and wretchedness, the usual suspects in
El Norte rouse themselves from the slumber of indifference and start
barking furiously about democratic norms. It happened in 1973 in Chile; we
saw it again in Nicaragua in the 1980s; and here's the same show on summer
rerun in Venezuela, pending the August 15 recall referendum of President
Hugo Chávez.

Chávez is the best thing that has happened to Venezuel's poor in a very
long time. His government has actually delivered on some of its promises,
with improved literacy rates and more students getting school meals.
Public spending has quadrupled on education and tripled on healthcare, and
infant mortality has declined. The government is promoting one of the most
ambitious land-reform programs seen in Latin America in decades.

Most of this has been done under conditions of economic sabotage. Oil
strikes, a coup attempt and capital flight have resulted in about a 4
percent decline in GDP for the five years that Chávez has been in office.
But the economy is growing at close to 12 percent this year, and with
world oil prices near $40 a barrel, the government has extra billions that
it’s using for social programs. So naturally the United States wants him
out, just as the rich in Venezuela do. Chávez was re-elected in 2000 for
a six-year term. A US-backed coup against him was badly botched in 2002.

The imperial script calls for a human rights organization to start braying
about irregularities by their intended victim. And yes, here's José
Miguel Vivanco of Human Rights Watch. We last met him in this column
helping to ease a $1.7 billion US aid package for Colombia's military
apparatus. This time he's holding a press conference in Caracas, hollering
about the brazen way Chávez is trying to expand membership of Venezuela's
Supreme Court, the same way FDR did, and for the same reason: that the
Venezuelan court has been effectively packed the other way for decades,
with judicial flunkies of the rich. I don't recall Vivanco holding too
many press conferences to protest that perennial iniquity.

The "international observers" recruited to save the rich traditionally
include the Organization of American States and the Carter Center; in the
case of the Venezuelan recall they have mustered dead on schedule. On
behalf of the opposition, they exerted enormous pressure on the country's
independent National Electoral Council during the signature-gathering and
verification process. Eventually the head of the OAS mission had to be
replaced by the OAS secretary general because of his unacceptable public
statements.

The Carter Center's team is headed by Jennifer McCoy, whose forthcoming
book, The Unraveling of Representative Democracy in Venezuela, leans
heavily against the government. One of its contributors is José Antonio
Gil of the Datanalysis Polling Firm, most often cited for US media
analysis. The Los Angeles Times quoted Gil on what to do: "And he can see
only one way out of the political crisis surrounding President Hugo
Chávez 'He has to be killed,' he said, using his finger to stab the table
in his office far above this capital's filthy streets. 'He has to be
killed.'"

Media manipulation is an essential part of the script, and here, right on
cue, comes Bill Clinton's erstwhile pollster, Stan Greenberg, still a
leading Democratic Party strategist. Greenberg is under contract to RCTV,
one of the right-wing media companies leading the Venezuelan opposition
and recall effort. It's a pollster's dream job. Not only does he have
enormous resources against an old-fashioned, politically unsophisticated
poor people's movement, but his firm has something comrades back home can
only fantasize about: control over the Venezuelan media. Imagine if the
right wing controlled almost the entire media during Clinton's
impeachment.

That's the situation in Venezuela. Just think what Greenberg's associate,
Mark Feierstein -- a veteran of similar NED efforts in ousting the
Sandinistas in the 1990 elections -- can do with this kind of totalitarian
media control. NED? That's the National Endowment for Democracy, praised
not so long ago by John Kerry, who, like Bush, publicly craves the ouster
of Chávez.

The NED is coming over the hill arm in arm with the CIA and CIA-backed
institutions in the AFL-CIO, where John Sweeney's team has dismally failed
to clean house. The NED has helped fund the opposition to Chávez to the
tune of more than $1 million a year. Among the recipients are
organizations whose leaders actually supported the April 2002 coup -- they
signed the decree that overthrew the elected president and vice president
and abolished the country's democratic institutions, including the
Constitution, Supreme Court and National Assembly. The coup was thwarted
only because millions of Venezuelans rallied for Chávez.

Left out of the coup government, despite his support for it, was Carlos
Ortega, head of the CTV (Central Labor Federation). The AFL's Solidarity
Center, successor to the CIA-linked AIFLD, gets more than 80 percent of
its funding from the NED and USAID and has funneled NED money to Ortega
and his collaborators. The Solidarity Center has been up to its ears in
opposition plotting, a reprise of the Allende years, when the AFL helped
destroy Chilean democracy. The AFL has denied any role, but Rob Collier,
an excellent San Francisco Chronicle reporter, recently gave a detailed
refutation of AFL apologetics in an exchange in the current New Labor
Forum. "In Venezuela," he writes, "the AFL-CIO has blindly supported a
reactionary union establishment as it tried repeatedly to overthrow
President Hugo Chávez-and, in the process, wrecked the countr's economy.

The CTV worked in lockstep with FEDECAMARAS, the nation's business
association, to carry out the three general strikes/lockouts -- of 2001,
2002 and 2003. The CTV, Collier says, was directly involved in coup
organizing, and its leader was scheduled to be part of the new junta.

The end of this particular drama has yet to be written. The left here in
the United States could make a difference if it got off its haunches and
threw itself into the fray.

	--<http://counterpunch.org/>