[Peace-discuss] EXCLUSIVE: USA-backed Colombian invasion of Venezuela imminent?

[Phil Stinard]

Here is a draft of an article that I did for vheadline.com.  The final 
article with complete links to all supporting materials is at:

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

I recommend checking out the on-line version because it has better 
formatting, and, of course, valid links.  Needless to say, I'm deliriously 
happy about this article :-))))))))

--Phil Stinard

---------------------------------------------

Is a U.S.-backed Colombian invasion of Venezuela imminent?

by Philip Stinard

On April 13, the Colombian senate approved a resolution [link to my 
translation] 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 [link  http://www.oas.org/charter/docs/resolution1_en_p4.htm] 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 [link to http://www.vheadline.com/readnews.asp?id=17553] 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 [link to my translation] 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 Relations 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 General Assembly to suspend a member state 
from the OAS, which is considered the ultimate sanction.

The most notable Venezuelan response [link to my translation] to the 
Colombian resolution came from Jose Vicente Rangel, Executive Vice President 
of Venezuela, who made the astute observation, “Senator Gómez 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 [link to www.aporrea.org/dameletra.php?docid=7837] 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 Bogotá, Pedro Carmona [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, Spanish link www.anncol.org/side/445] point to the 
recent presence in Colombia of U. S. 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 delegate 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 U. S. State 
Department.  When asked about the resolution by the Venezuelan press, U. S. 
Ambassador to Venezuela Charles Shapiro said, “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 U. S. 
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 
[link to http://www.vheadline.com/readnews.asp?id=17335].

What could be behind the Colombian senate resolution?  Many point to U. S. 
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 U. S. 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 U. S. 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 U. S. 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 U. S. 
assistance.  And, knowing how U. S. covert operations have been conducted in 
the past, it is quite possible that the U. S. 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 [link to 
http://www.vheadline.com/readnews.asp?id=17552] 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 U.S.-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 [link to Spanish at 
http://www.asambleanacional.gov.ve/ns2/acuerdos.asp?id=195] 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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