Venezuala Watch
My cousin sent me an article about crisis in Venezuela from the Nation. It appears as though the Venezualan wealthy and the US are supporting a coup to oust Hugo Chávez, who "is the best thing that has happened to Venezuela'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." The economy has growing steadily during his rule, but there has been about a 4 decline of GDP that are likely the result of "oil strikes, a coup attempt and capital flight." The US-backed coup attempt in 2002 failed because millions rallied for Chávez. I'd link to the article, but it's only available to subscribers. I'll put up the whole thing in a comment if you want. The line breaks might mess up in there, so I could email it to you if you want it that badly.
posted by sdskyle at 6:13 PM
1 Comments:
Here's the article:
Venezuela: The Gang's All Here!
The Nation
Alexander Cockburn
July 12, 2004
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 Venezuela'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 country'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.
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