HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK ---------------------------Hey all,
While most commentaries on Venezuela are drawing parallels to Chile, Argentina, etc. - and the impact this will have on progressive movements in South America, rebel movements in Colombia, or world oil prices, etc. - I think we should also look to the Carribean for some clues as to what might happen and how this coup will be used to forward US interests there.
Reports are coming in from Granma that the Cuban embassy has been besieged by angry mobs. Apparently water and electricity to the embassy has been cut off and the safety of the personel inside the embassy is in real danger. For anyone who's read anything on CIA covert operations - I would suggest reading Philip Agee's excellent book on the topic, which gives an insiders perspective on how the CIA operates in Latin America - they can already guess that the mob outside the embassy has been fired up by fabricated anti-Cuban "black propaganda" most probably transmitted through the Catholic church and privately owned media outlets.
Such "black" operations (aka psychological operations, or PSYOPs) have been waged so often by CIA operatives against Cuba, throughout Latin America, that no serious scholar of the region gives such stories any credence anymore. This history, of course, has never stopped the Church and local private media from taking advantage of high-illeteracy rates to at least temporarily sway some people with the old hsyterical story about an imminent "Communist conspiracy to destroy the patria/nation." Neoliberal structural adjustment programs that target education spending in the South have, of course, only made the job of US psychological warfare experts in these regions that much easier in recent years.
Former US President John F. Kennedy - no stranger to Cold War-era propaganda techniques himself - once said "you can fool some of the people some of the time..." and that's all the US really needs in fluid situations such as this one in order to quickly get what they want done. Thus even if you can't "...fool all the people all of the time", at least you've managed to neutralize resistance in the first critical moments. The truth may come out later - i.e. that most of the dead from Thursday's violence where Chavez supporters, or that anti-Chavez "Bandera Roja" extremists where the first to fire upon the crowd - but by then the US will have gotten what it wants: i.e. the complete eradication of a viable progressive resistance in Venezuela.
The story being peddled now in Venezuela, by both the Church and the privately owned news media, is that Castro basically advised Chavez to kill unarmed demonstrators. Like all good propaganda, they don't go out and say it, but they've all been reporting that the military has allegedly uncovered "tape-recorded messages" in which Castro told Chavez to lure demonstrators to the Miraflores Palace and then to "clear them out by any means" (of course since the tapes don't exist - other than in the minds of "relliable sources in the military" - no one has, or ever will, actually hear these tapes). This story, of course, also falls into line with the oligarchic media's long-standing attempts to portray Chavez as nothing but a bumbling Cuban controlled patsy.
The goal? Well, of course, the USA - just as it tries to do in every other Latin American country - will work with those forces seeking to remove all traces of a Cuban presence from the country and to enlist Venezuela in Washington's decades old anti-Cuba crusade (a project that the Venezuelan elite is very fond of). In Venezuela this story will be used to legitimize the persecution of progressives by framing them as traitors to the nation and to deflect attention away from the real selling-off of the country's assets to the international financial community.
As the BBC reported today, the state-oil company PDVSA - now again in the hands of the old corrupt oil management - has moved to cut off all oil supplies to Cuba. This will certainly cripple the Cuban economy seeing as Venezuela, under Chavez, had cut a deal with all Carribean countries to sell them cheap oil so they wouldn't suffer as a result of OPEC's price hikes. This marks just another stepping-stone in the dramatic return of US-Latin American militarism in the past few years.
Reactionary forces in the America's are now slowly lining up for the ultimate showdown with the "Prime Evil" of their paranoid fantasis, i.e. Fidel. The last pockets of organized resistance to the deepening of US-military rule over the Hemisphere - outside of Cuba - are increasingly being neutralized, either with brutal military force, counter-insurgency operations, and classic repression (mostly the weapons employed against the poor), or by paralyzing opposition through the appropriation of progressive language to confuse those who may be sympathetic to resistance in the Hemisphere (mostly used to pre-empt forceful opposition among those who are better-off and don't live the need for resistance).
There are already reports coming out of Venezuela that MVR leaders and activists - i.e. Chavez's party - and other progressive forces from the Circulos Bolivarianos, are being rounded up by military and intelligence services and taken to undisclosed locations. They are targeting the leadership and intellectuals in order to decapitate any resistance to this crime against the increasingly imperilled self-determination of all Third World peoples.
In this way the coup is very similar to Argentina and Chile, but I think that the model they are going to use to ensure that Chavez stays out is the one they employed in Haiti in the early 1990s. The debacles for US foreign policy in Chile and Argentina were crude attempts at supressing popular movements, relative to the sophisticated mechanisms employed to marginalize and neutralize Aristide's Lavalas party in Haiti and other progressive movements in the "post-Cold War" era.
Since the late 1980s/early 1990s the US has shifted from supporting outright military dictatorships to a system of promoting "polyarchy" - which is basically a system of continued elite rule, but under the facade of the new "market democracies" so popular in the Clinton years.
The system ensures that venal elite sectors can simply recycle candidates whenever one of them steps out of line or they begin triggering mass anger. This system involves the funding of "indipendent" trade unions, journalists, student groups, etc. that can be mobilized to effect rapid changes in government, steer popular discontent, etc. Popular discontent in the lead up to elections is thus focused on local solutions - i.e. issues like corruption, transparency, good governance, etc. - and not the neoliberal system that produce illigitimate regimes.
After the success or failure of an attempted regime change, these elements of "civil society" can be dissolved in order not to further disturb the situation (note what happened to OTPOR in Yugoslavia, or what is currently happening to the MDC in Zimbabwe). If you're interested in how this system works, I highly recommend William Robinson's "Promoting Polyarchy".
Thus the illegitimate authorities in Caracas will probably affect a "transition" to a refreshed "market democracy" - i.e. polyarchy - that is fast becoming a pillar of Washington's subversive strategy in the region.
The scenario is the same as Dubbya's father, Bush Sr., had engineered for Haiti. In the early 1990s Jean Bertrand Aristide was elected to the presidency after years of a brutal US-backed military dictatorship under the Duvalier Familly and their FRAPH militias. Except that Aristide - a radical preacher and anti-poverty activist - wasn't supposed to win the election. His policies, much like Chavez's, were oriented towards empowering the poor in a country that was traditionally ruled by a small and corrupt, pro-US elite.
Lo-and-behold a coup by Gen. Raul Cedras takes place. The US makes noises about the need to "restore democracy" as soon as possible and publicly condemns the new regime. But as it has come out latter, and as Haitian activists claimed all along, US agents worked hand-in-glove to ensure that Cedras' persecutions, torture, and imprisonment of Lavalas supporters would continue. Haitians uniformly accuse the US of engineering the coup.
Yet the action was important for the US for two reasons: on the one hand it could eliminate forces hostile to it locally in Haiti - many of which where more radical than Aristide - and on the other it could try to sell, yet again, the concept of "humanitarian intervention" as a new justification for the projection of US power abroad.
It was that last concern that is critical for us to ponder. With the proliferation of new communications media and the rapidly increasing flows of information being made available by the early 1980s the Reagan White House decided to adopt a comprehensive global information strategy. As the international condemnation triggered by the US invasions of Greneda and Panama showerd, the US needed a much better excuse to project power globally. With the end of the Cold War this concern became paramount, especially given the tendency of Democratic "doves" to favor decreases in military spending. The military, corporations and the US foreign policy establishment had to come up quickly with a new way of SELLING global empire precisely to those progressive sectors who thought that the end of super power rivalry would mean the end of military engagements (Iraq, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Yugoslavia, etc, are all a product of this).
Once US forces invaded Haiti in 1994, in order to "restore democracy", one of their first actions was to take away from the island all the records of the Haitian security services. Not a single piece of paper was left - thereby occluding the complicity of these services with US-agents, and probably hiding the lists of activists that the US had drawn up for torture and murder. The US is known to have drawn up lists of individuals to be targeted in the past, Chile, Argentina, but also Panama come to mind immediately.
Thus for several years Haitians were subjected to a cruel military regime. Once Aristide was "returned to power" by the USA, his term was already up and he was forced to step down by the Americans. For the next four years after the "restoration" of democracy, an unacountable pro-US faction in Aristide's own party ruled the country WITHOUT ELECTIONS, while the US - with much Canadian help - armed and trained a "new security force" to defend multinational interests on the island once again.
When elections where held again in 2000 Aristide won hands down in a free election!!! Since then the US has cut assistence on the pretext that two seats are disputed and that the Aristide government is "anti-democratic" - even though if these two seats went to the opposition it still wouldn't reverse the results. Aristide has also linked-up on certain issues with Castro and Chavez (particularly in questioning the FTAA, although he did sign the document b/c of his precarious position - which includes being at the mercy of a CIA-controlled police force).
The key "mistake" in Haiti, according to US comentators on the country, was that the USA allowed Aristide to return, thinking they could control him. Far-right elements in the Republican party in the early 1990s were arguing that Aristide should be locked up instead as he would be a danger if he remained a free citizen. For whatever reason the USA didn't do this - and many in Haiti continue to mistrust Aristide for this reason.
However, it seems that the "lesson" was learned this time in Venezuela and that Chavez will face trumped up charges for Thursday's staged "massacre". Thus a "transition" period will usher in a period of silent "social cleansing" in Venezuela that the world media will ignore - although it is our duty to do everything in our power to bring to light persecutions inside Venezuela. Once the right number of people have been tortured, imprisoned, cowed, or killed into silence, an "election" will be held.
Chavez, of course, will be prevented from running in those elections and the privately owned media, which is controlled by the Venezuelan business elite and the military, will probably refuse to give any coverage to Chavez's movement (which by then will be severly weakened by the complete purging of its leadership, except maybe if the military manages to find willing collaborators within the movement).
The fascist Caracas-based media have already said that they will no longer broadcast any statements or speaches by Chavez. The entire progressive movement is therefore to be muzzled and everything is to be restored as it was in the pre-Chavez period. These are the broad outlines of the future strategy.
The propaganda about the need for a "quick restoration of democracy" in the A-section of every major Western paper, is undercut by the extacy this coup has brought to global financial markets which is so evident in any Business-section part of the paper (just pick some articles in Wall Street Journal, Financial Times etc., or whatch things like "Money Line" or "Business World" to see what I mean).
The Latin American press is in such a celebratory mood - and filled with outlandished Cold War era type fabrications of how Chavez spent his last moments holed up and surrounded only by "Cuban advisors" before his resignation - that it makes my stomach turn. The lessons of the past it seems still have to be learnt...
Saturday, 13 April, 2002, 09:51 GMT 10:51 UK
Election pledge for Venezuela
Tight security still in evidence after the week's upheaval
Venezuela's new caretaker president Pedro Carmona has promised a swift return to democratic government following the removal from office of Hugo Chavez by the armed forces.
People have the right to remove their government, but they have to do so through democratic channels
Alejandro Toledo
Peruvian president
The interim government has said it will hold presidential elections within a year, but Latin American leaders have refused to recognise the new regime. While not expressing personal support for Mr Chavez - renowned for his fiery rhetoric - Latin American leaders condemned "the interruption of constitutional order in Venezuela". Mr Chavez was forced to step down after the deaths of at least 13 anti-government protesters in violence on Thursday night.
Laws repealed
At a sombre ceremony on Friday, Mr Carmona, 60, a former oil executive, was sworn in as interim president.
Pedro Carmona: Quick elections promised
He quickly moved to repeal dozens of controversial economic laws and dissolved the Supreme Court and the National Assembly. Promising presidential elections within a year, Mr Carmona said: "We can achieve the governability required to improve Venezuela's image." "The strongman era has ended." Latin American leaders, at a Group of Rio meeting in Costa Rica, expressed regret at the loss of life on Thursday, but also concern at the manner of Mr Chavez's downfall.
"It is a lie, all lies. He said he never resigned
Hugo Chavez's daughter Maria Gabriela
The United States was initially unsympathetic, saying the government had tried to suppress a peaceful demonstration. Washington blamed Mr Chavez for creating the conditions that led to his removal.
International concern
But the US and Spain later issued a joint statement calling for calm, an end to violence and a swift return to normality with a "guarantee of fundamental rights and freedoms". UK Foreign Office Minister Denis MacShane, who met Mr Chavez just a few days ago, said he hoped the president's resignation would prevent more bloodshed.
Chavez befriended Cuba's isolated leader Fidel Castro
But elections should be held as soon possible, he said. "Any delay to this process will be contrary to Venezuela's long history of democracy and unacceptable to the international community." Cuba, a staunch supporter of Mr Chavez's left-wing policies, has expressed concern for his safety. He was initially being held at the Fuerte Tiuna military base in the capital, Caracas. But Cuban television broadcast an interview with his daughter, Maria Gabriela Chavez, who said there were reports he had been moved to an undisclosed location. The army has rejected his plea to be allowed to go into exile in Cuba. Army General Roman Fuemayor said: "He has to be held accountable to his country."
Chavez's version
Military leaders said Mr Chavez resigned at their insistence after he ordered troops and civilian gunmen to fire on a crowd of more than 150,000. At least 13 people died and more than 240 were injured. But Mr Chavez's daughter insisted he was the victim of a coup. "It is a lie, all lies. He said he never resigned, that a group of military took him away and he is being held incommunicado," she said. Mr Chavez won a landslide victory in 1998, six years after he led an abortive coup as a young paratroop officer.Following events of the last few days, oil production and distribution are beginning to return to normal for the world's fourth-largest oil producer after workers abandoned their action.But PDVSA has suspended oil exports to Cuba in protest at Havana's support for Mr Chavez who agreed cheap rates with President Fidel Castro.
--------------------------- ANTI-NATO INFORMATION LIST
==^================================================================ This email was sent to: archive@jab.org EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84x2u.a9617B Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] T O P I C A -- Register now to manage your mail! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/register ==^================================================================
