[LAAMN] "President Hugo Chavez and America’s “Backyard”"

Angostura1819 Thu, 07 Mar 2013 12:18:02 -0800

Interesting and truthful article about the real political social economic 
scenario in Venezuela and in Latin America in regards to the empire and its 
backyard countries.  OM

http://www.laprogressive.com/president-hugo-chavez/?utm_source=LA%20Progressive%20Newsletter&utm_campaign=81d4e85d95-LAP_News_17April12&utm_medium=email

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President Hugo Chavez and America’s “Backyard”
By Joseph Palermo

AP Photo

A
s sure as the sun rises in the East we can count on seeing a host of North
America’s most prominent “conservatives” and right-wingers hyperventilate in
the days ahead about what a horrible “friend of Castro” Venezuelan President
Hugo Chavez was. There will be obituaries that refer to Chavez as a “communist”
or a “dictator” or a “strong man” or worse. But the simple fact remains:
Chavez, who died of cancer at the age of 58, was the only president of
Venezuela in modern memory who did ANYTHING for the poor people of that country
who make up the vast majority of its nearly 30 million citizens.

Hugo Chavez was singled out for the white-hot hatred of the American Right (and
much of the “mainstream” media) primarily because he was the first Venezuelan
president to try to address the crying needs of the impoverished majority of
people in his country. After decades of failed “neo-liberal” economic policies
imposed from outside that produced more poverty than development the people
elected him to try something new. He was a nationalist leader who made it
abundantly clear that he sought to break out of the U.S. system of control of
the Western Hemisphere that dates back to the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 (and he
became immensely popular throughout Latin America for it).
One of the biggest “mega-slums” on Earth is located in Caracas, which resembles
more a slum with a city in the middle of it than a city with a slum around it.
With so many desperately poor people in Venezuela, compounded by the disastrous
“neo-liberalism” the U.S. rammed downed the throat of Latin America, the only
surprising thing about the hemisphere turning toward socialism when it had the
chance was that it didn’t do it earlier. This turn toward a New Deal, where the
votes of the majority and the wellbeing of the poor actually matter to the
government, is what enraged U.S. elites from the moment Chavez was elected in
1998.
The dominant frame in the corporate media of Hugo Chavez and Venezuela
predictably reflected the class priorities of the tiny ruling elites of both
countries. Like the wealthiest Venezuelans, American elites seemed to be aghast
that a Venezuelan government could come to power that instead of serving the
interests of large landowners, industrialists, oil tycoons, and big banks,
would actually implement successful “socialist” reforms to lower the poverty
rate.
During the George W. Bush years people like Michael Ignatieff and others were
telling us, in the wake of 9/11, we had to “get used” to “the burden” of the
United States being an aggressive imperialist power. Hugo Chavez became a
potent symbol against this neo-con project for a “new American century.” And
that symbolic stand against U.S. imperialism is why Chavez got under the skin
of the ruling elites so badly.
In fact, the elites in the United States, the CIA and people like Otto Reich in
the State Department, working hand-in-glove with their allies among the .01
percent of the wealthiest Venezuelans, were so upset by the idea of an oil rich
nation to the south turning toward socialism that in 2002 the George W. Bush
administration assisted right-wing elites in Venezuela in an attempt to oust
Chavez in an illegal and unconstitutional power grab reminiscent of an uglier
era.
The 2002 coup attempt had more in common with the actions of the United States
in Latin America back in the 1960s and 1970s than it did in the modern era.
(There are exceptions, however, to this modern trend, such as Haiti where the
U.S. helped oust Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004, and Honduras, where the U.S.
played a role in keeping Honduran President Manuel Zelaya out of power in 2009.)
The attempted coup d’etat against Chavez, which the Bush Administration
pretended to have nothing to do with, like the Iraq War and the current drone
strikes, underscores America’s rogue behavior internationally. It’s strange to
hear the full-throated denunciations of Chavez, who gave free heating oil to
low-income people in the northeast and never lifted a finger against the people
of the United States.
Like the Nixon Administration claiming it had nothing to do with the coup in
Chile in 1973 or the Eisenhower Administration pretending to be unaware of the
coup in Iran in 1953, there was no reason to believe Bush officials when they
said they had nothing to do with the 2002 coup in Venezuela.
Condi Rice and Ari Fleischer were sure quick to offer their congratulations to
the coup plotters after they seized power. They even promised to help the new
government. Then, in an Orwellian twist, they blamed Chavez for usurping the
Venezuelan Constitution. Watch the documentary, The Revolution Will Not Be
Televised, for Bush officials and the corporate media’s response. How thin
their commitment to “democracy” really was when the people doing the ousting
were aligned with the right U.S. banks and corporations.
Many of the same “conservatives” in North America who can’t wait to denounce
Hugo Chavez and everything he stood for, not long ago, were just fine with the
U.S.-backed juntas that dominated Latin America for decades. From Generals
Augusto Pinochet in Chile and Rios Montt in Guatemala, to the “Dirty Warriors”
in Argentina, the Duvaliers in Haiti, and the murderous junta during the Reagan
era in El Salvador — these same right-wingers who condemn Chavez’s record were
awfully quiet (or supportive) back then. These types of pro-U.S. regimes to the
south could do anything they wanted to their own people so long as they were
anti-communist or on the “right” side of the “war on drugs.” They could
practice all manner of human rights abuses, including torture, political
imprisonment, “disappearances” of labor leaders and other community activists,
or take part in CIA-backed coups. So long as the targets were labor leaders or
poor people death squads could roam wild, many of them receiving training at
the U.S. Army School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia, (since rebranded
the “Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation”).
And amidst the noise and static around Hugo Chavez’s legacy, will anyone stop
to remember the murder in November 1989 of six Jesuit priests at the University
of Central America in San Salvador? Father Ignacio Ellacuria, the Spanish-born
rector of the university, the housekeeper, Elba Ramos, and her 16-year-old
daughter, and five other priests were marched into a back garden, ordered to
lie face down, and shot in the back of the head. The Far Right in El Salvador
despised Father Ellacuria for trying to broker a peace settlement between the
government and the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN). Members of
a Salvadoran Army unit, including an officer who later became El Salvador’s
Defense Minister, covered up the military’s role. Some of the soldiers had
attended the School of the Americas. The atrocity touched off a long-standing,
largely Catholic protest movement, “SOA Watch,” which organizes annual vigils
and demonstrations at Fort Benning each November commemorating the 1989
killings.
Throughout the 1980s, the Reagan Administration and its Blue Dog Democratic
allies in Congress had argued that the contra war in Nicaragua, the U.S.
military aid to El Salvador and Honduras, and the invasion of Grenada, were all
vital steps in countering Soviet power in the region. President Reagan had
painted a dire picture of the threat:
“Using Nicaragua as a base, the Soviets and Cubans, can become the dominant
power in the crucial corridor between North and South America. Established
there, they will be in a position to threaten the Panama Canal, interdict our
vital Caribbean Sea lanes and, ultimately, move against Mexico.”
In one of his State of the Union addresses Reagan called Nicaragua a “Soviet
ally on the American mainland” and asked: “Could there be any greater tragedy
than for us to sit back and permit this cancer to spread?”
Today, it’s pretty dumb to hear spokespeople of the Right throw around the term
“communist” to smear Hugo Chavez. What does that term mean in 2013 more than 20
years since the fall of the Soviet Union and when Maoist China manufactures
just about everything we buy?
Long before the Russian Revolution of 1917 the United States was treating Latin
America like its “backyard.” In the 1850s, William Walker inserted himself
briefly as the dictator of Nicaragua. The Spanish-American War of 1898 secured
U.S. dominance of Cuba and Puerto Rico, and in 1903 Panama became a de facto
U.S. protectorate after President Theodore Roosevelt seized the country “and
let Congress debate.” The “Roosevelt Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine
institutionalized U.S. military power in the region; and President William
Taft’s “Dollar Diplomacy” sealed its finances in the hands of U.S. investors.
President Woodrow Wilson’s 1915 invasion of Haiti set the stage for a string of
pro-U.S. governments there. Historians have noted dozens of U.S. military and
CIA interventions in Latin America in the post-World War Two period. But in the
years following the 1959 Cuban uprising that swept Hugo Chavez’s friend Fidel
Castro into power the stated purpose of U.S. policy — from the Bay of Pigs and
the 1965 invasion of the Dominican Republic, to the contra war in Nicaragua and
the intervention in Grenada — had been justified to “contain” or “roll back”
Soviet influence.
But in December 1989, when President George Herbert Walker Bush invaded Panama
to oust General Manuel Noriega (who had been trained at the SOA and on the CIA
payroll), the intervention harkened back to a day before their existed a
“communist threat.” The United States would not hesitate to protect its
interests in its “backyard” with or without the justification of fighting
international communism.

T
he drug war accommodated a new rationale well suited for the post-Cold War
environment. The “New World Order” that replaced the Cold War, at least as far
as Latin America was concerned, looked a lot like the older world order where
U.S. military imperatives would be decisive with or without a Soviet “menace”
in the hemisphere.
Hugo Chavez defied this history of power relations in the hemisphere. And for
that defiance elite voices will vilify him, but a far larger number of people
will see him as a hero.
Joseph Palermo
Joseph Palermo’s Blog
Wednesday, 6 March 2013

[LAAMN] "President Hugo Chavez and America’s “Backyard”"

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