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Defying U.S., Venezuela's Chavez Embraces Socialism

Fri Feb 25, 2005 2:59 PM ET

 

By Pascal Fletcher

 

CARACAS, Venezuela (Reuters) - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on Friday embraced socialism as his ideology of choice in a political statement that sharpened his antagonism against the United States.

 

Chavez, a firebrand nationalist who has governed the world's No. 5 oil exporter for six years, has persistently declined to define the precise ideology of his self-styled "revolution."

 

But, addressing an international meeting on poverty in Caracas, he said Western-style capitalism was incapable of solving global economic and social problems.

 

"So, if not capitalism, then what? I have no doubt, it's socialism," said Chavez, who also rebuffed U.S. criticism of his left-wing rule in Venezuela and denounced President Bush as the "great destabilizer of the world."

 

Since coming to power, he has irritated Washington by developing alliances with China, Russia and Iran and flaunting a close personal friendship with Cuba's Communist President Fidel Castro, a longtime foe of the United States.

 

Chavez's public support for socialism recalled Castro's defining announcement in the early 1960s that his 1959 Cuban Revolution was "socialist."

 

Chavez said he had up to now avoided labeling his political program in Venezuela as "socialist."

 

But he added his personal experience in power, which included surviving a brief coup in 2002, had convinced him that socialism was the answer. "But what kind?"

 

Chavez, who won a referendum in August ratifying his rule until early 2007, said previous experiences of socialism in the world -- an apparent reference to the former Soviet Union -- might not be the example to follow.

 

"We have to invent the socialism of the 21st century," he added.

 

Venezuela's 1999 constitution promoted by Chavez enshrines a multi-party political system and he has denied he is a communist. But he has intensified state intervention in the economy, encouraged the formation of cooperatives and is pursuing land reforms critics say threaten private property.

 

Chavez resumed his aggressive stance just a day after his vice president, Jose Vicente Rangel, called for talks with the United States and said Caracas was ready to help fight terrorism and drug-trafficking and keep oil flowing to the United States.

 

But Rangel had also echoed Chavez's anti-U.S. criticisms, and U.S. diplomats here complain their requests for meetings with government ministers are turned down.

 

WHO IS DESTABILIZING?

 

While Venezuela remains a key oil supplier to the U.S., Chavez has this year stepped up a war of words with the United States. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has called him a "destabilizing influence" in Latin America.

 

A former paratroop officer, Chavez was first elected in a 1998 election, six years after leading a botched coup bid.

 

Opponents of the Venezuelan leader, whom Chavez dismisses as puppets of the United States, accuse him of ruling like a dictator and dragging the country toward Cuba-style communism.

 

In what Caracas calls "impertinent" meddling, U.S. officials are also opposing Venezuela's purchase of Russian helicopters and automatic rifles for its armed forces.

 

"The only destabilizer here is George W. Bush, he's the big destabilizer in the world, he's the threat," Chavez said. He has condemned the U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

 

Chavez also repeated charges that the increased U.S. criticism was preparing the ground for an attack against Venezuela and included a plan to assassinate him. U.S. officials have rejected this as "ridiculous."

 

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In other latin american news:

 

From the closing speech by Fidel Castro at an International Women's Day Event

 

We’re doing well

 

INTERNATIONAL Women’s Day brought good news for women and all Cubans in general, announced by President Fidel Castro in his closing remarks at the main event honoring March 8.

 

Fidel announced the implementation of measures ranging from public transportation to the rapid recovery of electric energy services to other strategies that directly benefit domestic chores and health, of genuine benefit to all.

 

Now we may say: We’re doing well, Camilo, Che, and comrades who fell during the attack on Moncada and the Granma expedition, in the Sierra and in the underground movement in the cities (el Llano), in the struggle against the dictatorship, during the Bay of Pigs, in the fight against bandits in the Escambray, in the internationalist struggle, men and women who died as a result of terrorist acts and the crimes of imperialism, internationalist comrades who covered themselves with glory freeing the peoples, contributing to their liberation and defending them against imperialist attempts to re-conquer them, the Revolution’s leader stated.

 

The President emphasized that our people are now beginning to rise up on the map of this chaotic and hopeless world, with a truly extraordinary model, and that it is advancing in every aspect, but that it is always necessary to advance in struggle.

 

We are going to solve problems, he said, by struggling against errors and against the diversions, confusions and effects left on us by specific eras, like the extremely difficult Special Period, which we are leaving behind.

 

He recalled the extraordinary role that women have played in the Revolution, and noted that while it has indeed dignified them, so have women dignified the Revolution, which they have taken to the highest planes that any process has reached.

 

Fidel related important news regarding solutions to some of the problems that affect women, including electricity shortages. He also announced that pressure and rice cookers, as well as gaskets and overpressure plugs, will be supplied to families beginning in April.

 

He reported other measures that will directly benefit the people, such as the construction of 100,000 homes; the completion of top-quality health services at the primary care level; timely wage increases in this latter sector and in general; the national railroad recovery project, and the incorporation of equipment to improve bus transportation between provinces.

 

He made broad reference to other issues, such as individualized attention to workers’ conditions; the relation between prices in the markets and the national currency’s financial balance; measures taken to protect the country’s income from bandit-like actions generated in the United States; the need to increase economic efficiency and production, and the increase in Cuban exports.

 

He explained the financial security that the country currently possesses; the support given to the convertible peso, independent of the dollar; the guarantee provided by relations with China and Venezuela, and, in summary, the economic independence that we are achieving.

 

We are marching towards economic invulnerability without having set that as a goal for ourselves. These things that we are doing and those we are forced to do by the blockades, threats and aggression have led us to approach economic invulnerability and the fact that our country does not depend on anyone else but itself.

 

THE COST IN LIVES OF AN AGGRESSIVE ACT AGAINST CUBA WOULD BE TOO MUCH FOR THE U.S.

 

The President predicted that the cost in lives would be too much for the U.S. to pay if Washington were to decide to carry out aggression against Cuba, and he affirmed that it would be impossible for the Cuban capital to be occupied.

 

The advances, tactics and methods developed by the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR) are impressive, he said, referring to the country’s armed institution, in which millions of citizens are integrated.

 

Thousands of Cuban women are not only part of the regular troops, but also the militias and other forms of organization that will occupy diverse trenches in defending the country in the case of attack or invasion.

 

"We are not afraid," the Revolution’s leader noted, in reference to new threats by the current U.S. administration against Cuba, which has suffered more than four decades of economic, financial and diplomatic blockade, that has been redoubled today.

 

The United States could not pay the cost in lives that an act of aggression against Cuba would signify, he emphasized. In that respect, he recalled that in Vietnam, more than 50,000 people from the U.S. died, a figure that he predicted would be small compared to what it would be here.

 

He regretted the fact that it is African-Americans and Hispanics who hand over their lives in the name of the Pentagon, and called them victims due to the lack of opportunity for access to jobs and universities in the most powerful country in the world.

 

In the case of an attempted invasion of Cuba, hundreds of lives would be lost every day among U.S. troops, predicted the president, who received numerous ovations from the audience of hundreds of Cuban women.

 

The Cuban women ratified their commitment to Fidel and to the homeland. They especially remembered Gladys Marín, leader of the Communist Party of Chile who recently died.

 

Others presiding over the event included the FMC’s National Secretariat and its National Committee, headed by its president, Vilma Espín; Heroine of the Republic Melba Hernández, a special guest; the mothers and wives of the Five Cuban patriots unjustly imprisoned by the empire; and leaders of the Communist Party, the government, the Young Communist League and mass and student organizations.

 

(original)

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about 2 weeks ago i stop in this little variety store to get a juice, and the

owner, this lady, starts asking me about my lineage and shit, right out of the

blue. so whatever, she starts telling me she's from venezuela...with a pretty

thick accent. so i float chavez's name...WELL, she got into this big tirade about

how chavez is a communist, how he wants to make venezuela the next cuba, but

most of all, starts a long winded thing about how chavez is taking away the elite

power structure and basically leveling the field for the poor..she rested her

argument on this: how would i like it if the government decided to take my nike's away(which i don't actually own any nike's). the more she got fired up, the more

she called me 'pepito', hahaha. a perspective i wasn't expecting.

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here's an interview with philip agee(anyone seen the 'secrets of the CIA' documentary?), former CIA player in latin america cum high profile anti-CIA

advocate.

 

 

The Nature of CIA Intervention in Venezuela

 

By Jonah Gindin

 

03/31/05 "ZNet" - - Philip Agee is a former CIA operative who left the agency in 1967 after becoming disillusioned by the CIA’s support for the status quo in the region. Says Agee, “I began to realize that what I and my colleagues had been doing in Latin America in the CIA was no more than a continuation of nearly five-hundred years of this, exploitation and genocide and so forth. And I began to think about what, until then would have been unthinkable, which was to write a book on how it all works.” The book, Inside the Company: CIA Diary, was an instant best-seller and was eventually published in over thirty languages. In 1978, three years after the publication of CIA Diary, Agee and a group of like-minded journalists began publishing the Covert Operations Information Bulletin (now Covert Action Quarterly), as part of a strategy of “guerilla journalism” aimed at destabilizing the CIA and exposing their operations. 

 

Not surprisingly, the response of the US government and the CIA in particular to Agee’s work has been somewhat aggressive, and he has been forced to divide his time since the 1970s between Germany and Cuba. He currently represents a Canadian petroleum technology firm in Latin America. 

 

Despite the recent rash of anti-Chávez editorials in the US media, and threatening statements made by a whole slew of senior US government officials at both the Departments of State and Defense, Agee sees a more cynical US strategy in Venezuela. Building on the work of scholar William I. Robinson on US intervention in Nicaragua throughout the 1980s, and recently published documents detailing CIA and US government activity in Venezuela, Agee suggests that the CIA’s strategy of “democracy promotion” is in full-force in Venezuela. 

 

As with Nicaragua in the 1980s, a series of foundations are providing millions of dollars of funding to opposition forces in Venezuela, meted out by a private consulting firm contracted by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Assistant Secretary of State, Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs Roger Noriega recently reaffirmed the State Departments commitment to this strategy, telling the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 2nd, 2005, “we will support democratic elements in Venezuela so that they can continue to maintain the political space to which they are entitled.” The funding of these “democratic elements” has as its ultimate goal the unification of Venezuela’s splintered opposition (formerly loosely grouped into the Coordinadora Democratica) for the upcoming Presidential elections in 2006. But failing a victory in 2006, cautions Agee, the CIA et al. will remain, their eyes set on the 2012 elections, and the 2018 elections, ad infinitum, “because what’s at stake is the stability of the political system in the United States, and the security of the political class in the United States.” 

 

How do you view recent developments in Venezuela?

 

When Chávez was first elected and I began following events here, I could see the writing on the wall, as I could see it in Chile in 1970, as I could see it in Nicaragua in 1979-80. There was no doubt in my mind that the United States would try to change the course of events in Venezuela as they had in Chile and in Nicaragua, and before that in various other countries. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the time to really follow events day to day, but I did try to follow them from a distance, and eventually when Eva Golinger started her website it came to my attention and I began reading some of the documents on the website and I could see the application here of the same mechanisms that were used in Nicaragua in the 1980s in the penetration of civil society and the efforts to influence the political process and the electoral process here in Venezuela. In Nicaragua I had in 1979 I think, just after the Sandinistas took over, written an analysis of what I believed would be the US program there and practically everything I wrote about happened, because these techniques, through the CIA, through AID, through the State Department, and since 1984 through the National Endowment for Democracy, all follow a certain pattern. In Nicaragua the program for influencing the outcome of the 1990 elections began about a year and a half before the elections, for uniting the opposition, for creating a civic movement, all these things seem to be happening again in Venezuela. So this is my interest politically in Venezuela, is to see these things happening and to write from time to time about them. 

 

What was the most prominent strategy of US intelligence when you were at the CIA, for protecting US ‘strategic interests’ in Latin America? 

 

When I was in the agency from the late 1950s on through to the late 1960s, the agency had operations going internationally, regionally, and nationally, attempting to penetrate and manipulate the institutions of power in countries around the world, and these were things that I did in the CIA—the penetration and manipulation of political parties, trade unions, youth and student movements, intellectual, professional and cultural societies, religious groups and women’s groups and especially of the public information media. We, for example, paid journalists to publish our information as if it were the journalists’ own information. The propaganda operations were continuous. We also spent large amounts of money intervening in elections to favor our candidates over others. The CIA took a Manichean view of the world, that is to say there were the people on our side, and there were people who were against us. And the agency’s job was to penetrate, weaken, divide, and destroy those political forces that were seen to be the enemy, which are those to the left of social democrats, normally, and to support and strengthen the political forces that were seen to be friendly to US interests in all these institutions I just mentioned a few minutes ago. 

 

One of the constant problems that the CIA had from the beginning of these types of operations, that is 1947, was the difficulty that the people and organizations that received their money had in covering it up, because when you get large amounts of money coming in it can be difficult to conceal. So the agency, early on, established a series of foundations, or worked out arrangements with established foundations. Sometimes the foundations of the agency were simply ‘paper foundations’ run by a lawyer in Washington on contract to the CIA. From the early 1950s the international program of the National Students Association of the United States—this is the University association that is on practically every campus—was run in fact by the CIA, the whole international program of the National Students Association was a CIA operation. And as each President of the NSA would come into office over the years they were briefed on how this international program worked under CIA direction. But the man who came into the Presidency of NSA in 1966—and this is the time of the Vietnam war and the protest movement—he refused to go along, and he told the whole story to Ramparts Magazine in California, a magazine that had connections with the Catholic church. And Ramparts published the story creating an enormous scandal. Well, it didn’t stop there, because every news media picked up on the Ramparts story and in February 1967 the Washington Post published a lengthy exposé of the CIA’s international funding network. In other words they named foundations, and quite a few of the foreign recipient organizations of CIA money in these different institutions that I mentioned earlier—political parties, trade unions, student movements, and so forth—and it was a disaster for the agency. I happened to be at headquarters in between assignments in Ecuador and Uruguay when this happened, and it was a huge disaster for the CIA. 

 

Within less than two months, after the collapse of this international funding mechanism, Dante Fascell—a member of the House of Representatives for Miami, with close ties to the CIA and to the right-wing Cuban-Americans in Miami—proposed in Congress the establishment of a non-governmental foundation that would receive funding from Congress and would in turn pass the money out openly to the different organizations that until that time would have been funded by the CIA secretly, under the table. But this was 1967 and bi-partisan consensus on foreign policy had, to a point, broken down and so Fascell’s proposal went nowhere. 

 

For that reason the CIA continued, even after the collapse of its international funding mechanism, to be the action agency for the US government in these activities known as ‘covert operations.’ For example, the CIA was responsible for undermining the Salvador Allende government in Chile from 1970 on. It happens that Allende was nearly elected in 1958. Elections came every 6 years in Chile and in 1964, the next election year, the CIA began early on, more than a year ahead of time, working to prevent his election in 1964. The money was spent in part to discredit Allende and the Socialist party and his coalition known as Unidad Popular and to finance Eduardo Frei’s campaign—the Christian Democratic campaign. Frei won that election, but when the next elections came around in 1970 Allende was finally elected. It’s documented that the CIA tried to prevent his ratification by Congress following the election by provoking a military coup, which failed. Allende took power and the CIA was then the action agency for fomenting popular discontent, for continuous propaganda against Allende and his government, for fomenting the very damaging strikes that occurred, the most important of which was the truckers, which stopped the delivery of goods and services over a period of months, and which eventually provoked the Pinochet coup against Allende in September 1973. 

 

Have there been significant changes in CIA strategy since you left the agency in 1968?

 

Yes, absolutely. In the 1970s there were brutal military dictatorships in all of the Cono Sur [southern Cone]—Uruguay, Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil, and of course, in Chile with Pinochet. And these were all supported by the CIA, by the way. It was during this period that a process of new thinking began in the upper echelons of the makers of US foreign policy, the new thinking being that these military dictatorships, with all the repression and the disappearances and death squads and so forth, might not be the best way to preserve US interests in Latin America, or other areas for that matter. The new thinking was that the preservation of US interests could better be achieved through the election of democratic governments formed by political elites who identify with the political class in the United States. Here I mean not the popular forces, but the traditional political classes in Latin America, to speak of one area, known as the ‘Oligarchies.’ And so the new American program, which became known as “Project Democracy,” was adopted and United States policy would seek to promote free, fair, transparent democratic elections but in such a way that it would assure that power went to the elites and not to the people. 

 

A foundation was established called the “American Political Foundation” in 1979 with major participation from the main labor center in the United States the AFL-CIO, with the United States Chamber of Commerce and with the Democratic and Republican parties, four main organizations, and the financing for this foundation came both from the government and from private sources. Their job was to study how the United States could best apply this new thinking in promoting democracy. The solution was the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and its four associated foundations: the International Republican Institute (IRI) of the Republican Party, the National Democratic Institute (NDI) of the Democratic Party, the American Center of International Labor Solidarity (ACILS) of the AFL-CIO, and the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE) of the United States Chamber of Commerce. Where the AFL-CIO foundation is concerned, they took an existing organization which had worked hand-in-glove with the CIA for many years called the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), they simply changed the name.[1] 

 

How exactly does the NED work with the CIA?

 

The mechanism would be that the Congress would give millions of dollars to the National Endowment for Democracy and the National Endowment would then pass the money to what they call the “core foundations” which were these four associated foundations, who in turn would then hand out the money to foreign recipients. This all began in 1984, and one of the first recipients of money from the NED was the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), which was then the focal point of the most extremist of the anti-Castro individuals and organizations in the United States. But the real test for this new system came in Nicaragua. In Nicaragua since 1979-1980 the CIA had this program of organizing counter-revolutionary military forces or paramilitary forces that became known as the Contras, with the logistics and the organization and backup all coming from places in Honduras. They infiltrated eventually something like 15,000 guerillas, whom the Sandinista army defeated. By 1987 they had terrorized the country-side, they had caused around 3,000 deaths, and many others were maimed for life. It was a strictly terrorist operation in the countryside, they were not able during all those years to take a single hamlet and hold it. So they were defeated militarily. 

 

By 1987, Central America was war weary: El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua. And there was a meeting of the Presidents of these countries in a Guatemalan town called Esquipulas and they worked out a series of agreements by themselves—the United States was not a party to this—which included the disarming of the Contras and ceasefires in the various countries. So in Nicaragua there was a ceasefire, but the CIA did not disarm the Contras because they knew that elections were coming up in 1990 and they wanted to maintain the Contras as a threat. Although the Contras had been defeated military by 1987 they had caused enormous economic problems and Nicaraguans were suffering very badly from the destruction. 

 

Following these accords of Esquipulas, US policy changed. More emphasis was placed on the penetration of civil society and the strengthening of the opposition forces to the Sandinista Liberation Front (FSLN), and one of the mechanisms was to the strengthen what was known as the Coordinadora Democratica Nicaraguense, which was comprised of the private sector business-leaders, of certain trade unions that were anti-Sandinista, anti-Sandinista political parties, and anti-Sandinista civil associations. A private consulting firm known as the Delphi International Group was contracted to run operations to influence the elections coming up in 1990. And they turned out to receive the most money of all, and they played the key role in the run-up to the elections in 1990. NED had been active also in Nicaragua from 1984 on, and NED and its associated foundations—all four of them—were also quite active in penetrating and trying to influence the political electoral process in Nicaragua which begins in about 1988, but really gets going in 1989. In order to get the anti-Sandinista vote out and to monitor the elections to create an anti-Sandinista political front the CIA and NED established a civic front called Via Civica and their ostensible job was political education and activism, civic action, non-partisan civic action. When in actual fact all their activities were designed to strengthen the anti-Sandinista side. So first there was the Coordinadora, then Via Civica, and finally the unification of the opposition, and they didn’t achieve this until about August of 1989, about 6 months before the lections, quite late, but they’d been working on it for a long time, and of the twenty opposition political parties, they unified—many simply through bribes—fourteen of these parties and they called it the United Nicaraguan Opposition (UNO). And UNO ran a single candidate for all the different positions, and the United States selected Violeta Chamoro to run as President. 

 

In September of 1989 there was a very strange agreement between the US government and the Sandinistas, wherein the Sandinistas would allow the United States to bring in US$9 million to support the opposition, if the United States promised that the CIA would not bring in any other money to invest against the Sandinistas. And strangely enough the Sandinistas agreed to it, and the first thing that happened was that the CIA brought in millions of dollars more, of course. The man who wrote the book on Nicaragua in the 1980s and about this election in 1990 is Bill Robinson, an academic, who lived for quite a bit of the 1980s in Nicaragua, and his book is called A Faustian Bargain. It’s an excellent book, very well documented, very well written. He estimated that the United States spent something in excess of US$20 million for the 1990 elections. And as everyone knows, the Sandinistas lost; the UNO coalition won something like 56% of the vote, and the Sandinistas 40% or something like that. And these operations that were started in order to ensure the defeat of the Sandinistas in the 1990 elections, they continued in order to assure that the Sandinistas would not come into power in the next elections, and that has been the case. 

 

How has this model been applied to Venezuela?

 

In Venezuela, there is something rather similar: you have the Coordinadora Democratica here, comprised of the same sectors of the same organizations as in Nicaragua, although from what I’ve read it has more or less collapsed at this point. But they’ll revive it I’m sure. You have an organization here that is supposedly non-partisan and dedicated to getting out the vote and making sure the elections are clean which is Súmate. You have the private US consulting group here which is called Development Alternatives Incorporated, that is fulfilling the same role that the Delphi International Group fulfilled in Nicaragua, and both the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute also have offices in Caracas, so you have three offices here that are handing out tens of millions of dollars, private offices that in actual fact are under the control of the US embassy and of the Department of State in Washington and of the Agency for International Development (AID).[2] The first contract that was given to Development Alternatives was by AID, while the NED programs continued at a rate of about US$1 million per year.[3] In the wake of the failed coup in April, 2002, the decision was taken in Washington to do the same thing they’d done in Nicaragua, which was to hire a consulting firm to act as a front for AID money which would be much larger than the NED money, and the first contract was signed on August 30th, 2002, which granted a little more than US$10 million over the next two years for political activities in Venezuela. And they opened in August, 2002 and sent five people down from Washington—five people that were named by AID. Get that: they hire this consulting firm, but they name the people. And for any Venezuelan that is hired by Development Alternatives, the contract requires that they be approved by AID in Washington. So there’s no other way to look upon these three offices here, than as mechanisms of the US embassy, and consider that behind the scenes of these three organizations is the CIA. And what is useful in having these foundations and the consulting firm giving out money is that it provides a way for the CIA to give a lot more money to organizations that are already receiving money somewhat openly, so it makes it easier for these recipient organizations in Venezuela to cover it up. So if the AID money to Development Alternatives is about US$5 million, of which US$3.5 million was for grants to Venezuelan organizations, with another US$1 million + from NED, you have about US$6 or 7 million of open money. All of this comes, by the way, from documentation that Eva Golinger has obtained. She’s done a marvelous job. In any case the CIA can add quite a lot of additional money to the US$6 or 7 million, and the evidence is there in the documentation of support for the oil strike, the national strike, from December of 2002 to February 2003, and then for the recall referendum campaign. All of these things they lost, so now they have to be focusing on the 2006 elections. 

 

Venezuela is certainly not the only country in which these operations to strengthen civil society, promote democracy, to educate people in election processes, but which is only a cover, the real purpose is to favor certain political forces over others, Venezuela is by no means the only place this is happening. There is a need a real need for research in this area because DAI if you look at their website, they’re all over the world. It’s not that all their programs are financed by the US government—they’re financed by the World Bank and I can’t remember how many other sources—one can look at their programs and see which ones are similar to what’s happening in Venezuela. The same thing with the National Democratic Institute and the three other foundations associated with NED, and one can see where they’re focusing this political penetration with the CIA, of course, in tandem. I think that there is a great need to expose this and to denounce it for what it is, which is fundamentally a lie, to promote democracy but in fact to overthrow governments, to achieve regime change, or to strengthen favorable governments that are already in power. 

 

Former-CIA agent Felix Rodríguez recently told Miami television that the US was looking for a change in Venezuela, possibly one brought about by violence. He gave the Reagan administration’s assassination attempt against Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi as an example. Is this a likely scenario for US intervention in Venezuela?

 

Well, remember that where Qaddafi is concerned, the United States believed that Qaddafi had organized the bombing of this discothéque in Berlin, and the raid on Tripoli was in retaliation. Now Chávez has made no provocation like that, so there is no justification for a military strike and I cannot believe that the United States has come to the point where they would so blatantly seek to assassinate the President of another country. I mean, things are bad enough in the United States—worse than they’ve ever been—but I don’t think we’ve quite come to that. One thing that is very important for the Chávez movement, the Bolivarian movement here, to keep in mind always, is that the United States will never stop trying to turn the clock back. US interests are defined as the unfettered access to natural resources, to labor, and to the markets of foreign countries. It is countries like the Latin American countries that assure prosperity in the United States. The more governments with their own agendas, with an element of nationalism, and that oppose US policies such as the neoliberal agenda come to power, the more of a threat these movement are seen to be in Washington, because what’s at stake is the stability of the political system in the United States, and the security of the political class in the United States. So the Venezuelans are going to have to fight for their survival just like the Cubans have had to fight for forty-five years, forty-five years from now the United States will still be trying to subvert the political process in Venezuela if it is still on the road that it is on today, just like they are still continuing to try to destroy the Cuban revolution. A President will come and a President will go, there are nine Presidents now that Fidel has survived, so I think it’s very important for Venezuelans to understand that this is going to be permanent, and that vigilance, organization, keeping unified, all that is key to avoiding these US programs, feeding these US programs which essentially are divide and conquer. 

 

 

[1] In 1997, President of the AFL-CIO John Sweeney disbanded the AIFLD, replacing it with the ACILS, better known as the “Solidarity Center.” 

 

[2] The Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE) of the US Chamber of Commerce has also been active in Venezuela ( http://www.cipe.org/regional/lac/index.htm ) . Last August, CIPE-CEDICE (Center for the Dissemination of Economic Information) helped draft the Venezuelan anti-Chávez umbrella group Coordinadora Democratica’s political program (http://www.rethinkvenezuela.com/downloads/cedice.htm  , and http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news.php?newsno=1308 ). 

 

[3] For original documents received under the Freedom of Information Act detailing NED and AID funding to Venezuela’s opposition, see http://www.venezuelafoia.info. 

from here, but apparently nicked from ZNet.

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Iraq can have democracy, but NO, Venezuela, YOU CANNOT!

 

It's strange to meet any fascists, who want to oppress their own people... but it's more common in the aristocratic class. Then they get other people to go along with it by saying, socialism is BAD! (Sometimes they don't bother to come up with an explaination.) So much crap out there. What I wouldn't give for a satellite uplink to the major television channels. Haha... Seriously though there needs to be an independent media in this country of the stature of other major media companies. But now that everything has been deregulated it would be hard to get a leg in.

 

To think of all the crap the CIA has done over the years... from the very beginning... pardoning and supporting nazi war criminals, controlling drug trade, gunrunning, overthrowing regimes and propping up dictators, hiring white supremecists to spy on the likes of Martin Luther King Jr and other civil rights leaders..... it's really a wonder that the CIA hasn't been completely overhauled. But it seems we are moving in the opposite direction, with Negroponte now as NID. I always thought working for the CIA would be wonderful.... but it seems hardly more than glorified thuggery sadly.

 

Thanks for that article poiesis.

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Nah... Chavez is different. This was a genuine peoples revolution. Just the other day I saw a news article about how Chavez raised the minimum wage by 23% and said it still "was not enough".

He's the real deal. That's why this administration hates him so much.

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  • 4 weeks later...

I'll post this here in addition to the citgo thread

 

From BBC.co.uk

 

 

Chavez considers breaking US ties

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez says he will consider breaking diplomatic ties with the US if it fails to hand over a Cuban-born terror suspect.

 

Venezuela says Luis Posada Carriles must stand trial over the 1976 bombing of Cuba's plane that killed 73 people.

 

Mr Chavez says Washington would be guilty of protecting international terrorism if it refused extradition.

 

Mr Posada Carriles - the 77-year-old former CIA employee - was charged last week with illegal entry into the US.

 

US immigration officials said that he would be held in custody until an immigration court hearing on 13 June.

 

Washington has up to 60 days to consider Venezuela's extradition request under a 1922 treaty between the two countries.

 

'Wasting money'

"If they don't extradite him (Mr Posada Carriles) in the time allowed in our agreement, we will review our relations with the United States," Mr Chavez said in his regular Sunday TV programme.

 

 

He said Caracas would decide "if it worth having an embassy in the United States, wasting money, or for the United States to have an embassy here".

 

"It is difficult, very difficult, to maintain ties with a government that so shamelessly hides and protects international terrorism," Mr Chavez said.

 

The president last week described Mr Posada Carriles as "a self-confessed terrorist".

 

Washington stance

Mr Posada Carriles - who was born in Cuba but now holds Venezuelan nationality - has denied involvement in the attack on the Cuban airline passenger plane on a flight from Caracas to Havana.

 

Mr Posada Carriles escaped a Venezuelan prison in 1985 while awaiting a trial on appeal.

 

He was twice acquitted by Venezuelan courts of plotting to bomb the plane.

 

The US says it will not deport Mr Posada Carriles to any country that would hand him over to Fidel Castro's regime in Cuba.

 

Venezuela has said it will not hand Mr Posada Carriles over, and Mr Castro has insisted he will be happy to see him tried there.

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U.S. Rejects Venezuelan Move on Extradition of Bombing Suspect

 

The Justice Department on Friday rejected Venezuela’s request for the arrest of a Cuban exile wanted for an airplane bombing as a preliminary to his extradition, saying it had not provided proper supporting evidence.

A State Department official said the Venezuelans were told that their request, which called for the arrest of Luis Posada Carriles to prevent his escape as a first step to extradition, did not contain sufficient information regarding the facts and circumstances of his involvement in the 1976 bombing. The midair explosion of a Cuban airliner off the coast of Barbados killed 73 people, including several Venezuelans.

“The provisional arrest request as submitted by the government was clearly inadequate,” the official said. The ruling does not preclude a formal extradition request.

Mr. Posada is in American custody. He escaped a Venezuelan jail in 1985 while awaiting trial on charges he planned the bombing. Now 77, he reappeared on May 17 in Miami.

The Venezuelan government, which said on Sunday that it would consider severing diplomatic ties with Washington if the extradition was denied, responded with a statement, from its embassy in Washington saying it would “present all the necessary documentation to request the extradition.”

Reached by phone in his office, the ambassador, Bernardo Álvarez, explained that the “preventive arrest” request had been filed on May 13, before Mr. Posada reappeared, when Venezuela had indications that he had slipped into the United States. The Venezuelan Supreme Court, he said, has called on the government of President Hugo Chávez to make a formal extradition request.

“We are going to request the extradition very soon, presenting all the documentation needed,” Mr. Álvarez said.

Mr. Posada, a former C.I.A. operative has placed the Bush administration in a political and legal predicament that has raised questions about whether it has a double standard on terrorism.

Extraditing Mr. Posada would embitter members of Miami’s Cuban-American community, some of whom are close allies and financial backers of President Bush and his brother, Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida. Not extraditing him could raise accusations that the administration was willing to protect a bombing suspect if his mission was to eliminate one of Washington’s adversaries.

American officials have not said whether they would extradite Mr. Posada, saying that the question was a legal matter. But they have indicated they would not willingly send him to Venezuela. The fear is that Mr. Posada would wind up in Cuba, where he would be executed for a range of crimes, including an assassination attempt on Mr. Castro.

Steven R. Weisman reported from Washington for this article and Juan Forero from Bogotá, Colombia.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/28/politics/28venez.html?

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Seems pretty clear to me. Shakur is being sheltered in Cuba, an international fugitive from American justice for being an accessory to the murder of a New Jersey police officer, in which she undisputably was involved. Carrilles is being sheltered here in the U.S. for being accused of (and TWICE AQUITTED in Venezuela) of the terrorist bombing of a Cuban airliner.

 

Shakur is a legitimate fugitive, Mos Def's personal opinions notwithstanding. Carrilles has served the interests of the United States, and carried out resistance operations against Castro's Communist dictatorship for about forty years. No contest here. Shakur is a domestic terrorist. Carrilles was a CIA operative carrying out the orders of the United States government, a genuine example of the bullshit fictional James Bond. End of story.

 

I guess I should put up a sign in my front window "CARRILLES WELCOME HERE."

 

If the U.S. government turns Carrilles over to the murderers in Venezuela, it will have a very difficult time recruiting any covert operatives in Latin America and elsewhere.

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I don't see how being present at a murder scene surrendering with your hands up makes you an accessory to the crime. Unless you want to call it guilty by association, which would legitimize her position as a political prisoner.

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Villian, there are numerous people incarcerated for "just being there" then a crime was committed. If one has knowlege of the details of a crime, and one fails to come forward and provide those details to the police, one is guilty of being an accessory. I know a girl who was riding with a gang who allegedly was in the car when they did a drive-by attack on a rival gang. One of the kids in her car was hit by return fire, and bled to death in her arms. They allegedly drove the kid out into the country and buried him in an unmarked grave. She was panicked and told her parents all about it. Her parents called the police, because her telling them made them "accessories after the fact" to a killing which was at least manslaughter, if not aggravated murder. Burying the kid made it even worse, that's conspiracy. No matter how you cut it, they are all going to prison for a very long time.

 

She had a choice. She made the choice to roll with a gang. Prison is the consequences. Her parents begged her to straighten up. All I can say is "She screwed up." Just about her only way to avoid it is to turn State's Evidence. If she does that, she will be looking over her shoulder the rest of her life.

 

Shakura made a choice to roll with people capable of murdering police officers. She screwed up. "Revolution" is no game. The only reason she's not doing life in a Federal pen is because she is in Cuba.

 

Carrilles' mistake was in surfacing once he arrived here. He should have kept his mouth shut and gone underground. I don't know the details of it, but I bet his surfacing had to do with publicity for his anti-Castro political organization. And, he may have felt safe in the U.S., or may have been told he would be protected. He is a CIA operative, after all. "License to kill" and all that.

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Of course she has a testimony...

 

Testimony of Assata Shakur before the United Nations

From Covert Action Quarterly

26 October 1998

 

CAQ Editor's note: This article contains portions of the text of several letters and interviews by Assata Shakur and comments by two noted attorneys, Lennox Hinds and Michael Ratner. The text that follows in (...) is by Rosemari Mealy, who has excerpted Assata's writings for Covert Action.

 

One person who was able to escape horrendous persecution, after being convicted in 1977 by an all-white jury and sentenced to life plus 33 years in prison, was Assata Shakur (formerly known as JoAnne Chesimard. In her written statement to the 54th Session of the United Nation's Commission on Human Rights, held in Geneva Switzer- land, in March 1998, Assata Shakur testified [as follows]:

 

The US Senate's 1976 Church Committee report on intelligence operations inside the USA revealed that, "The FBI has attempted covertly to influence the public's perception of persons and organizations by disseminating derogatory information to the press, either anonymously or through 'friendly' news contacts."

 

In 1978 my case was one of many cases brought before the United Nations..,exposing the existence of political prisoners in the United States, their political persecution, and the cruel and inhuman treat- ment they receive in US prisons... (see ... Shakur Petition).

 

I was falsely accused in six different "criminal cases," and in all six of these cases I was eventually acquitted or the charges were dismissed. The fact that I was acquitted or that the charges were dismissed, did not mean that I received justice in the courts; that was certainly not the case. It only meant that the "evidence" presented against me was so flimsy and false that my innocence became evident. This political persecution was part and parcel of the government's policy of eliminating political opponents by charging them with crimes and arresting them with no regard to the factual basis of such charges. ...

 

On May 2, 1973, I, along with Zayd Malik Shakur and Sundiata Acoli, were stopped on the New Jersey Turnpike, supposedly for a "faulty tail light".. Sundiata Acoli got out of the car to determine why we were stopped. Zayd and I remained in th car. State Trooper Harper then came to the car, opened the door,and began to question us.

 

Because we were black, and riding in a car with Vermont licence plates, he claimed he became "suspicious". He then drew his gun, pointed it at us, and told us to put our hands up in the air in front of us, where he could see them. I complied and in a split second, there was a sound that came from outside the car, there was a sudden movement, and I was shot once with my arms held up in the air, and then once again from the back. Zayd Malik Shakur was later killed, Trooper Werner Foerster was killed. I was left on the ground to die and when I did not, I was taken to a local hospital where I was threatened, beaten, and tortured...

 

Even though trooper Harper admitted that he shot and killed Zayd Malik Shakur, under the New Jersey felony murder law, I was charged with killing both Zayd Malik Shakur, who was my closest friend and comrade, and charged in the death of trooper Trooper Foerster. Never in my life have I felt such grief. Zayd had vowed to protect me, and to help me get to a safe place, and it was clear that he had lost his life trying to protect both me and Sundiata. Although he was also unarmed, and the gun that killed trooper Foerster was found under Zayd's leg, Sundiata Acoli, who was captured later, was also charged with both deaths. Neither Sundiata Acoli nor I ever received a fair trial. We were both convicted in the news media way before our trials. No news media was ever permitted to interview us, although the New Jersey police and the FBI fed stories to the press on a daily basis...

 

Because of government persecution, I was left with no other choice than to flee from the political repression, racism and violence that dominate US government's policy towards people of color, and in 1979, fearing that I would be murdered in prison, and knowing that I would never receive any justice, I was liberated from prison, aided by committed comrades who understood the depths of the injustices in my case, and who were also extremely fearful for my life.

 

(The greatest fear that Assata had to endure during the early years of her incarceration was for the safety of her daughter, Kakuya who was born while Assata was confined to a hospital ward. After the daring escape from a maximum security unit at New Jersey's Clinton Correctional facilities, Assata lived and struggled underground for many years. She was placed on the FBI's Most Wanted list and hunted by federal officials during this period.

 

There was great relief among the progressive community when it became known that Assata had been liberated from prison on Black Solidarity Day, Nov 2 1979. Bright yellow posters with Assata's photo were anonymously printed, and appeared on signposts throughout Harlem with the message, "Assata Is Welcome Here". But at the same time, Black women throughout the United States were summarily detained by the police under the pretext that they resembled the so-called fugitive. Homes of Black activists in New York and other cities were raided by heavily armed SWAT teams, where police informants had directed them to what they falsely believed to be safe houses harboring this dangerous "cop killer".

 

Assata's family was also harrassed. Her aunt and attorney, Evelyn Williams, was jailed for criminal contempt for vigorously defending her client. Ms Williams,in her book, "Inadmissible Evidence -Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 1993- provides in detail a frightening saga of American Jurisprudence. Before she passed in 1995, Assata's mother, Doris, bore the emotional scars induced by mental torture. Imagine your phone ringing constantly in the middle of the night with a sadistic caller telling you that your daughter is dead!

 

If the psychological warfare that was waged against her immediate family by the US police and other law enforcement agencies throughout the years took place in any other country, it would be deemed a human rights violation. In her own autobiography, Assata -Chicago Lawrence Hill, 1987, she chronicles her experiences, and describes herself as a "20th Century Escaped Slave."

 

In [the] late 1980's, Assata Shakur publicly emerged in Cuba where she was accorded the status of political refugee.

 

Throughout the years, the New Jersey police have been particularly vindictive, vowing to capture Assata Shakur dead or alive. On Dec 24 1979, the NJ State Police called a press conference to announce that they had written a letter to Pope John Paul II -who was about to embark on a trip to Cuba -asking him to intervene on their behalf to have Assata extradited to New Jersey (NJ).

 

Assata sent an open letter to the Pope, which received widespread international dissemination. It was published in Arabic, French Spanish and several other languages. In the United States, the letter went virtually unnoticed by the mainstream press, but was given front page coverage by New York's only Black Daily, -- the Daily Challenge.)

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  • 6 years later...

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