Is The US Plotting
To Murder Venezuelas President?
By Bill Vann
World Socialist
Web
08 October 2003
Venezuelan
president Hugo Chavez cancelled a planned trip last month to the United
Nations General Assemblys opening debate, explaining that he did
so because of a potential threat on his life. His governments
intelligence agencies had reportedly warned of a plot backed by the
US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to sabotage his plane in flight
from Caracas to New York City. He and others had also raised concerns
about Venezuelan anti-government terrorists conducting military training
on US soil.
The US media has
barely reported the Venezuelan presidents security concerns; and
when it has, it generally attempts to portray the charges as an indication
that Chavez is unstable or suffering from paranoia.
Chavezs concerns,
however, are hardly far-fetched. While he has won two consecutive popular
elections by the largest popular margins in Venezuelan history, he remains
in office today thanks only to the failure of an April 2002 coup attempt
carried out with the barely concealed backing of the Bush administration.
Those who carried out the coup were the recipients of US funding, including
government money funneled through the AFL-CIO union bureaucracy and
its international front, the American Center for International Labor
Solidarity.
The military-businessmens
regime that briefly seized power held Chavez incommunicado on an island
of the Venezuelan coast for two days while deciding his fate. Washington
welcomed the coup and then backtracked after mass opposition in the
streets of Caracas made the new ruling juntas position untenable.
After it emerged
that the coup plotters had held repeated discussions with a group of
right-wing Cuban émigrés and veterans of the CIA-backed
contra war in Nicaragua who hold key positions of power
in the State Department and the Pentagon, the Bush administration improbably
claimed that these individuals were merely trying to talk the Venezuelan
military and business establishment out of overthrowing the government.
None of them, however, thought to warn Chavez of the impending coup.
Since the failure
of the coup, Venezuela has been the target of an unrelenting economic
and political destabilization campaign, including a 64-day oil strike
backed by opposition leaders in December and January in an attempt to
bring down the government.
US officials, meanwhile,
have issued repeated statements denouncing Chavez. I think that
some of the things that he has done at home politically and his policies
on the economic side have ruined what is a relatively wealthy country,
Roger Noriega, the State Departments top official on Latin America,
declared recently. Noriega made no mention of the oil strike, which
enjoyed Washingtons tacit support, or of Washingtons decision
in July to cut off all credit to Venezuela from the US Export-Import
Bank.
At the same time,
the Bush administration has lent all but open support to the campaign
by elements of the opposition to force a recall election aimed at ousting
Chavez. In an act of gross interference in Venezuelas internal
affairs, US ambassador Charles Shapiro went before the countrys
newly formed electoral commission last month and offered US assistance
to the panel, including determining whether to accept the oppositions
recall petition.
Shapiro is no stranger
to CIA-sponsored subversion and killings. His diplomatic career in the
1980s was centered in El Salvador. He first served as the State Departments
Salvadoran desk officer from 1983 to 1985, and then as the political
consular at the US Embassy in San Salvador from 1985 to 1988. That position
has commonly been used as a cover for the CIAs chief of station
in a given country.
This period spanned
the height of the Salvadoran civil war and the wholesale massacres and
assassinations carried out by the military-backed death squads. It also
was when the US used El Salvador as a base of operations for its illegal
contra war against neighboring Nicaragua.
In the end, the
Venezuelan panel ruled that the opposition had gathered most of its
signatures illegally and then set a new timetable for holding a recall.
Supporters of Chavez in the Fifth Republic Movement indicated
that they too will petition for the recall of opposition governors,
mayors and deputies seeking the presidents ouster. The earliest
any recall referendum could be staged is next February.
Recent weeks have
seen a series of terrorist bombings in Caracas, including a bomb thrown
at the military barracks near the Miraflores presidential palace and
an attack on the Colombian consulate. Most recently, terrorists hurled
an explosive device at the headquarters of CONATEL, the governments
telecommunications regulatory agency, apparently in retaliation for
the confiscation of illegal equipment from the opposition-controlled
television network, Globovision.
Meanwhile, the Venezuelan
government has protested the fact that anti-government forces, including
direct participants in the April 2002 coup, are openly conducting training
in terrorist tactics on US soil.
An article published
in the Wall Street Journal in January detailed the activities in Florida
of Capt. Luis Eduardo Garcia, one of the first Venezuelan officers to
storm the presidential palace during the April 2002 coup. Heading up
an outfit known as the Venezuelan Patriotic Junta, Garcia has forged
a civic-military alliance with the F-4 Commandos, an anti-Castro
exile group that has carried out terrorist attacks against Cuba.
According to the
Journal: Now Capt. Garcia says he is providing military training
for some 50 members of the F-4 Commandos, 30 of them Cuban-Americans,
the rest Venezuelans, in a shooting range close to the Everglades. We
are preparing for war, he says.
Florida newspapers,
including El Nuevo Herald carried similar reports on the terrorist training
camp.
Chavez directly
protested the existence of the camp in a meeting last month with Shapiro.
In a speech also delivered in September, he denounced the hypocrisy
of the Bush administrations supposed war on terrorism. There
in the US they are conspiring against Venezuela, he said. Terrorists
are training against Venezuela and it is a demand that must be made
to the government of the US, because they are obligated by international
law to act. If what they say is true, that they are fighting against
terrorism, they should act against the terrorists on their own territory
who are threatening Venezuela.
Shapiro responded
by claiming that the training of terrorists on US soil is not
necessarily a crime. He asserted that the US government is in
the process of collecting information and we must follow all legal
procedures. The first reports of the military activities of Capt.
Garcia appeared in the Miami press fully a year ago.
While sheltering
Venezuelan terrorists in Florida, the administration has orchestrated
a sinister campaign to brand Venezuela as a terrorist haven. A product
of this propaganda drive appeared in the October 6 issue of US News
& World Report under the scare headline, Terror Close to Home.
The article, consisting
almost entirely of unsubstantiated allegations attributed to unnamed
US intelligence and government sources, claims that Chavez is
flirting with terrorism, and Washington is watching with increasing
alarm.
The substance of
these sensationalist claims consists largely of the fact that there
is an Arab minority in Venezuela as well as hundreds of thousands of
Colombian refugees. The fact that the Venezuelan government provides
identity documents to these peoplewhom the article insinuates
are somehow tied to terrorist groups by virtue of their nationalityis
branded as support for terrorism.
The suspicious
links between Venezuela and Islamic radicalism are multiplying,
the article declares. As evidence, it cites the case of a single Venezuelan
of Arab descent who was deported from the US in March 2002. When the
US sought to locate this individual for further questioning, they
were told by Venezuelan officials that he was not in the country.
The article provides no explanation as to why Venezuelas inability
to locate this person is any more suspicious than the US authorities
decision to release him before they were through with their interrogations.
The article concludes:
Given all that is happening in Chavezs Venezuela, some American
officials regret that terrorism is seen chiefly as a Middle East problem
and that the United States is not looking to protect its southern flank.
This amounts to a direct appeal for Washington to use the pretext of
terrorism to launch another predatory war, this time in
Latin America.
Chavezs populist
rhetoric and sharp criticism of the Bush administrations unprovoked
war on Iraq has earned Washingtons enmity, as has his friendly
ties with Castros Cuba. In the end, however, the sustained US
campaign against his government has the same essential roots as the
war against Iraq. Venezuela is the worlds fifth-largest oil exporter,
and the US ruling elite is determined to establish its undisputed hegemony
over the strategic energy resources that exist both there and in neighboring
Colombia.
It is not just the
petroleum reserves existing in Venezuela that concern Washington, but
also the Chavez governments behavior on the international petroleum
markets. Venezuela has pushed for raising oil prices and recently antagonized
the US administration by strenuously objecting to the seating of a delegation
from the US-controlled Iraqi Governing Council at a meeting of the Organization
of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). There are also indications
of US opposition to Venezuelas turn toward barter agreements with
other Latin American countries for petroleum deals and the use of euros
rather than dollars for other transactions.
In assessing the
validity of Chavezs concerns about assassination, Washingtons
international behavior is certainly relevant. In the run-up to the war
a year ago, Bushs White House spokesman declared that the problem
of Iraq could be solved with one bullet. The administration
has publicly lifted previous restrictions on CIA assassinations and
has carried out such political killings in both Yemen and Afghanistan,
claiming that its targets were terrorist suspects.
In Iraq, after carrying
out an illegal invasion and occupation of the country, the Bush administration
has repeatedly advocated the assassination of the countrys ousted
president, Saddam Hussein. Last July, it murdered his two sons and then
organized the international broadcast of the grisly images of their
corpses.
Meanwhile, the administration
has backed Israel in its policy of targeted assassinations
of Palestinian militants and leaders, and recently vetoed a resolution
condemning the Sharon regimes public threat to assassinate Palestinian
Authority president Yasser Arafat.
There is no reason
to doubt that elements within the Bush administration have ordered plans
drawn up for the realization of regime change in Venezuela
by means of assassination. In Iraq and elsewhere, this US government
has amply proven its readiness to resort to the most criminal methods
to realize its aims.