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These two articles, which constitute the second part of a three-part series of e-mails, were both posted on April 10, just two days before the coup. The first is from The Irish Times and the second from VHeadline.Com.
http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/opinion/2002/0410/3888033530OP10VINCENT.html
http://www.vheadline.com/0204/11768.asp
Thorn in the side of new world order
By Vincent Browne
The Irish Times
April 10, 2002Hugo Chávez may have been in Bertie Ahern's mind when he visited George Bush in Washington before St Patrick's Day. Bertie swore obedience to American world hegemony, to its "war on terrorism" and to everything it entailed.
He didn't quite put it like that but that was the message and George Bush acknowledged it as such. The President of Venezuela, the most "yankified" of South American states, had failed to offer appropriate obeisance.
Chávez has characterised the US bombardment of Afghanistan as responding to "terror with terror". He brandished photographs of Afghan children killed by US bombs and called for an end to "the slaughter of the innocents".
The US response to this impertinence was to send its ambassador, Donna Hrinak, to see Chávez. They had what a US official said (according to the Washington Post of February 23rd) "a very difficult meeting". She told the democratically elected president (again according to the Washington Post) "to keep his mouth shut on these important issues".
Washington doesn't like Chávez for other reasons. First he has had the temerity to invite Fidel Castro to Caracas. He also visited Libya, Iran and Iraq, all members, with Venezuela, of OPEC, through which he arranged for a substantial increase in the price of oil (the Americans were especially indignant over his visit to Saddam Hussein).
The US administration has recently expressed worry about Chávez's democratic credentials. He became president in 1998 after he won 58 per cent of the popular vote. In 2000, under a new constitution, he won a higher percentage vote and his party won more than 80 per cent of the seats in a new congress and nobody has questioned the validity of those elections. While protesting its respect for democracy in Venezuela, there are suspicions that the US may have inspired three generals in the Venezuelan army to call for the resignation of Chávez.
VENEZUELA is probably the richest country in South America because of its oil - it is by far the most important source of oil for the US economy, yet it has managed to squander the riches it has brought in the last 40 years.
This came about in large part through inefficiencies of State-run industrial companies and corruption. The legacy has been vast expanses of motorways, ugly high-rise office and apartment complexes, massive wealth for a tiny minority, gigantic shopping malls, the ubiquitous rash of international hotels (the Four Seasons group has opened a new hotel in Caracas even more ostentatious than that in Ballsbridge), and vast shanty towns clinging to the hills in and around Caracas, housing millions of impoverished people.
The economy is in ruins with huge debts to international banks. The IMF and World Bank have insisted on what Chávez has called "savage neo-liberal" policies - public expenditure cutbacks, privatisations and deregulation. These policies were enforced in the 1990s and caused even more misery to the millions of Venezuela's poor (the population is 22 million of whom six million are in Caracas and of whom 80 per cent are poor).
Chávez, formerly an army officer, staged an unsuccessful coup in 1992 and was jailed for three years. He entered politics on his release and won the presidency in 1998, having promised to sweep away the old corrupt political system, a new constitution and a new deal for the impoverished, including land reform, health care and education.
He has had enacted a new constitution, approved by a massive popular mandate. The former two main political parties have been almost extinguished and he has instituted a series of radical redistributative measures, including land-reform and relocation of shanty-town dwellers to rural areas. He has taken control of the state-owned petroleum corporation, Petróleos de Venezuela, he says, in an effort to ensure that oil riches are maximised and are used for the advancement of his social agenda (last week he announced a 20 per cent increase in the public sector minimum wage which is the equivalent to €200 a month).
HE PLACED on the board of this state-owned oil corporation people who reflected his political outlook. Senior managers in the corporation and trade unions rebelled. Some of the managers have been fired for refusing to carry out the policies of the new board. Thousands of the workers have gone on strike and output has slumped.
There have been street protests against him with calls for his resignation and the newspapers have reported his popularity ratings are running about 30 per cent. The privately owned media are virulently and almost unanimously hostile to Chávez.
There is a further problem. The civil war in neighbouring Colombia is threatening to spill over into Venezuela. Colombia says that a FARC camp is based inside the Venezuelan border and that Chávez is supporting the rebel movement. Chávez, whose ideological sympathies would align with FARC, has denied supporting any rebel movement (he has been accused of supporting Peruvian and Bolivian terrorist groups as well) and has arranged for reporters to be flown over the border region to show there are no terrorist camps inside Venezuela. Nevertheless this issue particularly may be the guise under which the Americans intervene, whether covertly or otherwise. Chávez is too irksome a threat to the new world order and perhaps Bertie Ahern was right to keep his mouth shut.
Editorial © by VHeadline.com Editor Roy S. Carson Will corruption and injustice
gain a stranglehold over
Venezuela's misery again?VHeadline.com : Wednesday, April 10, 2002 -- With new-found democracy and legitimacy now fighting for its survival on political barricades in Caracas, the question must surely be asked if truth and legitimacy is to be allowed to win the day ... or, if Venezuela will be plunged into yet another four decades of corruption and misery, where more than 80% of its population has already been subjugated by political manipulators and corrupt cliques, whose percentage is in the lower single digits, but appears to have all the mouth in the current media war against the democratically-elected government of President Hugo Chavez Frias.
The question is not, or should not, be focused on the personality of Chavez Frias, who may alternately be liked or disliked according to the flavor of the day. The greater truth is that the President has been elected, by a democratic majority, to serve the Venezuelan people, and he has the clear backing of a majority in the democratically-elected National Assembly (AN), which was itself constituted by a reform Constitutional Assembly, which was itself ratified by an overwhelming majority of the Venezuelan people in a National Referendum.
Chavez Frias chooses to call his specifically Venezuelan brand of UK Tony Blair's "Third Way" socialism a "peaceful revolution" ... it is a long and tedious battle from the corrupt abuses and blacker excesses of old discredited Accion Democratica (AD) and Christian Socialist (Copei), where suppression of the news and reporting freedoms were a rule of thumb and few, if any, Venezuelan journalists would then have dared to say even a fraction of what is being said today in a continuous spew of anti-government rhetoric window-dressed as freedom of expression.
What, however, is now at odds is a travesty of everything that has been fought for as freedom.
The very manipulators and politically corrupt that festered their way through the last forty years of Venezuela's decline, are venting their venom against the Chavez Frias government with a newly-discovered moral rectitude that belies their own deceit.
Corrupt executives and managers who have been swindling the State-owned oil corporation, Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) out of $ millions for years, are attempting to usurp the government's lawful right to decide.
They're joined by corrupt union officials, typified by the Confederation of Trade Unions (CTV) president (?) Carlos Ortega, who has stubbornly refused to hand in documents to establish legitimacy under the Venezuelan Constitution, which mandated democratic elections to decide trade union representation after decades of unionized corruption and political gerrymandering.
Yet these people are taken seriously as Venezuela struggles through its rebirth into recognizable democracy...
It would have been so easy for military-educated Lt. Col. (ret.) Hugo Chavez Frias to team up with his 1992 failed coup comrade Lt. Col. (ret.) Francisco Arias Cardenas to replace the doddery Presidency of Dr. Rafael Caldera with a military regime. God knows, Venezuela was ready for it after years of "pretend democracy" under the likes of Jaime Lusinchi and Carlos Andres Perez...
Any self-respecting reader will immediately recognize that, for a country ... any country ... to thrive and succeed, the Rule of Law must replace the assorted banditry of political thugs and miscreants.
AD and Copei have been thoroughly discredited and, although they twist and turn and pretend to be something else than their rotten core, their intention is clearly to reinstate the corruption and injustices that preceded their demise in December 1998 General Elections.
Today's question is not whether Chavez Frias will stand or fall...
The question is if democracy will prevail ... or if Venezuela will, once again, be plunged into thoughtless and unfeeling misery for another half century ... or, this time around, perhaps more? --- End Message ---
