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| Analysis of Venezuala Countercoup national | miscellaneous | news report  Friday April 19, 2002 16:10 by dave lordan - swp dlordan at hotmail dot com Socialist analysis of events in venezuala Turmoil in Venezuela Coup foiled by popular rising By Chris Harman THE POOR of Venezuela defeated an attempted coup against the country's president, Hugo Chavez, last weekend. The attempt to remove Chavez was the work of the head of the employers' organisation, with the connivance of army generals, the head of the Catholic church, and even a corrupt trade union leader. They were defeated by a popular uprising in Venezuela's capital, Caracas. From the shanty towns on the hills that surround the city, thousands of people risked their lives to take to the streets and defy the coup. Some were rioting and looting, others besieged the presidential palace and main military camp, and others seized control of the country's main TV station. The New York Times reported that those rising up in defence of Chavez were "the vendors and factory workers, the maids and truckers". Their heroism split the army, broke the coup attempt, and saw Chavez restored to office. The coup's failure is also a serious setback for the gang around George W Bush in the US White House. The South American country is one the world's biggest oil producers, and it also supplies 15 percent of all US oil imports. At least some of those around Bush's White House seem to have encouraged the coup plotters. The coup attempt was prepared by Venezuela's employers, who seized on Chavez's appointment of new directors to the state oil company as a pretext to organise a shutdown of industry. The corrupt leader of Venezuela's main union federation claimed the shutdown was a "strike" since it had the support of middle and upper management, and called on workers to support it. Disgracefully, the International Federation of Free Trade Unions, to which Britain's TUC is affiliated, supported him in this. On the second day of the shutdown last week there was a mass anti-Chavez demonstration of the middle classes in Caracas. The protest clashed with a smaller demonstration of Chavez supporters, and shooting took place. Supporters of the coup within the armed forces then intervened, claiming they were "preventing bloodshed", and declared that Chavez had resigned. Carmona, head of the employers' organisation, declared himself president, closed down the country's congress, and began mass arrests of those believed to be Chavez supporters. What upset his plans and saw him removed from office was the reaction among the poor. The popular uprising saw sudden panic overtake many ruling class figures who had backed the coup only hours before. They feared civil war between different sections of the armed forces. They also feared a repetition of the great riots of 1989, the "Caracazo". On that occasion a spontaneous revolt of the country's poor against a government and International Monetary Fund cuts package was only put down after more than 1,000 deaths. The mere threat of a repetition of such turmoil was enough for the heads of the armed forces to force Carmona to resign and announce Chavez's reinstatement.
Struggle from below is key BY SUNDAY the forces that had plotted to overthrow Hugo Chavez were terrified by the sight of the poor protesting on the streets. They brought Chavez back in the hope they could persuade him to bring the poor under control again. Armed forces commanders who switched from supporting the coup to opposing it will now be putting pressure on Chavez. They are telling him the only way he can remain secure is by following policies of "moderation". In his first statement on restoration to office Chavez seemed to endorse that message himself. He announced he was convoking a "round table of national unity" involving "the Catholic and evangelical churches, the employers, the political parties and their leaders, the unions and the mass media". To those who had risked their lives going on the streets on his behalf he said, "I hear there has been rioting and looting. Let's return home and reflect upon events." It is a message that many who took to the streets will not want to accept. They saw how little concern the bosses' have for democracy or human rights. They are bitter at the newspapers and TV proprietors for conniving in the coup attempt. They want to be rid of those military commanders who did not immediately move against the coup. It is up to ordinary people to take action to challenge the power of those at the top of society while their structures of control are in disarray. This cannot be done by relying, as much of the left has done for three years, on Chavez to do things using the top-down method. It means direct struggle from below, run by workers and the poor themselves, not middle class military officers who can so easily switch sides. It also means being absolutely clear that attacking the wages and conditions of employed workers is no way to help the unemployed, the semi-employed and the rural poor. That only plays into the hands of the rich, the multinationals and the Bush gang in the White House.
Who is Hugo Chavez? HUGO CHAVEZ has upset the United States in his three years in office. He has campaigned to strengthen the OPEC organisation of oil producing countries, cultivated a friendship with Cuba's Fidel Castro, and refused to support the US- backed war against left wing guerrilla groups in neighbouring Colombia. Chavez has also upset Venezuela's rulers by promising to reduce the huge gap between rich and poor. His talk of thoroughgoing reform had led to an unexpected electoral victory for him in 1998, and massive popularity during his first year in office. His poll ratings have fallen in the last year. This is because his political method prevented him turning talk of reform into real improvements for the mass of people. Chavez is a career military officer who tried unsuccessfully to seize power in the early 1990s. His aim was to introduce a series of top-down reforms while leaving Venezuelan capitalism intact. After a spell in prison Chavez turned to the electoral road in order to introduce the same kind of changes. After his electoral victory he insisted he was in favour of the "mixed economy", not an onslaught on capitalism. When his reforms faced resistance he relied on the command structure of the armed forces to push them through, not a mobilisation of the mass of people. His measures antagonised the ruling class and the US government but did not produce the great social changes Chavez had promised. His top-down approach has also led him to attack the wages and conditions of employed workers, even while talking about help to the unemployed, the semi-employed and the rural poor. It was this that enabled union leader Alfredo Ramos to back the employers' shutdown of industry. In this way, Chavez's own policies played into the hands of those who wanted to overthrow him.
A defeat for the Bush gang THE ATTEMPTED coup came after a long series of denunciations of Chavez by the US government. In February the US State Department and the CIA expressed their "worry" over his activities. A US State Department official told the Washington Post, "Venezuela is in a very dangerous position. If Chavez does not arrange things quickly he will not complete his term in office." This suggests that at least a section of the US government encouraged the coup plotters. The New York Times spelled out Chavez's crimes in US eyes: "Visions of a united South America unshackled from the dominance of Washington's power," "Selling oil to Castro," "His not so tacit support for the Colombian rebels," and, "The potential threat he posed to thousands of American gas stations." "Above all," the paper argued, "the US wants stability in its backyard. Mr Chavez did not fit in with President Bush's vision of the century of the Americas." This is in line with the approach of the core group in the Bush administration, who hold that the US can do whatever it wants anywhere in the world. The Bush gang suffered a significant setback when the poor took to the streets of Caracas on Saturday. That should be good news for everyone opposed to US power. www.socialistworker.co.uk |
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Jump To Comment: 1 2 3U.S. Papers Hail Venezuelan Coup as Pro-Democracy Move
by FAIR
FAIR
April 18, 2002
LATIN AMERICA WATCH
When elements of the Venezuelan military forced president Hugo Chavez from office last week, the editorial boards of several major U.S. newspapers followed the U.S. government's lead and greeted the news with enthusiasm.
In an April 13 editorial, the New York Times triumphantly declared that Chavez's "resignation" meant that "Venezuelan democracy is no longer threatened by a would-be dictator." Conspicuously avoiding the word "coup," the Times explained that Chavez "stepped down after the military intervened and handed power to a respected business leader."
Calling Chavez "a ruinous demagogue," the Times offered numerous criticisms of his policies and urged speedy new elections, saying "Venezuela urgently needs a leader with a strong democratic mandate." A casual reader might easily have missed the Times' brief acknowledgement that Chavez did actually have a democratic mandate, having been "elected president in 1998."
The paper's one nod to the fact that military takeovers are not generally regarded as democratic was to note hopefully that with "continued civic participation," perhaps "further military involvement" in Venezuelan politics could be kept "to a minimum."
Three days later, Chavez had returned to power and the Times ran a second editorial (4/16/02) half-apologizing for having gotten carried away:
"In his three years in office, Mr. Chavez has been such a divisive and demagogic leader that his forced departure last week drew applause at home and in Washington. That reaction, which we shared, overlooked the undemocratic manner in which he was removed. Forcibly unseating a democratically elected leader, no matter how badly he has performed, is never something to cheer."
The Times stood its ground, however, on the value of a timely military coup for teaching a president a lesson, saying, "We hope Mr. Chavez will act as a more responsible and moderate leader now that he seems to realize the anger he stirred."
The Chicago Tribune's editorial board seemed even more excited by the coup than the New York Times'. An April 14 Tribune editorial called Chavez an "elected strongman" and declared: "It's not every day that a democracy benefits from the military's intervention to force out an elected president."
Hoping that Venezuela could now "move on to better things," the Tribune expressed relief that Venezuela's president was "safely out of power and under arrest." No longer would he be free to pursue his habits of "toasting Fidel Castro, flying to Baghdad to visit Saddam Hussein, or praising Osama bin Laden."
(FAIR called the Tribune to ask when Chavez had "praised" bin Laden. Columnist and editorial board member Steve Chapman, who wrote the editorial, said that in attempting to locate the reference for FAIR, he discovered that he had "misread" his source, a Freedom House report. Chapman said that if the Tribune could find no record of Chavez praising bin Laden, the paper would run a correction.)
The Tribune stuck unapologetically to its pro-coup line even after Chavez had been restored to power. Chavez's return may have come as "good news to Latin American governments that had condemned his removal as just another military coup," wrote the Tribune in an April 16 editorial, "but that doesn't mean it's good news for democracy." The paper seemed to suggest that the coup would have been no bad thing if not for "the heavy-handed bungling of [Chavez's] successors."
Long Island's Newsday, another top-circulation paper, greeted the coup with an April 13 editorial headlined "Chavez's Ouster Is No Great Loss." Newsday offered a number of reasons why the coup wasn't so bad, including Chavez's "confrontational leadership style and left-wing populist rhetoric" and the fact that he "openly flaunted his ideological differences with Washington." The most important reason, however, was Chavez's "incompetence as an executive," specifically, that he was "mismanaging the nation's vast oil wealth."
After the coup failed, Newsday ran a follow-up editorial (4/16/02) which came to the remarkable conclusion that "if there is a winner in all this, it's Latin American democracy, in principle and practice." The incident, according to Newsday, was "an affirmation of the democratic process" because the coup gave "a sobering wake-up call" to Chavez, "who was on a path to subverting the democratic mandate that had put him in power three years ago."
The Los Angeles Times waited until the dust had settled (4/17/02) to run its editorial on "Venezuela's Strange Days." The paper was dismissive of Chavez's status as an elected leader-- saying "it goes against the grain to put the name Hugo Chavez and the word 'democracy' in the same sentence"-- but pointed out that "it's one thing to oppose policies and another to back a coup." The paper stated that by not adequately opposing the coup, "the White House failed to stay on the side of democracy," yet still suggested that in the long run, "Venezuela will benefit" if the coup teaches Chavez to reach out to the opposition "rather than continuing to divide the nation along class lines."
The Washington Post was one of the few major U.S. papers whose initial reaction was to condemn the coup outright. Though heavily critical of Chavez, the paper's April 14 editorial led with an affirmation that "any interruption of democracy in Latin America is wrong, the more so when it involves the military."
Curiously, however, the Washington Post took pains to insist that "there's been no suggestion that the United States had anything to do with this Latin American coup," even though details from Venezuela were still sketchy at that time. The New York Times, too, made a point of saying in its April 13 editorial that Washington's hands were clean, affirming that "rightly, his removal was a purely Venezuelan affair."
Ironically, news articles in both the Washington Post and the New York Times have since raised serious questions about whether the U.S. may in fact have been involved. Neither paper, however, has returned to the question on its editorial page.
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Latin America's Dilemma: Otto Reich's Propaganda is Reminiscent of the Third Reich
LATIN AMERICA WATCH
The Bush administration is engaging in damage control for their questionable involvement in the failed 2 day coup against the democratically elected government of President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. Alarmingly, the ominous Otto Reich is emerging as a key player in the administration's role in the failed coup attempt to replace Chavez with an oligarchy of business, military and wealthy elites. Scrambling to distance themselves from the botched overthrow of the democratically elected Chavez government, the Bush administration admitted that Mr. Reich called the coup leader, Mr. Carmona, and asked him not to dissolve the National Assembly because it would be a "stupid thing to do". The next day the administration revised their story and said Reich only asked our ambassador to relay that message to Carmona.
The New York Times noted that the disclosure raised questions as to whether Mr. Reich and other administration officials were stage-managing the takeover by Mr. Carmona. Although the Bush administration admits their desire to replace the Chavez government because of its opposition to U.S. policies and friendship with countries like Cuba and Iran, they now insist that they were not involved in the armed coup. The administration also admits talking with various Venezuelan officials prior to the coup including General Lucas Romero Rincon, head of the Venezuelan military, who met with Pentagon official Rogelio Pardo-Maurer, a former close associate of the U. S. supported Contra forces in Nicaragua.
Mr. Reich's propensity to pernicious propaganda has once again emerged from events surrounding the coup. According to the New York Times, Reich told congressional aides that the administration had received reports that "foreign paramilitary forces"-suspected to be Cuban-were involved in the bloody suppression of anti-Chavez demonstrators, in which at least 14 people were killed in Venezuela. Reich, a former U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela and lobbyist with ties to Mobil Oil in Venezuela, further told the Congressional staffers that Mr. Chavez had meddled with the historically independent state oil company, provided haven to Colombian guerillas, and bailed out Cuba with preferential rates on oil.
Reich is a right-wing Cuban-American obsessed with overthrowing Fidel Castro's regime and is also a big political supporter of President Bush's brother and Florida Governor Jeb Bush, who needs strong support from Cubans in Florida in his re-election bid this year. Reich, along with fellow Reagan administration cohorts, Elliott Abrams and John Negroponte, were discredited for their covert activities and false assertions when the United States intervened in Central America in the 1980's and '90s, but have been re-instated in prominent positions in the second Bush administration. They abhor Latin-American governments that are elected by the poor and working class people, like the Chavez government in Venezuela and the deposed Sandinista government in Nicaragua.
Abrams was convicted of lying to Congress about the Iran-Contra scandal, but has been remarkably rehabilitated and recycled back into the second Bush administration as head of the "Office of Democracy and Human Rights". Negroponte was appointed as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations last September in spite of being implicated as a friend of Honduran death squad leaders who committed atrocities against the people of Honduras while he was the U.S. Ambassador there.
The most recent resurrection of this trio of right-wing renegades is the appointment of Otto Reich as Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs. President Bush used the tricky recess appointment procedure to bypass potential hostile and damaging questioning by Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The Senators had some interesting examples of Mr. Reich's malfeasance to ask him about when he was the director of the State Department's Office of Public Diplomacy(OPD).
On September 30, 1987 a Republican appointed comptroller general of the U.S. found that Reich had done things as director of the OPD that were "prohibited, covert propaganda activities, "beyond the range of acceptable agency public information activities...". The same report said Mr. Reich's operation violated "a restriction on the State Department's annual appropriations prohibiting the use of federal funds for publicity or propaganda purposes not authorized by Congress." Reich used the covert propaganda to demonize the democratically elected Sandinista government of Nicaragua and establish the Contras as fearless freedom fighters. The purpose was to make the U.S. public afraid enough of the Sandinistas to get Congress to fund the Contras directly. The Boland Amendment was passed by Congress in 1982 that prohibited U.S. funds from being used to overthrow the Nicaraguan government. Meanwhile, the Contras were being illegally armed by the Reagan administration via the Iran-Contra arms deal.
On the night of Reagan's re-election in 1984, Reich's office put out the news that "intelligence sources"revealed that Soviet MIG fighter jets were arriving in Nicaragua and Andrea Mitchell interrupted election night coverage on NBC to give the phony report. This resembles the Joseph Goebbel's fabrication that Polish troops had attacked German soldiers to give the Third Reich an excuse to launch the Nazi blitzkrieg into Poland to
begin World War II in 1939. Other Reich prevarications given to media
sources included: Nicaragua had been given chemical weapons by the Soviets, according to the Miami Herald; and leaders of the Sandinistas were involved in drug trafficking, according to Newsweek magazine.
In Latin American countries the United States has a history of doing business and siding with wealthy oligarchies of business, professional and military elites who tend to be lighter skinned people of European descent against the poor and working class composed mainly of darker skinned, indigenous people and those of African descent. The second Bush administration appears to be adhering to this tradition with gusto. With Otto Reich churning out the hate and fear, it is a safe bet to predict that President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela will be increasingly presented as the devil incarnate and his government as evil, anti-American terrorists. Mr. Reich will dish out the poisonous propaganda to every news source that covers the Bush administration's Latin American policy. Joseph Goebbels would be proud.
Tom Turnipseed is an attorney, writer and civil rights activist in Columbia, South Carolina. www.turnipseed.net
Is there any truth in the claim that employers actually paid workers to go on strike? (the strike before the coup ,that is)