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CounterPunch
December
6, 2002
Satan Cries,
"Take Aim"
Going After Hugo Chavez
by RON JACOBS
On November 25, 2002, the Washington Times (which
seems to have the inside word on the Bush White House) ran a
story that attempted to tie the Venezuelan government of Hugo
Chavez to the FARC and ELN revolutionary forces in Colombia.
In the story, a couple "dissident" military officers
claimed that the Venezuelan military has turned a blind eye to
FARC encampments inside Venezuelan territory and has even given
arms to some FARC units. The so-called "dissidents"
are military men who are loyal to groups within Venezuela that
engineered a failed coup last April and who appear to be trying
to organize another one (with the assistance of the United States).
They have a vested interest in destroying the Chavez government.
Since they can't do it via democratic means, they hope to do
it through military ones. The Washington Times story was important
for two reasons-it seemed to be a straightforward piece of propaganda
released by some Pentagon or CIA propaganda office, and it is
an attempt to tie Venezuela's popularly elected government to
groups designated "terrorist" by the US government.
By making this association, the way is further cleared for some
kind of US military intervention that would facilitate a "regime
change" in Venezuela.
Add to this the so-called "general
strike" taking place in Venezuela as I write this piece
and you have a textbook counterinsurgency operation. The purpose
of this operation is to replace the left-leaning government of
Chavez with a government handpicked by Washington and its allies
in the Venezuelan ruling elites that were thrown out when Chavez
won his first election. According to eyewitness reports and articles
in non-US papers, the "strike" is less than successful.
Over fifty percent of businesses remain open in the urban core
of most Venezuelan cities and the percentage increases the further
one gets from that core. Most factories are running at 100%.
Even the oil industry is functioning. This is in spite of the
administrators of Ecopetrol, the consortium that runs the industry,
who "represent an elite, as the company has become since
the early 1980s a 'state within the state,'"according to
Steve Ellner, co-editor of the book Venezuelan Politics in the
Chavez Era: Class, Polarization and Conflict, scheduled to be
released in January 2003. This administrative group has been
consistently anti-Chavez, mostly because he is determined to
end the corruption that was rampant amongst the consortium's
administration and because he wants to use oil revenues to provide
for the working class and poor of Venezuela.
Colin Powell just returned from a visit
the first week of December 2002 to Bogota, Colombia, where he
promised the recently elected president of some of that country's
people even more military aid. "We are firmly committed
to President Uribe and his new national security strategy,"
Powell said. "We are going to work with our Congress to
provide additional funding for Colombia." As noted in several
media sources, close to $100 million of the money already requested
for the Colombian military in the next fiscal year will go directly
to protecting an oil pipeline in Colombia that is used by Occidental
Petroleum of Los Angeles. In addition to this money, 60 members
of the US Special Forces and intelligence operatives will be
sent to help train Colombian forces guard the pipeline. NarcoNews,
an independent news source that has covered the so-called drug
war and its effects in Latin America, reported on October 25,
2002 that, "Two battalions of US Marine Jungle Expeditionary
Forces have recently received deployment orders for insertion
into Colombia this coming February, 2003." According to
the report, the job of these soldiers will be to kill all the
high officers of the FARC. It is hoped that such an operation
would then throw the guerrilla into disarray. During his visit,
Powell hardly mentioned the right-wing paramilitaries, despite
the fact that they are responsible for close to 70% of all the
deaths in Colombia's civil war. Perhaps this omission is due
to a plan currently being put into place by Uribe that essentially
legalizes most of the paramilitaries, turning them into "civil
defense" forces who would work closely with informants amongst
the civilian population to identify and arrest or kill leftist
guerrillas and their sympathizers. As history has proven, this
means that labor unionists, social workers, progressive clergymen
and women, and other social activists will bear the brunt of
this "civil defense."
Meanwhile, much of the rest of Latin
America is turning away from its northern neighbor. Left populist
candidates have recently won election in Brazil and Ecuador.
Argentina continues to reorganize itself in the wake of the economic
collapse and rebellion of last winter. Some of the reorganization
is your standard governmental attempts to reassert its authority.
Much of the reorganization is taking place on a truly grassroots
level, with neighborhood and workers organizations taking over
daily operations of food distribution, education, and transportation.
What will happen in the future in Argentina and elsewhere is
anybody's guess. One can be certain that the current administration
in Washington is working overtime trying to figure out ways to
subvert the democratic motion to our south. After all, democracy
flies straight in the face of their plans for a complete corporate
takeover of the region via the FTAA and Plan de Puebla Panama.
Ron Jacobs
lives in Burlington, VT. He can be reached at: rjacobs@zoo.uvm.edu
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