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CounterPunch
January
11, 2003
Reflections
On:
"The Coup Lacked Professionalism
By SAUL LANDAU
Sung to the Tune of the Marine Corps
Anthem
From the unpaved streets of Teheran
To the Guatemalan hills
We have punished those who disobey
We invade and then we kill
We will fight the corporate battles well
We will hold the poor at bay
We proudly bear our subversive tag
We're the U.S. CIA
(Lyrics by G. Bush, written for Skull and Bones, just for fun)
On Monday, April 15, CNN Spanish asked a Venezuelan
"expert" why the coup had failed.
"Lack of professionalism,"
he pompously replied. I thought he would mention Assistant Secretary
of State Otto Reich's lack of experience in organizing such affairs.
Reich has had ample experience as a professional in lying and
twisting information, in conspiring with terrorists, but not
much in the way of coup making.
Perhaps, I thought, the expert meant
that the CIA and Pentagon had employed a team of novices. But
CNN since identified the man as a professor, I speculated that
the expert implied that the conspirators should have gotten their
PhDs in coup making at the Fort Benning School of the Americas
before attempting their dirty deeds in Caracas. Latin American
military officials could qualify for such advanced and graduate
studies if they made a straight A average in their "how
to torture" courses.
Other CNN "analysts" offered
profound words like "this should teach Chavez that he can't
exclude minorities," or "people's patience wore thin
over his high handed methods."
Euphemisms, like "minority"
of course means the ultra rich; people losing "patience"
signifies that the Venezuelan millionaires and Washington national
security gang had had enough of Chavez' heresy about helping
the poor who are, unfortunately, always with us.
The mass media reached new depths in
misreporting the Caracas coup. Yet, during the few days before
the "prestige" press had to admit that its reporting,
comments and editorials did not coincide with the facts in Venezuela,
I, like millions of others through the world, suffered serious
feelings of desperation, depression and anger. Except for La
Jornada in Mexico and the Cuban press, which said this was a
military coup d'etat, the rest of the media accepted the line
that elected President Hugo Chavez had resigned after a powerful
military-civilian alliance had exerted its rightful authority.
Sure, some cynics had predicted the coup
on the day Venezuelans voters overwhelmingly chose Hugo Chavez
as their president in 1998. By invoking the term "Bolivarian
Revolution," conjuring up the image of the Latin American
liberator, Chavez signaled the onset of class war against the
small gang that has claimed the lion's share of Venezuela's wealth
and controls the political parties. This gang has ruled (looted)
the country for more than four decades.
Before Chavez pushed through a new Constitution
in 2000, he and his popular forces held and won a series of elections.
The wealthy and the corrupt, having lost at the ballot box, began
to claim that Chavez was anti democratic. They claimed the name
"civil society," included some elite union leaders,
businessmen's groups, sectors of the church, and of course the
owners of the media TV to try to present Chavez not as an elected
President, but as a dictator, probably a communist and certainly
a friend of terrorists. True, Chavez' popularity had declined
from more than 75% to less than 50% according to the usual pollsters.
But analysts did not ascertain whether the drop in his popularity
was due to his not delivering rapidly on some reform pledges
related to the betterment of the poor, or to the media hype that
painted him daily with antipathetic colors.
Skeptics repeated the dogma that the
United States would simply not permit the presence of another
case of serious disobedience in the Western Hemisphere. Cuba's
Fidel Castro, in the Guinness Book of Records for his 43 plus
years of naughtiness, had taught the national security gang in
Washington its lesson: no more mischievous behavior in our sphere
from the right, left or center.
Recall that arch reactionaries like the
Dominican Republic's Leonidas Trujillo, moderate reformers like
Brazil's Joao Goulart and of course radicals ranging from Chile's
Salvador Allende to the Nicaraguan Sandinistas all fell victim
to the CIA's punishing department. The covert tactics have included
assassinations, coups, economic destabilization and psychological
warfare; well, let's just call it state terrorism. In the case
of Manuel Noriega. CIA and DEA agent who turned disobedient,
President Bush I ordered the most expensive arresting force in
the world. Naturally, the patterns of CIA efforts to overthrow
popular governments also included attempts to influence the mass
media. In 1970, while making a film in Chile, I witnessed parts
of the "destabilization" operation that began even
before Salvador Allende won his plurality in September of
that year. After the election, as the CIA hatched plots to prevent
Allende's inauguration, I occasionally dropped into Santiago's
Hotel Carrera bar. Invariably, well-dressed Chileans would whisper
that Allende had advanced syphilis. Another would confide that
he was a homosexual, a sex tool of Castro, a love slave of Brezhnev,
intent on turning over control of Chile to Moscow.
I almost gagged at the grossness of the
anti-Allende cartoons in the right wing press (they controlled
the majority of the Chilean media). I observed a campaign of
planned violence, beginning with the October 1970 murder of Army
Chief General Rene Schneider, by Patria y Libertad, a gang of
fascists hired by the CIA. The "destabilization" continued
through Allende's three years, by paying some labor leaders to
call strikes in strategic sectors and by imposing economic hardships
on Chile. Above all came the constant, daily flood of lies and
distortion about the nature of the Allende government and its
agenda, which was to better the lot of the poor working people
urban and rural through legislation enacted under the existing
Constitution.
When the various and combined tactics
failed, the Chilean military aided by Washington resorted to
a bloody coup. The US Navy played a crucial role, monitoring
the traffic emanating from military bases so as to ensure that
the coup makers could quickly dispatch any Allende loyalists.
September 11, 1973 stands for many Chileans
as a day comparable to 9/11/01 for Americans. Chilean air force
jets fired rockets into the president's office building and tanks
blasted away at the revered structure as troops surrounded the
symbol of democratic government and then proceeded with a campaign
of terror: assassination, kidnapping, torture and exile for their
political opponents backed by Washington. After seventeen years
of Pinochet-led fascism, more than 3000 Chileans died at the
hands of the terrorists that Washington had helped into the seat
of government.
In 1976 and again in 1980 making films
in Jamaica, I had a déjà vu experience in the bar
of the Hotel Pegasus in Kingston. Prime Minister Michael Manley,
a Jamaican businessman told me, was homosexual, a Castro servant
and dying of venereal disease. Articles I had read a few years
earlier in Spanish in El Mercurio and other Chilean rags began
to appear in English in Kingston's Daily Gleaner. The violence
and labor unrest, the rumors, the flight of capital all the features
of the Chilean operation now appeared in Jamaica. In his first
term, Manley had befriended the poor, struck a friendship with
Castro, his neighbor, stood up for third world rights and rejected
the conditions the multi lateral lending agencies tried to impose
on Jamaica. He also refused Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's
request to condemn Cuba for sending troops to Angola in 1975.
Indeed, Manley supported the Cuban move. He paid for his independent
behavior.
I recalling sitting next to Manley in
July 1980 when police agents told him that they had just thwarted
an assassination attempt. Manley lost the 1980s election in an
atmosphere of fear and violence generated by a CIA-backed campaign
to "destabilize" his government. He had tried to pursue
an independent course, remove Jamaica from the dictates of the
free market missionaries of the lending agencies and the US Treasury.
He, like Allende, had designed legislation to aid the poor and
promote healthy not dependent development. Jamaicans feared that
if he won, the violence and destabilization would increase. Some
Manley supporters confessed to me that they had voted against
him because they feared that his victory would have meant more
violence and some thought that the CIA would surely assassinate
Joshua, as Manley's followers called him. In 1981, I visited
a friend working in the US Embassy in Jamaica and she told me
that on the night of the election after Manley had conceded to
the CIA favored candidate Edward Seaga, the CIA station chief
had invited the Embassy staff to a champagne party. He proudly
opened his monster-sized safe on whose walls he had pasted the
hundreds of articles, editorials and cartoons written or suggested
by CIA personnel that had appeared in the Jamaica press. The
Sandinistas in Nicaragua suffered a decade of undeclared war
from Washington, one that cost them the 1990 election and cost
Nicaraguans some 50,000 dead in a terrorist war in which criminals
in the highest offices of the United States circumvented Congressional
regulations to supply a mercenary army.
So, when I read on April 12 that Venezuelan
President Hugo Chavez had "resigned," I experienced
the shock of recognition, not surprise. For two years, Washington
had been sponsoring anti Chavez groups. Indeed, organizations
appeared in the United States to protect or defend Venezuelan
democracy. This alone would arouse suspicion. When the US and
its allied media runs consistently negative articles about Chavez
and ignore his accomplishments, one's suspicions grow stronger.
How many Americans knew that Chavez had
offered a democratic constitution that he had designed in order
to take institutional power from the traditional and corrupt
political parties, which had shared power for decades?
How many were aware of his land reforms
favoring the small and landless peasants. Almost no articles
appeared to applaud his energetic environmental programs. Similarly,
Chavez received scant press attention for his campaign against
corruption, the hideous institution that had seen Venezuelan's
political and business class steal fortunes from the poor. Unlike
his shady predecessors, Chavez invested in education for the
poor and tried to increase their share of wealth. Indeed, Chavez,
unlike his larcenous forerunners, struggled to get more oil revenues
for Venezuela and by taking a tough OPEC position he did succeed
in raising revenues. Chavez also committed heresy by opposing
the free market order. He used the government a sin to promote
employment and offer credits to the poor and to women. He stepped
on the toes of the rich when he insisted that they pay taxes.
The picture that the respected media
painted of Chavez however characterized him as something between
a populist fascist and communist dictator who ruled because he
adored power and practiced extreme media censorship. Western
feminists took little notice of Chavez' appointment of many women
to high posts. The cliché in the US and the sheepish media
was that Chavez was yet another power mad utopian who was destroying
his country's economy. Then came the coup, portrayed as a democratic
move to reestablish democracy and sanity and avoid inevitable
and bloody class war. Democrats like the state oil company executives
and their high paid union pals, business federation heads, rigid
clergymen and, of course, the media, declared themselves as constituting
civil society and, as such, allied themselves with the "good"
military officers to save democracy.
On April 11, the richest classes and
backed by Washington mobilized as many as 200,000 people who,
in the name of democracy, defended the integrity of Venezuela's
oil company, PDVSA, whose management Chavez had dismissed for
failure to use its resource equitably for the poorest Venezuelans.
Previously, the media had broadcast constant advertisements for
the impending march and telephone trees and peer pressure had
produced a massive outpouring of Chavez' enemies. And this minority,
representing the old and corrupt order, the current class structure,
marched for hours through busy streets in Caracas.
Then leaders of the march took a detour
from their stated route in order to confront a few thousand rallying
Chavez backers who had gathered in front of the President's office.
Predictably, the clash became physical. Shots rang out from police,
demonstrators and Chavez supporters. Snipers on buildings fired
into the crowds. People died. The plan, concocted between conspirators
with the full knowledge at the very least of the highest authorities
in Washington, went into effect. Military officials seized Chavez.
They apparently named or else God did Pedro Carmona, the business
official, as provisional president and the media dutifully reported
the events as if democracy were being restored instead of destroyed.
As the CNN anchor interviewed Carmona she resisted asking him
the obvious. The Venezuela people elected Chavez. By what authority
are you President? When Chavez supporters took to the streets
in the hundreds of thousands and, unlike in Chile, military units
swore loyalty to the elected president, the coup fell apart.
Lack of professionalism indeed! The people who voted for their
president decided not to allow the filthy rich and the Washington
interventionists to alter their destiny as they had done to so
many Latin American peoples.
One restored to the presidency, Chavez
commented on the media and diplomatic subterfuge. He could have
been referring to Otto Reich. "This is nothing new if you
understand that they are imitating Goebbels, who in Adolph Hitler's
time had the task of repeating a lie until it seemed true,"
he said.
I think it appropriate that hence forth
when Reich or his ilk mention the word "democracy"
at a press conference reporters worth their salt should audibly
pass gas or at least emit a Bronx cheer.
We will spread our lies around the world
In the press and TV screens
So our president won't have to use
The United States Marines
(G. Bush in an attempt to win a contest for best official, but
classified lyrics for CIA rallying anthem)
Saul Landau
is the Director of Digital Media and International Outreach Programs
for the College of Letters, Arts and Social Sciences California
State Polytechnic University, Pomona. He can be reached at: landau@counterpunch.org.
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