8-26-05, 1:45 pm
The Chávez Code: Cracking U.S. Intervention in Venezuela Eva Golinger Havana, Cuban Book Institute, 2005
Prior to Bush, Golinger remarks, the US was fairly indifferent to the Chávez administration. It was the extremism and the violent and irrational response of the Bush administration to the September 11th attacks that signaled a new direction in US foreign policy. Chávez opposed a series of Bush administration policy standards: the unilateral US 'war on terrorism,' free trade agreements, US intervention in Latin America and so on.
But most ultra right elements in the US simply didn’t like the fact that President Chávez wanted to use his nation’s wealth to provide health care for children, feed starving people, create jobs, build homes for the homeless, and give the people a say in how their government runs. So, in the spring of 2001, the international arm of the Republican Party, the International Republican Institute (IRI), took a grant from the administration to step up its efforts to organize and mobilize an anti-Chávez opposition party. Where they had failed before, they gathered new momentum as 2001 wore on.
And despite their claims to being non-partisan, IRI funders met only with virulent anti-Chávez opposition leaders, many of whom would later be implicated in the illegal coup of 2002. Soon other US entities got involved: National Democratic Institute, American Center for International Labor Solidarity (AFL-CIO), and USAID, among others. These entities were either directly or indirectly funded by Congress, the administration, the CIA, and the notorious National Endowment for Democracy. Between 2001 and April 2003, the amounts distributed to opposition groups in Venezuela totaled about $4 million, more than three-quarters of which was distributed to opposition groups in the five months before the illegal coup.
Between 2000 and the present, close to $30 million US taxpayer dollars have been spent to fund opposition groups, mainly by CIA sources. More than two-thirds of this amount has been spent since the coup.
What is extraordinary about this open intervention in Venezuela’s politics is that it is hypocritical. If a non-US entity were to give money to a political candidate in the US, it would be illegal and the politician that accepted the money would be characterized as untrustworthy and probably up to something against US interests. But not so in the case of Venezuela, I guess.
Such a large amount of US government funding to Chávez’s opposition gave it the courage to look for extra-legal means to overturn the policies of the Chávez administration. Despite the fact that by late 2001 Chávez’s policies and the political leadership of the Bolivarian movement and its allies had the support of the overwhelming majority of the people, the US-backed anti-Chávez opposition declared themselves willing to undo Venezuelan democracy, its law, and its legitimate government in order to preserve their elite business interests.
The opposition mainly centered around private corporate leaders, Venezuela’s collaborationist trade union leadership, the corporate media, the Caracas police, and several high-level military officers who had been trained at US schools of terror such as the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia.
In December 2001, using his Constitutional authority, President Chávez issued 49 laws that restructured Venezuela’s oil industry and gave the government authority to expropriate unused private land with compensation in order to provide land to small farmers. The oil law brought the state oil monopoly under the control of the administration rather than a few corporate leaders who systematically profited from Venezuela’s oil industry at the expense of the whole people to whom the industry ostensibly belonged.
As a response and using US aid, opposition leaders declared a business strike. The strike was a failure, but it showed the opposition had come along way with the help of the US.
Events began to move swiftly after that. In late February 2002, the US ambassador was replaced by Charles Shapiro whose résumé with the State Department shows that he has worked only in countries where US-backed coups or other political violence have been the mainstays of US policy.
That same month, three top Venezuelan military officials, all trained in the US, threatened military revolt. The Catholic Church declared its distaste for Chávez, and the opposition parties funded by the US organized several demonstrations of hundreds of people in Caracas.
By March, secret CIA documents, discovered through Freedom of Information Act requests by Golinger, show that it began to discuss what kind of transitional government was needed after Chávez’s ouster. The CIA regarded the opposition as disunited and in need of more support. Within days of this assessment, hundreds of thousands of dollars found their way into the pockets of anti-Chávez labor leaders, business-oriented opposition leaders and so on through the National Endowment for Democracy and other US entities.
By early March, US embassy officials praised the growing unity of the anti-Chávez opposition and its proposal for a post-Chávez transition, despite the fact that his presidential term wasn’t scheduled to end for three years.
In the first days of April, the CIA predicted a coup and pointed to conspiracies by the military, top police, and opposition leaders to topple Venezuela’s duly elected government.
Using US funds, opposition groups began staging demonstrations in Caracas. In response, pro-Chávez groups organized much larger demonstrations in defense of the President.
Violence broke out on April 11th. Around three o’clock, the Caracas Metropolitan Police, whose leadership was staunchly anti-Chávez, began shooting marchers, both pro- and anti-Chávez. That these killings were designed as provocations and were part of the larger conspiracy is evidenced by taped television statements from anti-Chávez military leaders who called on Chávez to resign, citing the shootings. The taped messages were made prior to the shootings.
Immediately, the corporate media blamed pro-Chávez marchers for the violence. Videotape footage of two men in the pro-Chávez demonstration shooting pistols from a bridge was played over and over again on the corporate media. What the news reports didn’t show was that the two men on the videotape began returning the fire of the Metro Police only 45 minutes after the last anti-Chávez demonstrator was killed. They also failed to discuss the fact that ballistics analysis of bullets found in the bodies of those killed matched police issue weapons, not the pistols carried by the two men on the bridge. The videotape also did not show that the two pro-Chávez gunmen were firing into a street whose only occupant was a Metro Police armored car that had initiated the exchange of fire.
By the time the videotape of the two men had been made, everyone on the streets of Caracas knew that it was police sharpshooters strategically placed on rooftops and in streets surrounding the demonstrations who had fired on the demonstrators. In all, the Metro Police killed 19 people and wounded over 80.
Nevertheless, the corporate media lied. The US government repeated the claims that blamed the violence on Chávez and his supporters. And the US-funded opposition stepped up and demanded Chávez’s resignation.
After refusing to resign, Chávez was kidnapped along with several of his ministers and hidden at various military locations.
Again the corporate media reported that Chávez had resigned and had dismissed his cabinet, the line the coup plotters told them to tell. On April 12th, pro-US business leader Pedro Carmona, who had met with State Department officials and other Bush administration people as well as with IMF officials just days and weeks before the illegal coup, took power and declared the reforms and policies of the Chávez government to be null and void.
Control over Venezuela’s oil was returned to the oligarchs, or so they thought.
The response from the people of Venezuela was swift and strong. Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets to demand the return of Chávez. Chávez was quickly found and brought back to the capital where the people hailed his return.
In an implicit admission of their guilt, coup leaders in the military, the police, and the business community left the country to escape justice. Meanwhile, Golinger reveals, the US government tried to cover its tracks by transmitting instructions to its representatives in Venezuela on how to deny or hide the fact that the Bush administration had had such a strong hand in the coup.
Since Chávez was restored on April 14th, US entities have helped fund strikes and sabotage in the oil sector, additional anti-Chávez violence, and a failed recall referendum. It is time for Bush administration intervention in Venezuela to end, and for friendly relations that would benefit working people here and in Venezuela to be reestablished.
Golinger’s book is a fast-paced read with reams of documents as evidence. Get this book if you need to know the truth about the events of April 2002. You can find out more information about the book and how to get it at .
--Joel Wendland is managing editor of Political Affairs and may be reached at jwendland@politicalaffairs.net.
