3-09-06, 8:57 am

The US will not succeed in destroying another liberation process in Latin America. On Thursday 16 February, 2006, US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, called for an ‘international united front’ against Venezuela which she justified on the grounds that its strong relationship with Cuba represented ‘a particular danger to the region.’ State Secretary Rice charged Venezuela with ‘attempting to influence neighbours away from democratic processes’ adding that the United States is ‘talking with others to try and make certain that there is a kind of united front against some of the kind of things that Venezuela gets involved in’ and stated that the State Department is, “working with responsible governments, even responsible governments of the left, like the Brazilian government or the Chilean government, to try and counter these [Venezuelan] influences.” --Venezuela Information Centre, 21st February 2006

Cesar Amorim, Brazil’s Foreign Affairs Minister, and Ricardo Lagos, President of Chile, have already publicly denied any participation or collaboration in such ‘united front’ against Venezuela both making strong statements as to the sturdy bonds of friendship and collaboration at regional level their respective countries have with the government of Venezuela. Besides, Lagos stated that ‘juridical limbos’ such as the U.S. Guantanamo Detention Camp ought not to exist. Such public rebuttals of Rice by Brazil and Chile, based on the fact that she implied that the neo-conservative US. administration already had their cooperation in the said united front smacks of desperation but particularly of amateurishness.   Rice made the statement to the House of Representatives International Relations Committee, chaired by Dan Burton (R-IN), - one of the sponsors of the Helms-Burton bill against Cuba which, violating every basic principle of international law, unilaterally applies economic sanctions against companies and executive directors of companies who invest in the Caribbean island. On occasion of U.S. Secretary for Hemispheric Affairs Thomas Shannon’s report to the House International Relations Committee’s Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, on 17 November, 2005, report which prepared the ground for the current U.S. offensive against Venezuela, Dan Burton, chairing the proceedings is on record saying: that he hoped the U.S. could initiate some sort of constructive dialogue so that “if everything goes to hell…the world will see that the U.S. has gone the extra step…and then what has to be done will be done.”   Ever since Shannon’s 17 November, 2005 report key members of the Bush administration have launched intemperate verbal attacks against the Bolivarian government of Venezuela without ever bothering to provide a shred of evidence to substantiate their feverish allegations.   On 2 February, 2006, Donald Rumsfeld, in characteristic fashion compared Chavez to Hitler because they both had been elected to office, and added that Chavez was guilty of the offence of ‘working closely with Fidel Castro, Evo Morales and others.’ Simultaneously, John Negroponte, U.S. Director of National Intelligence, with an astonishingly twisted logic, reported to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence of the U.S. Congress that Chavez’s electoral victories which gave him majorities in the Venezuela parliament and other democratic institutions represented a threat to democracy (sic!), and proceeded, Rumsfeld-style and against all evidence to the contrary, to accuse Chavez of scaling back on anti-narcotics cooperation with the U.S. and charged Chavez of the following: “Increased oil revenues have allowed Chavez to embark on an activist foreign policy in Latin America that includes providing oil at favorable repayment rates to gain allies, using newly created media outlets to generate support for his Bolivarian goals, and meddling in the internal affairs of his neighbors by backing particular candidates for elective office.” As it is publicly known, the Chavez administration has offered and given oil at preferential prices to the poor in various states in the U.S. itself, and, however reluctantly, the Bush administration has not been able to resist such an offer probably because, unlike Chavez, it is incapable of looking after its own poor. Such generous offer does not amount to interference but to generosity because it stems from the Bolivarian ethos. Needless to say that Negroponte did not feel the need to provide any evidence to substantiate his allegations of Venezuelan interference against its neighbours. And, with regards to Negroponte’s charge that Chavez is scaling back Venezuela’s anti-narcotics cooperation with the U.S., just last January, Venezuelan and U.S. officials approved a new anti-drug agreement and there have been record seizures of drug destined for the U.S. by Venezuelan anti-narcotic forces thus belying Negroponte allegations. The previous cooperation had been suspended by Venezuela amid allegations of U.S. spying.  
Also on February 2, 2006, President Hugo Chavez told the U.S. embassy that he was expelling its naval attaché from the country for spying. Previously, on January 26, the Venezuelan Vice-President, José Vicente Rangel, had already made public that 25 Venezuelan military personnel were suspected of passing state secrets to the U.S. through its embassy. U.S. Naval Attaché, Captain John Correa was named as the man through which the information was being passed. Correa’s expulsion was followed immediately by a retaliatory U.S. move by declaring the chief of staff to the Venezuelan ambassador in the U.S., Jenny Figueredo, to be “persona non grata,” a diplomatic term traditionally used for expelling embassy staff. Normally, governments whose diplomats are charged with wrongdoing demand explanations and evidence that may have justified the expulsion. Not in this case, thus the expulsion of Figueredo, was purely an act of political retaliation with no justification whatsoever, something admitted publicly by State Department spokesperson Sean McCormack who said, “We don't like to get into tit-for-tat games like this with the Venezuelan government, but they initiated this and we were forced to respond,” clarifying that unlike Correa, Figueredo was not being accused of any wrongdoing. Last year in December, there was another instance of U.S. subversive activity against Venezuela when an official of the United States Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) whose last name is Thomas attended a meeting in Colombia between Venezuelan dissident ex-military officers and Colombian military Although the DAS (Colombia’s Intelligence Service) first denied the meeting had taken place, Colombia’s President Alvaro Uribe, confirmed it and condemned it publicly.   And in what appears to be a well synchronized campaign, on February 3, 2006, Pat Robertson in interview to Fox News again called for the assassination on Chavez saying that ‘rather than to go to war [against Venezuela]’ the ‘world would be better without [Chavez].’ Unlike the first time Robertson called for the assassination of Chavez, this time round not one single utterance has come from the any U.S. authority to distance the administration from such a criminal act, let alone condemn it.   This intensification of U.S. aggression against Venezuela since last year comes in the wake of concerted efforts on the part of high U.S. government pressure on Russia, Spain and Brazil not to sell defensive military equipment to Venezuela, which includes patrol boats, fighter planes and other smaller items. The U.S. vetoed the sale arguing that the planes have parts that use U.S. technology. The Spanish government rejected US pressure and agreed to sell the equipment, but EADS-CASA, the company that manufactures them said on 7 February, 2006, that it would be economically unviable to find substitutes for the U.S.-made parts. One can only imagine the pressure that EADS-CASA may have been under to draw this conclusion. Venezuela’s arms purchase was going to generate 1,000 new jobs in Spain which due to U.S. aggression will now be lost. Similar pressure is being exerted on Brazil not to sell the Super Tucano plane fighters to Venezuela. Mendaciously, U.S. officials have also argued that selling military equipment to Venezuela might trigger an arms race in Latin America with destabilizing consequences for the region when it is well known that U.S. military sales to the region is unsurpassed.

And as an important cog in a bigger mechanism there came Tony Blair’s statement to the House of Commons last Wednesday 8 February, 2006, in which, very much in right-wing U.S. Republican style, he just parroted the neo-conservative line that Venezuela ‘should abide by the rules of the international community’ and referred to Venezuela’s strong alliance with Cuba as evidence of Venezuela’s international misbehaviour. And mimicking U.S. neo-conservative charges against Venezuela, Blair furnished not a shred of evidence to substantiate his allegations.   On the same day, 8 February, 2006, President Bush’s proposed 2007 budget asked for enhanced Voice of America (VOA) coverage to Venezuela which led Venezuela’s Ministry of Communication and Information to express its deep concern about this intensification of the neo-conservative propaganda against his country in what amounts to a gross interference in the internal affairs of this sovereign nation. VOA is fully funded by the U.S. government and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is one of its eight board members.

On 15 February, 2006, John Bolton, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, replying to a reporter's question on the possibility that Venezuela was seeking a Security Council seat and the U.S. was making the demarches to oppose such a bid, stated: 'The US, traditionally, does not say what countries it votes for, but I don't think there is any mistake that Venezuela would not contribute to the effective operation of the Security Council.  I think we can see that from their actions in the past six months in the General Assembly, which have been unhelpful.'

It is evident that Condoleezza Rice’s statement to the House of Representatives International Relations Committee, on 16 February, 2006 is the latest installment on an ongoing furious offensive against the Bolivarian Revolution which the Bush administration has embarked upon in order to discredit and destabilize the sovereign Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela with the aim of ‘regime change’, but which, in the short term seeks to inflict another assault against the people of Venezuela’s democratic rights by seeking to discredit the presidential elections scheduled to take place in December 2006.

VIC regrets and rejects the tone and content of U.S. State Secretary charges against Venezuela of representing a threat or a force of instability in Latin America and condemns her efforts, on behalf of her administration to isolate, destabilize, and discredit the government of President Chavez. Given the April 2002 coup against the democratically-elected government of Venezuela, the three-month lock-out of Venezuela’s oil industry and the attempt to unseat President Chavez through the recall referendum in 2004, all of which were openly encouraged and supported by the U.S. administration, U.S. State Secretary Rice’s latest verbal assault against Venezuela is part and parcel of an overall policy of ‘regime change.’ Equally, VIC condemns the recent vituperative and intemperate statements of U.S. Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld which likened President Chavez to Hitler, which is not only preposterous and offensive but simply ridiculous.

It is, furthermore, lamentable that the holder of such an influential and powerful position, as the U.S. State Secretary, claim support for her policy of aggression against Chavez from the governments of Brazil and Chile just to be disabused publicly in the next few hours by the those countries’ Foreign Affairs Minister and President of the Republic respectively It surely does not bode well for world affairs, nor for Inter-Hemispheric relations, that the official who designs and shapes the foreign policy of the most powerful country in the planet behaves in such unprofessional and reckless manner.

The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela is a sovereign nation that has the absolute right, as guaranteed by the United Nations Charter and all existing international norms and laws, to establish commercial or any type of relation with any nation, anywhere in the world. Its is an insult to the dignity of the Latin American countries that have entered into profound and long-term agreements with the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, to suggest that they have been influenced away from democracy by President Chavez as Condoleezza Rice has done. Likewise, no principle of international law of any kind is violated by Venezuela in establishing a special relationship with Cuba.

It is precisely because many nations in the region have experienced an explosion and deepening of the democratic spirit through mass participation of the traditionally excluded and impoverished majorities, such as the indigenous masses in Bolivia that they have, independently and in the most sovereign manner, entered into a long-term process of Bolivarian integration. Besides, it is the process of participatory democracy, imperfect as anything novel may be, and the gigantic advances made in tackling poverty and social exclusion, which has lies at the root of the intense collaboration that Venezuela seeks with her neighbours in the region. In fact, the Bolivarian Revolution represents one of the most positive examples in today's world of a participatory democracy working to make poverty history and redress decades of corruption and mis-government.

Furthermore, Argentina, Cuba, Brazil, Uruguay, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Paraguay, Chile, the nations of the Caribbean, have all struck commercial and other agreements with Venezuela willingly and freely. It is pure neo-conservative propaganda fallacy to suggest otherwise as spokespeople of the Bush administration persistently do. In fact the only nation that applies unconventional pressure on others in the region (and further afield) for sovereign countries not to freely decide what is best for their national interest is the United States which is deploying huge leverage to try and prevent other countries from freely deciding their relations with Venezuela.

A responsible foreign policy which seeks stability and good neighbourliness, cannot and must not rest on unsubstantiated allegations, reckless behaviour, insults, amateurishness, threats and destabilization campaigns. Furthermore, such approach to the government and people of another country who have embarked on an independent course verges on the criminal and breaks the best norms of international diplomacy when calls are made through international U.S. networks to assassinate President Chavez, as TV evangelist Pat Robertson has done (twice), and the response of U.S. government spokespeople has been, at best, equivocal, and at worst, a deafening silence. The fact is that the U.S. authorities have not yet condemned Pat Robertson’s criminal statements. Only one conclusion is possible from such an attitude.

Nor does it bode well for Hemispheric relations and democracy in the region the millions of dollars in massive financial support being provided by the Bush administration through the National Endowment for Democracy, the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute, and the Office of Transition Initiatives (the latter heavily involved in ’transitioning’ Cuba) to opposition groups in Venezuela whose aim is to oust Chavez and subvert the people of Venezuela’s democratic government, constitution, institutions and political processes. The short-lived Carmona government which came to power during the April 2002 coup, and in which many suspect the Bush administration was heavily involved in its planning and execution, suppressed all the democratic freedoms obtained up to that point by Venezuela society and unleashed a Pinochet-style repression against the population of the country. Many people were slaughtered in less than 72 hours during the coup. Not one word of condemnation against the ousting of a democratically-elected president nor of lamentation or criticism about the brutality of those who carried it out came from the U.S. State Department of from any spokesperson in the Bush administration. Therefore, it is pretty difficult not to be highly skeptical about U.S. State Department spokespeople’s claims that they are defending democracy in Venezuela when every one of their actions proves they are trying exactly the opposite.

The evident fact that the Bush administration does not like and fundamentally disagrees with what President Chavez’s government is trying to do both domestically and in collaboration with many of its neighbours in the region does not justify the confrontational, irrational and aggressive stance it has adopted in the last seven years against Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution. The Bush administration has abandoned any effort to resolve potential or actual disputes with Venezuela through diplomatic or political channels and instead has chosen the path of naked aggression. Rhetoric apart, this is not at all the result of intransigence on the part of Venezuela, which on numerous occasions has sought to resolve disputes through dialogue and negotiation, but it flows naturally from the ideological postulates of an administration dominated by neo-conservative fixations. It is time that Secretary of State Rice, President Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Thomas Shannon, and the U.S. political establishment as a whole realize that Venezuela has the absolute right to determine its own future and destiny without external interference. The U.S. neo-conservative ideological project to ‘demonstrate’ that the Bolivarian Revolution is a threat to democracy is as convincing as it is its claim that it seeks to protect and spread democracy in the region and elsewhere. U.S. government’s policies and pronouncements are ever harder to accept, especially after the flagrant violation of international law with the war against Iraq and the whole saga of the inexistent weapons of mass destruction. Furthermore, its overall reputation has been seriously tarnished with the Guantanamo detention centre which breaks all of the most fundamental human rights and which has been rightly condemned by the United Nations and many other bodies and prominent individuals, such as the Bishop of York, number two in the Church of England.

As regards Tony Blair’s astonishing and unsubstantiated attack against Venezuela, VIC will continue to campaign to ensure that, since there are no disputes of any kind whatsoever between the United Kingdom and the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, foreign policy on the South American nation remains as it is and not accept that it is changed by off-the cuff remarks by the Prime Minister. In fact, both countries will significantly benefit from strengthening their political, commercial and cultural links.

The broad solidarity movement that VIC expresses and represents will campaign vigorously to defend Venezuela’s right to self-determination and national sovereignty against U.S. current as well as future aggressions. 

From Venezuela Information Centre