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A TALE OF TWO COUPS
(Greg Palast, July 1, 2002)
The anti-Chavistas don't equate democracy with voting. With 80 per cent of Venezuela's population at or below the poverty level, elections are not attractive to the protesting financiers. Ch�vez had won the election in 1998 with a crushing 58 per cent of the popular vote and that was unlikely to change except at gunpoint. . . . And so on 12 April the business leadership of Venezuela, backed by a few 'Spanish' generals, turned their guns on the Presidential Palace and kidnapped Ch�vez. Pedro Carmona, the chief of Fedecamaras, the nation's confederation of business and industry, declared himself President. This coup, one might say, was the ultimate in corporate lobbying. Within hours, he set about voiding the 49 Ch�vez laws that had so annoyed the captains of industry, executives of the foreign oil companies and latifundistas, the big plantation owners. . . . In response to my question about who gave him authority to name himself president, coup leader Carmona responded, 'Civil society'. To him this meant the bankers, the oil company chiefs and others who signed his proclamation. . . . In an interview Ch�vez told me: 'I have the written proof, I have the time of the entries and exits of the two military officers from the United States into the headquarters of the coup plotters - I have their names, who they met with, what they said on video and still photographs.' He elaborated: 'I have in my hands a radar image of a military vessel that came into Venezuelan waters on 13 April. I have radar images of a helicopter that takes off from that ship and flies over Venezuela and of other planes that violated Venezuelan air space.' . . . While the immediate cause of America's panicked need to remove Ch�vez was a looming oil embargo, the Bush administration's grievances go much deeper. Miguel Bustamante-Madriz, a member of Ch�vez's cabinet, paints a bigger conflict with the global corporate agenda: 'America can't let us stay in power. We are the exception to the new globalization order. If we succeed, we are an example to all the Americas.' . . . George W Bush is an oil man; he owned oil companies, now it looks like they own him. . . . Certainly the Keystone Kops-style plot against Ch�vez by Venezuela's military-industrial complex served Big Oil's interests. But that's an old-style shoot'em-up coup, likely to fail. The coup d'etats of the 21st century will follow the Argentine model, in which the international banks seize the financial lifeblood of a nation, making the official presidential title-holder merely inconsequential except as a factotum of the corporate agenda.

posted by LoZo 11:30 AM