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US Openly Funding Opponents of Democratically Elected Chavez
(Pascal Fletcher, Reuters, April 15, 2004)
Documents showing U.S. funding for Venezuelan opposition groups have prompted an increase in personal attacks by President Hugo Chavez against President Bush, according to a U.S. lawyer who helped unearth the evidence. . . . Eva Golinger, a Brooklyn, N.Y.-based attorney who supports Chavez, said documents obtained through the U.S. Freedom of Information Act showed that around $4 million in U.S. Congress-allocated funds had been channeled to the groups before and after a 2002 coup that briefly toppled Chavez. . . . "These groups are being financed by a foreign government, a U.S. government that has taken an open stance against the Chavez administration, that supported the coup ... it's major meddling," Golinger told Reuters in an interview Wednesday. . . . In his latest anti-Bush onslaught Tuesday, the Venezuelan leader took the side of insurgents fighting U.S. troops in Iraq and blamed the U.S. president for the bloodshed there. He called him an "asshole" in February. . . . Golinger says the 2,000 documents she and a journalist colleague have unearthed since fall last year indicate a pattern of U.S. financial support for groups seeking to end Chavez's rule. . . . She said the National Endowment For Democracy (NED), a private body funded by Congress and supported by the State Department, has given up to $1 million a year since 2000 to anti-Chavez groups and individuals, including several who played a role in the 2002 coup. . . . They know they participated in the coup, but they keep on giving them funding," she said. She has posted the NED programs and their Venezuelan recipients on a Web site, www.venezuelafoia.info.

posted by LoZo 3:24 PM

    War on Venezuela Archives     War on Venezuela [Home]

 

Celebrating Venezuelan Democracy
(Alex Contreras Baspineiro, Narco News Bulletin, April 14, 2004)
Two Years After Defeating a Coup, a Global Gathering in Caracas . . . Workers' representatives, peasant farmers, indigenous, women's and youth leaders, intellectuals, as well as journalists from around the world, are assembled in this city to participate in the Second World Gathering of Solidarity with the Bolivarian Revolution. . . . Two years ago, a fascist revolt of the Venezuelan ruling class, supported by the US Embassy, tried to interrupt the democratic process in this country. But the people always have the power to overturn the ambitions of an oligarchy. . . . "The revolution is entering a new sage," announced Chavez, "the stage of social and economic transformation. This year will be a key one in that line of transformation." . . . Venezuela is going through profound changes in the areas of health, education, housing, agriculture, land ownership, food security, and others, which benefit the majority of the people in this courageous country. . . . President Chavez said that the government this year would continue to strengthen these kinds of projects and to benefit the country's poorest. For years, he said, people have been excluded from the benefits that the many resources in this land should provide.

posted by LoZo 7:26 PM

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Disturbing Signals: Kerry's South America policy looks like Bush's
(Larry Birns & Jessica Leight, Guerrilla News Network, March 30, 2004)
Sen. Kerry voted for the Patriot Act. He voted for the resolution that allowed Bush to invade Iraq. In this brief, the Council on Hemispheric Affairs notes another disturbing fact: Sen Kerry's stated policies on Latin America look like his opponent's. . . . In a series of foreign policy formulations in recent days, the presumptive Democratic party presidential nominee, Senator John Kerry, has issued a number of statements on Latin American-related subjects which, if anything, appear to outflank on the right the Bush administration's extremist regional policymakers, as he shamelessly panders to the anti-Castro paranoia of a group of aging but wealthy Cuban-American ideologues in South Florida, and rich Venezuelan expatriates in Coral Gables. His two primary targets have been President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Cuba's Fidel Castro. . . . Kerry's rhetoric regarding Cuba and Venezuela is reminiscent of barren Cold War strictures which, for all purposes, places him in the same extremist ideological bracket as the administration's two chief Latin American policy makers; the State Department's Roger Noriega and the Bush White House's Otto Reich. . . . Kerry's Cuba and Venezuela Policies Duplicate those of Noriega and Reich Regarding Castro, Kerry called for the continuation and intensification of Washington's near-universally acknowledged failed embargo policy towards Havana. . . . Having endeavored throughout the Democratic primaries to establish his credentials as an advocate of a more principled and professional method of international engagement, in contrast to the interventionist and unilateralist blunderings of the current administration when it came to the Iraq war, the senator is now in danger of tarnishing that reputation through his reckless endorsement of the White House's long discredited Latin America policies that are now even opposed by conservative farm state Republican legislators and businessmen. The positions staked out by Kerry are so far to the right that they even challenge Noriega and Reich for their extremism and irrationality. . . . Kerry's regrettable baiting of Bush on being soft on Castro and Chavez borders on the irresponsible and could have dangerous implications for peace in the region. . . . Kerry could be making a mortal mistake by assuming that hundreds of thousands of former Nader voters, who at the present time are not in the mood to again "waste" their votes on the latter, will stick with the former at whatever price. On the contrary, Senator Kerry's calculation that embracing a reactionary policy towards Latin America will bring about a win-win situation for him politically could be dangerously misguided. . . . There is still time for Kerry to review his simplistic and unimaginative formulations on regional issues and abandon his mimicking of Roger Noriega and Otto Reich's positions by beginning to articulate a clear alternative to the Bush administration's disastrous Latin America policy. This approach would be far more enlightening than his present one in which Kerry accused Bush of "sending mixed signals by supporting undemocratic processes in our own hemisphere." Kerry should also be denouncing the administration's involvement in a coup attempt in Venezuela, its stubbornness in maintaining a Cuba policy that has not been reviewed since its inception almost five decades ago, and its persistent ignorance of social justice concerns. Kerry also should be condemning the White House's bankrupt trade policy, its attempt to arm-twist its hemispheric counterparts into supporting its Middle East misadventures, and the general direction of Bush's high-handed regional policy, including its fundamental intolerance for differing points of view.

posted by LoZo 2:19 PM