- When Latin American leaders declare their
intention to redistribute wealth downward in their countries, a Pavlovian
bell rings in Washington. Like the dog in Russian scientist's experiments,
the U.S. national security gang respond with aggressive intervention to
the very mention of taking some of the ill-gotten gains from the filthy
rich and distributing them to the miserably poor.
-
- Look at a partial list in Latin America
alone.
-
- 1954, the CIA overthrew Guatemala's elected
government under President Jacobo Arbenz because he intended to expropriate
- with payment - some of the United Fruit Company's vast, and unused, acreage
in his country.
-
- 1959, Fidel Castro became an object for
destabilization and terror because he redistributed wealth.
-
- 1964, the United States backed a military
coup in Brazil to prevent nationalist President Joao Goulart from reforming
Brazil's economic structure.
-
- 1965, U.S. troops stopped Juan Bosch
from becoming president of the Dominican Republic.
-
- 1970-73, CIA destabilized Chile under
Allende and backed a bloody, military coup.
-
- 1980, the CIA tried to derail the reforms
of Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley. The Agency waged covert war
against Nicaragua's Sandinistas from 1979-90 and cooperated in ousting
President Jean Bertrand Aristide in Haiti - twice.
-
- The CIA knew about the planned April
coup against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. An April 6, 2002 Agency
document reports that "dissident military factions, including some
disgruntled senior officers and a group of radical junior officers, are
stepping up efforts to organize a coup against President Chavez, possibly
as early as this month." The report placed the coup within the context
of a strike by oil workers. "To provoke military action, the plotters
may try to exploit unrest stemming from opposition demonstrations slated
for later this month or ongoing strikes at the state-owned oil company
PSVSA." Washington did not inform Venezuelan authorities of this information.
Accessories to a crime? That the CIA "knew" of the coup surprised
me as much as George Bush dropping a malapropos.
-
- As I arrived on December 2, I scanned
Caracas' Simon Bolivar International Airport for likely looking CIAniks.
Apparent serenity prevailed, but exciting social change was taking place
throughout the country.
-
- On December 3, I traveled to Guarenas,
a city of about 140,000 people, about 15 miles east of Caracas. I had joined
hundreds of Artists and Intellectuals in Defense of Humanity, among them
actor Danny Glover, former Algerian Prime Minister Ben Bella and Nobel
Prize laureate Adolfo Perez Esquivel. We spent eight hours applauding grandmas
showing off their newly acquired reading skills and pointing proudly to
the North Pole on the map after taking a geography course. The education
program ("Mision Robinson," named after Samuel Robinson, one
of Simon Bolivar's teachers) now extends into the most remote rural areas.
Cuban teachers help Venezuelan educators bring literacy and more advanced
learning to areas that were previously deprived.
-
- We also met scores of Cuban doctors,
nurses, X-ray and lab technicians. They appeared to have routine and friendly
interaction with poor patients at primary health care clinics in Oropeza
Castillo, a slum neighborhood of eroding high rise apartments.
-
- The Cubans, indistinguishable from the
Venezuelans by skin color - slightly different accents and wearing white
lab coats - proudly described how their primary health care programs and
diagnostic centers treat thousands daily in facilities that the residents
previously lacked. A group of women bystanders agreed that the Cubans treated
them with dignity and professionalism, from physical exams through x-ray
and lab work.
-
- Before I had left for Venezuela, one
wealthy Venezuelan student told me that "Castro's doctors deprive
Venezuelan physicians. They treat patients for nothing. How will our own
doctors survive?"
-
- Before the Cuban doctors came, I asked
one middle-aged woman, "What kind of medical attention did you receive?"
-
- She laughed. "When students graduated
from medical school, they would come and treat us, but without any support
system. They did their best, but the public hospitals were filthy and often
had inadequate staff, even when we came in with emergencies," another
said. "Look how many babies died in childbirth!" She named neighbors
who lost their babies.
-
- The next day President Hugo Chavez provided
exact figures. "Before we began the new primary care programs,"
Chavez said, "our infant mortality rate was 24 to every 1000 births.
We've reduced it in the last year to 17, a major drop, but still too high."
Imagine an oil rich country with such mortality figures! The Cuban doctors
are helping to bring the rate down further.
-
- Chavez' barrio adentro (inside the neighborhood)
program also includes public dining rooms and markets where the government
offers free or subsidized food to the poorest residents.
-
- At the "Casa de Alimentacion Auricela
Diaz," the residents served us rice, beans, shredded pork and fried
bananas. Residents said they received meals like this on a regular basis,
thanks to Hugo Chavez. In a school yard, Cuban physical education teachers
had organized a potato sack race and other games involving parents and
kids. Several neighbors commented on how the quality of life had improved
since the arrival of the Cubans. "They're very much like us,"
a woman told me after her daughter had won a prize in a coordination contest.
"You know, Caribbean people."
-
- A Cuban doctor from Santi Espiritu told
me that his "grandparents were illiterate guajiros (peasants) and
every time they see me my grandmother bursts out crying. She still can't
believe I'm a doctor. I'm repaying my debt to my country by helping people
here in Guarenas. I feel good about it."
-
- Enough barefoot kids ran around to assure
me that I was not seeing Caribbean versions of the Potemkin village, an
ideal community set up to please Catherine the Great.
-
- "This is my revolution," Asia,
a young dark-skinned woman proudly tells me. "And it belongs to us
because we voted for it several times." She referred to both the 1998
election when Venezuelans overwhelmingly chose Hugo Chavez president and
to the August 2004 referendum when almost 60% opted for him. He vowed to
end the Kleptocracy that had governed the country for decades and to spread
the wealth to the poor. "I feel proud to be Venezuelan," she
said. "I really feel as if Bolivar's spirit is alive with Hugo Chavez."
-
- The wealthy behaved in Venezuela as they
did in Cuba after the 1959 revolution, in Chile after the 1970 election
of Allende and in Nicaragua after the 1979 Sandinista triumph. They responded
to the loss of some power and privilege by mounting a vicious campaign
against the new government.
-
- After four years of incessant propaganda
on how Chavez was a dictator, stupid, gay, a Castro tool, a terrorist and
incompetent, the old privileged class convinced their corrupt union leader
buddies in the oil industry to stage a crippling strike. In April 2002,
with the Bush Administration blessing, they staged an unsuccessful coup.
Following that, they sought to recall Chavez through a referendum. When
almost 95% of the electorate turned out, the old ruling elite understood
they could not use a democratic ritual against the first Venezuelan President
that had given the word democracy real meaning.
-
- Chavez won despite unrelenting opposition
from the two main daily newspapers (Universal and Nacional) and the leading
television stations. Chavez is a "black monkey," his white opponents
smirked. Even Colin Powell took offense as he endorsed policies to overthrow
Chavez.
-
- He spoke to the delegates at the Defense
of Humanity Meeting about why he rejected the IMF model. "It brought
us the 'Carracazo' [1989 anti-IMF riots]." The rich imposed austerity
policies on the poor and then the repressive forces shot down as many as
2,000 people. These neo-liberal policies have led to a million kids living
in Venezuelan slums. Indeed, Egypt, Indonesia, Argentina and scores of
third world countries have also been IMF'd. Neo-liberal economic policies,
Chavez told the assembled delegates, produced an oil-rich nation with 1
million plus illiterate adults. For decades, alternating Social Democratic
and Christian Democratic governments looted the treasury.
-
- Chavez sang the praises of the 10,000
Cuban doctors, plus nurses and technicians, in the more than 11,000 urban
and rural clinics. Chavez has also invested in housing and agrarian reform
for poor farmers - 117,000 farm families will have received almost 5 million
acres by January. "We've done very little," Chavez said. "The
big job is ahead." He expected to win a larger majority in 2006, based
on the performance of his government. He said that Venezuela can't do it
alone, that a block of Latin American nations must form to insure proper
development. Chavez has taken steps, along with Cuba's Castro and Brazil's
Lula to start such a process. "The world needs development and peace
and the only road to peace," he concluded, "is justice."
-
- Chavez quoted Bolivar, Marti, O'Higgins
and contemporary authors in his discourse, hardly the picture of the military
hick that his enemies paint. He showed intellect, a sense of humor, iron
will and determination to push ahead with his ambitious and just programs.
He laid out a reasonable social democracy model as his goal.
-
- On the road back to the airport, I passed
elegant high rises and wealthy neighborhoods. The class struggle will undoubtedly
intensify. The unanswered question: how to stop Bush from further intervention
and defend humanity in Venezuela?
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- http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=
viewArticle&code=LAN20041222&articleId=338
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