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SouthAmerica: Here is an article from a British newspaper, explaining the US position regarding Hugo Chavez.
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The Independent - UK
Published: 25 August 2005
âVenezuela: revolutionaries and a country on the edgeâ
Venezuelans were hardly surprised by an American preacher's call to kill their President. After all, the US funded a coup attempt against him
By Johann Hari
Venezuela is living in the shadow of the other 11 September. In 1972, on a day synonymous with death, Salvador Allende - the democratically elected left-wing President of Chile - was bombed and blasted from power. The CIA and the US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, had decided the "irresponsibility" of the Chilean people at the ballot box needed to be "rectified" - so they installed a fascist general, Augusto Pinochet. He "disappeared" at least 3,000 people and tortured 27,000 more as he clung to power right up to 1990.
Since the Venezuelans elected Hugo Chavez, their own left-wing democrat, in a 1998 landslide, they have been waiting for their 11 September. That's why it did not surprise anyone here this week when Pat Robertson - one of America's leading evangelicals and a friend of George W. Bush - openly called for a US-backed murder of their President.
In the four corners of the Plaza Bolivar - Caracas's Trafalgar Square - there are groups of citizens who work in shifts, waiting, permanently waiting, to mobilise for when an attack on Chavez happens. They are known as the "hot corners", and everybody in the city knows to head there if there is an attack on Venezuela's elected leader.
Laydez Primera, 34, has been doing an eight-hour shift. He explains: " Los esqualidos [the squalid ones, as the opposition is often called] and Bush have tried everything to get rid of Chavez. They know we have elected him in totally open elections, but they don't care. They have tried forcing a recall referendum in the middle of Chavez's term, but the President won by 60 per cent. They have tried saying the elections were rigged, but the opposition asked Jimmy Carter to come and watch the elections, and he said they were totally free. He didn't say that about the election of Bush in Florida! And they even tried staging a coup. We will never, never forget that."
The coup, the coup. Everybody here has their stories about the 2002 coup d'état, and the strange 47-hour Presidency of Pedro Carmona Estanga, the head of Venezuela's equivalent of the Confederation of British Industry. (Pat Robertson's call caused a cascade of memories to burst across the streets of Caracas.) That April, Chavez was kidnapped and removed from power in a decapitation of democracy orchestrated by the media, a few generals and the wealthy. Carmona dissolved the Supreme Court, the Constitution and the elected National Assembly and assumed control of the country. This was immediately welcomed by the Bush administration.
Washington was eager to ensure the largest pot of oil outside the Middle East - providing 10 per cent of US domestic imports - was placed back under the control of US corporations, rather than a left-winger with his own ideas about oil revenue. It later emerged the US had been funding the coup leaders. Only the story didn't end there. Venezuela refused to be Chile. Judith Patino, a 57-year-old grandmother and street-seller who lives in one of the shanty-towns in the west of Caracas, explains: "We would not let our democracy be destroyed. We refused. Everybody from this barrio [district], everybody from all the barrios, went on to the streets of Caracas. We were afraid, we thought there would be massacres, but we had chosen our President and we were governing our own country and we would not surrender."
More than a million people took to the streets, surrounding the Miraflores Palace - the President's residence - and calling for Chavez to return. Los Esqualidos scurried away; Chavez returned to the Miraflores by helicopter, and Caracas erupted into what one young woman told me was "the biggest, maddest party Venezuela has ever seen". Yet, three years on, the country is still split. There is the rich 20 per cent, who for more than a century received all the oil profits - until Chavez came to power and began to distribute them more widely. They welcomed the coup and rejoiced at Robertson's comments. And, glaring at them across a chasm of incomprehension, there is the poor 80 per cent, who defended Chavez.
A taxi ride across Caracas shows how small the physical divide is between these Two Venezuelas, the conflicting mental universes that share a country. Santa Fe, in the east of the city, could be a slice of Beverley Hills. Palatial, gated communities stretch along the hillsides, interrupted only by private golf courses and turrets for security guards. I am surprised to spot one of the battered, chugging public buses, which always seem to be held together by Sellotape and goodwill. "For their servants," the taxi driver explains. The bus carries them 15 minutes away to the barrio shanty-towns that could be a slice of Africa.
Many are squatter barrios, thrown together in the rush migration to the cities over the past 50 years. Houses made of tin and cardboard scar the hillsides, with life somehow flourishing in the crevices. Is this steel shack really a hairdresser's salon? Is that tottering mass of concrete really a clothes shop? It is easy to see why the people of the barrios support Chavez so passionately: I visited dozens of the "missions" built by Chavez that provide health and education for the poor, in some places for the first time. The Miracle Mission, for example, provides cataract operations, restoring the sight of poor people who have been blind for decades. They would have never seen again under the opposition's vision of slashed public spending and oil revenues directed once again to the rich. If democracy was destroyed, these missions - the lifelines for the barrios - would soon disappear.
â¦But you would not know - from what the opposition says in every Venezuelan newspaper, or from the propaganda of Pat Robertson - that Venezuelan elections are open and fair, that Chavez has been approved in polls or referenda no less than seven times, and there is more substantial free speech than in Britain. In Venezuela, people can (and, every night, do) call on television for the President to be killed. Indeed, Chavez has been so reluctant to commit a crackdown that the leaders of the coup are still free and unpunished. Venezuelans are still nervously waiting for them to return, in the form of another coup - or a CIA bullet.
At 2am on one of Caracas's party-heavy mornings, I head again for Plaza Bolivar's hot corners, below the parrots that sit in the trees. I ask Zaid Cortez, 27, what will happen if Chavez is assassinated. "Venezuela will never go back to being governed by Los esqualidos. We won't go back to being a country where the petrol money is used for a minority and not for the barrios. So what will happen if Chavez is killed? Civil war. We are ready."
The country, and its oil
* Result of presidential election in 1998: 56.2 per cent for Chavez
* General strikes in 2002: four
* Result of 2004 referendum on whether Chavez should stay in power: 58.3 per cent vote in his favour
* Highest popularity rating: 80 per cent
* Lowest rating: 30 per cent
* Covert aid from the US to the Venezuelan opposition since Chavez came to power: $4m
* Population: 25.4 million
* Foreign debt: $33.3bn (£19bn)
* Unemployment: 17 per cent
* Amount spent by Chavez on social sector: $2bn
* Proportion of country's earnings from oil sector: 80 per cent
* Chavez on oil executives: They live in luxury chalets "where they perform orgies, drinking whisky"
* Proportion of US oil imports from Venezuela: 10 per cent
* Proportion of Venezuelans on poverty line: 47 per cent
* Total Venezuelan oil production: 2.6 million barrels per day
* Total Venezuelan oil exports: 2.1 million barrels per day
* Number of free barrels given to Fidel Castro: 90,000 per day
* Cuban professionals working in Venezuela: 25,000
* Its greatest hero: Simon Bolivar, who liberated much of Latin America from Spain. He was born in Caracas in 1783
.
SouthAmerica: Here is an article from a British newspaper, explaining the US position regarding Hugo Chavez.
******
The Independent - UK
Published: 25 August 2005
âVenezuela: revolutionaries and a country on the edgeâ
Venezuelans were hardly surprised by an American preacher's call to kill their President. After all, the US funded a coup attempt against him
By Johann Hari
Venezuela is living in the shadow of the other 11 September. In 1972, on a day synonymous with death, Salvador Allende - the democratically elected left-wing President of Chile - was bombed and blasted from power. The CIA and the US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, had decided the "irresponsibility" of the Chilean people at the ballot box needed to be "rectified" - so they installed a fascist general, Augusto Pinochet. He "disappeared" at least 3,000 people and tortured 27,000 more as he clung to power right up to 1990.
Since the Venezuelans elected Hugo Chavez, their own left-wing democrat, in a 1998 landslide, they have been waiting for their 11 September. That's why it did not surprise anyone here this week when Pat Robertson - one of America's leading evangelicals and a friend of George W. Bush - openly called for a US-backed murder of their President.
In the four corners of the Plaza Bolivar - Caracas's Trafalgar Square - there are groups of citizens who work in shifts, waiting, permanently waiting, to mobilise for when an attack on Chavez happens. They are known as the "hot corners", and everybody in the city knows to head there if there is an attack on Venezuela's elected leader.
Laydez Primera, 34, has been doing an eight-hour shift. He explains: " Los esqualidos [the squalid ones, as the opposition is often called] and Bush have tried everything to get rid of Chavez. They know we have elected him in totally open elections, but they don't care. They have tried forcing a recall referendum in the middle of Chavez's term, but the President won by 60 per cent. They have tried saying the elections were rigged, but the opposition asked Jimmy Carter to come and watch the elections, and he said they were totally free. He didn't say that about the election of Bush in Florida! And they even tried staging a coup. We will never, never forget that."
The coup, the coup. Everybody here has their stories about the 2002 coup d'état, and the strange 47-hour Presidency of Pedro Carmona Estanga, the head of Venezuela's equivalent of the Confederation of British Industry. (Pat Robertson's call caused a cascade of memories to burst across the streets of Caracas.) That April, Chavez was kidnapped and removed from power in a decapitation of democracy orchestrated by the media, a few generals and the wealthy. Carmona dissolved the Supreme Court, the Constitution and the elected National Assembly and assumed control of the country. This was immediately welcomed by the Bush administration.
Washington was eager to ensure the largest pot of oil outside the Middle East - providing 10 per cent of US domestic imports - was placed back under the control of US corporations, rather than a left-winger with his own ideas about oil revenue. It later emerged the US had been funding the coup leaders. Only the story didn't end there. Venezuela refused to be Chile. Judith Patino, a 57-year-old grandmother and street-seller who lives in one of the shanty-towns in the west of Caracas, explains: "We would not let our democracy be destroyed. We refused. Everybody from this barrio [district], everybody from all the barrios, went on to the streets of Caracas. We were afraid, we thought there would be massacres, but we had chosen our President and we were governing our own country and we would not surrender."
More than a million people took to the streets, surrounding the Miraflores Palace - the President's residence - and calling for Chavez to return. Los Esqualidos scurried away; Chavez returned to the Miraflores by helicopter, and Caracas erupted into what one young woman told me was "the biggest, maddest party Venezuela has ever seen". Yet, three years on, the country is still split. There is the rich 20 per cent, who for more than a century received all the oil profits - until Chavez came to power and began to distribute them more widely. They welcomed the coup and rejoiced at Robertson's comments. And, glaring at them across a chasm of incomprehension, there is the poor 80 per cent, who defended Chavez.
A taxi ride across Caracas shows how small the physical divide is between these Two Venezuelas, the conflicting mental universes that share a country. Santa Fe, in the east of the city, could be a slice of Beverley Hills. Palatial, gated communities stretch along the hillsides, interrupted only by private golf courses and turrets for security guards. I am surprised to spot one of the battered, chugging public buses, which always seem to be held together by Sellotape and goodwill. "For their servants," the taxi driver explains. The bus carries them 15 minutes away to the barrio shanty-towns that could be a slice of Africa.
Many are squatter barrios, thrown together in the rush migration to the cities over the past 50 years. Houses made of tin and cardboard scar the hillsides, with life somehow flourishing in the crevices. Is this steel shack really a hairdresser's salon? Is that tottering mass of concrete really a clothes shop? It is easy to see why the people of the barrios support Chavez so passionately: I visited dozens of the "missions" built by Chavez that provide health and education for the poor, in some places for the first time. The Miracle Mission, for example, provides cataract operations, restoring the sight of poor people who have been blind for decades. They would have never seen again under the opposition's vision of slashed public spending and oil revenues directed once again to the rich. If democracy was destroyed, these missions - the lifelines for the barrios - would soon disappear.
â¦But you would not know - from what the opposition says in every Venezuelan newspaper, or from the propaganda of Pat Robertson - that Venezuelan elections are open and fair, that Chavez has been approved in polls or referenda no less than seven times, and there is more substantial free speech than in Britain. In Venezuela, people can (and, every night, do) call on television for the President to be killed. Indeed, Chavez has been so reluctant to commit a crackdown that the leaders of the coup are still free and unpunished. Venezuelans are still nervously waiting for them to return, in the form of another coup - or a CIA bullet.
At 2am on one of Caracas's party-heavy mornings, I head again for Plaza Bolivar's hot corners, below the parrots that sit in the trees. I ask Zaid Cortez, 27, what will happen if Chavez is assassinated. "Venezuela will never go back to being governed by Los esqualidos. We won't go back to being a country where the petrol money is used for a minority and not for the barrios. So what will happen if Chavez is killed? Civil war. We are ready."
The country, and its oil
* Result of presidential election in 1998: 56.2 per cent for Chavez
* General strikes in 2002: four
* Result of 2004 referendum on whether Chavez should stay in power: 58.3 per cent vote in his favour
* Highest popularity rating: 80 per cent
* Lowest rating: 30 per cent
* Covert aid from the US to the Venezuelan opposition since Chavez came to power: $4m
* Population: 25.4 million
* Foreign debt: $33.3bn (£19bn)
* Unemployment: 17 per cent
* Amount spent by Chavez on social sector: $2bn
* Proportion of country's earnings from oil sector: 80 per cent
* Chavez on oil executives: They live in luxury chalets "where they perform orgies, drinking whisky"
* Proportion of US oil imports from Venezuela: 10 per cent
* Proportion of Venezuelans on poverty line: 47 per cent
* Total Venezuelan oil production: 2.6 million barrels per day
* Total Venezuelan oil exports: 2.1 million barrels per day
* Number of free barrels given to Fidel Castro: 90,000 per day
* Cuban professionals working in Venezuela: 25,000
* Its greatest hero: Simon Bolivar, who liberated much of Latin America from Spain. He was born in Caracas in 1783
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