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Friday, March 29 2024 @ 12:47 AM CDT

Venezuela presents the threat of a good example.

Age of Reason

During Bush's two terms, Chavez' presidency has symbolized USA's decline
(Alexander Cockburn): Can Venezuela’s elite and the CIA contain their fury over Chavez? Amid daily prophecies that Bush will order an attack on Iran, there's demure silence in the US about the fact that Venezuela and its President Hugo Chavez are facing their most serious crisis since Chavez nearly lost power and his life in the military coup of 2002.

An overthrow, even a defeat at the ballot box for Chavez, would have huge consequences across Latin America and in the United States.

During Bush's two terms, Hugo Chavez' presidency has symbolized America's decline.

In decades past, Chavez would have been finished off by a consortium of Venezuelan generals and the CIA, the same way Salvador Allende and his moderate-left government were toppled by Pinochet, the Chilean Army and the CIA in 1973. Even Bush Sr managed to put Panama's Noriega in prison ... but Chavez has gone from strength to strength, supplying cheap home heating oil to poor people in US cities, denouncing Bush Jr as "the devil" in the UN, and forging a close alliance with the US Public Enemy Number One, Fidel Castro.

From the point of view of the US government, Chavez' menace stems not only from the high price of oil, which has given him unexpected leverage, but also from his desire for major radical reforms -- land for peasants, education, housing and opportunity for the poor.

For the rest of the continent, Venezuela presents the threat of a good example.

Chavez' proposed constitutional reforms have provoked the current confrontation, and the overall political temperature has been sharply raised by unprecedented verbal brawling between the volcanic Chavez and the King of Spain, Juan Carlos, last Saturday at an Ibero-American summit.

Chavez' denunciations of former Spanish president Jose Maria Aznar as a "fascist" culminated in a spat where Juan Carlos shouted "Why don't you shut up" and temporarily quit the conference room. Chavez' ire stemmed from the well-founded belief that the King and Aznar had been playing an active role in the failed 2002 coup against him.

Fidel Castro has now entered the fray ... from his sickbed, the 81-year-old declared in a speech read over Cuban radio that: "When the King of Spain in an abrupt way asked Chavez: 'Why don't you shut up?,' in that instant, the hearts of all Latin America quivered. Saturday, November 10, 2007, will go down in history... as the day of truth: an ideological Waterloo."

On December 2, Venezuelans will vote in a referendum on the constitutional reforms. The proposals -- already debated, amended and voted through by the Venezuelan Congress -- include lowering of the voting age to 16, reducing the work day to six hours, extending the presidential term from six to seven years, and ending the independence of Venezuela's central bank.

Both in Venezuela and in the US these changes have been portrayed in hysterical terms as a power grab by Chavez, all part of the march towards dictatorship. And of course the charges do have a certain truth. Chavez is trying to level the playing field in Venezuela, long dominated by a small, corrupt elite.

So long as the Central Bank enjoyed independence, Venezuela's sovereignty was leased out to the international money markets.

Now ex-Minister of Defense Raul Baduel has launched a violent attack on the referendum, on Chavez and the Congress. Back in 2002, Baduel, an army general, refused the invitation to launch a Pinochet-type bloodbath. But he is a right-winger and at a press conference on November 5 he appeared to favor a military coup.

The Venezuelan elites and the US government see the next few weeks as the last opportunity they may have to reverse the tide.

We may see a 'strategy of tension' script unwind, as it has done in the past with coups in which the CIA has had a role: bombs in public places, assassinations, dramatic marches.

On the other hand, Chavez is popular, canny and a survivor ... the stakes are very high.

http://www.vheadline.com


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