The US role in the Venezuelan coup
by John Gilman* When the coup took place in Caracas, Venezuela, on April 11, the usurper of the US Presidency, George W Bush, had his press agent, Ari Fleischer, state, "Chavez brought it on himself". Yet, according to an article in The London Observer by Ed Vulliamy, "Washington was deeply immersed in the overthrow of Chavez many months ago." The plan was hatched by Otto Reich, the professional liar and behind-the- scenes hater of Cuba just shortly after Bush named him Under Secretary of Latin American Affairs. There were a number of other players besides Reich in the Bush administration who planned the coup d'etat. One of the main characters was Eliot Abrams, convicted of giving false information during his involvement in the Iran-Contra Affair and later pardoned from prison by former President George Bush. Abrams presently heads the National Security Council for Democracy, Human Rights and International Operations. A leading braintruster in the Council, Abrams was head of the school known as "Hemispherism", the main purpose of which is to combat Marxism in the Americas. The third person in the coup conspiracy is John Negroponte, newly appointed US ambassador to the United Nations. Negroponte, ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1986, sat silently while death squads tortured and murdered hundreds of political activists campaigning for social change. The death squads were trained at the School of the Americas. The London Observer confirmed that, "the US Government was not only aware of the coup but sanctioned it". These three scoundrels were the main architects of the coup at the behest of George W Bush. They had a number of meetings with Pedro Carmona, the business magnet who headed the coup government, the Venezuelan military, and Gustavo Cisneros, the multi-billionaire magnet who owns four of the five television stations and all the radio stations in Venezuela. At the time of the right-wing demonstrations, Cisneros jammed the one government TV station and focused on the right-wing counter-democracy mob. According to Newsweek, Reich and Cisneros deny having anything to do with the coup except speaking to Carmona for information on the situation. The most glaring information on the coup came from a report by James Madsen and Richard M. Bennet, former National Security Officers. They reported that, from Eastern Colombia, the CIA and the US Government "contracted military personnel, ostensibly used for counter-narcotics operations and stood by to provide logistics support for the leading members of the coup". Additional US Navy vessels also stood by in the event that the coup against Chavez faltered, thus requiring an evacuation of US citizens. Some of the vessels reportedly had NSA [National Security Agency] Direct Support Units aboard to provide additional signals intelligence support to US special operatives and intelligence personnel deployed on the ground in close cooperation with the Venezuelan army and along the Colombian side of the border. The CIA provided Special Operations Group personnel who contacted pro-US military officers including Venezuelan Arms Forces Chief General Lucas Rincon and union leaders from the state-owned oil company and the Venezuelan Workers' Confederation. The CIA began laying plans for the coup against Chavez last year. Carmona, who headed a Venezuelan business syndicate was recruited early on. It is quite obvious that millions of dollars were used to pay off the labour leaders. This information has never been published in American newspapers. We need a full investigation of the US role in the attempted Venezuelan coup and American newspapers need to publicise the role of the US government in undermining democracy. Chavez was catapulted back into power by the Venezuelan people who had voted him in as President in the first place.* * * * John Gilman is the Director of Wisconsin Committee for Peace and Justice. This article, slightly abridged, is from People's Weekly World paper of Communist Party, USA http://www.pww.org/article/view/1408