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| By Saul Landau
The Progreso Weekly
Global Research
2-5-6
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?
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index....AN20041222&arti
cleId=338
Viva la revolucion!
Lord Cerne Abbas
We shall go on to the end, we shall defend our World, whatever the cost may be,
we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall
fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall
never surrender, and even if this World, or a large part of it were subjugated
and starving, then we would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time,
the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue
and the liberation of the old."
To rebel is right, to disobey is a duty, to act is necessary !
http://www.veloceraptor.free-online.co.uk/identity.html
http://www.veloceraptor.free-online.co.uk/mylinks.html
http://lordcerneabbas.blogspot.com/
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