| Chavez blamed the CIA for the failed coup, and for good reason: Charles S. Shapiro, the US ambassador in Caracas and former Deputy Chief of Mission at the US embassy in Chile at the time of the CIA-sponsored coup against Salvador Allende, admitted that military training camps for Venezuelan opposition forces are currently being run in Florida. For some reason the Ministry of Homeland Security does not seem to mind.
If it walks and talks like the CIA, good chance it is the CIA. "On January 29, 2003, The U.S. daily, the Wall Street Journal, published an editorial revealing the existence of terrorist training camps in Florida," writes CasaVenezuela editor Dozthor Zurlent. "Rodolfo Frometa, a Cuban, and former Army Captain Luis Eduardo Garcia, a Venezuelan, are named in the article as the leaders of the paramilitary coalition formed by the 'F-4 Commandos' and 'The Venezuelan Patriotic Junta.' Garcia, a former Captain, was one of the leaders of the defeated coup against democratically elected president Hugo Chavez Frias in Venezuela in April 2002." Florida is where the CIA's Task Force WH-4, Branch 4 of the Western Hemisphere Division, set up training camps for the failed Bay of Pigs covert operation against Cuba. According to Shapiro, plotting the overthrow of Venezuela's democratically elected government "is not necessarily a crime," especially when that country has a whole lot of mighty fine sweet crude and a leader with funny ideas about empowering poor negro y indio folk. Bush and the bankers have a little problem. Globalization is taking heat all over Central and South America, from Bolivia to Chiapas. Opposition to the FTAA, a sort of NAFTA on steroids, is nearly universal. In October, Bolivians brought down neoliberal President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada. "All governments in Latin America, even those most solicitous of the United States, know they are negotiating the FTAA with a loaded and angry popular movement cocked at their political heads," writes David Moberg for In These Times. For the Bushites, though, "loaded and angry" popular movements are not the problem; under brutal enough conditions, those movements can be stifled. The problem is Hugo Chavez. |
Previous posts on Venezuela
More information on Venezuela
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments are moderated. There may be some delay before your comment is published. It all depends on how much time M has in the day. But please comment!