Posted on 04/19/2002 3:19:43 PM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
Pedro Carmona of Venezuela has a nice point. He didn't participate in a coup, he says. All he did was agree to serve as interim president after being told that Hugo Chavez had resigned! There are those who find this explanation a little smelly, and certainly it is self-serving. As a rule, if asked by military generals to become chief of state, one shows a little interest in what it is that happened to the predecessor.
Hugo Chavez is a provocative figure. He, and Chavez loyalists, are opposed to anti-Chavez coups. Pro-Chavez coups are another thing. Hugo tried to become chief of state via a coup d'etat in 1992, but failed, and went to jail for two years. But then he succeeded, winning one election, modifying the Constitution to permit him a second election, and winning it.
But President Chavez has many problems. The insurrection preceding his 48-hour dethronement was something substantially of his own making. There were tens of thousands of demonstrators out there protesting Chavez policies. He confronted that problem in high autocratic style: He forced television stations to go off the air, and ordered snipers and other armed loyalists at the presidential palace to open fire. When word got around that a dozen people had been killed and many wounded, military commanders took over, effecting his momentary withdrawal.
It has been a doleful journey. The Washington Post summarized it on April 13: "Along the way, Mr. Chavez seriously compromised the integrity of democratic institutions such as Congress and the courts. And unfortunately for the poor, who make up 80 percent of the population of an oil-rich country, Mr. Chavez was a terrible leader. His senseless mix of populist and socialist decrees seriously damaged the economy and galvanized opposition from businesses, media, and the middle class, while his courting of Fidel Castro, Colombia's Marxist guerrillas, and Saddam Hussein made him a pariah both in Latin America and in Washington."
But attention is now being given to the role the United States played in the attempted coup. The White House said there had been no collaboration with the generals, but there are skeptics. There is, of course, a long historical record of American intervention in Latin affairs. Sometimes we get so upset over the absence of a coup, we send down the Marines to remove an incumbent leader, as the senior President Bush did in 1989 in Panama. There were Venezuelan efforts to do something about Chavez well before the April events. In November of last year, the Washington Post reported on a clandestine movement to oust Mr. Chavez. Reporter Scott Wilson wrote of "a petition drive on the streets, and a push in the National Assembly to have him declared insane by a medical panel appointed by the Supreme Court."
But the National Assembly was controlled by Chavez. The deadlock brought an apocalyptic prediction: "There is no legal solution, so what can we do? In my opinion, military intervention is inevitable." That was said in November by Oswaldo Alvarez Paz, who had been named by Chavez to help draft a new constitution.
U.S. thought in such matters is done at two levels. On the one hand, we need to swing with democratic elections, paying formal respect to correct political procedure. Hugo Chavez was elected, so Hugo Chavez gets to rule.
But when we let our hair down, we occasionally have undemocratic thoughts. "The lesson here [in Venezuela] is that charismatic demagogues can still win elections in poor countries," said Anibal Romero, a political science professor at Simon Bolivar University. "The economic and social instability is still with us. The field is still open for the successful appearance of these figures that, by distorting reality and securing the hearts and minds of the uneducated, win elections."
It was a coup that, in Peru, got rid of President Fujimori, and it was the absence of a coup that prolonged for year after year the reign of Peron and his cousins and his aunts in Argentina. When Bolivia had its 49th coup in the 1960s, National Review magazine acerbically proposed that Bolivia should prepare festivities to celebrate its 50th coup, which was presumably in the making. Mexico avoided the problem for seventy years by going through the motions of an election.
We have an endless problem, contending with our superstitious assumption that a democratically elected leader is absolutely entitled to govern. He is presumptively entitled to govern. Allende was democratically elected in Chile, and in three years was busy subverting freedom of the press and the nation's Constitution, inaugurating years of despotism by Pinochet. The restored Hugo Chavez has said he will seek to cooperate with the policies of his opponents, and so far, he hasn't executed anybody, but democratic standards aren't automatically guaranteed by his restoration. The U.S. didn't engineer the attempted coup, but there is no reason to rejoice in its failure.
Ali Rodriguez, secretary-general of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, has spent the week in Caracas, Venezuela, mulling Chavez's invitation to take the top job at Petroleos de Venezuela SA. Rodriguez had served earlier as energy minister under Chavez, and an OPEC source said there was a 70 percent likelihood that he would accept the president's offer.
Venezuela is the third-largest supplier of oil to the United States and a leading member of OPEC. Petroleos de Venezuela was at the center of a dispute that sparked last week's failed coup against Chavez.
As boss at OPEC, Rodriguez has shared Chavez's interest in trying to keep oil prices high by sharply limiting crude production by the group's 11 member countries. But Jan Stuart, head of research for global energy futures at ABN AMRO in New York, said Rodriguez would be more than just a Chavez puppet if he took the job at PdVSA.***
And the U.S. is so superior that we only elect the best man for the job.
Until we are willing to recognize that not all peoples are equally qualified to make a modern political system work, we will continue to have a very muddled view of why the world is the way that it is.
William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site
We have an endless problem, contending with our superstitious assumption that a democratically elected leader is absolutely entitled to govern. He is presumptively entitled to govern. Allende was democratically elected in Chile, and in three years was busy subverting freedom of the press and the nation's Constitution, inaugurating years of despotism by Pinochet. The restored Hugo Chavez has said he will seek to cooperate with the policies of his opponents, and so far, he hasn't executed anybody, but democratic standards aren't automatically guaranteed by his restoration. The U.S. didn't engineer the attempted coup, but there is no reason to rejoice in its failure.Go Chavez my ass.
I know but he makes his point. It's a problem we're going to deal with soon.
Yes... and they can win them in the USA too... ergo willie the sinkmaster... bater...
USA to venezuela.... "WE really DO FEEL your PAIN!"
Sat Apr 20, 2002 -Venezuelan Officers Explain Coup - By MARK STEVENSON, AP [Full Text] **** Defense lawyer Hidalgo Valero said that as many as 3,000 officers supported or participated in the uprising against Chavez. Hundreds of lower-ranking officers have testified before military intelligence officers. Army Gen. Nestor Gonzalez has defended the coup as "a humanitarian act meant to avoid having the army attack the people and produce a massacre." Gonzalez said generals balked at Chavez's order to activate "Plan Avila," calling out troops to defend the palace by any means necessary during the march by hundreds of thousands of civilians.
Chavez was confronted by his high command after the bloodbath. Asked why the generals didn't grant Chavez's request to flee to Cuba, Gen. Hector Gonzalez said the army was afraid of taking the blame for the dead. "If the president had been allowed to leave, he would have left all of these deaths and this tremendous conflict for us to clear up, that was implicit," Gonzalez said. "What would society have thought?"
Chavez's chief ideologue - Guillermo Garcia Ponce, whose official title is director of the Revolutionary Political Command - insists that dissident generals, local media and anti-Chavez groups in the United States plotted his overthrow. He claims they even hired sharpshooters to fire on the anti-Chavez demonstrators. "The most reactionary sectors in the United States were also implicated in the conspiracy," Garcia Ponce told Globovision television on Friday. Asked to explain the April 11 shooting of opposition protesters, purportedly by Chavez's own activists, Garcia Ponce blamed provocateurs.***
April 1, 2001- Venezuela Catholics Condemn Church Bomb Incidents***Interior Sec Miquilena told reporters on Tuesday those responsible were ''provocateurs who are trying to stir up trouble and distort certain realities.''***
Fri Apr 19, 2002 - Venezuela President: Oil Will Flow - By JORGE RUEDA, AP **** CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) - President Hugo Chavez on Friday promised that oil from America's third-largest supplier would keep flowing and expressed hope the United States wasn't involved in last week's coup attempt. In an interview with the U.S.-based Telemundo network, Chavez alluded to allegations - denied by Washington - that the U.S. government had known of or encouraged the uprising against him. "I pray to God ... that all these reports that are emerging are not true," Chavez said, whose comments were rebroadcast on state television. He said the reports should be treated "with great prudence."
...."In Europe there are heads of state, or entire peoples, who are going to think that the United States was involved in this. That would be very negative for the tranquility of the world, for democracy in the world," Chavez said. "It is important that this is cleared up." The Bush administration has maintained that it discouraged any talk of a coup, but it blamed Chavez for his own overthrow before criticizing the coup itself. Chavez said he hoped that U.S.-Venezuelan relations would reach "an optimum state" and reiterated that petroleum from the U.S.' third-largest supplier would keep flowing.****
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