US Media Goes To The Baricades In Support Of Venezuela Coup

The minority of folks in the US who follow alternative and/or foreign media knew the anti-Chavez coup was coming a couple of months in advance. Al Giordano's indispensable Drug War news website Narconews.com predicted it back in February. Like Sadat, Arbenz, Allende and many other past Latin American leaders before him who tried to defy US hegemony over the Western Hemisphere, democratically elected Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has stepped on the toes of one too many important people in his home country, in Washington, and on Wall Street during his past three-plus years in office.

It can take years before we will know fully how much Washington was working behind the scenes to help the April 11 anti-Chavez coup. The immediate and unequivocal support of the Bush administration for Carmona's short-lived coup government, plus the unwillingness to support Chavez after popular demonstrations and a revolt within the military led to his April 14 return to power, is about all we need to know to figure out whether or not Washington was helping the coup plotters. The official position of the US government on Chavez's government was best summed up by an unnamed State Department source in an April 15 Reuters article when he/she said, "He was democratically elected. He won a majority of votes. Legitimacy is something that is conferred not just by a majority of votes, however."

An appointed official of a US president who did not win the popular vote and was selected into office by a partisan Supreme Court in a bitterly contested election 16 months ago should know.

Predictably, the US mass media reflexively went to the barricades in Caracas in defense of the coup. An April 13 P-I article by its Washington Bureau correspondent Stewart M. Powell basically repeated the line coming from the coup plotters in Caracas and Bush administration officials in Washington that was being reported in most of the US media. The line went that it was the 14 deaths and 240 injuries of anti-Chavez demonstrators, shot while rallying in favor of an anti-Chavez strike, that was the straw that broke the camel's back. The anti-Chavez generals just had to do something to stop the carnage being perpetrated by the civilian and military supporters of the authoritarian Chavez. However, eyewitness accounts at various Indymedia websites, Z Magazine's website, Narconews.com, and Pacifica's Democracy Now! radio program suggested that it was actually pro-Chavez demonstrators who were being shot and not the other way around.

Even if the carnage of April 11 in Caracas was all perpetrated by pro-Chavez forces, Powell could have easily pointed out the extreme hypocrisy of the US government's position. Here is a government that has unequivocally supported some of the most murderous military juntas in history over the past five decades saying with a straight face that 14 deaths and 240 injuries is simply beyond the pale on any acceptable human conduct in Latin America. Powell could have easily cited the 4,000 or near politically motivated murders per year in neighboring Colombia and the role the more than $1 billion in annual financial and military aid from Washington plays in these atrocities. The majority of these murders are perpetrated by US-backed paramilitaries and the Colombian military.

Meanwhile, inside the Beltway the Washington Post was quick to write Chavez's political obituary. An April 13 article by the Post's Foreign Service reporter Scott Wilson titled "Chavez's Gloomy Legacy for the Left," doesn't even need much comment. The coup was obviously a done deal and Chavez's populist presidency was a major disaster and now history.

In a major embarrassment, the Post published an April 14 editorial, the day of Chavez's return to power, where they opined that the overthrow of a democratically elected leader in Latin America was something nobody wanted to see, "But first facts from Venezuela suggest that the violation of democracy that led to the ouster of President Hugo Chavez Thursday night was initiated not by the army but by Mr. Chavez himself." The editorial went on to support the coup installed "presidency" of business leader Pedro Carmona, who resigned a day before the editorial was published, and urging a quick return to "democracy" after the overthrow of a democratically elected president. In other words, install a "democracy" that unequivocally implements the kind of pro-IMF/World Bank policies Washington and Wall Street loves on demand.

No review of the mainstream media coverage of the coup and counter-coup would be complete without checking up on those right-wing loonies on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. Predictably, the WSJ's anti-Chavez editorial "Castro's Man In Caracas" didn't mince words about what Washington should do next to try to overthrow Chavez: "Saddam Hussein has hailed his return and Castro and Gadhafi cannot be far behind. That these rogues are Mr. Chavez's best friends tells us a lot about Venezuela's future."

With Cuba's Castro, you have a punitive four-decade-old US embargo in place and numerous attempts to assassinate the Cuban leader by multiple past US administrations. With Iraq, the US has enforced an embargo that has reached genocidal proportions over the past 11 years, and has maintained a permanent campaign of routine bombings. In other words, WSJ editorial writers are telling us to expect Washington to step up the economic and covert warfare against Chavez. Kind of like the economic and covert war Nixon waged against Allende in Chile in the early '70s. There can be no doubt the WSJ's policy suggestion for Venezuela will be implemented soon.

Looks like we have another country that needs the help of international observers, like those brave International Solidarity Movement activists in the Occupied Territories putting their bodies between Israeli tanks and mostly unarmed, unprovisioned, and homeless Palestinians.