Author: Justin Podur

I can’t imagine two people who hate what one another stand for more completely than Hugo Chavez and Alvaro Uribe. And yet, here they are, meeting, signing accords in principle, and even joking about life and death matters.

The idea is, as I blogged yesterday, for Venezuela to export its gas through Colombia, which is sort of the portal between the Americas. And apparently, not only were the discussions positive, but Uribe was trying to out-Bolivarian Chavez, saying: “Any work we can think of doing today was already been done by the Liberator (Bolivar)… today, 200 years later, we are trying to make these things happen, so that history doesn’t pass us by.” He apparently said it was time to leave rhetoric behind and said Chavez was “talking and doing, taking advantage of his vigor and dynamism.”

(And I am still wondering why Uribe didn’t wait a month to see how the recall vote went…)

But wait — it gets even better!

Apparently in the press conference Uribe said he hoped that Spain would sell Colombia something more useful than tanks!

“I don’t want the tanks any more; I hope that with the government of President Zapatero we can make a deal where, instead of selling us these tanks, they can sell us something more useful.”

Chavez, no less magnanimous, said that that decision was up to sovereign Colombia and that he wasn’t going to let any speculation get out of control. Chavez said that there had been bad relations between Colombia and Venezuela, including war plans between them, but that what was really needed was “a joint war against poverty and underdevelopment.” Uribe then replied that there would “never be war” between the two countries.

And then it gets even more surreal. Uribe said he would miss not being able to learn how to drive a tank, and that he wished Chavez could teach him how: “The only thing I deplore is that I’ve lost the chance to have President Chavez as my teacher. How many tanks will you loan me, President Chavez? Please loan me some tanquecitos!”

I will be trying to figure out what the hell is going on over the next few days. This is all rather out of the ordinary.

But there are some things going on that are completely within the ordinary on the Venezuela front.

For your first example, a recent Wall Street Journal article (pointed out to me by fellow killingtrain blogger CP Pandya and reproduced in full below) says that the Overseas Private Investment Corporation is going to make it extra difficult for companies to invest in Venezuela, exacerbating capital flight and harming the economy. Why? This is rich. Because Venezuela apparently illegally expropriated assets belonging to Science Applications International Corporation. If you are doing a double-take at the name of the company, that’s probably because you know what Hector Mondragon pointed out about this set of gangsters last year. A quote from that article:

“But the real strength of the strike in Venezuela has been in the computers that control the giant and highly automated petroleum industry. Even though the PDV is nominally state-owned and run, the computer system is in the hands of the ‘mixed’ (public-private) enterprise Intesa. The party with the technical skill in the partnership is the Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC)-a transnational computing company. Among its directors: ex-US Secretaries of Defense William Perry and Melvin Laird; ex-directors of the CIA John Deutsch, Robert Gates; Admiral Bobby Ray Inman (ex-director of the National Security Agency); other retired military staff including Wayne Downing (former commander in chief of US Special Forces) and Jasper Welch (ex-coordinator of the National Security Council).

“The hold-up of the oil-tankers was directed from these computing centers. The hold-up was welcomed by various captains, but the tankers were forced to shore in any case: nothing moves without direction from the computers, which also stopped key operations in the refineries and the entry of vital gas for the iron and steel industries of eastern Venezuela. ‘Lungos’ from Guayana had to recover the gas.”

A lot of this is actually in the mainstream coverage, though the idea that these companies might have done something wrong by locking out local workers, trying to shut down an economy, and imposing massive suffering on a population in order to force a government that they don’t like (precisely because it is trying to alleviate the suffering of that population) out of power doesn’t seem to get across in these articles. If it did, perhaps that would make it more difficult for the same companies to be doing the exact same thing right now.

The WSJ story is below. But before the WSJ article, your second example. The Venezuelan ‘opposition’ has declared its ‘program’ for the Venezuelan people should Chavez be recalled on August 15 (Uribe doesn’t seem to think that will happen…). The ‘opposition’ got a lot of help with its ‘plan’ from the United States. See the article below the WSJ piece for details.

Allow me to sum up today’s Venezuela news:

1) Bizarre (Uribe’s visit and behaviour)
2) Predictably appalling part 1: Sanctioning Venezuela because US companies participated in the coup attempts of 2003
3) Predictably appalling part 2: The US-authored ‘plan’ for ‘transition’ after Chavez’s recall in August.

Details below.

———

U.S. Ruling May Curb Investment to Venezuela

By DAVID LUHNOW
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
July 15, 2004; Page A9

In a further blow to Venezuela’s reputation among international investors, a U.S. government agency has ruled that Venezuela illegally expropriated a U.S. company’s assets — a move that could make it harder for U.S. companies to invest in the politically volatile Andean nation.

The United States Overseas Private Investment Corp., an agency that provides financing and insurance against political risk for American companies investing in the developing world, ruled this week that it would pay insurance compensation to a San Diego company, Science Applications International Corp., for having had its assets illegally seized in late 2002 by the Venezuelan government of President Hugo Chavez. A spokesman for OPIC, as the agency is known, said the payout was roughly $6 million.

Science Applications, known as SAIC, ran a joint venture with Venezuela’s state-run oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela SA, or PdVSA, to provide information-technology services to the oil giant. SAIC says that when Mr. Chavez became president in 1998, its relations with the government soured. After both sides failed to resolve a dispute over continuing the joint venture, called Intesa, the company’s assets were taken over by Venezuela’s military during a general strike in late 2002. The company received no compensation, according to the company and OPIC.

The Venezuelan state oil company criticized the decision yesterday, saying it was based on politics — and the U.S. government’s dislike of Mr. Chavez –rather than the facts. PdVSA chief Ali Rodriguez said the company wouldn’t pay “money that is not lawfully due.” A fiery populist, President Chavez has presided over an increasingly volatile country and faces an Aug. 15 recall vote.

OPIC is seeking damages of $6 million from PdVSA through an independent arbitration panel for the case. If Venezuela doesn’t agree to arbitration, OPIC is “very unlikely” to support new investments in Venezuela, OPIC communications director Larry Spinelli said yesterday. OPIC has provided financing or insurance for more than $900 million in current foreign direct investment in Venezuela, he said. “We are generally a very important catalyst for investment…and a bellwether for political risk in a country.”

—-

Published: Friday, July 09, 2004
Bylined to: Eva Golinger-Moncada

Venezuelan opposition’s new plan of government is “Made in the USA”

Venezuela Solidarity Committee (New York) Eva Golinger-Moncada writes:

The Venezuelan opposition has today announced their long-awaited “plan” for a post-Chavez government and society.

Denominated “Plan Consenso Pais” (Country Consensus Plan), this new agenda attempts to seek “reconciliation” and “reconstruction” in Venezuela and to bring “peace”, “reactivation of the economy” and the “creation of a social and educative political sphere that includes all citizens, without exception.”

* The proposed Plan was presented by Diego Bautista Urbaneja, Coordinator of the Committee for the Country Consensus Plan of the Democratic Coordinator, the opposition umbrella group.

At a press conference early Friday, Urbaneja explained that the Plan was the product of a process of consultations and consensus of 9 political parties, 26 social organizations from civil society, 27 labor and workforce organizations and 5 opinion groups.

The Consensus Plan is a pact amongst the opposition, who (allegedly) are committing to adopt such plan as the base of transitional government, post-Chavez. Urbaneja claims that the Plan will last from once President Chavez is recalled in a referendum to be held on August 15, 2004 until January 2007, the end of the constitutionally allotted presidential term.

The opposition has come under attack recently in the international press and by its own members for not offering any concrete alternatives to the Venezuelan people, but merely clamoring for the ouster of the current President. Many of the key political parties and members comprising the Democratic Coordinator umbrella group are members of former governments and of political parties, such as Accion Democratica (AD) and COPEI, which lost power based on their lack of policies to address the vast majority of poor and working class Venezuelans and their exclusionary politics that catered to Venezuela’s elite.

The new Consensus Plan offered today may, on its face, appear as a viable alternative, yet there exists one major fact that chips away its credibility: The Plan is a creation of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a US government entity that has been funneling in millions of dollars to anti-Chavez groups in Venezuela to aid their coup and strike efforts back in 2002-3, and now to springboard the referendum campaign and this new transitional government “Plan.”

The National Endowment for Democracy awarded a grant of approximately US$300,000 in early 2003 to The Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE), a US-based entity and one of four core NED grantees, together with the Center for Dissemination of Economic Information (CEDICE), a Venezuelan organization. CEDICE is presided by Rocio Guijarra, one of the initial signors of the now infamous “Carmona Decree” enacted during the brief dictatorship that took control of Venezuela’s government during the 48-hour coup d’etat against President Chavez back in April 2002. The “Decree” authorized businessman Pedro Carmona as “President” and dissolved all of Venezuela’s democratic institutions, such as the National Assembly (and all its elected members), the Supreme Court, the Constitution, the General Attorney and the Public Defender’s office.

The CIPE-CEDICE grant was entitled “Project Consensus to Build a National Agenda” and featured prominent radical opposition leaders and coup participants as project committee members. Organizations comprising the “Project” included many of the same groups that led the coup efforts in April 2002 and the illegal strike in December 2003-February 2004 that crippled Venezuela’s economy, such as Gente de Petroleo, Fedecamaras, Alianza Bravo Pueblo, CTV, COPEI and the Democratic Coordinator, amongst others.

Another key organization figuring in the Consensus Plan Committee is Liderazgo y Vision, a direct NED grantee led by Oscar Garcia Mendoza, head of the Banco de Credito. Mr. Garcia Mendoza published an advertisement in Venezuela’s national newspapers during the April 2002 praising the coup for bringing back “liberty and democracy with solid institutions and respect for the Law.” Garcia Mendoza also signed a business announcement published in national press on April 13, 2002, recognizing and supporting the “transitional government” of Pedro Carmona … despite the fact that Carmona had taken power via an illegal coup and had unabashedly violated Venezuela’s Constitution.

In a March-May 2003 quarterly report by CEDICE to NED, the Consensus Plan Project is justified by comparing the Chavez administration to the German Nazi Party: “The one thing separating the country from full revolutionary control is the fact that the Chavez Government was the result of free elections (as was the Nazi regime in its inception) “

More than two years after the coup against President Chavez, the opposition has become increasingly dependent on the US government for economic help, political guidance and support.

The NED funds over nineteen (19) organizations operating in Venezuela — all on the anti-Chavez side, a fact which the NED themselves have admitted on various occasions. (Bart Jones, The National Catholic Reporter). Other financing sources, such as USAID, fund more than US$5 million annually to “democracy building” activities in Venezuela that are entirely within the realm of civil society and not government-based.

Now, the opposition’s one-time shot at offering a real alternative to Venezuelans dissatisfied with the current government is none other than a creation of the US government together with organizations and individuals who figured prominently in the April 2002 coup.

* The US government has chosen coup leaders and Constitutional violators to create an alternative agenda for a transitional government in Venezuela.

Will Venezuelans allow their futures to be placed in the hands of a foreign government that doesn’t have their best interests in mind?

Eva Golinger-Moncada
evagolinger@hotmail.com

Making the blog rounds (well, in this case the blob rounds), I came across various posts of David Peterson’s on Israel’s Wall and the World Court ruling. This one is a good example. As is David’s wont, he provides the full article with his blob. But the quote he pulled out, from our old friend Netanyahu, is quite telling:

“Because the court’s decision makes a mockery of Israel’s right to defend itself, the government of Israel will ignore it. Israel will never sacrifice Jewish life on the debased altar of ”international justice.”

I added the emphasis on ‘Jewish life’. I thought it quite telling. Kind of reminds me of Howard Dean saying that 400 PEOPLE had been killed in the Iraq War, when thousands of Iraqis had already been killed.

Unfortunately for Palestinians, Israel is willing to sacrifice Palestinian life on the debased altar of ‘security’. For example, the life of Mahmoud Khalafallah, a 75 year old man who was crushed in his house by an Israeli bulldozer. Unfortunately for Jewish activists against the occupation, Israel is willing to sacrifice even their ‘right’ to enter Israel to prevent protest against the wall, as Jamie Spector learned when she tried to join the ISM there.

Referendum fever is on in Venezuela, with 1.4 million people having registered to vote in the referendum, setting new records for voter registration in a place where records of participation have been repeatedly broken in recent years. There are now 14 million Venezuelans who are able to vote on August 15 — earlier this year, there were 12.5 million, according to the Electoral Council’s figures. Remember that Chavez was re-elected with 3.7 million votes in 2000. As I understand it, the opposition needs to either beat that number or beat the number of ‘No’ voters in the recall vote, whichever is higher. The population of the country is 24 million (according to this El Tiempo article I’m quoting from — I thought it was 22 million).

Venezuela has formally asked the US to stop helping the coup plotters and the ‘opposition’.

But Venezuelans aren’t the only people going to a major referendum soon. There’s also Bolivia.

This coming Sunday, Bolivians will vote on the future of their natural gas resource. This was the promise of Carlos Mesa, the Vice President who took over after President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada was ousted by a popular uprising. Some movements had sought a question about nationalization of the resource, in addition to the question about whether or not to export the gas. Mesa didn’t listen — he was trying to placate the multinationals as much as the powerful social movements. So as it stands, it seems to me that if Bolivians vote against the exportation of gas, they will avoid losing a huge amount of control over their resources, but they won’t gain much in the way of control, since really important questions are not on the table.

I have heard that the Bolivian social movements are working and strategizing slowly and patiently: knowing that they can overthrow Mesa the same way they overthrew Sanchez de Lozada any time they want doesn’t get them the democratic control over their lives that is their right.

And while Venezuelans and Bolivians are struggling to express their democratic will, the US is fining companies for providing vaccines to Cuban children. Thanks a lot.

The Phillippines is thinking of withdrawing its token troops involved in the US occupation of Iraq, due to the kidnapping and threat against a Filipino national there. If you take a look at the article, there is a breakdown of the troops in Iraq by country. I knew that the ‘coalition’ was a sham, but I was surprised that the numbers of troops from countries other than the US was so low. While the Filipino withdrawal is good for Filipinos and Iraqis, Australians are stepping in to fill the breach. The Australian elections, coming up, it seems aren’t going to give Australians a chance to punish their regime for its warmongering. If you can stomach the unsophisticated propaganda, you can read about how the Iraqi insurgents have been attacking Abu Ghraib prison.

As usual, much of the above via News Insider.

The Sudan continues to be a painful horror. In the comments section of this blog, Richard Hindes suggested two good sources. Darfur Info is good. So is the ‘Passion of the Present’ blog. Following that one will take you to a resource with daily updates, a set of introductory materials (including a useful HRW report), and, notably, yet another blog. This one, by Ingrid Jones, has an interesting piece on oil interests that are in the background of this massacre/displacement.

If you asked me to speculate (someone did recently) I suspect that the massacres in Darfur are linked to the peace accord between the Sudanese regime and the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) led by John Garang. The SPLA was the big and powerful rebel group in the country. Its signing a peace accord with the government and agreeing to a power-sharing formula could have freed the regime to unleash its militias against Darfur. It could be a matter of rewarding the militias for their service against the SPLA.

I will look into this further, and report on what I find. Anyone who has done more research and wants to comment is welcome.

Someone wrote me today asking for some advice about what to study in school, what to do in life, etc. This is a rare occurrence, but it isn’t so rare that I haven’t thought about it. I know I looked around for guidance a lot when I was younger (hell, I would happily accept some now too!). People usually ask things like — I have an opportunity to study, what should I study? I have an opportunity to travel, what should I do with it? How can I learn more about how to change the world? Of course, the answers to all of these questions depends a great deal on the talents, interests, skills, and circumstances of the person asking. But even that answer alone is a bit of guidance that would have been useful for me when I was wondering what to do…

In terms of reading, I found Peter Kropotkin’s ‘Appeal to the Young’ to be a very nice essay. More recently, George Monbiot wrote a nice piece, aimed also at privileged youth who have opportunities most can’t dream of (as Kropotkin’s is aimed) and as such are in a position to ask for advice. My own little pep talk for young people (actually young social democrats who I was trying to radicalize) is here. For people heading into professional schools or work, I can’t recommend Jeff Schmidt’s Disciplined Minds enough. If you want to know how your professional training will warp your mind and turn you into a privileged caste without empathy for working people or the public good, read this book. Better, Schmidt provides advice and ideas on how to resist the indoctrination.

That might have turned out to be more of a reading list than an advice column. Reading advice columns (I won’t tell you which ones) is a guilty pleasure of mine, I have to admit. A genuine radical advice column would actually be fun… though I suppose if radicals have a problem it’s that they are keener to give advice than to ask it… that would seem to be a blog post for another day, though.

For today, I’ll quote you George Monbiot’s last line from the essay linked above: “You know you have only one life. You know it is a precious, extraordinary, unrepeatable thing: the product of billions of years of serendipity and evolution. So why waste it by handing it over to the living dead?”

The world court ruling against Israel’s apartheid wall is, as Samer Elatrash describes, a good ruling. By now, people have pointed out that the World Court’s moral suasion didn’t count for much when it ruled against the US for its terrorist war against Nicaragua in the 1980s.

You will know that something has changed in the world when a bombing that kills an Israeli soldier, as one did today, isn’t presented as ‘proof’ that the wall needs to exist, as opposed to, say, proof that the wall doesn’t provide security (whereas a political solution that didn’t involve murdering and starving Palestinians might). When Israel killed 4 people in Gaza yesterday with a missile attack the media, when it presented it at all, presented it as ‘reprisal’ or ‘attacks on militants’. Today’s bombing in Israel, however, was uncaused, or just ‘proof’ that Israel needs to ignore the World Court ruling. There are very few parts of the world that ‘matter’, after all — the media opinion-makers, the US elite, some parts of the public — and they are all willing to help Israel ignore the world, so long as there aren’t political forces capable of enforcing the world’s, or in this case the world court’s, opinion.

On July 5 the Interamerican Human Rights Court demanded that the Colombian government adopt provisional measures to protect the indigenous Kankuamo people. This decision was the result of a case brought to the Interamerican Human Rights Commission against the Colombian state in October 2003 by the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia and the Jose Alvear Restrepo Lawyers’ collective.

The court demanded that the government seek out and punish those responsible for the forcible displacement of so many Kankuamo. Since the 1990s, the state and paramilitaries have killed at least 166 people. Today they are in a lot of danger, as 300 families have been displaced. 50 Kankuamo people were killed in 2003 alone.

In other declarations, SINALTRAINAL, the food worker’s union that represents the bottling workers at the Coca Cola bottling plants among other workers, made a declaration with the “Caravan for Life” of internationals who joined Colombian unionists earlier this month. They cited the successes of the campaign against Coke and the need for continuing work to support Colombian unionists, who hold the world’s most dangerous job.

And, while remembering the explicitly political state-backed violence of paramilitaries who try to bust unions and clear territory for multinationals by murdering organizers and community leaders and massacring people, it’s important to remember the social violence as well. I received a testimony from a friend in Cali, Colombia, about an incident a month ago.

Cristian Felipe Gomez Renteria and Ricardo Ortega Gonzales, 16 years old, two kids from one of Cali’s poorest neighbourhoods, who were picked up by a municipal police patrol on their way home from visiting friends. The parents and friends of the kids went from police station to police station trying to figure out where the kids were, being told at each stage to look somewhere else. They were called at home and told their children were dead and where to find the bodies. The bodies, when they were found, showed signs of torture. The group who filed the report, with Amnesty International, the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Cali, and the regional Ombudsperson, provided written testimony and photos of the children (I don’t have those, only the report). Of course there has been no investigation, which is what the community group that filed the report really wants, so nothing definitive can be said other than what the parents and friends of the kids attest happened.

The violence is usually political, but the goals are social, and sometimes it is simply that brutal: literally picking up poor children, murdering them, and dumping them.

This democratic social cleansing is the model for repairing the damage done by the dictatorial regime in Venezuela, should the referendum in August succeed. On that subject, James Petras (who I like, though not about everything) has a piece about the referendum and Carter’s vile role in Counterpunch. This section by Petras contains what everyone needs to understand about Venezuela, the knowledge that has motivated all of my (miniscule) efforts to work on Venezuela:

If Chavez is defeated and if the Right takes power, it will privatize the state petroleum and gas company, selling it to US multinationals, withdraw from OPEC, raise its production and exports to the US, thus lowering Venezuelan revenues by half or more. Internally the popular health programs in the urban “ranchos” will end along with the literary campaign and public housing for the poor. The agrarian reform will be reversed and about 500,000 land reform recipients (100,000 families) will be turned off the land. This will be accomplished through extensive and intensive state bloodletting, jailing and extrajudicial assassination, and intense repression of pro-Chavez neighborhoods, trade unions and social movements. The apparently “democratic” referendum will have profoundly authoritarian, colonial and socially regressive results if the opposition wins.