Pro-Venezuelan loyalists in the Washington D.C. area are being urged to participate, Monday March 1, in a global protest against United States and Organization of American States (OAS) intervention in the sovereign domestic affairs of Venezuela at 11:30 a.m. outside the OAS, 17th and Constitution Avenue, followed by a protest at US News & World Report against biased reporting that feeds the flame for US intervention against the democratically-elected reform government of Venezuela.
Audiences across the United States learned the basics from Venezuelan Women's Development Bank (BANMUJER) president Nora Castaneda in a series of speeches about what she described as the peaceful and democratic revolution being achieved in Venezuela, and how grassroots women who live in poverty ... the majority of African and indigenous descent ... are the most involved in the process and have the most to lose if it is crushed.
Venezuelan women won Article 88 of the 1999 Constitution which recognizes unwaged work in the home as economically productive and entitles housewives to social security benefits; and Article 14 of the Land Law which prioritizes single mothers for land distribution and guarantees food subsidies for pregnant women before and after birth. Global Women's Strike Dozthor Zurlent says "what women all over the world have been campaigning for over decades is becoming a reality in Venezuela."
"As we near March 8 International Women's Day, we ask to protect and defend these and other hard-won achievements ... literacy, free healthcare in the poorest communities, etc. ... which represent a real alternative for all of us who oppose US corporate greed and military might. We know time is tight, but people in Venezuela have asked their supporters in the US to protest a potentially dangerous situation that is presented by the imminent findings on the referendum."
"Venezuela's National Elections Council is under pressure from the US and political opposition forces, threatening that if the decision is not favorable to them, violence will ensue. That only a referendum independently of the number of signatures can guarantee peace. It is nothing more than a flagrant call to disrespect the law and the Constitution, both which instruments of law clearly state that at least 20% of valid signatures are required for a recall referendum. No fake, no duplicated signatures can be considered ... people signing for others is an illegal act and not a 'technicality' as the US State Department is calling it."
"Since the US-backed April 2002 coup and December-January 2003 lock-out which were reversed by popular uprisings, the US has been pressing to get the democratically-elected President Chavez out of power. President Chavez was overwhelmingly elected in 1998 and re-elected in 2000, to get the country's oil revenue back to tackle poverty and corruption and to create a caring economy in Venezuela. Recently, it was uncovered that the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) has been funneling money to forces trying to overthrow President Chavez ... including those participating in the April 2002 coup."
"As Venezuelan government reforms advance, 1.5 million children newly obtained access to school, 1 million adults learned to read and write, 1.5 million people obtained access to drinkable water, the economy is recovering steadily in spite of the sabotage, and the United Nations PNUD has recognized (last report 2003) that poverty in Venezuela has declined 3 points ... a unique case in Latin America and the United States where the number of people in poverty increased."
"Venezuela has a new form of democracy that the US does not like ... a democracy where people not only participate in discussions about their process of development (participation) but also have the legal instruments that allow them to make the decisions. They do not have to depend on politicians or political parties to make decisions for them, people make their own decisions about their projects of development (articles 166 and 182 of the 1999 Constitution) ... this is called "protagonism." Venezuelan democracy is then called participatory and "protagonistic." Since there is no room for corporations to influence the decision-making process this kind of democracy is not liked by the USA."
"As the opposition failure in collecting the required signatures for the referendum on Chavez comes to light, attempts are being made to undermine the Elections Council and democratic life in Venezuela. Richard Boucher, Roger Noriega and other US State Department officials and the US News & World Report, UNIVISION and some other media outlets are misrepresenting what is happening in Venezuela with the object to create conditions for an OAS political and military intervention. Cesar Gaviria and the OAS have presented a one-sided view of events and there is danger that they will continue to follow US directions in the Venezuelan process."
This is a slightly dated excerpt regarding Venezuela but answers a lot of questions.
2. More developing countries follow the lead of Venezuela and China in diversifying their currency reserves away from dollars and balanced with euros. Such a shift in dollar-euro holdings in Latin America and Asia could keep the dollar and euro close to parity.
7. Developing countries lacking dollars or "hard" currencies follow Venezuela's lead and begin bartering their undervalued commodities directly with each other in computerized swaps and counter trade deals. President Chavez has inked 13 such country barter deals on its oil, e.g., with Cuba in exchange for Cuban health paramedics who are setting up clinics in rural Venezuelan villages.
As for the events currently taking place in Venezuela, items #2 and #7 on the above list may allude to why the Bush administration quickly endorsed the failed military-led coup of Hugo Chavez in April 2002. Although the coup collapsed after 2 days, various reports suggest the CIA and a rather embarrassed Bush administration approved and may have been actively involved with the civilian/military coup plotters. "George W. Bush's administration was the failed coup's primary loser, underscoring its bankrupt hemispheric policy. Now it is slowly filtering out that in recent months White House officials met with key coup figures, including Carmona. Although the administration insists that it explicitly objected to any extra-constitutional action to remove Chavez, comments by senior U.S. officials did little to convey this. . . . "The CIA's role in a 1971 Chilean strike could have served as the working model for generating economic and social instability in order to topple Chavez. In the truckers' strike of that year, the agency secretly orchestrated and financed the artificial prolongation of a contrived work stoppage in order to economically asphyxiate the leftist Salvador Allende government. "This scenario would have had CIA operatives acting in liaison with the Venezuelan military, as well as with opposition business and labor leaders, to convert a relatively minor afternoon-long work stoppage by senior management into a nearly successful coup de grâce." [14] Interestingly, according to an article by Michael Ruppert, Venezuelan's ambassador Francisco Mieres-Lopez apparently floated the idea of switching to the euro as their oil currency standard approximately one year before the failed coup attempt. Furthermore, there is evidence that the CIA is still active in its attempts to overthrow the democratically elected Chavez administration. In fact, this past December a Uruguayan government official exposed the ongoing covert CIA operations in Venezuela: "Uruguayan EP-FA congressman Jose Nayardi says he has information that far-reaching plan have been put into place by the CIA and other North American intelligence agencies to overthrow Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez Frias within the next 72 hours. . . . Nayardi says he has received copies of top-secret communications between the Bush administration in Washington and the government of Uruguay requesting the latter's cooperation to support white collar executives and trade union activists to `break down levels of intransigence within the Chavez Frias administration.'" [15] Venezuela is the fourth largest producer of oil, and the corporate elites whose political power runs unfettered in the Bush/Cheney oligarchy appear interested in privatizing Venezuela's oil industry. Furthermore, the establishment might be concerned that Chavez's `barter deals' with 12 Latin American countries and Cuba are effectively cutting the U.S. dollar out of the vital oil transaction currency cycle. Commodities are being traded among these countries in exchange for Venezuela's oil, thereby reducing reliance on fiat dollars. If these unique oil transactions proliferate, they could create more devaluation pressure on the dollar. Continuing attempts by the CIA to remove Hugo Chavez appear likely.
The U.S. economy has acquired significant structural imbalances, including our record-high trade account deficit (now almost 5% of GDP), a $6.3 trillion dollar deficit (60% of GDP), and the recent return to annual budget deficits in the hundreds of billions. These factors would devalue the currency of any nation under the `old rules.' Why is the dollar still predominant despite these structural imbalances? While many Americans assume the strength of the U.S. dollar merely rests on our economic output (i.e. GDP), the ruling elites understand that the dollarÅfs strength is based on two fundamentally unique advantages relative to all other hard currencies
The reality is that the strength of the U.S. dollar since 1945 rests on it being the international reserve currency. Thus it assumes the role of fiat currency for global oil transactions (ie. `petro-dollar'). The U.S. prints hundreds of billions of these fiat petro-dollars, which are then used by nation states to purchase oil/energy from OPEC producers (except Iraq, to some degree Venezuela, and perhaps Iran in the near future). These petro-dollars are then re-cycled from OPEC back into the U.S. via Treasury Bills or other dollar-denominated assets such as U.S. stocks, real estate, etc. In essence, global oil consumption provides a subsidy to the U.S. economy. Hence, the Europeans created the euro to compete with the dollar as an alternative international reserve currency. Obviously the E.U. would like oil priced in euros as well. #msg-994080
What's really happening in Venezuela? By Ron Smith, Posted on Mon Mar 1st, 2004 at 09:01:29 PM EST As most of us focus on the latest Narcocoup in Haiti, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez asserts his legitimacy and warns the US away from futher intervention.
I guess the best place to start is here: http://sg.biz.yahoo.com/040301/1/3ifqa.html Agence France Presse's report on Chavez's statements to the United States. It's March 1st of a very strange year, of a very strange US presidency. A great number of us Latinophiles are looking stunned at an at least momentarily successful coup d'etat in Haiti straight out of the 1950's. In Haiti, a president with a populist history and a proven electoral mandate is toppled in favor of the remnants of the Duvalier dictatorship. It didn't take much time at all for the seemingly inexorable outcome in Port-au-Prince, perhaps this explains the current goings on in Venezuela. The timing may be coincidental, but there's reason to be wary of an encore performance by US policy makers in Caracas.
Perhaps a good way to frame this current situation in Venezuela is the recall referendum. I assume most narconews readers have been following the referendum for the recall in Venezuela. Now it doesn't take much more than a cursory look at the history to see that this recall referendum is just the latest attempt by the oft-discredited opposition to remove the democratically elected Chavez from office.
It's important to note that the opposition isn't stupid, anymore than the US policy makers are. The opposition, with some possible exceptions to allow for the self-deluded, knows that President Chavez is highly popular. A real campaign to win a recall election would not come to pass as it did in California in 2003. In California, we had an unpopular Governer excreted from the Democratic Party's machine who refused to make even the most simple progressive reforms. Chavez, on the other hand, has indeed enacted a long series of reforms, perhaps not as quickly as some would like, but has for the most part been consistent in his stance on major issues that affect Venezuelans.
So if you were a big mover at the ironically named Coordinadora Democratica (CD), you wouldn't really want a referendum where you could be summarily trounced in an open election. Instead, you'd want to do everything you could to make a mess of the political system, and attempt to discredit the constitutional process.
None of this is news, it's been reported in the authentic press for some time. What is new is what appears to be a change towards a more aggressive response by the Chavez presidency. I think the most notable act of the Chavez government was the threat to end oil exports to the US. This threat is a major shift in Venezuelan policy and demonstrates that the Venezuelan government has grown tired of US anti-democratic actions and support of the most reactionary sectors of Venezuelan society.
The escalation occurred as the CNE, the Venezuelan National Electoral body approached a decision regarding the authenticity of the signatures on the recall referendum petitions. According to the reports by Charles Hardy of Vheadline and Narconews fame, some opposition leaders have even admitted their lack of sufficient signatures to call the referendum a success. It's important to note that Chavez's opposition is not homogenous, if you oppose the policies of Chavez, the only significant game in town is the CD, whose helm is currently populated by some of the most spoiled and reactionary people in Venezuela. It's important to keep in mind that there are perfectly reasonable members of the opposition with valid claims against Chavez, they just don't happen to be in charge. (You can glean some knowledge about the make-up of the CD by reading my previous article on Venezuela I did for Narconews in 2002) http://narconews.com/Issue25/article11.html
Last week, the CNE seemed ready to release their decision about the recall petition signatures. The Carter center was dispatched early in the decision making process to oversee the signature analysis, but the result seemed already clear, the CNE would invalidate as many as 1.6 million signatures out of the 3.4 million supplied by the opposition. After subtracting the fraudulent signatures, the total falls far short of the 2.4 million needed for a recount. The opposition has now placed itself in the position of "To hell with the democratic process, we want a democratic recall referendum where we win, regardless of how many signatures and votes we receive!" It worked in Florida, I can understand their disappointment. In a temper tantrum of thousands, the opposition took to the streets last week, according to my Venezuelan friend's eyewitness account, and tried to provoke the Venezuelan National Guard into firing upon the opposition marchers. The National Guard responded with "less-lethal" weapons and tear gas, which I can tell you from personal experience are no fun, and the less-lethal projectiles can do some serious damage, but the national guard did not use live weapons. A protester was shot by a live round from a motorcycle rider during the march, but the details are still quite murky as to whom this protester was, which side the protester supported, and the identity of the assailant.
Another part of the equation are the revelations achieved by a Freedom of Information Act(FOIA) Request by a Venezuelan solidarity organization, which reveals some of the direct meddling and intervention by the US government in Venezuela's political affairs. You can see the result of the FOIA request at: http://www.venezuelafoia.info
So what now? The opposition is setting fire to barricades in their middle-class neighborhoods (According to Vheadline) to protest the decision of the CNE. The Oil threat is an important development, as Venezuela is in a difficult position with oil. They need the US to import oil as badly or more than the US needs the oil. This statement by Chavez is a major escalation, but this weekend's events are a clear indication that President Chavez has reason to be concerned.
Your oil comment (3.00 / 1) (#1) by Peter Carlin on Mon Mar 1st, 2004 at 09:23:29 PM EST (User Info) As a follow on note. With oil prices at $36.50 a barrel, Venezuelan oil could be shipped elsewhere and still be profitable, but your basic point is valid. Ven. also produces large amounts of gasoline addidtives for the US market as it heads into the driving season. Gasoline futures are near record highs today, and this is an issue that could cripple Bush in the election. $2.50 a gallon gasoline could wreck havoc on his campaign.
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