From the Guardian: Greg Palast weighs in on the lies and distortions passed off as journalism about the Chavez coup:
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The resignation myth was the capstone of a year-long disinformation campaign against the populist former paratrooper who took office with 60% of the vote. The Bush White House is quoted as stating that Chavez’s being elected by “a majority of voters” did not confer “legitimacy” on the Venezuelan government. The assertion was not unexpected from a US administration selected over the opposition of the majority of American voters.
What neither Bush nor the papers told you is that Chavez’s real crime was to pass two laws through Venezuela’s national assembly. The first ordered big plantation owners to turn over untilled land to the landless. The second nearly doubled, from roughly 16% to 30%, royalties paid for extracting Venezuela’s oil. Venezuela was once the largest exporter of oil to the USA, bigger than Saudi Arabia. This explains Chavez’s unpopularity – at least within that key constituency, the American petroleum industry.
There remains the charge that, in the words of the New York Times, “Chavez ordered soldiers to fire on a crowd [of protesters].” This bloody smear, sans evidence, stained every Western paper, including Britain’s newest lefty, the Mirror. Yet I could easily reach eyewitnesses without ties to any faction who said the shooting began from a roadway overpass controlled by the anti-Chavez Metropolitan Police, and the first to fall were pro-Chavez demonstrators.
Related links:
- U.S. Regrets Hasty Embrace of Chavez Coup They only regret that it failed. This would be a whole different story otherwise. If they weren’t distrustful before Central and South American governments have learned to be wary of the US and especially the corruption in the Bush administration.
- Guardian: US ‘gave the nod’ to Venezuelan coup:
The same message was echoed on Saturday by the US ambassador to the Organisation of American States (OAS), Roger Noriega, at an emergency meeting in Washington.One OAS diplomat said: “We were in that room for 14 hours, and for most of that 14 hours, Noriega was pushing the line that it was Chavez that had created the problem.”
The OAS denounced the coup attempt, as did all Venezuela’s neighbours. Washington, however, acknowledged the new government. “A transitional civilian government has been installed,” Mr Fleischer said on Saturday. “This government has promised early elections.”
Some of the key participants in US meetings with Venezuelan figures in the run-up to the coup were veterans of Reagan-era “dirty tricks” operations. Mr Pardo-Maurer served as the chief of staff to the Nicaraguan contras’ representative in Washington between 1986 and 1989.
Mr Reich was the head of the office of public diplomacy in the state department, which was later found to have been involved in covert pro-contra propaganda.
- Washington Post: Media’s Role in Crisis Becomes the Big Story in Venezuela Of course, the media says they only failed to show enough of both sides rather than truthfully admit to being completely dishonest and manipulative.
- U.S. Embassy Workers Leave Venezuela Time for the vermine to get while the getting is good.