Venezuela’s Vice-President: “U.S. Apologizes, But Only After it has Tried

[Say_What]

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“North-Americans always apologize, but always after they have done everything else,” said Vice-President José Vicente Rangel, referring to the U.S. history of covert intervention in Latin America and its eventual discovery. Rangel made these comments during yesterday’s book launch of Venezuelan edition of The Chavez Code, by Eva Golinger, a book that documents U.S. intervention in Venezuela during the Chavez presidency.

The first speaker of the evening, History Professor and Minister of Higher Education Samuel Moncada, provided an overview of U.S. intervention in Latin America and around the world. Moncada spoke of how the U.S. concept of “manifest destiny,” which existed in the very beginning of U.S. history and which held that it was the destiny of the North American people to dominate the continent, was still making itself felt in U.S. foreign policy today. Except, instead of speaking of manifest destiny, U.S. foreign policy officials now speak of Latin America as its “back yard,” where certain forms of government must be prevented.

Rangel then presented Golinger’s book, pointing out its importance for all Venezuelans. Rangel added that every decade or so the United States denies having covertly involved itself in the internal affairs of other countries, only to have to admit its involvement several decades later and apologize. According to Rangel, this book will make it impossible for anyone to claim that they did not know about U.S. involvement. Eventually, when the truth is revealed, it is claimed that these were incidents of the past and that now we live in a different epoch in which such things cannot happen. “This is the trap of the anti-code of the empire: the forgetting or rejection of the bad remembrance,” said Rangel.

For Rangel, the U.S. government’s financing of the opposition “were determinant, were the fuel, the stimulus without which the democratic stability would never have been affected.”

Eva Golinger, the U.S.-Venezuelan civil rights attorney of Broklyn, New York, spoke next, highlighting the three failed attempts to topple the Chavez government and how these had been supported by the U.S. Golinger also highlighted that in some respects the intervention in Venezuela is unique, in that unlike in Chile, Nicaragua, Panama, or Cuba, the effort is aimed at all social classes, including the poorest. The U.S. government has been perfecting its techniques of intervention for the past 40 years and now has a good idea of what works and what does not, said Golinger.

http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news.php?newsno=1555

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The Nature of CIA Intervention in Venezuela

...Not surprisingly, the response of the US government and the CIA in particular to Agee’s work has been somewhat aggressive, and he has been forced to divide his time since the 1970s between Germany and Cuba. He currently represents a Canadian petroleum technology firm in Latin America.

Despite the recent rash of anti-Chávez editorials in the US media, and threatening statements made by a whole slew of senior US government officials at both the Departments of State and Defense, Agee sees a more cynical US strategy in Venezuela. Building on the work of scholar William I. Robinson on US intervention in Nicaragua throughout the 1980s, and recently published documents detailing CIA and US government activity in Venezuela, Agee suggests that the CIA’s strategy of “democracy promotion” is in full-force in Venezuela.

As with Nicaragua in the 1980s, a series of foundations are providing millions of dollars of funding to opposition forces in Venezuela, meted out by a private consulting firm contracted by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Assistant Secretary of State, Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs Roger Noriega recently reaffirmed the State Departments commitment to this strategy, telling the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 2nd, 2005, “we will support democratic elements in Venezuela so that they can continue to maintain the political space to which they are entitled.” The funding of these “democratic elements” has as its ultimate goal the unification of Venezuela’s splintered opposition (formerly loosely grouped into the Coordinadora Democratica) for the upcoming Presidential elections in 2006. But failing a victory in 2006, cautions Agee, the CIA et al. will remain, their eyes set on the 2012 elections, and the 2018 elections, ad infinitum, “because what’s at stake is the stability of the political system in the United States, and the security of the political class in the United States.”

How do you view recent developments in Venezuela?

When Chávez was first elected and I began following events here, I could see the writing on the wall, as I could see it in Chile in 1970, as I could see it in Nicaragua in 1979-80. There was no doubt in my mind that the United States would try to change the course of events in Venezuela as they had in Chile and in Nicaragua, and before that in various other countries. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the time to really follow events day to day, but I did try to follow them from a distance, and eventually when Eva Golinger started her website it came to my attention and I began reading some of the documents on the website and I could see the application here of the same mechanisms that were used in Nicaragua in the 1980s in the penetration of civil society and the efforts to influence the political process and the electoral process here in Venezuela. In Nicaragua I had in 1979 I think, just after the Sandinistas took over, written an analysis of what I believed would be the US program there and practically everything I wrote about happened, because these techniques, through the CIA, through AID, through the State Department, and since 1984 through the National Endowment for Democracy, all follow a certain pattern. In Nicaragua the program for influencing the outcome of the 1990 elections began about a year and a half before the elections, for uniting the opposition, for creating a civic movement, all these things seem to be happening again in Venezuela. So this is my interest politically in Venezuela, is to see these things happening and to write from time to time about them.

http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=1403

[jobycom]

1. We still see Columbus as an American

Columbus sailed to a continent he probably already knew was there, immediately set up plantations and began enslaving the inhabitants, and over time waged warfare on any village that dared resist him. America was as settled and advanced as much of rural Europe at the time, but to the Christian Europeans, a person wasn't really a person unless they were Christian, thus Columbus could enslave, exploit or kill them. He is known to have recruited slave traders to find young girls for his men's sexual pleasures, complaining that the men were tired of the old women the slave traders usually brought them. He wanted women under twelve.

Columbus was the first "Manifest Destinarian" in America, and we have not escaped his legacy. I truly believe the nation now is the moral equivalent of the slave-holding South before 1860, and that we will eventually be overthrown-- probably economically more than militarily-- by the rest of the world because of our hubris.

Unfortunately for the rest of the world, we are also the Donald Trump of the world. We owe so many people so much money, that to destroy us or call us to task for what we owe would mean bankruptcy for much of the world. So they continue to prop us up, pretending we are still financially viable. That will end. Ultimately, 9-11 will have succeeded in bringing us down. We are where the Ottoman Empire was before WWI-- the sick man of the world, about to die. We are a Greek tragedy beginning our third act.

Sorry for the monologue.