The Observer had a good article on the OBVIOUS link to the Bush administration and the Venezuelan coup. Not just link, but senior staff of the Bush administration directed the coup! It has been mentioned many times before, but it should be emphasized that many of the people behind this in the US government took part in the shadiness during Iran-Contra and the dirty tricks of the Reagan-Bush years. Don’t let them sweep this under the rug. It’s criminal. Bush and everyone involved ought to be tried for war crimes in a military tribunal, and if convicted, sentenced to capital punishment in Texas. As far as I’m concerned the Bush administration has the blood of Venezuelans on its hands. They are nothing but thugs, racketeers, and worst of all, traitors to democracy.
The failed coup in Venezuela was closely tied to senior officials in the US government, The Observer has established. They have long histories in the ‘dirty wars’ of the 1980s, and links to death squads working in Central America at that time. …
One of them, Elliot Abrams, who gave a nod to the attempted Venezuelan coup, has a conviction for misleading Congress over the infamous Iran-Contra affair. …
Now officials at the Organisation of American States and other diplomatic sources, talking to The Observer, assert that the US administration was not only aware the coup was about to take place, but had sanctioned it, presuming it to be destined for success. …
The visits by Venezuelans plotting a coup, including Carmona himself, began, say sources, ‘several months ago’, and continued until weeks before the putsch last weekend. The visitors were received at the White House by the man President George Bush tasked to be his key policy-maker for Latin America, Otto Reich.
Reich is a right-wing Cuban-American who, under Reagan, ran the Office for Public Diplomacy. It reported in theory to the State Department, but Reich was shown by congressional investigations to report directly to Reagan’s National Security Aide, Colonel Oliver North, in the White House. …
On the day Carmona claimed power, Reich summoned ambassadors from Latin America and the Caribbean to his office. He said the removal of Chavez was not a rupture of democra tic rule, as he had resigned and was ‘responsible for his fate’. He said the US would support the Carmona government.
But the crucial figure around the coup was Abrams, who operates in the White House as senior director of the National Security Council for ‘democracy, human rights and international opera tions’. He was a leading theoretician of the school known as ‘Hemispherism’, which put a priority on combating Marxism in the Americas.
It led to the coup in Chile in 1973, and the sponsorship of regimes and death squads that followed it in Argentina, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and elsewhere. During the Contras’ rampage in Nicaragua, he worked directly to North.
Congressional investigations found Abrams had harvested illegal funding for the rebellion. Convicted for withholding information from the inquiry, he was pardoned by George Bush senior.