Re: U.S. nudges the Vatican, other allies to help rescue Venezuela
Dear Tracy Wilkinson:
You wrote
“Socialist, anti-U.S. governments have ruled Venezuela since Chavez came to power in 1999, prevailing over a brief 2002 coup that Chavez blamed on Washington.”
The U.S. State Department’s Office of Inspector General stated that the Bush administration had “provided training, institution building, and other support to individuals and organizations understood to be actively involved” in the coup.
The U.S. government never disputed the legitimacy of the Carmona dictatorship and totally swallowed its claims that Hugo Chavez had “resigned” even though the intelligence officials had reported that a military coup was imminent weeks before it happened. The New York Times editorial board was even more openly enthusiastic in applauding the coup proclaiming that “Venezuelan democracy is no longer threatened by a would-be dictator. Mr. Chávez, a ruinous demagogue, stepped down after the military intervened and handed power to a respected business leader, Pedro Carmona.”
It was a coup solidly backed not just by the US government but by the US political establishment; yet in your Orwellian retelling it was simply a “coup that Chavez blamed on Washington.”
Only a few months ago the Obama administration renewed an executive order that declared the situation in Venezuela to be an “extraordinary threat to the national security of the United States”. That insane declaration was required to legally target Venezuelan officials with sanctions. Why do you whitewash years of US efforts to impose an undemocratic “regime change” on Venezuela?
You also wrote “by any measure” Venezuela is “one of the poorest and most dysfunctional” countries in the world.
Okay, consider two widely used measures for classifying a country as “rich” or “poor”: GDP per capita and child mortality.
Despite the brutal recession over the past 2 years, Venezuela is better than average by both measures in Latin America – never mind the world. That you and your editors are comfortable printing such a wild exaggeration really speaks volumes about how fully the US media continues to back “regime change” in Venezuela.
Another disgraceful thing about your article is that you refer to Hugo Chavez as the “late strongman” – as if he had not been a democratically elected leader.
Would you apply the “strongman” term to Obama or Bush given all the death and destruction they’ve inflicted throughout the world, or given an incarceration rate in the US that may, quite possibly, only be surpassed by North Korea’s? I wonder if you will call the white supremacist endorsed Trump a “strongman” should he slither into the White House thanks to the widespread ignorance and bigotry promoted by the US media.
Joe Emersberger
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