|
||
Support Caribbean authors and Hot Calaloo - Buy: Satisfy My Soul the eagerly awaited 2nd novel by Jamaican born Colin Channer
Our Price: $13.97
|
September 2004 UNDILUTEDEditor's Note: Hugo Chavez faced almost an identical foe as President Aristide in Haiti. Political leaders that champion the poor are obviously prime targets. Read below and see the role of racism. - Michael I. Phillips Also see Venezuela proposes cheap oil prices for Caribbean. Why
Venezuela has Voted Again for Their 'Negro e Indio' President
By:
Greg Palast There's
so much BS and baloney thrown around about Venezuela that I may be
violating some rule of US journalism by providing some facts. Let's begin
with this: 77% of Venezuela's farmland is owned by 3% of the population,
the 'hacendados.' I
met one of these farmlords in Caracas at an anti-Chavez protest march.
Oddest demonstration I've ever seen: frosted blondes in high heels
clutching designer bags, screeching, "Chavez - dic-ta-dor!" The
plantation owner griped about the "socialismo" of Chavez, then
jumped into his Jaguar convertible. That
week, Chavez himself handed me a copy of the "socialist"
manifesto that so rattled the man in the Jag. It was a new law passed by
Venezuela's Congress which gave land to the landless. The Chavez law
transferred only fields from the giant haciendas which had been left
unused and abandoned. This
land reform, by the way, was promoted to Venezuela in the 1960s by that
Lefty radical, John F. Kennedy. Venezuela's dictator of the time agreed to
hand out land, but forgot to give peasants title to their property. But
Chavez won't forget, because the mirror reminds him. What the affable
president sees in his reflection, beyond the ribbons of office, is a
"negro e indio" -- a "Black and Indian" man, dark as a
cola nut, same as the landless and, until now, the hopeless. For the first
time in Venezuela's history, the 80% Black-Indian population elected a man
with skin darker than the man in the Jaguar. So
why, with a huge majority of the electorate behind him, twice in elections
and today in a referendum, is Hugo Chavez in hot water with our
democracy-promoting White House? Maybe
it's the oil. Lots of it. Chavez sits atop a reserve of crude that rivals
Iraq's. And it's not his presidency of Venezuela that drives the White
House bananas, it was his presidency of the Organization of Petroleum
Exporting Countries, OPEC. While in control of the OPEC secretariat,
Chavez cut a deal with our maximum leader of the time, Bill Clinton, on
the price of oil. It was a 'Goldilocks' plan. The price would not be too
low, not too high; just right, kept between $20 and $30 a barrel. But
Dick Cheney does not like Clinton nor Chavez nor their band. To him, the
oil industry's (and Saudi Arabia's) freedom to set oil prices is as sacred
as freedom of speech is to the ACLU. I got this info, by the way, from
three top oil industry lobbyists. Why
should Chavez worry about what Dick thinks? Because, said one of the oil
men, the Veep in his bunker, not the pretzel-chewer in the White House,
"runs energy policy in the United States." And
what seems to have gotten our Veep's knickers in a twist is not the price
of oil, but who keeps the loot from the current band-busting spurt in
prices. Chavez had his Congress pass another oil law, the "Law of
Hydrocarbons," which changes the split. Right now, the oil majors -
like PhillipsConoco - keep 84% of the proceeds of the sale of Venezuela
oil; the nation gets only 16%. Chavez
wanted to double his Treasury's take to 30%. And for good reason.
Landless, hungry peasants have, over decades, drifted into Caracas and
other cities, building million-person ghettos of cardboard shacks and open
sewers. Chavez promised to do something about that. And
he did. "Chavez gives them bread and bricks," one Venezuelan TV
reporter told me. The blonde TV newscaster, in the middle of a publicity
shoot, said the words "pan y ladrillos" with disdain, making it
clear that she never touched bricks and certainly never waited in a bread
line. But
to feed and house the darker folk in those bread and brick lines, Chavez
would need funds, and the 16% slice of the oil pie wouldn't do it. So the
President of Venezuela demanded 30%, leaving Big Oil only 70%. Suddenly,
Bill Clinton's ally in Caracas became Mr. Cheney's -- and therefore, Mr.
Bush's -- enemy. So
began the Bush-Cheney campaign to "Floridate" the will of the
Venezuela electorate. It didn't matter that Chavez had twice won election.
Winning most of the votes, said a White House spokesman, did not make
Chavez' government "legitimate." Hmmm. Secret contracts were
awarded by our Homeland Security spooks to steal official Venezuela voter
lists. Cash passed discreetly from the US taxpayer, via the so-called
'Endowment for Democracy,' to the Chavez-haters running today's
"recall" election. A
brilliant campaign of placing stories about Chavez' supposed unpopularity
and "dictatorial" manner seized US news and op-ed pages, ranging
from the San Francisco Chronicle to the New York Times. But
some facts just can't be smothered in propaganda ink. While George Bush
can appoint the government of Iraq and call it "sovereign," the
government of Venezuela is appointed by its people. And the fact is that
most people in this slum-choked land don't drive Jaguars or have their
hair tinted in Miami. Most look in the mirror and see someone "negro
e indio," as dark as their President Hugo. The
official CIA handbook on Venezuela says that half the nation's farmers own
only 1% of the land. They are the lucky ones, as more peasants owned
nothing. That is, until their man Chavez took office. Even under Chavez,
land redistribution remains more a promise than an accomplishment. But
today, the landless and homeless voted their hopes, knowing that their man
may not, against the armed axis of local oligarchs and Dick Cheney,
succeed for them. But they are convinced he will never forget them. And
that's a fact. Greg
Palast's reports from Venezuela for BBC Television's Newsnight and the
Guardian papers of Britain earned a California State University Journalism
School "Project Censored" award for 2002. View photos and
Palast's reports on Venezuela at www.GregPalast.com.
|