- What do you call a nation that provides medical aid to
desperately poor people in Mexico, heating assistance to low-income families
in the U.S., crucial project financing to some of the poorest countries
in Africa, and aid to impoverished Caribbean island nations?
-
- If you're the New York Times, you call it "provocative,"
and you call the leader of that country "the next Fidel Castro."
-
- Venezuela, under President Hugo Chavez, has been turning
its increasingly valuable oil reserves into an engine for development,
not just in Venezuela, where the revenues are being used to finance schools,
housing and job creation for the nation's long-suffering and long-ignored
poor, but also across Latin America, in the process creating a new model
for Latin America--one which challenges the imperial domination of the
United States.
-
- In an April 4 page one article that reeks of Cold War
rhetoric, Timesman Juan Forero warns that with Venezuela's oil revenues
rising 32 percent last year, Venezuela's foreign aid spending "now
surpasses the nearly $2 billion Washington allocates annually to pay for
development programs and the drug war in western South America." (The
drug war is foreign aid?)
-
- Quoting only Chavez critics--both political opponents
within Venezuela, and U.S. government and right-wing think tank members
in the U.S.--Forero paints an ominous picture of a budding threat to U.S.
influence in the Americas.
-
- The most appalling quote comes from John Negroponte,
the overall director of intelligence operations in the U.S., and a man
with a long history of meddling in the affairs of, and indeed subverting
the governments of nations in Latin America. Mr. Chavez is "spending
considerable sums involving himself in the political and economic life
of other countries in Latin America and elsewhere, this despite the very
real economic development and social needs of his own country," Negroponte
is quoted as telling Forero.
-
- This from an official of a nation that has so far wasted
$500 billion destroying a nation in the middle east, that is making preparations
for going to war against yet another nation in the middle east, that has
subverted nations from the Tierra del Fuego to the Yucatan, including
Venezuela, and that, it must be noted, has been for years ignoring "very
real economic development and social needs" inside its own borders.
-
- Given the fact that no one has accused Chavez of any
of the kind of subversive or heavy-handed pressure of the kind for which
the U.S. has become notorious--only of providing much needed financial
aid to less fortunate countries--what exactly is so awful about a an oil-rich
country like Venezuela spreading the wealth?
-
- The only negative things Forero can seem to come up with
are that Chavez has been derisive of President Bush, referring to him
in speeches as a "donkey," "drunkard" and "coward,"
and that right-wing critics have accused him of "mismanagement"
and "populist decadence." Heck, Bush faces worse invective than
that at home.
-
- Even the comparisons between Chavez--the twice-elected
and hugely popular leader of Venezuela--and Castro, the aging dictator
of Cuba--are tendentious at best. Cuba, desperately poor and the victim
of decades of U.S. trade embargo and subversion policies, has admittedly
on occasion offered at least rhetorical support for anti-U.S. rebels, as
in El Salvador and Nicaragua. Chavez, while openly espousing anti-imperialist
views and seeking to challenge U.S. dominance in Latin America, has never
been accused of fomenting rebellion in the region. Indeed, if there is
anything about Castro's Cuba that Venezuela under Chavez has been emulating
it has been Cuba's commendable practice of furnishing of doctors and teachers
to needy regions of Latin America.
-
- Would that the U.S. would engage in more of this kind
of "influence peddling," and less of the kind that involves arms
sales, military bases and the training of secret police in the fine art
of torture.
-
- Imagine a Latin America where the U.S. and Venezuela
vied in seeing who could provide more doctors for the peasants of Guatemala
and Brazil, or who could provide lower-interest loans for water projects
in Bolivia or Ecuador. Imagine, for that matter, a Philadelphia where
poor people didn't have to depend upon handouts of cheap oil from Venezuela
to keep their apartments warm through the winter because of federal cuts
in heating oil assistance programs.
-
- Imagine, while we're at it, a New York Times that could
write a front page article about the wasteful militarism of America's
increasingly dictatorial President George W. Bush, juxtaposed against the
unmet "economic development and social needs of his own country."
-
- http://thiscantbehappening.net
|