U.S. Government has it in for Venezuela: and Venezuela is Ready

"If they kill me, the name of the person responsible is George Bush," Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez Frias said in his weekly television talk.  His statement comes on the heels of a new initiative in the United States Congress to interfere further in the affairs of Latin American countries – and propaganda in the Washington Post justify it – this time in the guise of controlling not drugs, but guns.

Chavez offered no evidence to back his claim that the U.S. government has plans to assassinate him, wrote the BBC in its report on Monday.

For a motive, though, the BBC needn't have looked any farther than their own 2004 November article, "Venezuela ignores IMF advice on oil money," by Iain Bruce.

For opportunity, George W. Bush's second term following a second fraudulent election will suffice.

As for means, well, that's exactly what the government and people of Venezuela are trying to deny the Bush regime. The U.S. propaganda campaign against Venezuela has begun anew.  Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice described Chavez as a "negative force" in Latin America, the BBC reported.  CIA chief Porter Goss, with incredible if unwitting irony, said Venezuela was a possible source of instability in the region.

Neither the government nor the people of Venezuela are taking this lying down.

"If Chavez is assassinated, the blame will fall on Bush," Fidel Castro had said the week before, noting that he has survived many U.S. murder plots.  Chavez has an answer never available to Castro.

"If, by the hand of the devil, those perverse plans succeed," he said, "...forget about Venezuelan oil, Mr Bush."

The possibility that the U.S. military or a surrogate might come in to take the oil has not been lost on the Venezuelan government, which followed its people in voicing opposition to the U.S. war on Iraq.  In a move that made the U.S. establishment very angry, Chavez has ordered 100,000 rifles from Russia.

Already, Republicans in the U.S. Congress have prepared legislation to remove weapons of local destruction from around the world.  (Assault weapons in other countries are apparently a threat to U.S. security, but not a problem in the hands of law-abiding citizens in the United States, where more homicides per 100,000 people are committed than any other first world country, especially against women.)

Les Blough, editor of Axis of Logic, recently visited the world's premiere Bolivarian democratic republic, an experience the 61-year-old called life-changing.  (He signs off: "It can happen here, in the United States.")  Blough's first report-back includes an excellent analysis of U.S. fearmongering on Venezuela's rifle purchase:

Last night, after returning from Venezuela, I read with new comprehension when I reviewed new U.S. legislation sponsored by Richard Lugar, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in Washington.  Washington is calling the legislation the Conventional Arms Threat Reduction Act (CATRA).  The new act would create an office in the U.S. State Department for the purpose of eliminating small arms around the globe and particularly in Latin America.  This ambitious move in Washington is clearly conceived - at least in part - as a response to Venezuela's recent arms purchase from Russia and other Venezuelan foreign policy.

Marcela Sanchez of the Washington Post and Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Richard G. Lugar ran a now-classic propaganda play with her February 17 article.

Blough wrote:

The U.S. cannot make any credible claim that Venezuela has "weapons of mass destruction" as it did in Iraq, so it is beginning to weave a new lie.  The new deception is that conventional weapons now comprise the threat to the U.S. and to "others".

Blough asked a 78 year old woman shopkeeper in Caracas if she fears an invasion by the United States to steal their oil, he wrote.  She answered, "We will shortly receive a big shipment of guns from Russia.  We will fight. We will defend our country."

The Bruce BBC article about Venezuela ignoring the International Monetary Fund and pouring its oil profits into social programs hints at the reason Venezuelans may feel such ownership of their country now:

It's 6pm in the Caracas shanty town of Carapita.  In the local schoolroom, Greydaris Motta and about forty of her neighbours are beginning class.

Ms Motta left school early.  Her parents couldn't afford it and then she got pregnant.

Now Mission Ribas, as it's called here, is giving thousands of poor Venezuelans the chance to finish their secondary education.

Ms Motta wants to become a lawyer.

"I'm doing it for my children's future," she says. "If I study, maybe they'll follow my example."

Further up one of Carapita's winding alleys, a dozen other local residents are squeezed into someone's front room.

They've just finished Part One of Mission Robinson, which teaches basic literacy. Now they're beginning Part Two, which covers primary education.

The Venezuelan government says it's taught over a million adults to read and write in the last year - they say it may be the biggest literacy programme the world has ever seen.

True democracy and a measure of justice perhaps can happen in the United States, as Blough writes.  But the first order of business is making sure it stays happening in Venezuela, whatever the public and private plans of the anti-democratic U.S. government.

Marcela Sanchez – whom we've run across before on the NarcoSphere and whom Al Giordano clobbered in 2001 with the less-flattering facts about Bolivia's then-president – and her shamefully distorting article deserve a more complete deconstructing than I or even Les Blough have given.  I don't have time now, but suffice it to view Marcela Sanchez as a tool for power from now on, if (like me) you hadn't already figured her out.