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Two things you won't hear in many mainstream media obituaries of Hugo Chavez.
– Chavez’ oft-mocked paranoia about the US was justified, as the Second Bush Administration backed the 2002 coup attempt against him:
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.
Washington’s involvement in the turbulent events that briefly removed left-wing leader Hugo Chavez from power last weekend resurrects fears about US ambitions in the hemisphere.
It also also deepens doubts about policy in the region being made by appointees to the Bush administration, all of whom owe their careers to serving in the dirty wars under President Reagan.
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.
– Chavez did a very good job of helping the 99% of Venezuela, something even people opposed to him admitted, as reporter Greg Palast found during a trip to Caracas some years ago:
While trolling around the poor housing blocks of Caracas, I ran into a local, Arturo Quiran, a merchant seaman and no big fan of Chavez. But over a beer at his kitchen table, he told me,
“Fifteen years ago under [then-President] Carlos Andrés Pérez, there was a lot of oil money in Venezuela. The ‘oil boom’ we called it. Here in Venezuela there was a lot of money, but we didn’t see it.”
But then came Hugo Chavez, and now the poor in his neighborhood, he said, “get medical attention, free operations, x-rays, medicines; education also. People who never knew how to write now know how to sign their own papers.”
– One reason the neoliberals and neoconservatives who both worship at the altar of disaster capitalism hate him so much is that he got nations like Nicaragua and Bolivia and Cuba, among others, to join the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas, or Alba for short, which is a cooperative partnership and mutual aid coalition. This alliance will outlive Chavez, and make it harder for economic feudalists of the Chicago School to recolonize the area.
That’s for starters.
Photo by Marcello Casal Jr./Abr released under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
15 Comments
Didn’t Chavez also help the poor in the U.S. by shipping heating fuel?
He attempted to when the Fuel Oil Subsidy program was cut, also he attempted to send fuel and aid to New Orleans after Katrina, both efforts were stopped by U.S. gov and dismissed as propaganda attempts, even though he did the same for other countries.
Yup.
Greg Grandin of The Nation has more on Chavez — and more things you won’t see in mainstream US media: http://www.thenation.com/article/173212/legacy-hugo-chavez#
From a post by my co-blogger Charles at my home blog:
Good post Phoenix, recommend!
Not to mention the more blatant assassinations of Allende, Torres, and Trujillo by the U.S.
… X 2
… X 2 again as well
North Amerika neo-conns/oil corp. try to stop the little people advancement. Sounds like another place I know;)
Both are long but worth reading. Good stuff PW
http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2013/03/us-plots-conquest-of-venezuela-in-wake.html
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/03/06/the-chavez-legacy/
“The Devil was here yesterday, yes, right here…I can still smell the sulfur.”
–Hugo Chavez, addressing the UN General Assembly, 2007
The Devil was of course President Bush. I started calling Chavez Uncle Hugo after that. He may have been a little crazy, but he truly did raise the living standards for the majority of the Venezuelan people, which is exactly why they kept re-electing him in elections which the UN and Jimmy Carter both said were free and fair.
One thing that is almost never mentioned in the American corporate media when they interview Venezuelan expats complaining about Chavez is that most of them lived quite well, at the expense of most other Venezuelans, under the old Perez regime, which massacred at least 3000 Venezuelans before Chavez’ revolution. Chavez used Venezuela’s oil wealth to do things like build roads, bridges, schools, public TV and radio stations, and provide health care.
What a monster to corporatist eyes!
His successor started off as a bus driver, did you know that? Then he was a union organizer. Before Chavez picked him for Veep, he was foreign minister for a few years. I’ve heard him speak a few times; one sharp cookie who will no doubt be underestimated by American elites and Venezuelan expats alike.
His Crazy seems more like humor to me the Right having no humor besides putting people down don’t understand it.
As a Commie I seriously doubt that Hugo believes in the devil.
Note that I am not accusing you of not having a sense of humor but Hugo is from a different culture and I suspect his humor does not translate well.
This maybe?
Oliver Stone: South of the Border
Chavez was not a Communist; never called himself that. He did call himself a socialist and a Roman Catholic.
There’s no contradiction, you know. Maybe you don’t.
He called his revolution Bolivarian. Some of us nortes would be advised to read a biography of Simon Bolivar so we don’t fall into anachronistic categories for classifying political movements.
And another strong element of the Bolivarian movement in Latin America is Roman Catholic liberation theology.
Socialism is too general a term to be descriptive, but of course Chavez and other folks who are pursuing the Bolivarian path are socialists in their approach to economic policy.