[Media-watch] Palast on Venezuela - gregpalast.com - 16/08/2004

[Julie-ann Davies]

Dick Cheney, Hugo Chavez and Bill Clinton's Band
Why Venezuela has Voted Again for Their 'Negro e Indio' President
Baltimore Chronicle
Monday, August 16, 2004
http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=362&row=0

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 with a nearly two-to-one landslide victory in a 
recall 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 would never forget them.

And that's a fact.