A medley of meddling: US undermines democracy throughout Latin America

The first link is actually from 2010, but it’s an important one that I had missed.

Mark Weisbrot:

The United States actually intervened in Brazilian politics as recently as 2005, organizing a conference to promote a legal change that would make it more difficult for legislators to switch parties. This would have strengthened the opposition to Lula’s Workers’ Party (PT) government, since the PT has party discipline but many opposition politicians do not. This intervention by the U.S. government was only discovered last year through a Freedom of Information Act request filed in Washington.

Weisbrot, April 20th:

Recent events indicate that the Obama administration has stepped up its strategy of “regime change” against the left-of-center governments in Latin America, promoting conflict in ways not seen since the military coup that Washington supported in Venezuela in 2002. The most high-profile example is in Venezuela itself, during the past week. As this goes to press, Washington has grown increasingly isolated in its efforts to destabilize the newly elected government of Nicolas Maduro.

But Venezuela is not the only country to fall prey to Washington’s efforts to reverse the electoral results of the past 15 years in Latin America. It is now clear that last year’s ouster of President Fernando Lugo of Paraguay was also aided and abetted by the United States government. In a brilliant investigative work for Agência Pública, journalist Natalia Viana shows that the Obama administration funded the principal actors involved in the “parliamentary coup” against Lugo. Washington then helped organize international support for coup.

Daniel Kovalik, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

I just returned from Venezuela where I was one of 170 international election observers from around the world, including India, Brazil, Great Britain, Argentina, South Korea and France. Among the observers were two former presidents (of Guatemala and the Dominican Republic), judges, lawyers and high-ranking officials of national electoral councils.

What we found was a transparent, reliable, well-run and thoroughly audited electoral system.

Dawn Paley, Upside Down World:

There’s a new President in Latin America….
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Horacio Cartes is his name,
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Cartes’ link to drug traffickers was reported in the New York Times, and his implication in money laundering has been amply documented. “Through the utilization of a [Drug Enforcement Administration] [Buenos Aires Country Office] cooperating source and other DEA undercover personnel, agents have infiltrated CARTES’ money laundering enterprise, an organization believed to launder large quantities of United States currency generated through illegal means, including through the sale of narcotics, from the [Tri-Border Area of Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil] to the United States,” according to a State Department cable leaked by Wikileaks. As if that wasn’t enough, a recent report by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists revealed that a bank owned by Cartes opened a secret locale in the offshore tax-haven of the Cook Islands.

The decline of American influence: Venezuelan case study

Mark Weisbrot, The Guardian, via t/o

Washington’s efforts to de-legitimise the [Venezuelan] election mark a significant escalation of US efforts at regime change in Venezuela.
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But the Obama team’s effort failed miserably. On Wednesday, the government of Spain, Washington’s only significant ally supporting a “100% audit” reversed its position and recognised Maduro’s election. Then the secretary general of the Organisation of American States (OAS), José Miguel Insulza, backed off his prior alignment with the Obama administration and recognised the election result.

It was not just the left governments of Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, Bolivia, Uruguay and others that had quickly congratulated Maduro on his victory; Mexico, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Haiti and other non-left governments had joined them. The Obama administration was completely isolated in the world.

Washington’s clumsy efforts also helped highlight the election as an issue of national sovereignty, something that is deeply cherished in the region.
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The opposition representative on the national electoral council, Vicente Díaz, acknowledged that he had “no doubt” that the vote count was accurate.

I don’t expect my government to do something because it’s right or to abstain from doing it because it is wrong. But when they do something wrong in a way that damages even the greedy self-interest of the nation, then that government does not deserve to be in power.

Right now, Venezuela and all of Latam is giving us the finger.

Four Seven dead in Venezuela

As today’s DemocracyNow interview reminds us, the murderous violence inflicted on innocents in Boston is an everyday occurrence in places like Mogadishu.

In Venezuela, four have died in street violence over the election. These murders were committed by the right, according to Telesur. Other people were wounded.

Update Now seven dead, 61 wounded.

Dave Zirin asks, Is this the world we want to live in? If not, it’s time to stop the violence emanating from the heart of the Empire.
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More on this story now at Daily Kos.

Venezuela’s Maduro re-elected with 1.5% margin, 93% counted/updated

So says Telesur.

He very nearly lost himself the election–he was tipped to win by double digits. Let’s hope Maduro is better at governing than at running for office.
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Update: Oh, great. The loser, Henrique Capriles is apparently serious in refusing to recognize the election, and has called for street protests. He is demanding a 100% recount, which legal experts say is not envisioned in the law.

While we have learned to expect irredentist tactics from the right, this is truly moronic. And it is matched by our State Department, which has failed to join Latin America in congratulating Maduro on his victory, instead focusing on the recount and calling him “candidate Maduro.” They could have sprung for “president-elect,” but they apparently continue to believe that behaving like a–holes will win hearts and minds.

Marc Weisbrot has a column in The Guardian.

Hugo Chavez’s successor publishes column in Guardian

Nicolas Maduro, who is running to succeed Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, has published a thoughtful column in The Guardian. An excerpt:

The media myth that our political project would fall apart without Chávez was a fundamental misreading of Venezuela’s revolution. Chávez has left a solid edifice, its foundation a broad, united movement that supports the process of transformation. We’ve lost our extraordinary leader, but his project – built collectively by workers, farmers, women, indigenous peoples, Afro-descendants, and the young – is more alive than ever.

The media often portray Venezuela as on the brink of economic collapse – but our economy is stronger than ever. We have a low debt burden and a significant trade surplus, and have accumulated close to $30bn in international reserves.

I don’t know if Maduro will be a good or even an effective leader. But I do know that when the likely president of one our largest oil suppliers writes a calm, coherent statement of this kind, a free press would report it. What I read in the NYT is a bad joke, a parody of what a free press should look like (here, here, here)

The election is this Sunday.

US State Department: Incompetence wrapped within intolerance wrapped within cowardice

The State Department did a special briefing on Venezuela today. This is how it opened.

Background Briefing on the Situation in Venezuela
Special Briefing
Senior State Department Officials
Via Teleconference
March 6, 2013
——————————————————————————–
MODERATOR: Hello, everyone, and thanks for joining us this afternoon. Today we have with us two senior State Department officials to discuss the situation in Venezuela. We have with us [Senior State Department Official One] and [Senior State Department Official Two]. Hereafter for the rest of the call, they will be Senior State Department Official One and Senior State Department Official Two. This call is on background, so for all attribution we will refer to them as Senior State Department Officials.

So without further ado, I’m going to turn it over to Senior State Department Official Number One for some opening remarks before we get to your questions. Go ahead, Senior Official One.

Can anyone suggest a single reason why State Department officials should be allowed or encouraged to make anonymous comments about a foreign government? This is precisely the sort of thing that breeds distrust. Is one of those officials John Kerry, whose wife lost a lot of money in the Ketchup Coup?

It certainly sounds like it, when Elise Labott of CNN says, “We understand that Senior Official One put out a statement. If you could release that to the rest of the – of us, that would be great.” Who would put out a statement–withheld from at least part of the press– on such an issue? And there are certain Kerry verbal tics, like the repeated use of “if you will”" (it seems to be a Senate tic, since Senator Corker uses it repeatedly as well)

State Department Official Number Two sounds like SDO #1′s minder, probably a country specialist, who –unlike SDO #1– knows that the improbably-named Diosdado Cabello (“God-given Hair”) is not a narcotics kingpin.

SDO #1 has elevated Nicolas Maduro’s suggestion that Hugo Chavez was murdered to the level of a threat to US security (“after you have the kind of broadside, if you will, that Vice President Maduro launched against the United States yesterday, we obviously have security concerns, and we will remain very vigilant and review security issues regularly within our Embassy and here in Washington”) A much better response would have been to acknowledge that the relationship has been riddled with suspicion and that the US will do whatever it can to re-establish trust.

If the State Department wants to build trust, it will not repeat this sort of anonymous press conference. And, if I understand correctly, the White House failed to give routine condolences. That’s just shameful.
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Added: It wasn’t just Nicolas Maduro who thought that Chavez might have been murdered. In La Jornada, referring to three top leftist Latin American leaders who have been stricken by cancer Astillero said, “Just look at the unusual carcinogenic marksmanship or recent years against South American leaders not aligned with the United States.” So, yes, conspiracism and paranoia, but not necessarily crazy.

The game of thorns. Chavez dead at 58. /updated with a must-read by Greg Grandin and an explanation of the cancer comment

Tamara Pearson, Venezuela Analysis:

Merida, March 5th 2013 (Venezuelanalysis.com) –After two years of battling cancer, President Hugo Chavez has died today at 4.25 pm.

Tamara Pearson, VA:

Merida, March 5th 2013 (Venezuelanalysis.com) – Vice-president Nicolas Maduro today denounced destabilisation plans by the international and Venezuelan right wing, announcing the expulsion of two US officials for threatening military security. [Without any evidence whatsoever] He also implied that Chavez’s cancer was “caused by enemies of Venezuela”.
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Maduro pronounced the expulsion of Air Attaché David Delmonaco, and assistant Air Attaché Devlin Costal of the US embassy in Caracas for being implicated in “conspiracy plans”.

“They have 24 hours to pack their bags and leave,” Maduro said.

He explained that Monaco had, for the last few weeks, been contacting members of the Venezuelan military in order to bring about a destabilisation plan in Venezuela.

So one of the thorns in Washington’s paw is gone. One just hopes that the next president is even as competent and honest as Chavez (and Chavez had plenty of faults).
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Added

Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, The Guardian:

The facts speak for themselves: the percentage of households in poverty fell from 55% in 1995 to 26.4% in 2009. When Chávez was sworn into office unemployment was 15%, in June 2009 it was 7.8%. Compare that to current unemployment figures in Europe. In that period Chávez won 56% of the vote in 1998, 60% in 2000, survived a coup d’état in 2002, got over 7m votes in 2006 and secured 54.4% of the vote last October.

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Greg Grandin, Venezuela Analysis:

Latin American populists, from Argentina’s Juan Perón to, most recently, Chávez, have long served as characters in a story the US tells about itself, reaffirming the maturity of its electorate and the moderation of its political culture. There are at most eleven political prisoners in Venezuela, and that’s taking the opposition’s broad definition of the term, which includes individuals who worked to overthrow the government in 2002, and yet it is not just the right in this country who regularly compared Chávez to the worst mass murderers and dictators in history.
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In 1958, political elites negotiated a pact that maintained the trappings of democratic rule for four decades, as two ideological indistinguishable parties traded the presidency back and forth (sound familiar?). Where the State Department and its allied policy intellectuals isolated and condemned Havana, they celebrated Caracas as the end point of development.
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We know now that its institutions were rotting from the inside out. Every sin that Chávez was accused of committing—governing without accountability, marginalizing the opposition, appointing partisan supporters to the judiciary, dominating labor unions, professional organizations and civil society, corruption and using oil revenue to dispense patronage—flourished in a system the US held up as exemplary.
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There’s been great work done on the ground by scholars such as Alejandro Velasco, Sujatha Fernandes, Naomi Schiller and George Ciccariello-Maher on these social movements that, taken together, lead to the conclusion that Venezuela might be the most democratic country in the Western Hemisphere. One study found that organized Chavistas held to “liberal conceptions of democracy and held pluralistic norms,” believed in peaceful methods of conflict resolution and worked to ensure that their organizations functioned with high levels of “horizontal or non-hierarchical” democracy.
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Chávez was a strongman. He packed the courts, hounded the corporate media, legislated by decree and pretty much did away with any effective system of institutional checks or balances [in reconciling this to the previous paragraph, it should be noted that the US president has just asserted the right to kill US citizens on US soil without any due process. There is a democracy deficit across the hemisphere].
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Rather than forming a single-party dictatorship with an interventionist state bureaucracy controlling people’s lives, Chavismo has been pretty wide open and chaotic.
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The high point of Chávez’s international agenda was his relationship with Brazil’s [president] Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva….
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For a good eight years they worked something like a Laurel and Hardy routine, with Chávez acting the buffoon and Lula the straight man.

The whole article is worth reading, since it provides the positive perspective on Chavez that is sadly lacking in the US press, whose negative view cannot explain why Chavez was elected and re-elected, and is mourned throughout Latin America.

FWIW, my major criticisms of Chavez are that he failed to develop a second rank of leadership to make sure that the improvements to education and health that he introduced become permanent, that he failed to develop a refining industry to give Venezuela real alternatives to selling to the US, that he failed to diversify Venezuela’s economy, and that he failed to make a sufficient dent in corruption. Had he accomplished just the latter, he would have broadened his base of support to make opposition to his reforms impossible. But of course I know that Venezuela was such a total mess when he was elected that accomplishing anything was a minor miracle.
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Update: It was puzzling why vice-president Nicolas Maduro should have accused Venezuela’s “historical enemies” (i.e., the CIA) of causing Chavez’ cancer. But it turns out that Chavez himself mentioned the possibility in 2011, and for an interesting reason: three of Latin America’s eleven left-wing leaders were stricken with cancer: Chavez, Lula, and Lugo (this is not counting Fidel Castro, who suffered some kind of intestinal illness). Three were removed in coups (Aristide, Zelaya, and Chavez, with Chavez surviving), and the Kirschners both had serious health problems, with Nestor dying of cardiovascular disease and Cristina being misdiagnosed with thyroid cancer. So there has been what looks like a cancer cluster among Latin American leftists and, more generally, a lot of very bad luck. So it’s not entirely tin foil to suspect foul play.
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Update: Jo6Pac draws our attention to Greg Palast’s eulogy. He calls Nicolas Maduro good and decent. Venezuela needs that.

The future of Venezuela

DemocracyNow had an excellent debate between Michael Shifter and Pomona college professor (and Venezuelan emigre) Miguel Tinker Salas.

The essential points are that:
* when Chavez took over, things were in terrible shape
* the price of oil is much higher now than before Chavez took office
* things are not great now

One interpretation (Shifter) is that Chavez got lucky over the price of oil but otherwise squandered his time in office. The other interpretation is that Chavez was lucky in the price of oil, but unlucky in having the opposition he had, that his first few years in office were a loss due to factors outside his control, but that lately he’s done much better. This view is supported by Weisbrot and Johnston (see Fig. 1).

The one interesting issue raised by Shifter is the decline in Venezuelan production of oil (and natural gas). These are issues important to social stability, since natural gas is used for electrical generation (insufficient production = blackouts), and Venezuelans expect cheap gasoline. Euan Mearns at The Oil Drum says

OPEC stalwart and heavy weight Venezuela has had flat production over the decade of between 2 and 2.5 mmbpd. The impact of the 2002/ 03 general strike upon production is clear to see. Production has been hitting near term highs over 2.5 mmbpd and spare capacity is essentially zero.

What seems to be limiting oil production is a shortage of natural gas, as well as a decline in readily-accessible reserves in favor of the Orinoco Basin heavy crude similar to the Canadian tar sands. So, it’s not clear to me that Shifter’s criticism is valid, except insofar as it rests on the endemic corruption in Venezuelan society that makes it harder to do anything. The story of why they are producing more nat gas sounds like an example of that.

Another interesting issue raised in the debate is what the factions within chavismo are. Basically it seems that there are two principal factions, a civil society movement led by Nicolas Maduro, and a military faction led by Diosdado Cabello.

Venezuela may be on path to crisis/updated

Newly-elected president Hugo Chavez is in Cuba getting treatment for cancer. He developed a lung infection, which means he can’t travel back to Venezuela for the inauguration. The Venezuelan Constitution specifies (see Art. 231) that the swearing in must be done on the 10th, either before the Legislature or the Supreme Court. So the right wing is trying to force new elections in the hope that they can split Chavez’s successors in a new election. Their argument is flawed, because Art. 234 specifies detailed procedures to declare a president-elect permanently disabled, and those procedures are under the control of Chavez proteges. (Something similar, by the way, happened during the coup d’etat against Honduras’s Zelaya, where he was declared permanently disabled to hold the presidency because the right-wing wouldn’t let him return).

The danger of the US considering this an opportune moment to meddle in Venezuela’s affairs is, in my opinion, significant. And, of course, there’s no guarantee that Chavez will survive this most recent health crisis, meaning that we could be seeing new elections in a few months. But the real problem is that the factions within the Chavez bloc have serious strains, and there is no figure of his stature and cleverness to hold it all together and keep infighting from weakening the coalition. It is good to see other Latin American countries rallying around to try to prevent the right-wing seizure of power through their mischievous interpretation of the Constitution.

This is a tragic situation. I think Chavez made a mistake by running again, because he has been drifting toward authoritarianism to try to overcome seemingly intractable problems. I have also said that the greatest failure of the Bolivaran “revolution” is the failure to develop leaders who could continue the process of change after his passing. There’s no doubt that a significant majority of the population believes that Chavez was on the right track, even if they disagreed with specific policies. If their will is denied, it will be a tragedy for democracy, and it will leave Venezuela ripe for crisis. Democracy only works when most people want it to, and it’s pretty clear that neither the US nor the Venezuelan oligarchy want it to.
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Update: Greg Palast has a piece on Chavez, as well as a DVD. Palast thinks Nicolas Maduro can, and deserves to, survive the coming storm.
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And right on cue, the Catholic Church lays down markers with the opposition. Jonathan Watts and Virginia Lopez, The Guardian:

“The nation’s political and social stability is at serious risk,” said Bishop Diego Padrón, the conference’s president, reading a statement from the Venezuelan bishops’ conference.

They never learn.
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And Mark Weisbrot rebuts fear-mongering on the Venezuelan economy.

Your media in action/Updated

One can learn a lot about American elections by watching how our press handles elections abroad. Venezuela Analysis pulled together articles by Michael McGehee, Murray Polner, and Greg Wilpert to present some extraordinary examples of how our media–the article focuses on the NYT– openly supports oligarchy against democracy. The NYT:

* Consistently claimed that the election was close when in fact Chavez was ahead by landslide proportions and everyone knew it

* Claimed that Venezuelans were voting for Chavez out of fear of retaliation when the voting system actually is secure and people trust that their votes are confidential

* Claimed that Venezuelans were voting for Chavez because of Tammany-style patronage, whereas what they are calling patronage is what we in the US call “voting your pocketbook.”

* Published an OpEd that used misleading statistics about child deaths while failing to mention that unemployment has improved, and poverty has decreased (but crime is up)

* Repeated an unverified claim that government workers who signed a petition to recall Chavez suffered retaliation

If our media think that benefits like old-age pensions are “patronage,” how do they see Social Security? If they are lying to us about a foreign election–calling a landslide victory too close to call!– why do we think they aren’t spinning us about our own? I guess we think that we can decode or debunk what they are saying about the US. But this is a big country, with all sorts of wrinkles and hidden action. I think we are fooling ourselves.
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Update: Mark Weisbrot has some of the economic statistics on VZ.