Chavez dead

[Michael Bailey]

Greg Palast airing some insights about Chavez, front and center at his site:

http://www.gregpalast.com/


sizable quote (fair usage, one hopes)

On April 11, 2002, President Chavez was kidnapped at gunpoint and
flown to an island prison in the Caribbean Sea. On April 12, Pedro
Carmona, a business partner of the US oil companies and president of
the nation's Chamber of Commerce, declared himself President of
Venezuela – giving a whole new meaning to the term, "corporate
takeover."

U.S. Ambassador Charles Shapiro immediately rushed down from his
hilltop embassy to have his picture taken grinning with the
self-proclaimed "President" and the leaders of the coup d'état.

Bush's White House spokesman admitted that Chavez was, "democratically
elected," but, he added, "Legitimacy is something that is conferred
not by just the majority of voters." I see.

With an armed and angry citizenry marching on the Presidential Palace
in Caracas ready to string up the coup plotters, Carmona, the Pretend
President from Exxon returned his captive Chavez back to his desk
within 48 hours. (How? Get The Assassination of Hugo Chavez, the film,
expanding on my reports for BBC Television. You can download it for
free for the next few days.)

Chavez had provoked the coup not just by clawing back some of the
bloated royalties of the oil companies. It's what he did with that oil
money that drove Venezuela's One Percent to violence.

In Caracas, I ran into the reporter for a TV station whose owner is
generally credited with plotting the coup against the president. While
doing a publicity photo shoot, leaning back against a tree, showing
her wide-open legs nearly up to where they met, the reporter pointed
down the hill to the "ranchos," the slums above Caracas, where shacks,
once made of cardboard and tin, where quickly transforming into homes
of cinder blocks and cement.

"He [Chavez] gives them bread and bricks, so they vote for him, of
course." She was disgusted by "them," the 80% of Venezuelans who are
negro e indio (Black and Indian)—and poor. Chavez, himself negro e
indio, had, for the first time in Venezuela's history, shifted the oil
wealth from the privileged class that called themselves "Spanish," to
the dark-skinned masses.

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."

Chavez' Robin Hood thing, shifting oil money from the rich to the
poor, would have been grudgingly tolerated by the US. But Chavez, who
told me, "We are no longer an oil colony," went further…too much
further, in the eyes of the American corporate elite.

Venezuela had landless citizens by the millions – and unused land by
the millions of acres tied up, untilled, on which a tiny elite of
plantation owners squatted. Chavez' congress passed in a law in 2001
requiring untilled land to be sold to the landless. It was a program
long promised by Venezuela's politicians at the urging of John F.
Kennedy as part of his "Alliance for Progress."

Plantation owner Heinz Corporation didn't like that one bit. In
retaliation, Heinz closed its ketchup plant in the state of Maturin
and fired all the workers. Chavez seized Heinz' plant and put the
workers back on the job. Chavez didn't realize that he'd just squeezed
the tomatoes of America's powerful Heinz family and Mrs. Heinz'
husband, Senator John Kerry, now U.S. Secretary of State.

Or, knowing Chavez as I do, he didn't give a damn.