EDITORIALS
Carter in Venezuela
What's an old imperialist like Jimmy Carter
doing validating the results of the referendum in
Venezuela--results that show the large majority of the
Venezuelan people support President Hugo Chávez and his
Bolivarian Revolution, which seeks to free Latin Americans from
the domination of U.S. imperialism and is raising the living
standards of the masses?
It is being reported that Carter "stunned" the elites in the
Venezuelan opposition by disputing their charges of voting
fraud and telling them in a face-to-face meeting to accept the
results of the referendum.
The former U.S. president and his Carter Center have a
history of paving the way for elections that have produced
quite the opposite result. Carter went to Nicaragua in 1990,
supposedly to observe the election. But on the eve of the
voting, he bolstered the opposition candidate, Violeta
Chamorro, by allowing a photo to be run on the front page of
the daily newspaper she owned that showed the two of them with
hands clasped and raised in a victory gesture. Carter then
convinced Daniel Ortega, leader of the Sandinistas, to accept
his party's election defeat. Of course, behind the outcome of
this "democratic process" was the terrible U.S.-sponsored war
that threatened to become even worse if the Sandinistas held on
to power.
The Sandinistas had overthrown the hated Somoza dictatorship
in a heroic guerrilla struggle, but they then faced a bloody
counter-revolution--organized, armed and financed by the
U.S.--that kept them from realizing their promises to the
people. Hunger and violence wore them down. The cynical
imperialists were very happy that they could overthrow the
Nicaraguan Revolution and make it look like an exercise in
democracy.
This time the results of an election monitored by Carter are
very different. Venezuela has been able to use its significant
oil income to improve the lives of the people, and that has
brought many who had nearly lost hope into political activism
in a big way. They turned out in huge numbers for the
referendum.
But is Carter any different? What does he represent?
Throughout his political career Carter has been consistent
in this respect: He always seems to know which way the wind is
blowing.
When he began his political career in Georgia, open racism
dominated Southern politics. In his 1970 bid for governor,
Carter chastised his opponent "for failing, during his
governorship, to invite Alabama's outspoken segregationist
governor, George C. Wallace, to address the Georgia General
Assembly." (The New Georgia Encyclopedia) On taking office,
however, Carter softened his attitude toward the growing civil
rights movement. But he hedged his bets by naming
arch-segregationist Lester Maddox as lieutenant governor.
Carter moved onto the national stage in 1976, when he
captured the Demo cra tic nomination for president after having
been endorsed by Time, Newsweek and the major newspapers of the
imperialist political establishment. By then he had been
schooled in foreign policy by the Trilateral Commission, a
Rockefeller-sponsored think tank that has groomed presidents,
secretaries of state and other political heavies from both the
Republican and Democratic parties.
As president from 1977 to 1981, he did what he was supposed
to do for U.S. glo bal imperialist interests. His national
security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who had been appointed
the first director of the Trilateral Commission by David Rocke
feller, presided over the covert campaign to overthrow the
secular democratic government in Afghanistan, directing the CIA
to set up a guerrilla army of right-wing fundamentalists there.
That secret U.S. intervention eventually led the Afghan
government to call on the Soviet Union for support, and a
terrible war followed. Brzezinski later boasted that he had
drawn the USSR into a quagmire.
Since 9/11, has one major newspaper or television channel
asked Carter about how his multi-billion-dollar CIA operation
may have set the stage for the rise of al-Qaeda? Maybe Carter
himself is reflecting on that, but not publicly, of course.
Carter's role in the Venezuelan referendum undoubtedly helps
those Demo crats who want the world to believe that a Kerry
administration will not resort to the blatant imperialist
tactics of Bush. And this is what a growing section of the
billionaire class in the U.S. wants right now. They see how
hated the U.S. has become in the world. No matter how the
Pentagon, the CIA and other instruments of repression try to
stamp out wildfires with their hobnail boots, new ones flare up
immediately.
Latin America has become a cauldron. All over the continent
broad struggles of the people are changing the political
climate. The knee-jerk reaction of some of the ultras in the
Bush administration was undoubtedly to support the opposition's
fraudulent charges of election fraud in Venezuela--in the same
way that they called the 2002 military coup against
Chávez a triumph for democracy, until the intervention
of the people made it fail. But Carter and the more wily
imperialists know that wouldn't do them a bit of good now. It
would only further enrage the people and make it impossible for
the U.S. to talk to any Latin American leaders.
After the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, the new
Kennedy administration launched the Alliance for Progress,
offering Latin America billions for development so more
countries would not go the way of Cuba. But in the end,
according to former CIA officer Philip Agee in his book "Inside
the Com pany," U.S. corporations were taking out even bigger
profits from the area while U.S. agents worked with the
generals to strengthen their hold, ushering in a period of
military coups throughout the region.
Kennedy, Carter, Kerry--the same old imperialism, but with a
smile.
Reprinted from the Aug. 26, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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