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No to United States intervention in Venezuela; no more blood, rape and other torture for oil

Call by Global Women's Strike

A referendum to recall President Chavez as well as a number of anti-chavista elected officials is being called for August. US pressure to overthrow President Chavez and get its hands on the oil of the Venezuelan people is greater than ever. We demand that the media report what is happening in Venezuela rather than act as employees of the hated and unelected Bush administration.

On 1 June, the Global Women's Strike Bolivarian Circles and organizations and individuals from all over the world (see full list below) wrote:

As with Iraq, the most respected newspapers are being used to justify overt US intervention in Venezuela. Unlike Saddam Hussein, Hugo Chavez was democratically elected and has one of the best human rights records anywhere. Yet we hear constant references to him as dictator, demagogue, populist.

As with Iraq, the Bush administration wants to privatize, that is, take over, Venezuela's oil. Those who elected President Chavez want to use their oil revenue to tackle the poverty suffered by 80% of Venezuela's population, mainly people of African and Indigenous descent. This refusal of the corruption and theft which ruled oil production for over 40 years is presented as "undemocratic".

Far from being isolated, President Chavez has wide and growing support among people in many countries and increasingly among governments, especially in Latin America. The same cannot be said of President Bush.

Chavez is attempting to bring together countries of the South, beginning with Latin America, to refuse IMF privatization policies. Such policies have caused over $2 trillion to flow from Latin America to the US and Europe during the past 20 years. There are many examples of what this has meant for Latin Americans. We mention only two: the "Caracazo" (Caracas's 1989 popular uprising against the overnight doubling of fares), violently repressed by the army, left 2000 people dead; and the economy of Argentina under the IMF's direction, collapsed, reducing 50% of its population to poverty.

While women in Argentina had to run barter markets to save their families from starvation and children died of malnutrition, in Venezuela the poorest women were getting subsidized micro-credits from the Women's Development Bank and child mortality went down. They also been helped by Cuba which has sent 10,000 doctors to provide free healthcare to communities that have never seen a doctor before.

For 40 years prior to Chavez's election, two parties ruled Venezuela for the benefit of a wealthy minority and their US corporate friends. It was known as one of the most corrupt countries in Latin America. Torture, disappearances and other repression were rife. Successive US administrations never complained.

Henry Kissinger declared of the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile: "I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people." The CIA organized a coup with General Pinochet, including by getting the American Institute for Free Labor Development (now American Center for International Labor Solidarity) of the AFL-CIO to act for the State Department. Allende was assassinated, at least 3000 people disappeared and a million went into exile. There was a similar coup against President Chavez in April 2002 - it was defeated by a popular uprising that motivated troops loyal to the Constitution to act and get the President back.

An oil coup followed in late 2002 - the CIA, oil executives and corrupt trade union leaders, which have also had backing from the American Center for International Labor Solidarity, tried to bring the government down by paralyzing the oil industry. It was defeated by the oil workers refusing to take part in the employers' "strike" and together with the community working round the clock for months to regain control of their industry.

There have been other attacks and assassination attempts, the latest a few weeks ago when over 100 Colombian paramilitaries were arrested in Venezuela.

The US administration has now thrown its political and economic weight behind the referendum to recall President Chavez. Democrat candidate John Kerry and much of the US and UK media are doing the same. They have attacked the National Electoral Council in charge of validating the necessary 2.4 million recall signatures for insisting on the ratification of signatures that may be fraudulent. A further 550,000 valid signatures are needed for the referendum to go ahead. Such ratification took place last weekend and the results are expected on 4 June.

In March 2004, when the National Electoral Council first ruled on the validity of the signatures collected for the referendum, it was under enormous pressure from the US administration and its friends in the Venezuelan elite to allow the referendum to go ahead regardless of evidence of widespread fraud - this fraud was a "technicality" to the US administration which itself gained power through electoral fraud.

On 26 March, 2,000 oil workers marched to the US embassy in Caracas to deliver a letter to Ambassador Shapiro. Their letter said:

"As oil workers we witnessed the active collaboration of US corporations with the actions of those who tried to sabotage and break our oil industry at the end of 2002. . . . Functionaries of your government are now intervening with . . . the National Electoral Council regarding the validation of signatures for a presidential recall referendum, a problem which are the affairs only of our institutions and our people. . . .

"We have come to your residence today to express the oil workers' strong rejection of such policies and the practices that implement them. We have also come to let the government you represent know that if . . . there were attempts to divert us from the constitutionally established path of national independence, we the oil workers, who were able to get the production of an almost paralyzed complex industry back on its feet in record time . . . will call on the people to propose to our government that not a single barrel of oil leave these shores for the United States."

The 2000 oil workers were not received by the US Ambassador and we saw no media coverage of their action.

Instead, on 20 May the Washington Post reported that: "The Bush administration is stepping up the pressure on President Hugo Chavez. State Department officials say they are talking with U.S. editorial writers, hoping to send a clear message to Chavez through the press: let the recall referendum happen or face the consequences." On May 27, The Financial Times also threatened: "What seems certain is that change will take place - through internal or external means."

There is evidence of further US meddling in Venezuela's electoral process. According to journalist Greg Palast: "The company responsible for wrongly classifying roughly 90,000 thousand people in Florida as felons and barring them from voting in the 2000 election, sold the U.S. government a database of information about thousands of Venezuelans." And there have been allegations that two election monitors for the Organization of American States and the Carter Center are State Department employees!

On 26 May, the editors of the New York Times apologized for allowing its pages to be used to spread disinformation that justified the invasion of Iraq. ". . . we have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been. . . . The [claims] depended at least in part on information from . . . informants, defectors and exiles bent on "regime change" . . . whose credibility has come under increasing public debate in recent weeks. . . the accounts of these exiles were often eagerly confirmed by United States officials convinced of the need to intervene in Iraq." (The Times and Iraq)

But it is too late for the many thousands who died, or were raped and otherwise tortured as a result. Will recognition of this deadly manipulation prevent a repeat with Venezuela? Will it not matter once again how many people may die as a result?

Venezuela is a beacon for all those opposing coups, assassinations, paramilitarism, wars and occupations - in Iraq, Haiti, Colombia and elsewhere. We demand that the media allow the Venezuelan people to decide their own destiny, and stop espousing views that make way for US intervention.

No more blood, rape and other torture for oil.

Issued by:

Andaiye, Global Women’s Strike, Georgetown, Guyana

Selma James, Global Women’s Strike, London, UK

Phoebe Jones, Global Women’s Strike Bolivarian Circle, Philadelphia, USA

Nina López, Global Women’s Strike Bolivarian Circle, London, UK

Margaret Prescod, Women of Colour in the Global Women’s Strike, Los Angeles, USA

Maggie Ronayne, Global Women’s Strike, Galway, Ireland

Sara Williams, Global Women’s Strike Bolivarian Circle, Barcelona, Spain

5 June 2004

See review of The Battle of Venezuela