Palast on Venezuela's Hugo Chavez: "negro e indio" - "Floridate" - "pan y ladrillos"

Why does the U.S. mean corruption and greed in other countries? I wonder why? Another brillant piece of journalism from Palast. Quite timely too since I heard about this struggle in Venezuela on Democracy Now! today.


DICK CHENEY, HUGO CHAVEZ AND BILL CLINTON'S BAND
Why Venezuela has Voted Again for Their 'Negro e Indio' President
Monday Aug 16, 2004

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 in a 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 will never forget them.

And that's a fact.

---

Greg Palast's reports from Venezuela for BBC Television's Newsnight
and the Guardian papers of Britain earned a California State
University Journalism School "Project Censored" award for
2002. View photos and Palast's reports on Venezuela at
www.GregPalast.com.

This is seriously the most tragic thing I've heard all day. How can we continue to engage in war when it destroys peoples lives and minds because it's too much for humans to take. This young person could not overcome the pain of killing other human beings, especially if they were unarmed. I can't seriously sit here and do nothing about the madness in the world. I don't think any protest could change things now.

Wednesday, August 11th, 2004
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/08/11/145205

Parents Mourn Son's Suicide After Returning From Iraq Duty: "He's a Casualty of War But He'll Never Be Known As That"


We continue our conversation with Kevin and Joyce Lucey, the parents of Jeffrey Lucey, a 23 year-old U.S. soldier who hung himself a year after returning home from military duty in Iraq.
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During the Democratic National Convention in Boston, the parents of Jeffrey Lucey, a U.S. soldier who killed himself after returning home from military duty in Iraq, spoke publicly for the first time on Democracy Now!
Lucey signed up for the Marine Reserves straight out of high school. In February 2003, one month before the invasion, he was shipped out to Iraq. He was deployed there for five months, during which he fought in the battle of Nasiriyah. He returned to the U.S. later that year.

A few months after his return, Jeffrey's parents, Kevin and Joyce, began noticing signs of what they later came to know as post-traumatic stress syndrome. In late May 2004, they had Jeffrey involuntarily committed to a military veteran's hospital after he ignored his parents' and sister, Debbie's pleas to seek help. The hospital discharged him after a few days.

Three weeks later on June 22nd, Jeffrey Lucey took his own life. He was 23 years old. His father, Kevin came home to find his son had hung himself with a hose in the cellar of their house. The dog tags of two Iraqi prisoners he said he was forced to shoot unarmed, lay on his bed.

Shortly after his death, Kevin and Joyce Lucey joined us on the program to talk about their son. After the broadcast, we continued our conversation with them.