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Two
coup attempts in four years with Bush
In
the past four years the United States has
backed two military coups against the democratically
elected governments of Venezuela and Haiti.
Both countries were attempting to improve
the lives of the poor in their countries.
While the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have
grabbed the headlines, these incidents have
been bypassed by mainstream media.
Under
the Bush administration, officials and appointees
(most of whom earned their credentials serving
in the dirty wars in Central America under
President Reagan during the 1980s), were
reinstalled as purveyors of American interests.
People such as Elliot Abrahams, convicted
of misleading Congress over the Iran-Contra
affair, now drive the U.S. foreign policy
towards Latin America.
Prior
to the attempted coup against President
Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, the United States
National Endowment for Democracy provided
$340,000 to opposition groups that backed
the coup.
On
April 11, 2002 Chavez was kidnapped at gunpoint
in Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, and
taken aboard a United States plane to an
island in the Caribbean. Reich claimed Chavez
was "responsible for his fate"
and the coup was not a rupture of democratic
rule. Condoleza Rice stated that she hoped
Chavez had "learned his lesson".
Meanwhile, under the cover of the Joint
Task
Force Exercise in the Caribbean, the United
States Navy provided signal intelligence
and communications jamming support to the
coup. Personnel from the special operations
psychological warfare unit of the United
States army were deployed from Fort Bragg
to put out Spanish-language television announcements
claiming that Chavez provoked the crisis.
But
the coup failed as the poor masses, who
had voted Chavez into office in multiple
democratic elections, refused to accept
the ‘dictator for a day' Pedro Carmona
and rallied against him, handing a stunning
blow to the undemocratic intentions of the
Bush administration.
Jean-Bertran
Aristide, the first ever democratically
and popularly elected president of Haiti,
led one of the poorest countries in the
world. The Bush administration's Aid Embargo
on Haiti blocked $500 million in aid from
humanitarian assistance organizations, previously
allowed by the Clinton administration. Aristide's
attempts to improve the minimum wage and
standard of living for Haitian workers was
met with a stiff reaction by the Haitian
sweatshop owners and the neo-conservative
Bush administration. They wanted Aristide
dead or out of office. The opposition worked
to mobilize international support for the
removal of Aristide.
On
Feb. 29, 2004 the elected president of Haiti,
Jean-Bertran Aristide, was kidnapped and
forced out of Haiti by several hundred United
States Marines. He too was flown on a United
States plane to be exiled. Rebel death squads
entered Haiti from the Dominican Republic
equipped with bullet-proof, all-terrain
four wheel drive SUVs.
Conveniently
a shipment of 20,000 M-16 machine guns arrived
in the Dominican Republic around the same
time. Haiti's former dictator Jean Claude
Duvalier, whose regime was responsible for
killing tens of thousands of Haitians, welcomed
the landing of United States Marines. The
Bush administration is now helping to legitimize
and maintain the rebel government in Haiti,
which is busily killing and imprisoning
Aristide's supporters.
As
Americans, we pride ourselves in living
in a free and democratic nation, but as
Americans we must also question ourselves
when our elected leaders consistently back
coups of democratically elected governments.
John Adams once said, "Liberty cannot
be preserved without a general knowledge
among the people, who have… a right,
an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible,
divine right to that most dreaded and envied
kind of knowledge, I mean the characters
and conduct of their rulers."
Jeb
Sprague is a CSULB grad student in history.
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