Posted on 17-4-2002
Bushed
Officials
By CHRISTOPHER MARQUIS, NY Times. (Photo shows former U.S. President
George
Bush and father of current US President, shaking hands with
restored
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez after a private meeting at
the Miraflores
Presidential Palace in Feb 2001. George Bush said he held cordial
talks
with Hugo Chavez but insisted his main mission to the oil exporting
South
American country was to practise one of his favorite hobbies:
fishing... hmmm)
WASHINGTON, April 15 — Senior members of the Bush administration
met
several times in recent months with leaders of a coalition that
ousted the
Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez, for two days last weekend,
and agreed
with them that he should be removed from office, administration
officials
said today.
But administration officials gave conflicting accounts of what
the United
States told those opponents of Mr. Chávez about acceptable ways
of ousting
him. One senior official involved in the discussions insisted
that the
Venezuelans use constitutional means, like a referendum, to
effect an
overthrow. "They came here to complain," the official said,
referring to
the anti-Chávez group. "Our message was very clear: there are
constitutional processes. We did not even wink at anyone." But
a Defense
Department official who is involved in the development of policy
toward
Venezuela said the administration's message was less categorical.
"We were
not discouraging people," the official said. "We were sending
informal,
subtle signals that we don't like this guy. We didn't say, `No,
don't you
dare,' and we weren't advocates saying, `Here's some arms; we'll
help you
overthrow this guy.' We were not doing that."
The disclosures come as rights advocates, Latin American diplomats
and
others accuse the administration of having turned a blind eye
to coup
plotting activities, or even encouraged the people who temporarily
removed
Mr. Chávez. Such actions would place the United States at odds
with its
fellow members of the Organization of American States, whose
charter
condemns the overthrow of democratically elected governments.
In the
immediate aftermath of the ouster, the White House spokesman,
Ari
Fleischer, suggested that the administration was pleased that
Mr. Chávez
was gone. "The government suppressed what was a peaceful demonstration
of
the people," Mr. Fleischer said, which "led very quickly to
a combustible
situation in which Chávez resigned." That statement contrasted
with a clear
stand by other nations in the hemisphere, which all condemned
the removal
of a democratically elected leader.
Mr. Chávez has made himself very unpopular with the Bush administration
with his pro-Cuban stance and mouthing of revolutionary slogans
— and, most
recently, by threatening the independence of Venezuela's state-owned
oil
company, Petróleos de Venezuela, the third-largest foreign supplier
of
American oil. Whether or not the administration knew about the
pending
action against Mr. Chávez, critics note that it was slow to
condemn the
overthrow and that it still refuses to acknowledge that a coup
even took
place. One result, according to the critics, is that in its
zeal to rid
itself of Mr. Chávez, the administration has damaged its credibility
as a
chief defender of democratically elected governments. And even
though they
deny having encouraged Mr. Chávez's ouster, administration officials
did
not hide their dismay at his restora tion. Asked whether the
administration
now recognizes Mr. Chávez as Venezuela's legitimate president,
one
administration official replied, "He was democratically elected,"
then
added, "Legitimacy is something that is conferred not just by
a majority of
the voters, however." A senior administration official said
today that the
anti-Chávez group had not asked for American backing and that
none had been
offered. Still, one American diplomat said, Mr. Chávez was so
distressed by
his opponents' lobbying in Washington that he sent officials
from his
government to plead his case there.
Mr. Chávez returned to power on Sunday, after two days. The
Bush
administration swiftly laid the blame for the episode on him,
pointing out
that troops loyal to him had fired on unarmed civilians and
wounded more
than 100 demonstrators. Mr. Fleischer, the White House spokesman,
stuck to
that approach today, saying Mr. Chávez should heed the message
of his
opponents and reach out to "all the democratic forces in Venezuela."
"The
people of Venezuela have sent a clear message to President Chávez
that they
want both democracy and reform," he said. "The Chávez administration
has an
opportunity to respond to this message by correcting its course
and
governing in a fully democratic manner."
On Sunday, President Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza
Rice,
expressed hopes that Mr. Chávez would deal with his opponents
in a less
"highhanded fashion." But to some critics, it was the Bush administration
that had displayed arrogance in initially bucking the tide of
international
condemnation of the action against Mr. Chavez, who was democratically
elected in 1998.
Arturo Valenzuela, the Latin America national security aide
in the Clinton
administration, accused the Bush administration of running roughshod
over
more than a decade of treaties and agreements for the collective
defense of
democracy. Since 1990, the United States has repeatedly invoked
those
agreements at the Organization of American States to help restore
democratic rule in such countries as Haiti, Guatemala and Peru.
Mr.
Valenzuela, who now heads the Latin American studies department
at
Georgetown University here, warned that the nations in the region
might
view the administration's tepid support of Venezuelan democracy
as a green
light to return to 1960's and 1970's, when power was transferred
from coup
to coup. "I think it's a very negative development for the principle
of
constitutional government in Latin America," Mr. Valenzuela
said. "I think
it's going to come back and haunt all of us."
Administration officials insist that they are firmly behind
efforts at the
Organization of American States to determine what happened in
Venezuela and
restore democratic rule. The secretary general of the O.A.S.,
César
Gaviria, left today for Caracas, the Venezuelan capital, and
the
organization is scheduled to meet in Washington on Thursday.
Still, critics
say, there were several signs that the administration was too
quick to
rally around the businessman Pedro Carmona Estanga as Mr. Chávez's
successor. One Democratic foreign policy aide complained that
the
administration, in phone calls to Congress on Friday, reported
that Mr.
Chávez had resigned, even though officials now concede that
they had no
evidence of that. And on Saturday, the administration supported
an O.A.S.
resolution condemning "the alteration of constitutional order
in Venezuela"
only after learning that Mr. Chávez had regained control, Latin
American
diplomats said. One official said political hard-liners in the
administration might have "gone overboard" in proclaiming Mr.
Chávez's
ouster before the dust settled. The official said there were
competing
impulses within the administration, signaling a disagreement
on the extent
of trouble posed by Mr. Chávez, who has thumbed his nose at
American
officials by maintaining ties with Cuba, Libya and Iraq.
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