The Chávez Code: Cracking U.S. Intervention in Venezuela

- The Chávez Code: Cracking U.S. Intervention in Venezuela, by Eva Golinger. Northhampton, MA, Olive Branch Press, 2006.

By 2002, as the Bush administration turned its attention away from the hemisphere to the global war on terrorism and embarked on an unnecessary war of choice in Iraq, evidence began to accumulate that the regional ground was shifting from under Washington. In a certain sense Venezuela's Hugo Chávez appeared to personify the Bush administration's failure to engage Latin America and the decline of its diplomatic clout at the same time as he offered a competing vision for the region's peoples. Moreover, stepping into the breach, Venezuela seemed to take the lead in coordinating diplomatic, political and economic action to reduce, if not marginalize, U.S. hemispheric influence.

Chávez's friendly relations with Fidel Castro, including selling discounted oil to Cuba, broke new ground in Latin American attitudes toward the island and accounts in part for the near unanimous rejection today by the OAS of the nearly half century-old U.S. embargo, a dismal failure Washington still clings to for political reasons. Later, Chávez appeared to many in Washington as the lynchpin of a regional 'axis of evil', joining the island of Cuba with radical nationalist regimes under Evo Morales in Bolivia, and Rafael Correa in Ecuador. He also made common cause with Iran's anti-imperialism and strengthened Caracas's commercial ties with Tehran. Finally, Chávez's lavish petrodiplomacy was informed by his radical 'Bolivarian' vision of a more united and independent South America. This included the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA), his own socially progressive antidote to the U.S.-sponsored Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA); oil-financed projects like a South American development bank; a continental energy and communications network; and Telesur, a South American news network offering an alternative, left-oriented view to the establishment international media.

Eva Golinger in The Chávez Code dedicates most of her interesting book to the period 2001-2005, perhaps when U.S.-Venezuelan relations were at their most tense. The centrepiece of this period is the April 2002 failed coup against Chávez and its aftermath. Golinger concentrates on the U.S. role in the coup and its continued meddling and interference in the internal politics of the country. At the time of the coup Chávez had already become a significant irritant to Washington, visiting Libya and Iraq, slowing negotiations for the FTAA, and criticizing the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan. In fact, the government of Venezuela's Hugo Chávez and his vociferous anti-imperialism caught the Bush administration's attention and focused its concern more than any other regional development with the exception of the 40 year-old drug-related civil war in Colombia. Absent the cold war context and distracted by Iraq, Washington could no longer orchestrate interventions and coups with the ease that it did so in the past. But that circumstance certainly did not prevent the Bush administration from trying.

Golinger, a journalist who has provided researchers with timely and important analyses of U.S. activities in Chávez's Venezuela, recounts the sordid tale of U.S. involvement, at diplomatic and covert levels, with opposition political forces both before and after the coup. The author, making use of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) documents (some of which she includes in the appendix) offers a wealth of detail on the activities of such U.S. organizations as the Agency for International Development (USAID), the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the International Republican Institute (IRI) - and of course, the ubiquitous Central Intelligence Agency in its various guises, whose dealings with the civilian opposition were removed from congressional oversight and thus from public discussion.

Both the NED and the IRI are U.S. government-funded organizations, created in the 1983 during the Reagan administration ostensibly to promote democracy; but in fact they have played a nefarious role in Latin America supporting and financing political groups which promote the U.S. regional agenda. The NED cut its political teeth in Nicaragua where it funded a campaign against the Sandinista government; its past there served as precedent and prologue to the organization's financial and political relationship to Sumate, a major opposition group to Chávez. The IRI was most notoriously associated with backing and training unsavoury opponents of Haiti's president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and ultimately fostering the successful coup against him in 2004. It basically continued its work in Venezuela, training promising opposition politicians and aiding in the formation of rival parties. The use of not so subtle threats to withdraw Venezuelan credits from multilateral lending institutions like the World Bank also echoed Reagan era arm-twisting in the Inter-American Development Bank to deny Sandinista Nicaragua development loans. Plus ça change ....

In a work containing so much information it is perhaps inevitable to find an occasional error. Luis Posada Carriles, escaped - in fact walked out the front door - of the Modelo prison in Caracas in 1985 not 1995, whereupon he promptly became enmeshed in the Iran-Contra network, a role for which he is best remembered and which is curiously omitted. The book concludes with 90 pages of appendices, endnotes and a glossary, but no index, a lamentable lacuna in such a detailed account.

Occasionally, reflections by the author seem exaggerated while a few others have been rendered less relevant by subsequent history. The comment on p. 133 that the United States would go 'as far as necessary' in its covert war against Chávez was almost certainly never true. In fact, Washington in the second Bush term could hardly muster sufficient attention on the dangerously deteriorating international mission in Afghanistan, much less think seriously about threatening Venezuela or toppling Chávez. Accusations by Caracas of Washington's meddling in Venezuelan internal affairs waxed and waned during the Bush years. Yet the fact is that after 2002 Venezuela was more a part of the administration's neglect of the region than a special case singled out for the kind of past intervention witnessed in Chile in the 1970s or Nicaragua in the 1980s. There was always a certain level of anti-Chávez rhetoric in the U.S. government; however, even when Chávez engaged in an unprecedented denunciation of Bush as the devil from a UN podium in 2006, Washington appeared more resigned than vengeful. Thus far in the new Democratic administration, with the exception of Barack Obama's campaign pledge to talk to adversaries, there doesn't seem to be any change in either Washington's distaste for Chávez or its tepid desire to do much about him.