The Chavez Code, by Eva Gollinger, explains why Hugo hates us and how the United States (specifically the Republican Party) has meddled in Venezuela since the September 11 attacks and during George Bush’s watch. Here’s an excerpt from a review on Political Affairs.net:
Prior to Bush, Golinger remarks, the US was fairly indifferent to the Chávez administration. It was the extremism and the violent and irrational response of the Bush administration to the September 11th attacks that signaled a new direction in US foreign policy. Chávez opposed a series of Bush administration policy standards: the unilateral US “war on terrorism,” free trade agreements, US intervention in Latin America and so on.
But most ultra right elements in the US simply didn’t like the fact that President Chávez wanted to use his nation’s wealth to provide health care for children, feed starving people, create jobs, build homes for the homeless, and give the people a say in how their government runs. So, in the spring of 2001, the international arm of the Republican Party, the International Republican Institute (IRI), took a grant from the administration to step up its efforts to organize and mobilize an anti-Chávez opposition party. Where they had failed before, they gathered new momentum as 2001 wore on.
And despite their claims to being non-partisan, IRI funders met only with virulent anti-Chávez opposition leaders, many of whom would later be implicated in the illegal coup of 2002. Soon other US entities got involved: National Democratic Institute, American Center for International Labor Solidarity (AFL-CIO), and USAID, among others. These entities were either directly or indirectly funded by Congress, the administration, the CIA, and the notorious National Endowment for Democracy. Between 2001 and April 2003, the amounts distributed to opposition groups in Venezuela totaled about $4 million, more than three-quarters of which was distributed to opposition groups in the five months before the illegal coup.
Read the rest here.
