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Dick Cheney, Hugo Chavez and Bill Clinton's Band
Monday, August 16, 2004
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Why Venezuela has Voted Again for Their 'Negro e Indio' President
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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 with a nearly two-to-one landslide victory in a recall
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 would never forget them.

And that's a fact.

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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.