by Heinz Dietrich Steffan
http://www.rebelion.org, April 13, 2002

It took three years to destroy the Unidad Popular in Chile, eight for the Sandinista Front of National Liberation in Nicaragua and three for the Bolivarian forces.

Failure to give away natural resources and national sovereignty continues to be the death sentence for any Latin American government.

The master plan for the fall of Venezuela's president Hugo Chávez - made in USA and commanded in situ by Carlos Ortega - leader of the mainstream union of Venezuelan Workers (Central de Trabajadores de Venezuela - CTV), and Pedro Carmona - president of the business confederation, Fedecamaras - was published five weeks ago in one of the epicentres of anti-government conspiracies: the daily El Nacional.

The ideologue and Cabbala confident Julio García Mora revealed the internal (Venezuelan) part of the coup mechanics. The external part - that of the White House participation, of Miami, of Colombian paramilitaries, of the U.S. AFL-CIO, of the Spanish government, of right-wing international foundations and the international media was left in the dark. With regards to the Venezuelan civil gearing aimed to remove the president, García postulated that the unity of CTV, Fedecamaras and the Church was "the only way out" from Chávez's mandate.

"This front will act [Š] with great force. With the 12-hour general strike of March 18 and the chain of actions that start on the 4th [Š]. The demonstrations signal the episodes of a foreseeable government end [Š.] Those are the dynamics that end with an institutional exit. With a provisional President who designates the vice-president and from there on, everything is set, the executive cabinet and the powers [Š] Nine months of transitory effort and once you remake the Executive Power you go to a general election [.] A striking technical K.O. and with no rupture of the institutional thread."

The definitive operation in this strategy was undertaken by Ortega and Carmona. Under the false label of general strike they laid a double ambush. Unable to paralyse the country as they promised, and through an intensive media campaign, they called to a solidarity demonstration of a strike from a few executives from the government-owned Petróleos de Venezuela S. A. (PdVSA) [state oil company]. This demonstration was authorised to reach the Caracas neighbourhood of Chuao, but from there it was diverted towards the presidential residence, the Miraflores Palace. The obvious intention was to produce clashes and killings that confronted to their failed "general strike" could generate the military coup, preached many times over by other key external conspirator: the social-democrat Carlos Andrés Pérez.

In the eighties, the CIA lectured its Nicaraguan mercenaries (the contras) that every political movement needed martyrs, and the ambush by Ortega and Carmona met that prescription. Alfredo Peña, Caracas mayor and chief of the notoriously repressive and corrupt Metropolitan Police (PM), provided the snipers who dressed as civilians shot from the building roofs nearby to the Palace to civilians, particularly to government supporters who had the greater losses in deaths.

The media, among them the TV station Globovisión and the daily El Nacional and El Universal caused the propagandistic multipliers to the tunes whilst the transnational media networks guaranteed the world dissemination of lies.

The civilians killed by the conspirators will now be used to fabricate a trial to the president under arrest at Fuerte Tiuna in order to take him out definitively from the country political scene.

For this end, the lies over the orders that Hugo Chávez gave to shoot are being propagated by the military collaborators and media, as well as the falsity that he resigned to his post when, in fact, he was detained by a group of disloyal generals.

The anatomy of the coup reveals that it was a carbon copy of the coup d'état against Nicolae Ceaucescu in Romania. A lie over a supposed government violation of human rights is turned, through an intensive TV and newspaper campaign, into a cause for people's fury and as a justification for a coup from a section of the army, which was previously prepared to takeover.

The transitory defeat of the Bolivarian project in Venezuela is significant set back to the democratic and patriotic forces of Latin America as it changes the force balance in the sub-continent to its detriment: for the mass movement in Argentina; for the electoral chances of the popular forces in Ecuador and Brazil; for the ALCA [FTAA in English] resistance and the defence of MERCOSUR; for a negotiated solution in Colombia and of course, for Cuba.

In conversation between Cuban president, Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez, the first said to Chávez: "You have a historic opportunity, don't waste it."

Excruciatingly, it was wasted for multiple reasons, amongst them, the complicity of many intellectuals and international media with the destabilising agents. Some of them are now even trying to pass as "Bolivarianos" to maintain their image of progressives.

The coup was foreseeable since the moment Hugo Chávez won the election and it was revealed, as we showed, five weeks ago.

The Bolivarian State did not take the necessary steps to defend its project and lost power. It lacked the political-software to make the most of the "historic opportunity", just as it happened two years earlier during another "historic opportunity" in the Andean countries: the indigenous-popular-military rise in Ecuador.

**Translated from Spanish by Jose Luna