Counterattack as Fateful Referendum Looms

On November 26, 2007 the Venezuelan government broadcast and circulated a confidential memo from the US embassy to the CIA which is devastatingly revealing of US clandestine operations and which will influence the referendum this Sunday, December 2, 2007.

The memo sent by an embassy official, Michael Middleton Steere, was addressed to the Director of Central Intelligence, Michael Hayden. The memo was entitled ‘Advancing to the Last Phase of Operation Pincer’ and updates the activity by a CIA unit with the acronym ‘HUMINT’ (Human Intelligence) which is engaged in clandestine action to destabilize the forth-coming referendum and coordinate the civil military overthrow of the elected Chavez government. The Embassy-CIA’s polls concede that 57 per cent of the voters approved of the constitutional amendments proposed by Chavez but also predicted a 60 per cent abstention.

The US operatives emphasized their capacity to recruit former Chavez supporters among the social democrats (PODEMOS) and the former Minister of Defense Baduel, claiming to have reduced the ‘yes’ vote by 6 per cent from its original margin. Nevertheless the Embassy operatives concede that they have reached their ceiling, recognizing they cannot defeat the amendments via the electoral route.

The memo then recommends that Operation Pincer (OP) [Operación Tenaza] be operationalized. OP involves a two-pronged strategy of impeding the referendum, rejecting the outcome at the same time as calling for a ‘no’ vote. The run up to the referendum includes running phony polls, attacking electoral officials and running propaganda through the private media accusing the government of fraud and calling for a ‘no’ vote. Contradictions, the report emphasizes, are of no matter.

The CIA-Embassy reports internal division and recriminations among the opponents of the amendments including several defections from their ‘umbrella group’. The key and most dangerous threats to democracy raised by the Embassy memo point to their success in mobilizing the private university students (backed by top administrators) to attack key government buildings including the Presidential Palace, Supreme Court and the National Electoral Council. The Embassy is especially full of praise for the ex-Maoist ‘Red Flag’ group for its violent street fighting activity. Ironically, small Trotskyist sects and their trade unionists join the ex-Maoists in opposing the constitutional amendments. The Embassy, while discarding their ‘Marxist rhetoric’, perceives their opposition as fitting in with their overall strategy.

The ultimate objective of ‘Operation Pincer’ is to seize a territorial or institutional base with the ‘massive support’ of the defeated electoral minority within three or four days (presumably after the elections though this is not clear. JP) backed by an uprising by oppositionist military officers principally in the National Guard. The Embassy operative concede that the military plotters have run into serous problems as key intelligence operatives were detected, stores of arms were decommissioned and several plotters are under tight surveillance.

Apart from the deep involvement of the US, the primary organization of the Venezuelan business elite (FEDECAMARAS), as well as all the major private television, radio and newspaper outlets have been engaged in a campaign of fear and intimidation campaign. Food producers, wholesale and retail distributors have created artificial shortages of basic food items and have provoked large scale capital flight to sow chaos in the hopes of reaping a ‘no’ vote.

President Chavez Counter-Attacks

In a speech to pro-Chavez, pro-amendment nationalist business-people (Entrepreneurs for Venezuela ­ EMPREVEN) Chavez warned the President of FEDECAMARAS that if he continues to threaten the government with a coup, he would nationalize all their business affiliates. With the exception of the Trotskyists and other sects, the vast majority of organized workers, peasants, small farmers, poor neighborhood councils, informal self-employed and public school students have mobilized and demonstrated in favor of the constitutional amendments.

The reason for the popular majority is found in a few of the key amendments: One article expedites land expropriation facilitating re-distribution to the landless and small producers. Chavez has already settled over 150,000 landless workers on 2 million acres of land. Another amendment provides universal social security coverage for the entire informal sector (street sellers, domestic workers, self-employed) amounting to 40 per cent of the labor force. Organized and unorganized workers’ workweek will be reduced from 40 to 36 hours a week (Monday to Friday noon) with no reduction in pay. Open admission and universal free higher education will open greater educational opportunities for lower class students. Amendments will allow the government to by-pass current bureaucratic blockage of the socialization of strategic industries, thus creating greater employment and lower utility costs. Most important, an amendment will increase the power and budget of neighborhood councils to legislate and invest in their communities.

The electorate supporting the constitutional amendments is voting in favor of their socio-economic and class interests; the issue of extended re-election of the President is not high on their priorities: And that is the issue that the Right has focused on in calling Chavez a ‘dictator’ and the referendum a ‘coup’.

The Opposition

With strong financial backing from the US Embassy ($8 million dollars in propaganda alone according to the Embassy memo) and the business elite and ‘free time’ by the right-wing media, the Right has organized a majority of the upper middle class students from the private universities, backed by the Catholic Church hierarchy, large swaths of the affluent middle class neighborhoods, entire sectors of the commercial, real estate and financial middle classes and apparently sectors of the military, especially officials in the National Guard. While the Right has control over the major private media, public television and radio back the constitutional reforms. While the Right has its followers among some generals and the National Guard, Chavez has the backing of the paratroops and legions of middle-rank officers and most other generals.

The outcome of the Referendum of December 2 is a major historical event first and foremost for Venezuela but also for the rest of the Americas. A positive vote (Vota ‘Sí’) will provide the legal framework for the democratization of the political system, the socialization of strategic economic sectors, empower the poor and provide the basis for a self-managed factory system. A negative vote (or a successful US-backed civil-military uprising) would reverse the most promising living experience of popular self-rule, of advanced social welfare and democratically based socialism. A reversal, especially a military dictated outcome, would lead to a blood bath, such as we have not seen since the days of the Indonesian Generals’ Coup of 1966, which killed over a million workers and peasants or the Argentine Coup of 1976 in which over 30,000 Argentines were murdered by the US- backed Generals.

A decisive vote for ‘Sí’ will not end US military and political destabilization campaigns but it will certainly undermine and demoralize their collaborators. On December 2, 2007 the Venezuelans have a rendezvous with history.

A plan by the counterterrorism bureau of the Los Angeles Police Department to create a map detailing the Muslim communities in that city, an effort described as a step toward thwarting radicalization, has angered civil rights groups, which say it is no better than racial profiling.

At least three major Muslim groups and the American Civil Liberties Union sent a letter yesterday to top city officials raising concerns about the plan.

“When the starting point for a police investigation is ‘let’s look at all Muslims,’ we are going down a dangerous road,” Peter Bibring, a lawyer with the A.C.L.U. of Southern California, said in an interview. “Police can and should be engaged with the communities they are policing, but that engagement can’t be a mask for intelligence gathering.”

The objections started after Michael P. Downing, a deputy Los Angeles police chief who heads the counterterrorism bureau, testified before a United States Senate committee on Oct. 30 that the Police Department was combining forces with an unidentified academic institution and looking for a Muslim partner to carry out the mapping project. He emphasized that he wanted the process to be transparent.

In his testimony, to the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Mr. Downing said the project would determine the geographic distribution of Muslims in the sprawling Los Angeles area and take “a look at their history, demographics, language, culture, ethnic breakdown, socioeconomic status and social interactions.”

The idea, Mr. Downing said in an interview yesterday, would be to determine which communities might be having problems integrating into the larger society and thus might have members susceptible to carrying out attacks, much like domestic cells in England and elsewhere in Europe.

“There are people out there who believe in extreme violent ideology who present a threat to the American people, and that is what we are trying to prevent,” he said. “This could be called another prevention strategy.”

The civil rights groups argue that contrary to what has been found in Europe, the scattered cases exposed in the United States have involved individuals with no clear ties to international terrorism groups.

The estimated 500,000 Muslims living in the greater Los Angeles area, including Orange and Riverside Counties, make its concentration of Muslims the second largest in the United States, after New York City’s.

Not all Muslim groups in the area object to Mr. Downing’s idea.

“There has been a lot of discussion on the issue of ghettoization and counterghettoization,” said Salam al-Marayati, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, which is considering being the Police Department’s partner in the project. Mr. Marayati said his group supported anything that would help integration as long as it safeguarded civil liberties.

Among those interviewed, whatever their position on the project, Mr. Downing rated high marks for his community policing efforts, and the letter to city officials suggested that the groups opposed to his idea meet with him to discuss it. Those signing the letter included Muslim Advocates, a national association of Muslim lawyers, and the Islamic Shura Council of Southern California, an umbrella organization for mosques.

The groups were particularly angered that in his Senate testimony, Mr. Downing, discussing the possibility of Muslims’ radicalization, seemed to suggest looking at factors like exposure to the puritanical teachings of the Wahhabi sect, instability in countries of origin and where they get their news. He also suggested that the study would result in helping amplify the voice of Muslim moderates who could counter fanatics.

“Who is going to decide who are the moderates?” said Hussam Ayloush, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations for the Los Angeles area, who also signed the letter. “Are Muslims who criticize the war in Iraq moderate?”

The groups’ letter coincided with the release yesterday by Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa and other city and law enforcement officials of an F.B.I. report that Al Qaeda might be planning to strike at shopping malls in Los Angeles and Chicago during the Christmas season. But the F.B.I. report itself characterized the information as uncertain.

The groups involved in protesting the mapping plan said any threat from Al Qaeda, even a tenuous one, underscored their point that limited police resources should be directed at investigating real crimes rather than at what they characterized as treating the entire Muslim community with suspicion.

“Al Qaeda has always operated outside the United States,” Mr. Ayloush said, “and has miserably failed to gain any support or sympathy among the American Muslim population.”

Reading this article should help those who are having difficulty understanding why CENTCOM Commander Admiral Fallon met with Musharaf and his generals the day before Musharaf announced the “state of emergency” in Pakistan, and is currently conducting a crack down on dissenters and potential challengers to his rule throughout Pakistan.

While the neocons may or may not be willing to sacrifice the oldest of the U.S. nuclear carriers for political support for total war here at home, the U.S. Navy will have a critical role to play in any future military conflict with Iran.

Many of the potential problems outlined in the article for engaging Iran with U.S naval power can be overcome with the use of Pakistani air space and territorial waters from which to launch sustained offensive actions.

While this level of cooperation with the U.S. to attack a neighboring Islamic Republic is certain to enrage the people of the Islamic State of Pakistan; Musharaf has already launched a preemptive “emergency” to quell dissent and challenge to his rule and more importantly, the authority of the Pakistani military in this eventuality.

Three years after their elected president Jean Bertrand Aristide, was overthrown by a band of U.S.-trained adventurers, Haitians continue to deal with the consequences. Violence persists, both within desperately impoverished communities and directed at those who resist the UN-supported government, with frequent raids being undertaken by UN forces on opposition strongholds like Port au Prince’s Cite Soleil.

DISAPPEARED: Pierre Antoine Lovinsky

Thousands have died since Aristide was deposed, mostly under the two-year dictatorship of Gerard Latortue. A study published by The Lancet reported in 2006 that in the 22 months after Aristide’s removal, over 8,000 people died violently with over 35,000 women and girls being raped. The whole country was essentially raped, with the connivance of the UN mandated MINUSTAH security forces, leaving a trail of fear, resentment, psychological scars and, with the police now staffed by many ex-participants in the 1991 coup (which also targeted Aristide), a budding police state. It’s been quite an intervention, and it’s completely off the rails.

The government has little control over right-wing paramilitaries and the police, while UN forces bludgeon impoverished communities into obedience. As journalist Ben Terrell has reported, “Though elected by the country’s poor majority largely because of his past association with Aristide (he was Prime Minister in the first Aristide administration which ended in the 1991 coup), most activists I spoke to now see Preval as at best ineffectual in standing up to rightist forces.”

Yet despite this, the resistance shown by Haitian civil society against the return of paramilitaries and foreign intervention has demonstrated that Haiti can’t be shocked into docility. Lavalas, far from melting away and disintegrating, has bounced back. In 2006, when popular protests brought a round of elections, it was a Lavalas old-hand, Rene Preval who took the presidency. That was despite massive corruption in favor of candidates more closely aligned with the U.S.-Canadian-French co-ordinated occupation.

Political activism also spread from Lavalas, and fed into it again, via a range of civil society organizations which developed in direct response to disappearances, massacres, corruption, poverty and the trauma of sexual assault. One of the most prominent has been the September 30 Foundation which has worked in the poorest areas of Port au Prince, with rape and torture victims, with the so-called “chimeres,” with the relatives of those killed in the brutal interventions carried out by MINUSTAH in Cite Soleil and by the Haitian “police.”

But that was decimated in recent months by the abduction in August of the September 30 Foundation’s inspirational leader, Pierre-Antoine Lovinsky (also known as Lovinsky Pierre Antoine). Haitian democracy and society took another blow last week when it emerged that another inspirational Lavalas activist and humanitarian worker, Maryse Narcisse, had disappeared.

With elections on the horizon and resistance rising, Lavalas and Haitian activists are under attack. MINUSTAH does nothing. Foreign governments too have done nothing. Their silence betrays a complicity in Haiti’s torment that needs to be reported.

Why Pierre and Maryse?

It’s not hard to see why powerful people might want to remove Pierre-Antoine from Haiti’s political map. A long-time Lavalas organizer and radical psychologist (he worked for years with the victims of the 1991 coup and the Duvalier dictatorship), Lovinsky never hid his allegiance to the Haitian poor and his commitment to activism. He also never hid his opposition to the removal of Aristide and the subsequent UN-backed regime.

As he told Democracy Now! in December 2006, “What happened in Haiti is a continuation of a war of genocide against the poor population. And that is an expression in fact of the class struggle in Haiti. What happens is that the United Nations by what is called the MINUSTAH (United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti) is an accomplice of this war against the poor in Haiti.” Speaking after MINUSTAH troops had mounted a deadly operation in Cite Soleil, supposedly in pursuit of gangsters, he railed against “what happens every day in Cité-Soleil where soldiers kill the poor for nothing, and what happened this past 21st, 22nd of December of this year. This campaign against the poor in Haiti where they give them some kind of pejorative name” adding that “the presence of the United Nations forces is just an expression of the continuation of the 2004 coup d’ etat.”

Never afraid to make dangerous enemies, he then told Juan Gonzalez that “Because all the people who were doing crimes at the end of 2003 and all the former military, they don’t have any problem. They are just circulating freely in the country.”

Lovinsky has consistently defended the poor of Port au Prince against accusations of lawlessness and criminality, preferring to argue that the poor have been deliberately represented as sub-human “chimeres” – the easier to then shoot them down when they resist. In the Democracy Now! interview he even accused the UN and the government of staging kidnappings to create an atmosphere of crisis (“precisely so that they could target Cité-Soleil, to give the impression that they were trying to fight against insecurity” he told Gonzalez).

This year, he moved into even more dangerous territory when he began to link together police brutality, the UN occupation and U.S. “democracy promotion.” As he said in an interview with the human rights group Haiti Action, the U.S. has been seeking to detach an 800-strong contingent of loyal police to form a new Haitian “army.” This would be a disaster for Haitian democracy, Lovinsky argued, noting that it was “The absence of the army prior to the 2004 coup [that] made the completion of the coup impossible, so the US had to get openly involved in order to finish the job, even though they wanted to keep their involvement covert.”

It wasn’t just that Lovinsky said things which upset the powers that be in post-coup Haiti, however. The problem was that he then acted upon his own analysis. As he told Haiti Action, “we in the 30th of September Foundation will be campaigning against the creation of this parallel security force.” Before his disappearance, he had registered as a Senatorial candidate for Lavalas and had been leading demonstrations against the continuation of the MINUSTAH deployment.

Coupling that energetic activism with an uncompromising loyalty to the poor made Lovinsky a marked man. A man who could tell foreigners that “It’s always the poor who rise up to defend national sovereignty [and] that is why in the eyes of the Bourgeoisie, in the eyes of the intellectual elites, these people are no different than the “va-nou-pieds,” nothing but criminals, whereas in my opinion these people are the protectors of our sovereignty” would be a danger to authority and elite rule in any country.

Maryse Narcise comes from the same tradition – the defense of Haitian democracy, a commitment to the poor and a willingness to alienate the rich and powerful. In her capacity as Jean Bertrand Aristide’s spokeswoman, it has been Maryse who has relayed many messages of support back to Haitians from their exiled president. Just like Lovinsky, Narcise has coupled her politics with humanitarianism, working as a medical doctor “in the forefront of efforts to provide community-based health care and education for all Haitians” according to Haiti Action and risking a return to Haiti in 2006 “to restore democracy.”

Who cares about Pierre?

If Pierre-Antoine and Maryse have been disappeared and the worst has transpired, then these are intolerable, disgusting violations of human rights and basic decency. This is, however, made doubly intolerable as they have occured under the supposedly humanitarian eyes of a UN mission. But it’s worse than that, at least from a Canadian perspective.

Lovinsky was abducted in the middle of the visit of a human rights delegation which was investigating abuses committed by the Haitian police and MINUSTAH forces. Roger Annis, a Canadian, was one of the members of that delegation, and as he wrote in a piece for Znet on 27 September, “On August 15, I and another Canadian member of the delegation visited the Canadian embassy to urge Canadian ambassador Claude Boucher to make a public statement of concern about Lovinsky’s disappearance. That request was refused by the embassy, and it has made no such statement to date.”

Annis also told the Hour that he suspected the Canadian silence was far from coincidental. As he told journalist Christopher Scott, “Canada is playing a very decisive role in…financing the Haitian judicial system [while] the RCMP are the training force for the Haitian National Police.” The official line remains that Canada “doesn’t get involved” in Haitian politics, according to Annis. Human rights activists can expect no help from that quarter, to Canada’s shame.

Like the Haitian people rebuilding their democracy, campaigners looking for official support for human rights in Haiti will have to work on their own, and petitions have begun to circulate across the world to demand action and end impunity for Haiti’s political classes and the multi-national occupation. There may still be time to derail the occupation and prevent the remilitarization of Haitian society along U.S.-approved lines. There may be time to rebuild a social justice movement in Haiti. Yet there is a brutal right-wing assault under way on Haitian activism and whether the people of Haiti can respond, only time will tell.

still a proud american?
fuck you.