With Complicity in the Media Favoring the Coup, Roger “CIA” Noriega Keeps Slandering Venezuela

With the complicity of a Honduran newspaper that favors a coup and the right-wing Spanish agency Europa Press, Roger Noriega, George W. Bush’s former ambassador to the OAS as well as Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, continues his anti-Venezuelan campaign. This time he “warns” that President Chavez seeks to create a “state of chaos” in Honduras to “prepare the ground for drug dealers” and succeed in “extending his regimen to Central America.”

In declarations made to the Honduran newspaper El Heraldo, Noriega, an old CIA collaborator whom Bush appointed to a high position as a statesman, affirmed that “Honduras is under much pressure because of Chavez and his network of countries,” and that he is “pressuring the Honduran president, Porfirio Lobo, and the people” by means of “violence and strikes” with the collaboration of “agents” working “to destabilize society.”

Noriega, who has become a defender of democracy, alongside Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, current chairman of the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs, was one of the most avid defenders of Roberto Micheletti’s dictatorship and repressive system.

In the final hours of the Peruvian election, this former member of the Bush clan was slandering the progressive candidate Ollanta Humala in an attempt to salvage the candidacy of Keiko Fujimori, the incarcerated dictator’s daughter.

Noriega categorizes the Venezuelan head of state as a “leader,” and, in a truly deceitful and infamous statement, he declares, “He has very close ties to Mexican drug dealers.” Ironically, Bush’s former official is a member of the Cuban-American mafia, whose ties with drug dealers have frequently been revealed.

In his distorted version of what happened in Honduras, Noriega considers that “if this continues,” Lobo will have to “sacrifice part of his sovereignty” and “put his external politics with Chavez and that group of countries in order,” which “implies, in some cases, a decision to work against the interests of the United States, Chavez’s primary enemy, by receiving Iranians and others who belong to the network” of the Venezuelan government.

Noriega’s theories about Honduras’ future don’t end here. He continues with gross theories about ex-president Manuel Zelaya, whom he classifies as a “clown.”

“According to our sources, there are those in the Venezuelan government who believe we must find a new protagonist,” affirms this partner of Otto Reich, whose gang that has devoted itself to misinformation since the 1970s.

Roger Noriega, during Bush’s administration, was responsible for Luis Posada Carriles, the international terrorist, who achieved his release through legal means in an agreeable trial before a judge appointed by the former U.S. president.

According to the Chilean investigator Ernesto Carmona, Jorge J. Larach founded El Heraldo of Tegucigalpa in 1979. Today, Larach’s descendant Jorge Canahuati Larach is in charge. He is a member of important commissions and always closely associated with the current president and suppliers of weapons… and state pharmaceuticals.

Confidential sources specify that during and after the coup d’etat, El Heraldo has, on various occasions, been the means of disclosing information to those who support the coup and the general public and that this information could only be coming from the American embassy.