Chavez vs. The United States

The reaction to the remarks from the North American “establishment” against Chavez has begun. It was time. It has been almost 11 years since this cowboy began committing misdeeds upon half the planet. The starting signal was given on the eighth of September by Robert Morgenthau, fiscal general of Manhattan. Morgenthau denounced Chavez in front of the Brookings Institution, and his comments were not ignored by the White House or by Congress, the two powers responsible for national security.

What did he say? He spoke of the links between Venezuela and Iran, the development of nuclear arms among the two countries and their objective to threaten the United States, just like what happened in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He noted how the Venezuelan banking system has converted itself into a Laundromat of drug dollars, and a shortcut for Iran to evade the trade restrictions from Washington towards Iranian transactions.

The consequences of Morgenthau’s speech were immediate. The three largest newspapers — The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal — published articles and editorials. The most influential television programs and blogs made note of it as well. There is no reliable intellectual that will not admit that Chavez is a tenacious enemy dedicated to harming North Americans in all possible scenarios; yet what will not stop being ironic is that the United States buys 80 percent of Venezuela’s oil.

Chavez is converting himself into a Noriega of the twenty-first century. Manuel Noriega was a Panamanian narco-dictator and ex-collaborator with the CIA. He established strong links to Cuban and Columbian narco-traffickers, rented national territory as an intermediary highway for the shipment of cocaine to the U.S. and was involved in money laundering. He also threatened the U.S. military, which were at that time occupying bases situated near the Panama Canal. Through much indecision, and with an administration divided over the type of response they must give, President George Herbert Walker Bush finally ordered the invasion. It began December 19, 1989, and was successfully concluded the next day.

Latin American governments protested without much energy; nobody wanted to associate themselves with a completely discredited narco-dictator. The overwhelming majority of Panamanians endorsed the invasion.

Will history repeat itself? It is highly unlikely for the same situation to recur, but it is probable that a powerful sector of the U.S. government will attempt to remove this dangerous enemy of democracy from power.