BY LANCE SELFA
CHICAGO — People all over Latin America must have let out a hearty laugh when they heard US national security adviser Condoleezza Rice lecture Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez about his post-coup need to "uphold constitutional principles".
Only a few days earlier, US officials had recognised as the legitimate government plotters whose first action was to suspend the Venezuelan constitution and dissolve the National Assembly.
Fortunately, the Venezuelan people showed a greater commitment to democracy. They restored Chavez, the constitutionally elected president — elected with overwhelming popular support in 1998 and in 2000 — to power.
In the aftermath of the coup, US efforts to cover its tracks had the appearance of a Keystone Kops routine. White House and defence and state department hacks have been salting the press with stories admitting the US met with coup leaders, but that they urged them not to overthrow Chavez. Those stories are as credible as an Enron annual report.
Even the Wall Street Journal called the Bush administration on it. "When democratically elected President Hugo Chavez seemed to have been deposed by the military, the White House expressed quick satisfaction. This put the US at odds with every Latin leader, but especially with 20 years of American lectures on the uses of democracy. This makes the Bush administration look bumbling, if not cynical. It won't help Mr Bush preach the virtues of democracy in, say, Iraq."
"Democracy" has always been a flexible term in the hands of US officials, especially when they use it to pursue US imperial aims.
Ordinary Americans — and most people around the world — think democracy is a good thing. When the US was trying to win Third World "hearts and minds" in the Cold War against the USSR, it didn't say it was fighting for "free-market capitalism" or "free trade." It stood for "democracy" against "totalitarianism."
Yet the last thing the US wanted was popularly elected governments whose leaders carried out the wishes of their people instead of the whims of US business. As former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger once said, in justifying the 1973 US-backed overthrow of the Allende government in Chile, the US wouldn't allow a government to "go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people".
So when popularly elected leader Mohammed Mossadegh of Iran nationalised the oil industry in 1952, and when Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala declared land reform, the CIA engineered coups.
In the 1980s in Latin America, the US intervened in Nicaragua and El Salvador to defeat leftist movements that threatened the US hold on Central America. This time, however, the US used "democracy" as a weapon against the left.
In El Salvador, the US and its allies organised 1982 "demonstration elections" to produce a toothless civilian government that fronted for the US-allied death squads who murdered thousands of trade unionists, peasants and guerrillas.
The US plan in Colombia today seems to be following the Salvadoran script.
There's no doubt that the Bush gang views "democracy" as a virtue to be preached rather than a principle to be upheld. One of its chief allies in the "war on terrorism" is, after all, a military dictator in Pakistan. And it's sponsoring the reinstatement of a king in Afghanistan.
But the US government isn't all that interested in democracy at home either. A US official, justifying support for the Venezuelan coup, conceded to the New York Times that Chavez was "democratically elected", but added: "Legitimacy is something that is conferred not just by a majority of the voters, however."
That's a convenient alibi for an administration that lost an election but won the White House through a Supreme Court "velvet coup". Chavez can say he won the support of the majority of voters. George W. Bush can't.
[From Socialist Worker, weekly paper of the US International Socialist Organization. Visit <http://www.socialistworker.org>.]
From Green Left Weekly, May 8, 2002.
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