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the Colombian military, to be triggered around the 2006 election. Chavez had won the USAID-funded recall election in 2004, hands down. He was heading for an electoral victory in the regularly scheduled presidential election in 2006, which he also won hands down. The plot was to promulgate a false poll, saying Chavez didn't win, to stir up the rightwing mobs to destabilize the country, with assassination as the capper. The false poll was exposed. So was the assassination plot. The president of Colombia, Alvaro Uribe, was obliged to apologize to Chavez for this plot, in a four-hour meeting.
Bushwhack tool, ambassador William Brownfield, was then moved from Venezuela to Colombia, as ambassador, and, from that perch, launched several other nefarious anti-democracy, anti-left, and anti-peace schemes, which I won't go into here.
The Catholic bishops have opposed Chavez in several ways. I believe they were the originators, way at the beginning, of the first rightwing "talking point"-- that Chavez "is increasingly authoritarian." (I think that they are the source for the first AP use of this "talking point," with AP disguising the source with the phrase, "His critics say...," i.e., "His critics say that he is increasingly authoritarian." It's a guess but a pretty educated one.) At least one Catholic bishop signed the "Carmona Decrees"--the coup d'etat document in 2002 which suspended the constitution, the courts, the national assembly and all civil rights. Throughout this period, there was a very rightwing bishop--a man who had spent his entire career in the Vatican finance office, and had finally been fired from that position in the Italian banking scandals of the 1980's) regularly railing against Chavez from the pulpit, in Venezuela, in his retirement. He has since died. (He was very old.) In 2007, we find the bishops opposing the Chavistas' 69 amendment constitutional package, which was put to the voters. The package contained an equal rights provision for women and gays, and I'm pretty sure that is why the package was defeated, in an extremely close vote (the bishops got some Catholics to defect from Chavez). The rightwing ran ads that said that Chavez was going to take children from their mothers (re some education reforms). I suspect that the bishops had a hand in that wording, cuz it's actually their thing to brainwash children in Catholic schools, and they are forever using "motherhood" as their sword and shield. But probably Chavez's biggest sin, with them, was trying to cut state subsidies to Catholic institutions. After the '02 coup attempt, Chavez backed down on that one, but the Church hierarchy obviously continued their plotting and meddling in many ways, including offering up their priests, nuns, parishioners, students and others as a spy network.
This latter surprises me not at all.
To anyone who believes that there is anything at all--even a particle of truth--to the rightwing "talking point" that Chavez is a "dictator," I offer this thought: WHO suspended the constitution, the courts, the national assembly and all civil rights, in 2002? And WHO, on the other hand, has scrupulously adhered to the constitution, to the laws passed by the national assembly, and to the will of the people in honest, transparent elections and has protected and expanded human and civil rights?
I can present you with a factual account of Chavez's presidency that supports my view that he doesn't even remotely resemble a "dictator," but I won't do that here. I will just ask you to consider what sorts of people oppose Chavez--rightwing Catholic bishops, landowners, the rich, and Wall Street and Exxon Mobil and their bought and paid for government--our own. THEIR lie, that Chavez is a "dictator," is promulgated throughout the corpo-fascist press, as have other lies that they have told us. It is a propaganda campaign, and a very intense one. Consider the source.
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