While the UK and US media are having a happy happy fun time decidering the election and the actual electorate gets more and more irate about it, banana republicanism and all round diplomatic skullduggery goes on as blithely as usual. In this particular instance, Venezuela, it may have electoral implications – but perhaps that’s the plan.
The supposedly lame-duck Bush administration is continuing to destabilise neighbouring countries for fun and profit by fomenting dissent and plotting coups:
President Hugo Chávez last night ordered the US ambassador to leave Venezuela within 72 hours and accused Washington of fomenting a coup attempt against his socialist revolution.
Chávez also ordered Venezuela’s ambassador to Washington to return home and threatened to cut oil supplies, plunging relations between the countries to a new low. “Go to hell a hundred times, fucking Yankees,” he told a televised rally thronged with supporters clad in red.
The move came a day after Venezuela’s ally Bolivia expelled its US ambassador for allegedly backing opposition groups engaged in bloody clashes with police and government supporters; turmoil which claimed eight lives and split the country in two.
[…]
In a day of intrigue and brinkmanship, Chávez announced that Venezuelan military officers had plotted to assassinate him with US complicity. “They’re trying to do here what they were doing in Bolivia. That’s enough shit from you Yankees,” he said.
Ties would be restored when the US had a new government that “respected” Latin America, he added.
Coincidental or not, his accusation fell on the 35th anniversary of the CIA-backed coup which replaced Chile’s leftist president, Salvador Allende, with the dictator Augusto Pinochet.
The American diplomatic and security apparatus has learned precisely nothing from Chile. They think that it’s still the 1970s in South America: the cold war has never ended there for them.
It’s all beginning to look rather Georgian, or even Bay of Pigsian, isn’t it, what with the Russian navy conducting war games off the coast of Venezuela and Russian bombers at South American bases and everyone taking sides:
Russian bombers arrive in Venezuela
Russia has flown two long-range bombers to Venezuela for military exercises, a move likely to cause concern in Washington.
Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president, said on Wednesday that the Tu-160 strategic bombers had arrived to strengthen military ties and to counter US regional influence.
Apart from the larger geopolitical political implications there are domestic US electoral considerations too, in light of the bellicose attitude being expressed shown by McCain/ Palin towards Russia. United against a common enemy and all that…
The Bush administration definitely seems to have a strategy; it’s armageddon or bust. Trouble in South America, the Caucasus, the Gulf, Afghanistan, Pakistan -any one of of those situations could ripen into regional and perhaps global war, given the right sequence of events. Surely one’s got to pay off in time to give the Republicans a pre- election boost.
Is it just me or is there more than a whiff of October Surprise to all this?
