Peruvian leaders cry foul as Chávez exports healthcare

[Joanne98]

Source: Guardian

The plane door opened and the elderly visitors, all visually impaired and in some cases blind, shuffled out slowly and carefully into Venezuela.

Disease, age and poverty had stolen their eyesight but now they were in the land of Hugo Chávez and that was about to change. A scheme called Misión Milagro - Mission Miracle - had flown them here from Peru for free surgery which would transform their lives.

A portrait of Venezuela's president gazed down from the airport terminal. "It is thanks to Chávez we are here," beamed Rosario Vilcavilca, 88, a peasant farmer in a traditional highland skirt.

Mission Miracle has helped 400,000 impoverished Latin Americans see again and cast Venezuela's revolutionary leader as the region's humanitarian benefactor.



Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/mar/24/venezuela

[fasttense]

1. What a horrible thing to do.

Subvert citizens with free health care and poverty aide. How dare they. What will they think of next? Free heating oil? Bread lines? Free education? Free water?

You have to watch out for a country dedicated to helping the poor. They may just take away the corporation's markets.

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and you've just reduced your market share. :sarcasm:

[EFerrari]

2. This is another one of those "Chavez is trying to destablize the country"

stories. It's like a brief is being built.

[Vinca]

3. Any chance he'll send a plane to the U.S. for those of us left

high and dry by the "greatest country on earth?"

[madmom]

4. Has this man NO shame???

:sarcasm:

[sam sarrha]

5. what is the address........??

[AP]

6. When Chavez was in prison, he had an eye problem that could have been fixed with surgery

which is why he is so big on helping poor people with vision problems.

[Vidar]

7. A peaceful humanitarian revolutionary--no wonder Chavez scares our corporate thugs

and their political whores.

[Judi Lynn]

8. Take a look to see what Bush is exporting to Venezuela:

March 24, 2008

Eva Golinger's Bush v. Chavez
The Coming War on Venezuela
By GEORGE CICCARIELLO-MAHER

~snip~
The key institutional devices deployed by the U.S. in its covert support for the coup remained the same in its aftermath: the neoconservative National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), both convenient mechanisms for bypassing Congressional oversight. What was new on this front, as Golinger demonstrates, was the establishment by USAID in the months following the coup of a sinister-sounding Office of Transition Affairs (OTI). Both the NED and USAID (via the OTI) immediately began to shift strategies, providing covert support for the opposition-led bosses lockout of the oil industry which crippled the Venezuelan economy for two months in late 2002 and early 2003, and when this failed, by providing direct support for efforts to unseat Chávez electorally (a là Nicaragua) in a 2004 recall referendum spearheaded by opposition "civil society" organization Súmate. Needless to say, doing so entailed continuing to support those very same organizations who had proven their anti-democratic credentials in 2002, but such things are hardly scandalous these days.

Through the popular and military support enjoyed by the Chávez government, all these efforts failed, which is unprecedented in and of itself. In response to the emptying of its traditional toolbox, the U.S. government has been forced to diversify its tactics even more drastically than ever before, and this is where Bush Versus Chávez comes in.

Domestic Continuity

In her analysis of contemporary U.S. strategies to unseat Chávez, Golinger speaks of three broad fronts: the financial, the diplomatic, and the military (43-48). But we should be extremely wary of distinguishing too cleanly between such tightly-interwoven categories: the "financial front" remains largely in the hands of the NED and USAID, agencies directly controlled by the U.S. government and the embassy in Caracas, funding the domestic side of the equation through support for destabilizing opposition organizations and even psychological operations (psyops) targeting the Venezuelan press and military.

Since 2004, the NED and USAID have seen massive budgets earmarked for activities in Venezuela: currently, some $3 million for the former and $7.2 million for the latter's OTI operation (77). Of the NED funds, most went to the very same groups that participated in the 2002 coup, the 2003-4 oil lockout, and the 2004 recall referendum. Súmate, which headed up the recall effort, and whose spokesperson and Bush confidant Maria Corina Machado had signed the Carmona Decree, was granted more than $107,000 in 2005 alone. Súmate, to which Golinger devotes a chapter, had also received $84,000 in 2003 from USAID and $53,000 in 2003 and $107,000 in 2004 from the NED, as well as an inexplicable $300,000 from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (90). All of which demonstrates, for Golinger, that "Súmate is and continues to be Washington's main player in Venezuela" (91).

While USAID's funding structure has become more secretive, a turn that Golinger deems illegal, one project in particular has been publicly discussed: the establishment of "American Corners" throughout Venezuela, institutions which even the U.S. Embassy deem "satellite consulates" (145). Aside from the patent illegality of such underground U.S. institutions, Golinger points out that their primary function is the distribution of pro-U.S. propaganda to the Venezuelan population.

Perhaps most frightening on the domestic front is the strategic transformation that such U.S. funding has undergone. Specifically, such funding has increasingly begun to target what had previously been considered core Chavista constituencies, such as the nation's Afro and Indigenous populations (77-78). What Golinger doesn't emphasize is the fact that this has occurred alongside a concerted effort by opposition political parties, notably the NED-funded Primero Justicia, to penetrate the poorest and most dangerous Venezuelan barrios, like Petare in eastern Caracas.

While this domestic element has remained shockingly continuous, with the U.S. continuing to directly fund the groups involved in Chávez's 2002 overthrow, the military and diplomatic fronts are where Golinger reveals some veritably frightening new developments.

Asymmetrical Aggression

Perhaps the most intriguing and frightening revelation in Bush Versus Chávez surrounds a 2001 NATO exercise carried out in Spain under the title "Plan Balboa." Here we should bear in mind the open support provided by then Popular Party Prime Minister José Maria Aznar for the brief coup against Chávez. And while we might be struck by the irony of naming a NATO operation after the Spanish conquistador who invaded Panama, the name is far more accurate than we might initially believe.

Plan Balboa was, in fact, a mock invasion plan for taking over the oil-rich Zulia State in western Venezuela. In thinly veiled code-names (whose coded nature is undermined by the satellite imagery showing the nations involved), it entailed a "Blue" country (the U.S.) launching an invasion of the "Black" zone (Zulia) of a "Brown" country (Venezuela), from a large base in a "Cyan" country (Howard Air Force Base, in Panama) with the support of an allied "White" country (Colombia) (95-98). The fact that a trial-run invasion was carried out less than 11 months before the 2002 coup against Chávez should further convince us that this was mere contingency planning.

But Plan Balboa would be only the beginning, and Golinger deftly documents a series of increasingly overt military maneuvers carried out in recent years by the U.S. government in an effort to intimidate the Chávez government while preparing for any necessary action. Here, Golinger rightly trains her sights on the small Dutch Antillean island of Curaçao, which she deems the U.S.'s "third frontier." Curaçao hosts what is nominally a small U.S. Forward Operating Location (FOL) as well as, not coincidentally, a refinery owned by Venezuelan national oil company PDVSA. Furthermore, it sits fewer than 40 miles off Venezuela's coast, and more specifically, off the coast of the oil-rich "Black Zone" of Plan Balboa that is Zulia State.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/maher03242008.html



Eva Golinger



Maria Corina Machado, Bush opposition leader,
and recipient of enormo U.S. taxpayer bucks as
a token of his esteem for her work against
Venezuela's elected leader.

[Rage for Order]

9. Good for Chavez

There are many reasons for any given country to cry foul, but the act of a foreign country improving the health of its citizens is not one of them.