Suicides dog US troops in Iraq

Suicides dog US troops in Iraq
by Benjamin Duncan in Washington, DC
Tuesday 09 December 2003 3:12 AM GMT


Depression seems to be the cause of most suicides among troops

Of the more than 450 US fatalities since the beginning of the war in Iraq, 20 have reportedly been suicides, or “self-inflicted” deaths, as the military prefers to call them.

While officials at the Pentagon say they are looking at these cases seriously, there is no evidence yet to suggest that the stress, fatigue and uncertainty associated with combat environments such as Iraq contribute to an abnormally high rate of suicides, health experts say.


Even so, the United States Army considered the situation disturbing enough to send Lt Col Jerry Swanner, its suicide-prevention programme manager to Iraq in late September as part of a 12-person Mental Health Advisory Team.


The group was to study the effects of combat stress and extended deployments on US troops. Findings from the study are yet to be released.


Virginia Stephanakis, a spokeswoman for the Office of the Army Surgeon-General and the Army Medical Command, said the issue of military suicides in Iraq was a matter of concern, but it “was not the primary reason” the advisory team was dispatched.

Problem

“It’s always looked at as a problem,” Stephanakis said. “Even if it’s just one, it’s one too many.”


The precise number of troops who have taken their own lives has not even been determined, with some ambiguous cases still under review.


Staying away from home for long is taking its toll

“We have some deaths that we’re not sure what the problem was,” Stephanakis said.


Of the 20 individuals who have committed suicide thus far, 18 were army soldiers and two were Marines, according to representatives from each branch.


With roughly 130,000 US troops stationed in Iraq, there was a likelihood of at least a few suicides, said Dr Thomas Hicklin, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Southern California School of Medicine.

“When you have a bunch of people you’re going to have some naturally-occurring suicides,” Hicklin said, adding that the current number of suicides in Iraq was in line with US suicide rates in the general population.

Difference


In fact, said Dr Carl Bell, a psychiatrist and suicide specialist at the University of Illinois-Chicago, “If you look at the suicide stats during any war, including Vietnam, and you look at civilian stats, there’s not a big difference.”


In addition to his academic duties, Hicklin is an Army colonel who was chief of a unit in Afghanistan that dealt with stress disorders among troops. Depression, he said, is the greatest contributing factor in suicide cases overall, the military included.


The fact that some troops stationed in combat zones such as Iraq or Afghanistan for long periods of time would suffer from depression is practically unavoidable, he added.


“There’s some naturally-occurring depression that people feel when they’re away from home and in an austere environment ... plus they’re in the heat of the desert and there are some who are prone to depression,” he said.


An Army spokesperson told Aljazeera.net that, as of 8 December 601 soldiers had been medically evacuated from Iraq for behavioural health reasons.


Meanwhile, 42 soldiers had also been evacuated from Afghanistan for similar causes.

A soldier who enters a combat environment with an underlying emotional disorder could be more susceptible to the dangers of depression, Bell said.


No simple relationship between
war, depression and suicide

“What you’ve got are people with the proclivity to be depressed,” he said. “You put them in a toxic situation like a war and their proclivity manifests.”


However, that does not necessarily indicate a causal relationship between war, depression and suicide, he said.


“The vast majority of [troops suffering from depression] will not commit suicide,” he said. “That’s the problem, it doesn’t work that way. Suicide is a very complex thing to study.”


Problems with personal relationships, unrelated to military service, are the most frequent cause of suicides in the Army in war and peacetime, said Martha Rudd, an Army spokeswoman.


Stress factor


“That’s overwhelmingly the most common cause, the trigger of suicides in the Army: the loss of a significant relationship,” Rudd said.

Most mental health experts dismissed the so-called stress factor.


Although the situation in Iraq is fraught with danger, unpredictability and high-stress activities for US troops, many of whom are serving longer tours of duty than were originally anticipated, Bell said stress did not not play a major role in military suicides.


“When soldiers are in the thick of a fight, they don’t have time to dwell on their problems"

Martha Rudd,
spokeswoman, US Army

“The likelihood that what you’re getting is stress-induced is low and it’s low because the military has an extremely good handle on this kind of stuff,” he said.


Rudd said the Army tried to make sure that every soldier in the field had access to a chaplain or a psychiatrist if they needed one. One of the things the mental health team tried to assess in Iraq was “how the resources were distributed,” she said.


Ironically, Rudd said most of the suicides in Iraq occurred after 1 May, when President Bush announced the end of major combat operations, leading some to the conclusion that post-combat peacekeeping situations was when the troops were most at risk from killing themselves.

“When soldiers are in the thick of a fight, they don’t have time to dwell on their problems,” Rudd said.


Because the individual cases are still under review, neither the Army nor the Marine Corp are offering any details on the 20 reported instances of suicide in Iraq thus far.


But Bell said confusion about the circumstances was part of the problem for non-military experts trying to examine the situation.

“I don’t think we really have enough information about what’s going on over there to know what the hell is happening,” he said.

Aljazeera
By Benjamin Duncan in Washington, DC

You can find this article at:
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/805FDBBF-96C5-401A-B512-49A5AE73D9BE.htm


Good riddance to a bad, sad year

December 29, 2003

In 2003 the US flexed its imperial muscles and Australia showed its cruel side, writes Robert Manne.

From the political point of view, 2003 was dominated by the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, in which Australia was intimately involved. Almost everything about this invasion was unsettling and strange.

The Anglophone democracies invaded Iraq on the legal basis of certain United Nations Security Council resolutions, despite the fact that in regard to the invasion the Security Council was unambiguously opposed. The invasion was mounted in order to disarm Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction, which appeared not to exist. When the weapons could not be found, the occupying powers began to argue that their non-discovery was of no great consequence, as the real purpose of the invasion had been to remove a monstrous tyrant from power.

In 2002 the United States had revolutionised international law by arguing that preventive wars could justly be waged against "rogue states" possessing WMD. In 2003, when a rogue state was invaded but no WMD were found, international law was revolutionised a second time, with the claim that the US and its allies had the right to go to war, not in self-defence and as a last resort, but to rid the world of tyrants and to introduce democracy.

In 2003 the Americans began acting in the international arena in whatever way they pleased. As Owen Harries pointed out in his excellent Boyer Lectures, it is in a genuinely new historical era, of US hegemony, that we must now learn to live.

While it proved relatively easy to remove Saddam Hussein, to introduce even the foundations of democracy proved a considerably more difficult task. With the abolition of the Iraqi army and police force, law and order simply broke down. Largely because of robbery, rape and murder, 94 per cent of Iraqis surveyed said they now felt less secure than they had under the gruesome regime of Saddam.

Iraq had no democratic traditions on which to draw. In addition, it was divided between secular and religious segments of society; between Sunni and Shia branches of Islam; and between an Arab majority and a long-repressed Kurdish minority. No form of government is more difficult to create than a federal system of democracy for a people divided on religious and ethnic lines. Impoverished and occupied Iraq is now expected to succeed in such an impossible task.

By the end of 2003, what was always obvious to common sense became clear, namely that the plan to create a model Western-style democracy in Iraq was little more than a fantasy of the neo-conservative imagination.

Next year it seems likely that the US will begin to withdraw troops prematurely from Iraq, in order to help the re-election of President George Bush. If the Iraqis are lucky, a relatively benevolent dictatorship, most likely led by a Shia strongman, might emerge. If they are unlucky, Iraq will begin to descend into disorder of a fearsome kind.

From the Australian perspective, one of the most intriguing questions of 2003 is why the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq caused so many political headaches for Tony Blair and even George Bush but left John Howard untouched. One obvious explanation is the lack of Australian casualties. Another is the success of Howard's hints that the intelligence deceptions on which the war was based were the entire responsibility of our great and powerful friends. Yet another is the present supineness of parts of the Australian media, with the successful intimidation of the ABC and the Murdoch stranglehold over the tabloid press. Most important, however, is the fact that for the greater part of 2003 Australia remained a country without an effective Opposition.

Towards the end of the year, this finally changed. Mark Latham is probably the most right-wing leader the ALP has ever had. On economic questions he is a low tax, neo-liberal. On political questions he has shown consistent contempt for the values of the inner suburban chardonnay socialist set. Yet to the Howard Government, Latham might prove a genuine threat.

Because of his youth and vibrancy, Latham has made the Prime Minister, quite suddenly, seem old. He has the ability to interest ordinary Australians in a way Simon Crean never had. Latham's larrikinism and his bad language amuses people; it will probably be forgiven if he can convince them he has consigned these habits to the past.

After two years no one knew what Crean stood for. Already, because of his self-dramatising capacity, everyone knows Latham hopes to provide opportunities for less affluent Australians. As the next election is likely to be decided in the poorer outer suburban or country town electorates where Hansonism was once strong, the prospect of a Latham Labor government in 2004 is slim but real.

For me, 2003 has been overshadowed by the continuing cruel and purposeless Howard Government treatment of the 10,000 or so unfortunate beings who, between 1999 and 2001, sought refuge in Australia from the tyrannies of Saddam or the Taliban or from the Iranian theocratic state.

A little under 9000 of these people, found to be genuine refugees, are now being asked to prove for a second time their protection needs. If they fail, most face deportation to the chaos and the danger of post-invasion Afghanistan or Iraq.

Hundreds of those whose asylum claims, for one reason or another, originally failed, but who are simply too frightened to return to their homelands, have now been languishing in Australia's detention prisons for several years. A further 300 or so asylum seekers have spent the past two years in hell, imprisoned in the tropical detention camp on Nauru. Among the detainees in Australia and Nauru are more than 200 children, whose lives have slowly been destroyed.

The mercilessness of the Howard Government policy has been revealed by two brutally frank judicial comments in recent weeks. In the High Court, the Solicitor-General, David Bennett, QC, said there was no reason in law why asylum seekers might not be detained "until hell freezes over" - that is to say, for the rest of their lives. In the same court, Justice McHugh pointed out that there was no legal impediment to the repatriation of asylum seekers even to certain death.

In Australian history the disconnect between law and justice has rarely been stated with such little embarrassment.

Of all Western societies, Australia is now almost alone in having no asylum claims from unauthorised arrivals. Since Tampa, there has been no asylum seeker "problem" here. By offering permanent homes to refugees on temporary visas and to those presently indefinitely detained in Australia or on Nauru, absolutely nothing would be lost, but 10,000 lives would be redeemed. Surely for 2004 this is not too extravagant a hope.

Robert Manne is professor of politics at La Trobe University.
r.manne@latrobe.edu.au

This story was found at: http://www.theage.com.

Articles

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The fools amongst us
12/26/2003 -
By: Hesham A. Hassaballa, M.D
Iviews* -

Yet again, the government raised the terror threat level to Orange, or "High Risk of Terrorist Attack." This decision was based on an increased level of "chatter" among suspected terrorists, credible intelligence from human informants, and information gleaned from the interrogation of captured terrorist suspects. Although this has been done before, I was more worried this time around. As I was listening to the news about the government's decision, I reached down into the depths of my soul and prayed to God: "Lord, please do not destroy us by the actions of the fools amongst us."

This prayer was borne of a feeling of sheer helplessness. I know the government is doing all it can to protect the homeland, including recently grounding six planes that were due to fly to the United States from France. Nevertheless, the government can not guarantee that the United States will not be attacked, and so I prayed.

I made this prayer--"Lord, do not destroy us by the actions of the fools amongst us"--as both a Muslim and an American. As a Muslim, I prayed to God for protection from the actions of the terrorist fools amongst us. These people have no shame, no heart, no respect for human life. The use the garment of Islam to cloak their cult of murder. With each terrorist attack, they further damage the image of Islam and smear all Muslims with the putrid stain of their murderous actions. The fact that these monsters saw the attacks of September 11 as a "victory" for Islam serves to expose their utter foolishness. And so I prayed.

As an American, I prayed that God does not cause America to be destroyed by the actions of her Administration. I am not calling President Bush or anyone else in his administration a fool. Nevertheless, some of the foreign policy decisions have been seriously misguided, if not downright foolish. The war in Iraq is a prime example. With each passing day, more American soldiers are killed, more Iraqis join the resistance movement--despite Saddam Hussein's capture--and more precious taxpayer money is required to keep the peace. All this and weapons of mass destruction still have not been--and probably never will be--found. Meanwhile, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict continues to fester, further poisoning the Holy Land with the blood of innocents and tarnishing the image of the United States across the world. Adding insult to injury, the war in Iraq has increased the risk of terrorist attacks against Americans while alienating long-time allies because of America's arrogant unilateralism. And so I prayed.

I prayed hard, in fact, because the specter of another terrorist attack on American soil worries me deeply. It goes without saying that the loss of any innocent life would be a profound tragedy for humanity. But the other repercussions of a terrorist attack are also of deep concern. First of all, in the event of another September 11-like attack, I truly fear the possibility of Arab and Muslim Americans being interned in camps like the Japanese during World War II. After all, Korematsu vs. United States, the famous Supreme Court decision which upheld the internment of Japanese Americans, has technically never been overturned by the Supreme Court. The economy, which still has some weakness despite recent gains, would collapse and be left in utter shambles. What's more, it is quite likely that Congress would pass an even more "Patriotic" Act that would strip away even more of our precious civil liberties. And so I pray. I pray that God does not destroy us by the actions of the fools amongst us. It may not seem like a lot, but it is the only thing I have the power to do. And never underestimate the power of prayer.

Hesham A. Hassaballa is a Chicago physician and columnist for the Independent Writers Syndicate. He is author of "Why I Love the Ten Commandments," published in the Book Taking Back Islam: American Muslims Reclaim Their Faith (Rodale).

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Venezuela and Argentina: A Tale of Two Coups

Tuesday, October 7, 2003

by Greg Palast

The big business-led coup in Venezuela failed, where international finance's coup in Argentina has succeeded. Greg Palast gives us the inside track on two very different power-grabs.

Blondes in revolt

On May Day, starting out from the Hilton Hotel, 200,000 blondes marched East through Caracas' shopping corridor along Casanova Avenue. At the same time, half a million brunettes converged on them from the West. It would all seem like a comic shampoo commercial if 16 people hadn't been shot dead two weeks earlier when the two groups crossed paths.

The May Day brunettes support Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. They funnelled down from the ranchos, the pustules of crude red-brick bungalows, stacked one on the other, that erupt on the steep, unstable hillsides surrounding this city of five million. The bricks in some ranchos are new, a recent improvement in these fetid, impromptu slums where many previously sheltered behind cardboard walls. 'Chávez gives them bricks and milk,' a local TV reporter told me, 'and so they vote for him.'

Chávez is dark and round as a cola nut. Like his followers, Chávez is an 'Indian'. But the blondes, the 'Spanish', are the owners of Venezuela. A group near me on the blonde march screamed 'Out! Out!' in English, demanding the removal of the President. One edible-oils executive, in high heels, designer glasses and push-up bra had turned out, she said: 'To fight for democracy.' She added: 'We'll try to do it institutionally,' a phrase that meant nothing to me until a banker in pale pink lipstick explained that to remove Chávez, 'we can't wait until the next election'.

The anti-Chavistas don't equate democracy with voting. With 80 per cent of Venezuela's population at or below the poverty level, elections are not attractive to the protesting financiers. Chávez had won the election in 1998 with a crushing 58 per cent of the popular vote and that was unlikely to change except at gunpoint.

And so on 12 April the business leadership of Venezuela, backed by a few 'Spanish' generals, turned their guns on the Presidential Palace and kidnapped Chávez. Pedro Carmona, the chief of Fedecamaras, the nation's confederation of business and industry, declared himself President. This coup, one might say, was the ultimate in corporate lobbying. Within hours, he set about voiding the 49 Chávez laws that had so annoyed the captains of industry, executives of the foreign oil companies and latifundistas, the big plantation owners.

The banker's embrace

Carmona had dressed himself in impressive ribbons and braids for the inauguration. In the Miraflores ballroom, filled with the Venezuelan élite, Ignazio Salvatierra, president of the Banker's Association, signed his name to Carmona's self-election with a grand flourish. The two hugged emotionally as the audience applauded.

Carmona then decreed the dissolution of his nation's congress and supreme court while the business peopled clapped and chanted, 'Democracia! Democracia!' I later learned the Cardinal of Caracas had led Carmona into the Presidential Palace, a final Genet-esque touch to this delusional drama. This fantasy would evaporate ‘by the crowing of the cock,’ as Chávez told me in his poetic way.

Chávez minister Miguel Bustamante-Madriz, who had escaped the coup, led 60,000 brunettes down from Barrio Petare to Miraflores. As thousands marched against the coup, Caracas television stations, owned by media barons who supported (and possibly planned the coup) played soap operas. The station owned hoped their lack of coverage would keep the Chavista crowd from swelling; but it doubled and doubled and doubled. On l3 April, they were ready to die for Chávez.

They did not have to. Carmona, fresh from his fantasy inaugural, received a call from the head of a pro-Chávez paratroop regiment stationed in Maracay, outside the capital. To avoid bloodshed, Chávez had agreed to his own 'arrest' and removal by the putschists, but did not mention to the plotters that several hundred loyal troops had entered secret corridors under the Palace. Carmona, surrounded, could choose his method of death: bullets from the inside, rockets from above, or dismemberment by the encircling 'bricks and milk' crowd. Carmona took off his costume ribbons and surrendered.


Taking on the oil giants


I interviewed Carmona while I leaned out the fourth floor window of an apartment in La Alombra, a high-rise building complex. I spoke my pidgin Spanish across to his balcony on the building a few yards away. The one-time petrochemical mogul was under house arrest - the lucky bastard. If he had attempted to overthrow the President of Kazakhstan (or for that matter, the President of the US), he would by now have a bullet in his skull. Chávez, in a gracious if strained nod to the ultimate authority of the privileged, simply confined Carmona to his expensive flat.

In response to my question about who gave him authority to name himself president, coup leader Carmona responded, 'Civil society'. To him this meant the bankers, the oil company chiefs and others who signed his proclamation.

Most telling were Chávez's laws to which Carmona and coup leaders objected. The prime evil was the Ley De Tierras, the new land law which promised to give unused land to the landless, in particular, properties held out of production by the big plantation owners for more than two years. But Chávez's tenure would not have been threatened had he not also taken on the international petroleum giants. Chávez's crimes against the oil industry's interests included passing a law that doubled the royalty taxes paid by ExxonMobil and other oil operators from about 16 per cent to roughly 30 per cent on new finds. He had also moved to take control of the state oil company PDVSA - nominally owned by the government, but in fact in thrall to the foreign operators.

Chávez had almost single-handedly rebuilt the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) by committing Venezuela to adhere to its OPEC sales quotas, causing world oil prices to double to over $20 per barrel. It was this oil money which paid for the 'bricks and milk' programme and put Chávez head to head against ExxonMobil, the number-one extractor of Venezuelan oil.

This was no minor matter to the US. As OPEC's general secretary Alí Rodriguéz says: 'The dependence of the US on oil is increasing progressively. Venezuela is one of the most important suppliers of the US, and the stability of Venezuela is very important for [them].' It was the South American nation that broke the back of the 1973 Arab oil embargo by increasing output from its vast reserves way beyond its OPEC quota. Indeed, I learned from Alí Rodriguéz that the 12 April coup against Chávez was triggered by US fears of a renewed Arab oil embargo. Iraq and Libya were trying to organize OPEC to stop exporting oil to the US to protest American support of Israel. US access to Venezuela's oil suddenly became urgent.

In an interview Chávez told me: 'I have the written proof, I have the time of the entries and exits of the two military officers from the United States into the headquarters of the coup plotters - I have their names, who they met with, what they said on video and still photographs.' He elaborated: 'I have in my hands a radar image of a military vessel that came into Venezuelan waters on 13 April. I have radar images of a helicopter that takes off from that ship and flies over Venezuela and of other planes that violated Venezuelan air space.'

With such powerful enemies, it seems unlikely that attempts to remove Chávez will stop there.

Exception to the New Order

While the immediate cause of America's panicked need to remove Chávez was a looming oil embargo, the Bush administration's grievances go much deeper. Miguel Bustamante-Madriz, a member of Chávez's cabinet, paints a bigger conflict with the global corporate agenda: 'America can't let us stay in power. We are the exception to the new globalization order. If we succeed, we are an example to all the Americas.'

Despite the European and American media's hoo-ha over how Chávez has 'ruined' Venezuela's economy, in fact last year its Gross Domestic Product grew by 2.8 per cent. And it wasn't all due to improvements in oil-prices; excluding crude oil, economic activity jumped by about 4 per cent. Compare the 'ruined' Venezuelan economy to Argentina's. That 'poster boy' of neoliberalism ended last year in a depression which has since turned into an economic death spiral.

Chávez is an old-style social democratic reformer: land to the landless, increasing investment in housing and infrastructure, control over commodity export prices. But with Marx discredited as the philosophy of the 'losers' of the Cold War, 'Chavismo' is as radical as it gets. His redistributionist reformism offers an operating, credible alternative to the corporate-friendly free-market prescriptions of the kind currently being handed to Argentina by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Since 1980, the World Bank and IMF have peddled a four-part free-market agenda: free trade, 'flexible' labour laws, privatization and reduced government budgets and regulation. Chávez rejects it all outright, beginning with the phoney 'free' trade agenda under the terms of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (which the US would expand to South America under the aegis of the Free Trade Area of the Americas). Trade under these terms is anything but free to the peoples of the Southern Hemisphere. Instead he calls for a change in the North-South terms of trade, increasing the value of commodities exported to Europe and America. Chávez's longer-term policies of rebuilding OPEC and higher tariffs on oil must be seen in the context of smashing imbalanced trade relations epitomized by the WTO.

World Bank and WTO rules have also forced nations such as Argentina to sell off their state-owned and locally owned banks and insurance companies to foreign financial giants such as America's Citibank and Spain's Banco Santander. These swiftly vacuumed up the country's hard currency reserves, setting the stage for the national bankruptcy at the first hint of speculator-driven currency panics.

The anti-Argentina

Argentina accepted the World Bank's four-step economic medicine with fatal glee. Not that it had much choice. I have obtained the secret June 2001 'Country Assistance Strategy' progress report of the World Bank, ordering Argentina to pull out of its economic depression by increasing 'labour force flexibility'. This meant cutting works programmes, smashing union rules and slicing real wages. Contrast that with Chávez's first act after defeating the coup: announcing a 20-per- cent increase in the minimum wage. Chávez's protection of the economy by increasing the purchasing power of the lower-paid workers, rather than cutting wages, is anathema to the globalizers.

His Venezuela is the anti-Argentina, taking a path exactly opposite to the guidance given, and ultimately imposed, on Argentina by the World Bank and IMF.

For example, in the June 2001 document, World Bank President James Wolfensohn expressed particular pride that Argentina's Government had made 'a $3 billion cut in primary expenditures'. Slicing government spending in the midst of a recession is economic suicide, killing demand when it's most needed. Who could have pushed the banks to demand such a berserk programme? The answer is hinted at in the document. That $3 billion cut will 'accommodat[e] the increase in interest obligations' to pay off those foreign banks - Citibank, Chase Manhattan Bank, Bank of America, Credit Suisse, and Lloyds Bank - who, having bled the nation of capital, lent Argentina back its own money at rates that can only be called usury. Foreign banks working with the IMF had demanded that Argentina pay a whopping 16-per-cent risk premium above US Treasury lending rates.

Chávez would take Venezuela in the opposite direction. His plan is to pull out of a downturn threatened by a corporate embargo of investment in his nation by taxing the oil companies and spending - the 'Bricks and Milk' solution, old-style Keynesianism.

And while Chávez moved to renationalize oil and rejects the sale of water systems, Argentina sold off everything including the kitchen-sink tap. The World Bank beams: 'Almost all major utilities have been privatized.' That includes the sale of water systems to Enron of Texas and Vivendi of Paris, companies which immediately fired workers en masse, let the pipe systems fall apart and raised prices as much as 400 per cent. Wolfensohn, for some reason, is surprised to note that after these privatizations, the poor lack access to clean water.

Coup Nouvelle

George W Bush is an oil man; he owned oil companies, now it looks like they own him.

Certainly the Keystone Kops-style plot against Chávez by Venezuela's military-industrial complex served Big Oil's interests. But that's an old-style shoot'em-up coup, likely to fail. The coup d'etats of the 21st century will follow the Argentine model, in which the international banks seize the financial lifeblood of a nation, making the official presidential title-holder merely inconsequential except as a factotum of the corporate agenda.

Palast's latest book is, "THE BEST DEMOCRACY MONEY CAN BUY: An Investigative Reporter Exposes the Truth about Globalization, Corporate Cons and High Finance Fraudsters." At www.GregPalast.com you can read and subscribe to Palast's London Observer and Guardian columns and view his reports for BBC Television's Newsnight, including his interview with President Hugo Chavez

Venezuela and Argentina: A Tale of Two Coups - 2004 Project Censored Award

Venezuela and Argentina: A Tale of Two Coups - 2004 Project Censored Award

by Greg Palast

The big business-led coup in Venezuela failed, where international finance's coup in Argentina has succeeded. Greg Palast gives us the inside track on two very different power-grabs.


Blondes in revolt


On May Day, starting out from the Hilton Hotel, 200,000 blondes marched East through Caracas' shopping corridor along Casanova Avenue. At the same time, half a million brunettes converged on them from the West. It would all seem like a comic shampoo commercial if 16 people hadn't been shot dead two weeks earlier when the two groups crossed paths.

The May Day brunettes support Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. They funnelled down from the ranchos, the pustules of crude red-brick bungalows, stacked one on the other, that erupt on the steep, unstable hillsides surrounding this city of five million. The bricks in some ranchos are new, a recent improvement in these fetid, impromptu slums where many previously sheltered behind cardboard walls. 'Chávez gives them bricks and milk,' a local TV reporter told me, 'and so they vote for him.'

Chávez is dark and round as a cola nut. Like his followers, Chávez is an 'Indian'. But the blondes, the 'Spanish', are the owners of Venezuela. A group near me on the blonde march screamed 'Out! Out!' in English, demanding the removal of the President. One edible-oils executive, in high heels, designer glasses and push-up bra had turned out, she said: 'To fight for democracy.' She added: 'We'll try to do it institutionally,' a phrase that meant nothing to me until a banker in pale pink lipstick explained that to remove Chávez, 'we can't wait until the next election'.

The anti-Chavistas don't equate democracy with voting. With 80 per cent of Venezuela's population at or below the poverty level, elections are not attractive to the protesting financiers. Chávez had won the election in 1998 with a crushing 58 per cent of the popular vote and that was unlikely to change except at gunpoint.

And so on 12 April the business leadership of Venezuela, backed by a few 'Spanish' generals, turned their guns on the Presidential Palace and kidnapped Chávez. Pedro Carmona, the chief of Fedecamaras, the nation's confederation of business and industry, declared himself President. This coup, one might say, was the ultimate in corporate lobbying. Within hours, he set about voiding the 49 Chávez laws that had so annoyed the captains of industry, executives of the foreign oil companies and latifundistas, the big plantation owners.


The banker's embrace


Carmona had dressed himself in impressive ribbons and braids for the inauguration. In the Miraflores ballroom, filled with the Venezuelan élite, Ignazio Salvatierra, president of the Banker's Association, signed his name to Carmona's self-election with a grand flourish. The two hugged emotionally as the audience applauded.

Carmona then decreed the dissolution of his nation's congress and supreme court while the business peopled clapped and chanted, 'Democracia! Democracia!' I later learned the Cardinal of Caracas had led Carmona into the Presidential Palace, a final Genet-esque touch to this delusional drama. This fantasy would evaporate ‘by the crowing of the cock,’ as Chávez told me in his poetic way.

Chávez minister Miguel Bustamante-Madriz, who had escaped the coup, led 60,000 brunettes down from Barrio Petare to Miraflores. As thousands marched against the coup, Caracas television stations, owned by media barons who supported (and possibly planned the coup) played soap operas. The station owned hoped their lack of coverage would keep the Chavista crowd from swelling; but it doubled and doubled and doubled. On l3 April, they were ready to die for Chávez.

They did not have to. Carmona, fresh from his fantasy inaugural, received a call from the head of a pro-Chávez paratroop regiment stationed in Maracay, outside the capital. To avoid bloodshed, Chávez had agreed to his own 'arrest' and removal by the putschists, but did not mention to the plotters that several hundred loyal troops had entered secret corridors under the Palace. Carmona, surrounded, could choose his method of death: bullets from the inside, rockets from above, or dismemberment by the encircling 'bricks and milk' crowd. Carmona took off his costume ribbons and surrendered.


Taking on the oil giants


I interviewed Carmona while I leaned out the fourth floor window of an apartment in La Alombra, a high-rise building complex. I spoke my pidgin Spanish across to his balcony on the building a few yards away. The one-time petrochemical mogul was under house arrest - the lucky bastard. If he had attempted to overthrow the President of Kazakhstan (or for that matter, the President of the US), he would by now have a bullet in his skull. Chávez, in a gracious if strained nod to the ultimate authority of the privileged, simply confined Carmona to his expensive flat.

In response to my question about who gave him authority to name himself president, coup leader Carmona responded, 'Civil society'. To him this meant the bankers, the oil company chiefs and others who signed his proclamation.

Most telling were Chávez's laws to which Carmona and coup leaders objected. The prime evil was the Ley De Tierras, the new land law which promised to give unused land to the landless, in particular, properties held out of production by the big plantation owners for more than two years. But Chávez's tenure would not have been threatened had he not also taken on the international petroleum giants. Chávez's crimes against the oil industry's interests included passing a law that doubled the royalty taxes paid by ExxonMobil and other oil operators from about 16 per cent to roughly 30 per cent on new finds. He had also moved to take control of the state oil company PDVSA - nominally owned by the government, but in fact in thrall to the foreign operators.

Chávez had almost single-handedly rebuilt the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) by committing Venezuela to adhere to its OPEC sales quotas, causing world oil prices to double to over $20 per barrel. It was this oil money which paid for the 'bricks and milk' programme and put Chávez head to head against ExxonMobil, the number-one extractor of Venezuelan oil.

This was no minor matter to the US. As OPEC's general secretary Alí Rodriguéz says: 'The dependence of the US on oil is increasing progressively. Venezuela is one of the most important suppliers of the US, and the stability of Venezuela is very important for [them].' It was the South American nation that broke the back of the 1973 Arab oil embargo by increasing output from its vast reserves way beyond its OPEC quota. Indeed, I learned from Alí Rodriguéz that the 12 April coup against Chávez was triggered by US fears of a renewed Arab oil embargo. Iraq and Libya were trying to organize OPEC to stop exporting oil to the US to protest American support of Israel. US access to Venezuela's oil suddenly became urgent.

In an interview Chávez told me: 'I have the written proof, I have the time of the entries and exits of the two military officers from the United States into the headquarters of the coup plotters - I have their names, who they met with, what they said on video and still photographs.' He elaborated: 'I have in my hands a radar image of a military vessel that came into Venezuelan waters on 13 April. I have radar images of a helicopter that takes off from that ship and flies over Venezuela and of other planes that violated Venezuelan air space.'

With such powerful enemies, it seems unlikely that attempts to remove Chávez will stop there.


Exception to the New Order


While the immediate cause of America's panicked need to remove Chávez was a looming oil embargo, the Bush administration's grievances go much deeper. Miguel Bustamante-Madriz, a member of Chávez's cabinet, paints a bigger conflict with the global corporate agenda: 'America can't let us stay in power. We are the exception to the new globalization order. If we succeed, we are an example to all the Americas.'

Despite the European and American media's hoo-ha over how Chávez has 'ruined' Venezuela's economy, in fact last year its Gross Domestic Product grew by 2.8 per cent. And it wasn't all due to improvements in oil-prices; excluding crude oil, economic activity jumped by about 4 per cent. Compare the 'ruined' Venezuelan economy to Argentina's. That 'poster boy' of neoliberalism ended last year in a depression which has since turned into an economic death spiral.

Chávez is an old-style social democratic reformer: land to the landless, increasing investment in housing and infrastructure, control over commodity export prices. But with Marx discredited as the philosophy of the 'losers' of the Cold War, 'Chavismo' is as radical as it gets. His redistributionist reformism offers an operating, credible alternative to the corporate-friendly free-market prescriptions of the kind currently being handed to Argentina by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Since 1980, the World Bank and IMF have peddled a four-part free-market agenda: free trade, 'flexible' labour laws, privatization and reduced government budgets and regulation. Chávez rejects it all outright, beginning with the phoney 'free' trade agenda under the terms of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (which the US would expand to South America under the aegis of the Free Trade Area of the Americas). Trade under these terms is anything but free to the peoples of the Southern Hemisphere. Instead he calls for a change in the North-South terms of trade, increasing the value of commodities exported to Europe and America. Chávez's longer-term policies of rebuilding OPEC and higher tariffs on oil must be seen in the context of smashing imbalanced trade relations epitomized by the WTO.

World Bank and WTO rules have also forced nations such as Argentina to sell off their state-owned and locally owned banks and insurance companies to foreign financial giants such as America's Citibank and Spain's Banco Santander. These swiftly vacuumed up the country's hard currency reserves, setting the stage for the national bankruptcy at the first hint of speculator-driven currency panics.


The anti-Argentina


Argentina accepted the World Bank's four-step economic medicine with fatal glee. Not that it had much choice. I have obtained the secret June 2001 'Country Assistance Strategy' progress report of the World Bank, ordering Argentina to pull out of its economic depression by increasing 'labour force flexibility'. This meant cutting works programmes, smashing union rules and slicing real wages. Contrast that with Chávez's first act after defeating the coup: announcing a 20-per- cent increase in the minimum wage. Chávez's protection of the economy by increasing the purchasing power of the lower-paid workers, rather than cutting wages, is anathema to the globalizers.

His Venezuela is the anti-Argentina, taking a path exactly opposite to the guidance given, and ultimately imposed, on Argentina by the World Bank and IMF.

For example, in the June 2001 document, World Bank President James Wolfensohn expressed particular pride that Argentina's Government had made 'a $3 billion cut in primary expenditures'. Slicing government spending in the midst of a recession is economic suicide, killing demand when it's most needed. Who could have pushed the banks to demand such a berserk programme? The answer is hinted at in the document. That $3 billion cut will 'accommodat[e] the increase in interest obligations' to pay off those foreign banks - Citibank, Chase Manhattan Bank, Bank of America, Credit Suisse, and Lloyds Bank - who, having bled the nation of capital, lent Argentina back its own money at rates that can only be called usury. Foreign banks working with the IMF had demanded that Argentina pay a whopping 16-per-cent risk premium above US Treasury lending rates.

Chávez would take Venezuela in the opposite direction. His plan is to pull out of a downturn threatened by a corporate embargo of investment in his nation by taxing the oil companies and spending - the 'Bricks and Milk' solution, old-style Keynesianism.

And while Chávez moved to renationalize oil and rejects the sale of water systems, Argentina sold off everything including the kitchen-sink tap. The World Bank beams: 'Almost all major utilities have been privatized.' That includes the sale of water systems to Enron of Texas and Vivendi of Paris, companies which immediately fired workers en masse, let the pipe systems fall apart and raised prices as much as 400 per cent. Wolfensohn, for some reason, is surprised to note that after these privatizations, the poor lack access to clean water.


Coup Nouvelle


George W Bush is an oil man; he owned oil companies, now it looks like they own him.

Certainly the Keystone Kops-style plot against Chávez by Venezuela's military-industrial complex served Big Oil's interests. But that's an old-style shoot'em-up coup, likely to fail. The coup d'etats of the 21st century will follow the Argentine model, in which the international banks seize the financial lifeblood of a nation, making the official presidential title-holder merely inconsequential except as a factotum of the corporate agenda.

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Palast's latest book is, "THE BEST DEMOCRACY MONEY CAN BUY: An Investigative Reporter Exposes the Truth about Globalization, Corporate Cons and High Finance Fraudsters." At www.GregPalast.com you can read and subscribe to Palast's London Observer and Guardian columns and view his reports for BBC Television's Newsnight, including his interview with President Hugo Chavez.

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