The Ugly American Redux

"They hate what America stands for. They despise freedom. They now know we love freedom, and we will defend our freedom with all our might."

--George W. Bush, March 28, New York

You didn't have to blink to miss it. Let the record show that George W. Bush, reconstituted Cold Warrior and ardent defender of democracy, has suffered his first Bay of Pigs. Whether this experience will chasten him as much as it did JFK remains to be seen.

In a stunning reminder that the Resident's 76 percent approval rating stops at the Rio Grande, an American-backed coup against Venezuela's President Hugo Chávez went from fait accompli to farcical footnote in a matter of hours.

It all began at three o'clock in the morning of the 12th of April, when flamboyant populist Chávez was arrested by mutinous army officers and unceremoniously replaced by "interim president" Pedro Carmona Estanga. Carmona, chief of a national businessmen's association, immediately reverted to the right-wing strongman's play book. He suspended scheduled elections, tossed out laws regulating big business and promised "a pluralistic vision, democratic, civil and ensuring the implementation of the law." Following that declaration of devotion to democracy he dissolved both the National Assembly and the Supreme Court.

It comes as little surprise that the Bush Administration, itself the beneficiary of a coup, would endorse similar subversion elsewhere. But the American media also proved astonishingly sanguine at the replacement of a legally-elected leader by a '70s-style junta composed of right-wing army officers and corrupt businessmen. "We know that the Chávez government provoked this crisis," said White House press secretary Ari Fleischer in a statement welcoming news of the unfolding coup d'état. Describing Carmona as "a respected business leader" in a glowing puff piece, The New York Times slammed Chávez as "a ruinous demagogue."

Ruinous, perhaps. Demagogue, maybe. Nonetheless, Chávez was the legally-elected president of Venezuela. What had Chávez done, in the minds of the American establishment, to justify overthrow, exile and the subversion of democracy?

"According to the best information we have, the government suppressed what was a peaceful demonstration of the people," said Fleischer, in reference to an April 11th incident in which armed men wearing clothes indicating loyalty to Chávez shot 13 anti-government strikers to death and wounded more than 100. Was Fleischer suggesting that the Kent State shootings in 1970 should have precipitated a coup to remove President Richard Nixon?

Chávez's real crime was refusing to suck up to the U.S. or to its powerful corporate interests. A maverick elected with the overwhelming support of Venezuela's poor in 1998, he referred to his nation's upper classes as "squealing pigs" and "rancid oligarchs." He had a point, too: Venezuela's tiny elite have hogged its immense oil revenues for itself while millions starved.

Unfortunately for the downtrodden masses whose votes propelled Chávez into office, Venezuela produces 15 percent of America's oil. This makes the nation of particular economic and geopolitical interest to Washington. In February Chávez, acting on a campaign promise to distribute his country's oil revenues more evenly throughout its impoverished population, replaced Brigadier General Guaicaipuro Lameda with a politically progressive ally as head of the state-owned Petróleos de Venezuela.

The business community howled in fearful anticipation of further reform. Company officers, fearing that decades-old systemic corruption was drawing to a close, ordered work slowdowns, company-mandated strikes and street demonstrations against their own government in the hope of crippling the economy and destabilizing Chávez's rule.