[News] USA-backed Colombian invasion of Venezuela imminent?

[News at freedomarchives.org]

BREAKING NEWS

EXCLUSIVE: USA-backed Colombian invasion of Venezuela imminent?

<http://www.vheadline.com/readnews.asp?id=17569>http://www.vheadline.com/readnews.asp?id=17569

VHeadline.com correspondent Philip Stinard reports: 
<http://www.vheadline.com/readnews.asp?id=17566>On April 13, the Colombian 
senate approved a resolution proposed by Senator Enrique Gomez Hurtado that 
condemns the dictatorial regimeof Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez Frias 
and calls for the Organization of American States to apply 
<http://www.oas.org/charter/docs/resolution1_en_p4.htm>the Interamerican 
Democratic Charter to Venezuela.

According to Article 21 of the Charter In the event of an unconstitutional 
alteration of the constitutional regime that seriously impairs the 
democratic order in a member state, any member state or the Secretary 
General may request the immediate convocation of the Permanent Council to 
undertake a collective assessment of the situation and to take such 
decisions as it deems appropriate.

What is meant by such decisionsis not specified in the Charter, but it is 
generally accepted to include all actions up to and including military 
intervention by OAS states, including the United States.
    * Immediate responses to the Colombian senate resolution from both the 
Colombian and Venezuelan governments were swift in coming. Two official 
responses were released by Colombian governmental bodies.

<http://www.vheadline.com/readnews.asp?id=17553>The first response came 
from Colombias Delegation to the Andean Parliament, which stated that the 
views expressed by the Colombian senate are not necessarily those of the 
Colombian government and people, and that the decision to invoke the 
Democratic Charter is in the hands of Colombian President Alvaro Uribe 
Velez. Then, in a paragraph that is edited out of most news reports, the 
Colombian Delegation calls upon the Venezuelan government to find an exitto 
their situation, which is a more mildly worded version of the Colombian 
senate resolution that they supposedly condemned. This response was hardly 
reassuring to the Chavez government.

<http://www.vheadline.com/readnews.asp?id=17568>A second response came from 
the Colombian Ministry of Foreign Relations, which repeated the same points 
made by the Colombian Andean Parliament Delegation, but left out the overt 
criticism of Venezuela leveled by the first communication.

This communication met with a more favorable response from various 
representatives of the Chavez government (among them Venezuelan Minister of 
Foreign Affairs (MRE) Jesus Arnaldo Perez and Venezuelan OAS Ambassador 
Jorge Valero), and these representatives consider the Colombian senate 
resolution to be null and void.

One fact that is overlooked by Chavez government representatives in their 
responses is that only one OAS member state needs to make a request to 
invoke the Democratic Charter in order for the OAS Permanent Council to 
consider the request ... it takes a two thirds vote of the OAS General 
Assembly to suspend a member state from the OAS, which is considered the 
ultimate sanction.

<http://www.vheadline.com/readnews.asp?id=17567>The most notable Venezuelan 
response to the Colombian resolution came from Jose Vicente Rangel, 
Executive Vice President of Venezuela, who made the astute observation, 
Senator Gomez Hurtados proposal has as its bases the United States 
governments campaign against Venezuela and the geo-strategic development of 
Plan Colombia.

Rangels statement also 
<http://www.aporrea.org/dameletra.php?docid=7837>makes note of the fact 
that the original Spanish version of Proposition 249 is written in bad 
Spanish, with misspellings and grammatical errors that are uncharacteristic 
of the normally high standards of Colombian jurisprudence. Rangel proposes 
that the proposition could have been inspired and edited by the Venezuelan 
coup leaders in exile in Bogota, Pedro Carmona [exiled FEDECAMARAS 
president] and [&] Daniel Romero, spokesman of the de facto government the 
12th of April [2002].

However, others take a more sinister view...

Some Colombian social and political leaders 
<http://www.anncol.org/side/445>[Temor por guerra entre Colombia y 
Venezuela, New Colombian News Agency] point to the recent presence in 
Colombia of US Congressman Lincoln Diaz Balart ... cheerleader for the 
right-wing Cuban exile community in Florida ... as possibly having an 
influence in the drafting of this document.

Venezuelan National Assembly (AN) deputy Tarek William Saab characterized 
the Colombian resolution as a vile pamphletwhich, besides being poorly 
written, appears as though it could have originally been written in English 
by the US State Department.

When asked by the Venezuelan press about the resolution, US Ambassador to 
Venezuela Charles S. Shapiro is quoted as saying I dont have an 
appreciation at this time of the agreement approved by the Colombian Senate 
& the idea that this resolution from the Colombian parliament has anything 
to do with the United States is untrue.

Hollow words, coming from the US Ambassador 
<http://www.vheadline.com/readnews.asp?id=17335>who was implicated by taped 
police radio conversations in the April 11, 2002 massacre at Llaguno Bridge 
during the early hours of the coup.

What could be behind the Colombian senate resolution?

Many point to US policy in Colombia under the program Plan Colombia. Even 
mainstream Latin American history books (e.g. A History of Latin America, 
by Keen and Haynes, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 2004) state that Plan 
Colombia is not so much about US anti-drug policy as it is about securing 
the Colombian oil industry that had been under attack by leftist 
guerrillas. Besides outsourcing the task of taking back control of 
guerrilla-controlled areas to paramilitary death squads responsible for the 
slaughter of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of innocents, and providing juicy 
multimillion dollar contracts to US companies such as Monsanto and DynCorp, 
there have been few visible accomplishments for Plan Colombia.
    * It is not inconceivable that part of Plan Colombia would be to 
destabilize and overthrow the Chavez government and install puppet leaders 
to make US access to Venezuelan petroleum resources easier and cheaper.

Perhaps it is to this end that the Colombian government has purchased forty 
AMX-30 tanks from Spain with US assistance. And, knowing how US covert 
operations have been conducted in the past, it is quite possible that the 
US has great interest in testing and observing how much support the Chavez 
government has by, for instance, 
<http://www.vheadline.com/readnews.asp?id=17552>sending its surrogates to 
attack the hospital in Monagas State and watching the community response. 
This could also extend to observing the Venezuelan diplomatic response to 
the (intentional?) provocation produced by the Colombian senate resolution.

Is a US-backed invasion of Venezuela by Colombia imminent?

Perhaps. The one person who has remained conspicuously silent on this issue 
is Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, who holds the keys to this situation.

<http://www.asambleanacional.gov.ve/ns2/acuerdos.asp?id=195>The Venezuelan 
National Assembly passed a resolution on April 15 condemning the Colombian 
senate resolution. Among other things, the resolution calls upon President 
Uribe to speak to the issue of this anti-Venezuelan agreement.

We are all waiting for President Uribes response...


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