November
24, 2004
CIA papers on Venezuela
Coup: U.S. kept quiet on Chávez
plot
(Newsday) - "The U.S. government
knew of an imminent plot to oust Venezuela's
leftist President, Hugo Chávez,
in the weeks prior to a 2002 military
coup that briefly unseated him, newly
released CIA documents show, despite White
House claims to the contrary a week after
the putsch.
Yet the United States, which depends on
Venezuela for nearly one-sixth of its
oil, never warned the Chávez government.
The Bush administration has denied it
was involved in the coup or knew one was
being planned. At a White House briefing
on April 17, 2002, just days after the
47-hour coup, a senior administration
official who did not want to be named
said, 'The United States did not know
that there was going to be an attempt
of this kind to overthrow - or to get
Chávez out of power'.
Yet based on the newly released CIA briefs,
an analyst said that did not appear to
be the case.
'This is substantive evidence that the
CIA knew in advance about the coup, and
it is clear that this intelligence was
distributed to dozens of members of the
Bush administration, giving them knowledge
of coup plotting,' said Peter Kornbluh,
a senior analyst at the National Security
Archive in Washington.
However, Kornbluh said that while the
documents show U.S. officials knew a coup
was coming, perhaps implying tacit approval,
they do not constitute proof the United
States was involved in ousting Chávez,
Venezuela's elected leader (…).
The documents were obtained through Freedom
of Information Act requests submitted
by Eva Golinger, a Long Island attorney
who also is investigating U.S. funding
of groups opposed to the Venezuelan leader.
Golinger said she was outraged by the
documents. 'If they knew that a democratic
government was going to be overthrown,
why wouldn't they send signals to it or
at least explain what was going to happen?'.
The documents - called Senior Executive
Security Briefs - are one level below
the highest-level Presidential Daily Briefs
and are circulated among about 200 top-level
U.S. officials, Kornbluh said (…)
All the CIA documents were heavily censored
before being released (…)
While there is no requirement that one
government inform another with which it
has diplomatic relations that it may be
facing a coup attempt, such an alert would
be in keeping with the spirit of the Inter-American
Democratic Charter of which both Washington
and Venezuela are members, according to
international relations experts (…)".
