Reply #3: I think the fact that Bush tried to depose Chavez as one of his first [View All]

[applegrove]

'acts' of office shows tha Chavez was pretty much not 'starting' anything. As soon as Powel was out of the country ... an attempted coup against Chavez happened.

Here is an article from 2001(?):

"Bush Lends A Hand
by JP Leary
from Left Turn Magazine

It was only after mass protests returned Hugo Chavez to power last April 14, replacing the disgraced businessman Pedro Carmona, that the American government belatedly joined the rest of its hemisphere in opposing the coup against the elected Venezuelan leader. As his boss Colin Powell floundered in the Middle East, it was Otto Reich, the right-wing head of President Bush’s Latin American policy corps, who sounded the administration’s initial endorsement of the coup.

It was routinely regarded at the time as a bad week for US diplomacy. With Powell out of the country, Senator Christopher Dodd (D-CT) wryly called for "adult supervision" at the State Department. But was this simply ineptitude—a case of the State Department’s proverbial cat being away—or a hasty American reaction to an expected, but surprisingly failed, coup d’état?

Substantial contacts between American officials and Venezuelan coup leaders in the months leading up to the insurrection make it improbable that the United States was taken by surprise by the events of April 11. Just as unlikely is the possibility that this insurrection was orchestrated in Washington along the lines of, for example, the 1973 overthrow of Chile’s president Salvador Allende (that tragic event was certainly better planned). However, it is clear that the United States was committed to seeing the coup succeed—and that American officials knew beforehand that a military overthrow was in the works. Whether they knew when, and what form it would take, however, is still a matter of speculation.

Also troubling is the significant amount of money channeled to Chavez opponents over the past year by a congressionally funded policy institute, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Organizations receiving NED funds for their work with Chavez opponents include the AFL-CIO’s American Center for International Labor Solidarity (ACILS), or the Solidarity Center, which granted funds to the Confederation of Venezuelan Workers (CTV), a key player in the events that led to the coup.

SKIP....."

http://www.leftturn.org/Articles/Viewer.aspx?id=354&type=M