Venezuela's Vice Pres.-"US Apologizes Only After Trying Everything Else"

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Venezuela’s Vice-President: “U.S. Apologizes, But Only After it has Tried Everything Else”

Wednesday, Mar 23, 2005

By: Gregory Wilpert – Venezuelanalysis.com

Caracas, Venezuela, March 22, 2005—“North-Americans always apologize, but always after they have done everything else,” said Vice-President José Vicente Rangel, referring to the U.S. history of covert intervention in Latin America and its eventual discovery. Rangel made these comments during yesterday’s book launch of Venezuelan edition of The Chavez Code, by Eva Golinger, a book that documents U.S. intervention in Venezuela during the Chavez presidency.

The first speaker of the evening, History Professor and Minister of Higher Education Samuel Moncada, provided an overview of U.S. intervention in Latin America and around the world. Moncada spoke of how the U.S. concept of “manifest destiny,” which existed in the very beginning of U.S. history and which held that it was the destiny of the North American people to dominate the continent, was still making itself felt in U.S. foreign policy today. Except, instead of speaking of manifest destiny, U.S. foreign policy officials now speak of Latin America as its “back yard,” where certain forms of government must be prevented.

Rangel then presented Golinger’s book, pointing out its importance for all Venezuelans. Rangel added that every decade or so the United States denies having covertly involved itself in the internal affairs of other countries, only to have to admit its involvement several decades later and apologize. According to Rangel, this book will make it impossible for anyone to claim that they did not know about U.S. involvement. Eventually, when the truth is revealed, it is claimed that these were incidents of the past and that now we live in a different epoch in which such things cannot happen. “This is the trap of the anti-code of the empire: the forgetting or rejection of the bad remembrance,” said Rangel.

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Golinger concluded by pointing out that the U.S. campaign is far from over and that now it seems efforts are being made to target activist groups in the U.S. that are acting in solidarity with Venezuela and its government. She pointed out a recent newspaper article that appeared in El Nuevo Herald, the Spanish version of the Miami Herald, last weekend. The article presented the Bolivarian Circles as though they represented a threat to the U.S. Golinger added that the journalist who interviewed her implied that she too was being watched.

http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news.php?newsno=1555