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C O M M E N T A R Y
CHICAGO 
SUN-TIMES
TUESDAY,
AUGUST 30,
2005
 

PAGE 33

Bully tactics not serving U.S. well

JESSE JACKSON
 











C ARACAS, Venezuela -- To
      get a good sense of America in
      the world, it helps to look
      from the outside in. This
      week, I traveled to Venezuela
to meet with President Hugo
Chavez and address the National
Assembly. Here's how America
appears to many of its ne ighbors to
the South.
    Chavez has been elected twice by
large majorities. He is a populist
champion of the poor in Venezuela.
Riding the oil boom -- Venezuela
sits on the largest oil reserves of any
nation in the hemisphere -- he's
seeking to gain a higher percentage
of oil profits for his country. He is an
ardent nationalist, challenging what
he considers U.S. domination of the
hemisphere. He has even embraced
Fidel Castro, who has made U.S.
presidents froth for over 45 years.
    Chavez's brash independence irri-
tates the Bush administration. Don
Rumsfeld recently traveled through
Latin America proclaiming Chavez a
threat to stability, suggesting that
he was working to destabilize Bo-
livia. The defense secretary offered
no evidence for the charge. Last
week on TV, Pat Robertson, the
zealous right-wing minister who is a
key political ally of President Bush,
said if Rumsfeld is right, the United
States should "assassinate" Chavez,
which would be cheaper than waging
another $200 billion war to over-
throw him, as in the Iraq fiasco.
    Robertson's chilling words echoed
across the world. Bush did not re-
buke him. The FCC, so quick to re-
act to a bared breast in a Super
Bowl halftime, did not open an in-
vestigation. Rumsfeld dismissed
Robertson's statement, noting that
assassination is against the law.
Robertson later apologized, sort of,
suggesting that kidnapping would
do just as well as murder.
    Most Americans would dismiss
these words as the loony ravings of a
right-wing zealot. But consider how
this looks from Caracas, or Santiago,
or Managua. The Bush administra-
tion denounces Chavez as a threat to
stability. The same administration
proclaims it will act preemptively
with military force, covertly or
overtly, to eliminate potential
threats "before they have formed,"

___________________

Venezuela is our
neighbor and should be
our friend.

in Bush's words. It has unleashed
the CIA, used high-tech weaponry to
"take out" suspected terrorists, and
demonstrated, in Guantanamo and
elsewhere, that its agents are pre-
pared to trample laws and treaties.
    Throughout the hemisphere,
decades of U.S. intervention -- the
gunboat "diplomacy" of the early
20th century, the CIA's notorious
wars against elected presidents in
Guatemala, Chile and Nicaragua,
the assassination plots against Cas-
tro -- ensure Robertson and Rums-
feld's words are taken very seriously.
    In Venezuela, the Bush adminis-
tration is already seen as implicated

in the 2002 coup attempt against
Chavez. The Bush White House
rushed to recognize the coup leaders
one day after they announced
Chavez had been deposed, only to
discover that the Venezuelan people
would defend the democracy that
the U.S. administration scorned.
Prudence alone makes Chavez take
the threat of the president's close
political ally very seriously.
    America cannot change its history
in the hemisphere nor erase the
well-founded suspicions that history
creates. But it can change the fu-
ture. Venezuela is our neighbor and
should be our friend. Chavez is
elected by his people. Venezuela is
our fourth-largest source of crude
oil. It borders on Colombia and is vi-
tal to the ongoing war on drugs.
    We need to move from a big stick
to a good neighbor policy. Over the
past two decades, democracy has
spread across Latin America, but so
have poverty and inequality. The
policies that we've enforced -- the
"Washington consensus" -- have
failed to work for most poor and
working people in the region. Bolivia
is unstable not because of Chavez,
but because of the policies pursued
by Washington and the Interna-
tional Monetary Fund.
    Chavez announced a proposal to
provide low-cost heating oil to poor
communities, schools and hospitals
in the United States. With oil prices
reaching $70 a barrel, and gas prices
exceeding $3 a gallon, and winter on
the horizon, this is a plan that I and
the whole world can endure.
    Americans have to choose -- as-
sassination or engagement, the big
stick or the good neighbor. Too many
people looking at America from the
outside think that choice has already
been made the wrong way. It is up to
us to prove them wrong.