This is an open letter to Jacob Hornberger of the Future of Freedom Foundation, in reaction to his article of April 5, 2014, at http://www.lewrockwell.com. I am copying it to my blog at http://www.trutherator.wordpress.com.
His article is found here:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/04/jacob-hornberger/us-out-of-venezuela/
Mr. Hornberger,
I’m an anarcho-capitalist that found out with Ron Paul’s campaign in 2008 that my 40-year-old views had lined up with what are called “libertarian”, and as a former missionary that lived since early 1970s in Latin America or in Hispanic-dominated Miami-Dade Count. My ex-wife is from the Dominican Republic and my wife is from Honduras. I plan on retiring in Honduras. I hope it will not be overwhelmed by a socialist regime such as Maduro’s. What they have today would be better, but I hope to add to the libertarian conversation in Honduras.
I have a personal interest against USG and UN interventions around the world. Foreign aid and drug wars are killing men in great numbers in my wife’s country -and killing their economy. Maybe the new special economic regions, designed artfully with the help of some libertarian economists from the US and from the Mises-associated institute in Guatemala will help them. I hope.
No doubt the CIA is around somewhere doing whatever they do, and let us be honest here: Neither of us knows what they are really doing, except in general terms. I used to think we could presume they consistently support American capitalist interests. After Honduras, Libya, Syria, with the evidence from these episodes of the USG helping socialist dictators and its purported Number One enemy to gain power in these places, I’m not so sure. Honduras I know best; and they did not hide their efforts to support the socialist dictator there.
I am surprised and a bit irritated at the reaction to regimes like Maduros’. Especially since I read it on http://www.lewrockwell.com.
Before I get to why, I totally agree with your concluding paragraph:
Leave Venezuela to the Venezuelans. If private Americans wish to involve themselves in the controversy, that’s fine. But the U.S. government should butt out entirely. What happens in Venezuela is none of the U.S. government’s business. Unfortunately, given the secret nature of the U.S. national-security state, the American people will never know the extent of U.S. involvement in the Venezuelan crisis until the CIA’s files on the matter are opened several decades from now.
Maybe they’ll open the files, maybe not, but I doubt that any files that will be available either now or later will reveal anything on the subject worthwhile, and more likely misleading.
But it is an amazing spectacle to see all the well-deserved condemnation of probable USG involvement, and absolutely nothing about what the Venezuelans might actually want in reality independently of both the American government and their own dictatorship.
I don’t remember any such outrage over Obama’s demands and Hillary Clinton’s interventions in Honduras to try to force them to put the socialist dictator Manuel Zelaya.
The American ambassador to Honduras at the time, Hugo Llorens, made an appearance in a commercial aired by the Zelaya regime, propaganda to get public support for his very unpopular effort for his so-called “referendum” (later relabeled “survey”).
Hillary Clinton made a personal call to Roberto Micheletti to resign, which would of course make it easier to force Honduras to take Zelaya back as the dictator he already was.
This “referendum” horrified Hondurans, because they knew three things for sure. (1) One, the thing would be fraudulent. They know their politicians. (2) Two, Zelaya had already advocated presidential re-election (already defined as “treason” by the Honduras constitution because of earlier attempts at lifetime presidencies. (3) Three, and worst of all, it would open up for more fraudulent “elections” to create an irrevocable socialist dictatorship, Chavez style, in Honduras.
There was one piece that circulated on the Internet at the time, how Zelaya “brought the country together”. Every group of any significance at all in those days demanded first his resignation and then supported his removal and the constitutional successor government of Micheletti. Half the population filled the plazas of the biggest and the smallest cities and villages to say so. The Chambers of Commerce, BOTH major political parties, ALL the Congress (elected by the same people that voted for president), the Catholic Church (Zelaya’s mob had to import a priest), all the Protestant churches, all the unions (except the hopeless teachers’ union, that had them on strike more than in the classroom literally by count of days– for the previous three years), and EVERY ex-pat in a forum where I was member.
What’s the CIA going to do there? What can they do? Why would they waste a dime getting the country to get rid of somebody they did not want?
Oh, yeah, because Soros wants power. But no doubt HIS dirty hands were in the pot FOR Zelaya. Keynote speaker at the regional summit the November previous.
Hondurans got panicked at the prospect of fixed elections creating another Cuba or Venezuela in their country. They vote with their feet by getting to the States at the first opportunity.
Why is it so hard to understand that so many Hondurans, or even Venezuelans, hate the serfdom of socialism, along with the miserable poverty it brings?
Maduro bragged in his op-ed in the New York Times about universal health care? Oh get out! The poor have to bring their own sheets into hospitals and sleep on the floor there! We’re already getting our own taste of that bitter poisonous “medicine” in the States!
That was the attitude of most of the Hondurans. Fortunately for them, apparently many or most of the richest and most powerful interests were inclined their way. BUT not all; one zillionaire and perennial presidential candidate was fingered in newspapers and “on the street” as the one who smuggled Zelaya back in to the Brazilian embassy (Surprise, Brazilia!)
And it is relevant that Maduro is the heir of the Chavista regime that has meddled in its neighbor’s internal political affairs and tried its best to save the imposition by external Force of a dictatorship that had no regard for anything but seizing power.
The phony pro-Zelaya demonstrations had some genuine bodies, but it was mostly marching-for-hire. They poured so much money into the country that the lempira went up a full 10 percent against the dollar for those several months!
Zelaya admitted in a Univision interview that he had won the election by fraud by saying that all elections have fraud.
After 2009, I have followed events in Venezuela.
Please note an unsung development in Latin America. It’s hard to see its long-term effect, but it has been noticed by some statesmen “down south”.
Honduras changed history in Latin America with its reassertion of some constitutional order inside its borders, such as it is. Don’t get a smug face about it; they did better in 2009 than the US has done in recent years. Will Obama in 2016 declare a federal election nationwide to vote for a new constitution? That momentum is building, from both the phony “right wing” and the phony “left wing”.
After the 2009 elections in Honduras, the president of El Salvador of the former “leftist” guerrilla party, declared dead the move to join Venezuela’s petro association. The mayor of Caracas demanded the importation of “cojones” from Honduras. Freedom-minded Latins were inspired all over. Honduran ex-pat communities felt relief unspeakable. Brazilian Congressmen went back to Brazil with the news that the entire Brazilian community living in Honduras were engraged at Zelaya’s refuge in their embassy.
No doubt Paraguay had Honduras in the back of their minds when they impeached and dethroned their own dictator aspirant for his dictatorial acts. Venezuela’s caudillo government whined about another CIA-backed coup.
It’s a political safe bet down south (and apparently among some libertarian circles in the US today too) to blame the CIA and the US for all their troubles.
Maybe the CIA is trying for a coup in Caracas, given the atmosphere in Latin America today. Soros has his fingers everywhere. He would love to have a dictatorship to deal with, to give him good deals, good power, after all…
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
P.S. There are videos of the police shooting at protestors there. There is video on youtube of Chavistas shooting into the million-person march (literally) in cold blood that resulted in twelve people dead. A false flag coup distracted the world’s attention from this slaughter of civilians and a de-facto socialist coup ensued thereupon by outing anti-Chavez military to purge them. These “CIA lackeys” and “coup plotters” got no punishment at all, they were cleared by the *Chavista* Supreme Court of all charges, with military pensions and all honors retained. And it was a “CIA” coup?
Can people be more gullible?