U.S. attorney and writer, Eva Golinger, who has published two books detailing the U.S. funding of opposition actions against the democratically elected government of Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez, reports in her blog, "Postcards from the Revolution" (See also a report from today's edition of Venezuelanalysis.com) some of the Wikileaks documents bearing on U.S. actions and attitudes toward Venezuela's developing socialist state.
Golinger's books detail the involvement of the U.S. and its military in the 2002 coup against President Chavez based on information obtained from extensive Freedom Of Information Act requests. See “The Chávez Code: Cracking US Intervention in Venezuela” (2006 Olive Branch Press), “Bush vs. Chávez: Washington’s War on Venezuela” (2007, Monthly Review Press).
Golinger's review of the Wikileaks cables reveal even more extensive anti-Chavez activities eminating from the U.S. Embassy in Caracas and involving our Department of Defense and its Southern Command.
Thus it appears that the U.S. plan to build seven U.S. military bases in bordering Colombia may not have been designed merely to obtain information about the workings of the Venezuelan government, but to "catapult" psych ops propaganda into Venezuela itself:
PROPAGANDA CAMPAIGN
In 2008, the US Embassy in Caracas decided it was time to employ the heavy services of the Pentagon's psychological operations team to bombard Venezuelans with pro-US propaganda, to counter, what an Embassy cable claimed in March 2008, "Chavez's anti-americanism".
"Embassy Caracas requests DOD (Department of Defense) support in the execution of its strategic communications plan. The goal for this program is to influence the information environment within Venezuela...DOD support would greatly enhance existing Embassy Public Diplomacy and pro-democracy activities".
Infuencing the "information environment" in Venezuela with Pentagon support is clearly an outright violation of Venezuela's sovereignty, which appears to be a common denominator in most of the Embassy cables published so far on Venezuela. The State Department's 2011 budget includes a special multimillion-dollar fund for a "30-minute, 5-day a week program in Spanish in Venezuela" and the Pentagon's includes a new program for "psychological operations" in the Southern Command (Latin America).
Golinger's article details the misinformation that was frequently supplied to the U.S. State Department in D.C. and its analysts concerning the reality of Chavez's programs to improve conditions for Venezuelan citizens. Former U.S. Ambassadors Brownfield and Patrick Duddy appeared to base their reports almost exclusively on information supplied to them by oppositionists: the wealthy corporate opponants to Chavez and journalists for the routinely fanciful opposition press rather than on the reality on the ground. Thus Brownfield reported that Venezuela may be supplying uranium to Iran, while a later, more factually grounded analyst from his own embassy, discounted those rumors as unsubstantiated.
Thus, Golinger comments on Ambassador Duddy's claims that the Chavez government had damaged and depleted the existing health care system:
At the end of the cable, Duddy's comments show either ignorance or an intentional distortion of fact, when he claims, "The quality of healthcare in Venezuela has declined as the GBRV (Goverment of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela) has shifted resources from the traditional medical system to "Barrio Adentro". The hard evidence shows the contrary. For the first time in the nation's history, all Venezuelans have access to quality, free healthcare, from the preventive care level, up to complex, high-tech treatments and interventions.
(As an American who has lived in Venezuela for the last four years and who has personally had the benefit of a variety of Venezuela's health care services, medical, dental and optical, I am witness to the fact that the health services here are every bit as good as those provided to me in Hawaii by Kaiser Permanente, the difference being that here those services in Venezuela were free, while Kaiser cost me $450.00 a month, plus co-pays and Kaiser didn't give me free laboratory tests, EEG's, and two free pairs of glass a year!)
We also learn from Golinger's review of the cables that Ambassador Brownfield devoted a part of his U.S. taxpayers resources to counting the number of flights between Venezuela and Cuba, while trying to count the number of Cuban passengers who came off the planes. Perhaps he didn't realize, apparently lacking factual sources of information, that many of those passengers were medical personnel sent to Venezuela from Cuba to provide health care to Venezuelans in return for subsidized oil.
Since Chavez was first elected in 1998, the widespread illiteracy, previously endemic in Venezuela, has been almost completely eradicated, as has the vast inequality between the small number of very wealthy Venezuelans and the vast number of the poor. A recent United Nations Development study reported that Venezuela has the least income inequality in income in any Lain American country, something that was definitely not the the case prior to 1998 when President Chavez was first elected.