16 APRIL 02: ANOTHER
BUSH ADMINISTRATION FOREIGN POLICY OUTRAGE.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/16/international/americas/16DIPL.html

April 16, 2002

Bush Officials Met With Venezuelans
Who Ousted Leader

By CHRISTOPHER MARQUIS

WASHINGTON, April 15 ˜ Senior
members of the Bush administration met several times in recent months with
leaders of a coalition that ousted the Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez,
for two days last weekend, and agreed with them that he should be removed
from office, administration officials said today.

    But administration
officials gave conflicting accounts of what the United States told those
opponents of Mr. Chávez about acceptable ways of ousting him.

    One senior
official involved in the discussions insisted that the Venezuelans use
constitutional means, like a referendum, to effect an overthrow.

    “They
came here to complain,” the official said, referring to the anti-Chávez
group. “Our message was very clear: there are constitutional processes.
We did not even wink at anyone.”

   
But a Defense Department official who is involved in the development of
policy toward Venezuela said the administration’s message was less categorical.

   
“We were not discouraging people,” the official said. “We were sending
informal, subtle signals that we don’t like this guy. We didn’t say, `No,
don’t you dare,’ and we weren’t advocates saying, `Here’s some arms; we’ll
help you overthrow this guy.’ We were not doing that.”

    The disclosures
come as rights advocates, Latin American diplomats and others accuse the
administration of having turned a blind eye to coup plotting activities,
or even encouraged the people who temporarily removed Mr. Chávez.
Such actions would place the United States at odds with its fellow members
of the Organization of American States, whose charter condemns the overthrow
of democratically elected governments.

    In the
immediate aftermath of the ouster, the White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer,
suggested that the administration was pleased that Mr. Chávez was
gone. “The government suppressed what was a peaceful demonstration of the
people,” Mr. Fleischer said, which “led very quickly to a combustible situation
in which Chávez resigned.”

    That
statement contrasted with a clear stand by other nations in the hemisphere,
which all condemned the removal of a democratically elected leader.

    Mr. Chávez
has made himself very unpopular with the Bush administration with his pro-Cuban
stance and mouthing of revolutionary slogans ˜ and, most recently, by threatening
the independence of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, Petróleos
de Venezuela, the third-largest foreign supplier of American oil.

   
Whether or not the administration knew about the pending action against
Mr. Chávez, critics note that it was slow to condemn the overthrow
and that it still refuses to acknowledge that a coup even took place.

    One result,
according to the critics, is that in its zeal to rid itself of Mr. Chávez,
the administration has damaged its credibility as a chief defender of democratically
elected governments. And even though they deny having encouraged Mr. Chávez’s
ouster, administration officials did not hide their dismay at his restora
tion.

    Asked
whether the administration now recognizes Mr. Chávez as Venezuela’s
legitimate president, one administration official replied, “He was democratically
elected,” then added, “Legitimacy is something that is conferred not just
by a majority of the voters, however.”

    A senior
administration official said today that the anti-Chávez group had
not asked for American backing and that none had been offered. Still, one
American diplomat said, Mr. Chávez was so distressed by his opponents’
lobbying in Washington that he sent officials from his government to plead
his case there.

    Mr. Chávez
returned to power on Sunday, after two days. The Bush administration swiftly
laid the blame for the episode on him, pointing out that troops loyal to
him had fired on unarmed civilians and wounded more than 100 demonstrators.

    Mr. Fleischer,
the White House spokesman, stuck to that approach today, saying Mr. Chávez
should heed the message of his opponents and reach out to “all the democratic
forces in Venezuela.”

    “The
people of Venezuela have sent a clear message to President Chávez
that they want both democracy and reform,” he said. “The Chávez
administration has an opportunity to respond to this message by correcting
its course and governing in a fully democratic manner.”

    On Sunday,
President Bush’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, expressed
hopes that Mr. Chávez would deal with his opponents in a less “highhanded
fashion.”

    But to
some critics, it was the Bush administration that had displayed arrogance
in initially bucking the tide of international condemnation of the action
against Mr. Chavez, who was democratically elected in 1998.

    Arturo
Valenzuela, the Latin America national security aide in the Clinton administration,
accused the Bush administration of running roughshod over more than a decade
of treaties and agreements for the collective defense of democracy. Since
1990, the United States has repeatedly invoked those agreements at the
Organization of American States to help restore democratic rule in such
countries as Haiti, Guatemala and Peru.

    Mr. Valenzuela,
who now heads the Latin American studies department at Georgetown University
here, warned that the nations in the region might view the administration’s
tepid support of Venezuelan democracy as a green light to return to 1960’s
and 1970’s, when power was transferred from coup to coup.

    “I think
it’s a very negative development for the principle of constitutional government
in Latin America,” Mr. Valenzuela said. “I think it’s going to come back
and haunt all of us.”

    Administration
officials insist that they are firmly behind efforts at the Organization
of American States to determine what happened in Venezuela and restore
democratic rule. The secretary general of the O.A.S., César Gaviria,
left today for Caracas, the Venezuelan capital, and the organization is
scheduled to meet in Washington on Thursday.

    Still,
critics say, there were several signs that the administration was too quick
to rally around the businessman Pedro Carmona Estanga as Mr. Chávez’s
successor.

    One Democratic
foreign policy aide complained that the administration, in phone calls
to Congress on Friday, reported that Mr. Chávez had resigned, even
though officials now concede that they had no evidence of that.

    And on
Saturday, the administration supported an O.A.S. resolution condemning
“the alteration of constitutional order in Venezuela” only after learning
that Mr. Chávez had regained control, Latin American diplomats said.

   
One official said political hard-liners in the administration might have
“gone overboard” in proclaiming Mr. Chávez’s ouster before the dust
settled.

    The official
said there were competing impulses within the administration, signaling
a disagreement on the extent of trouble posed by Mr. Chávez, who
has thumbed his nose at American officials by maintaining ties with Cuba,
Libya and Iraq