Who killed Hugo Chavez?

The whisper is that the US killed Venezeulan President Hugo Chavez. Actually, it’s more than a whisper. Renowned historian William Blum says that there was no one than those who own and run the US wanted to see dead more than Hugo Chávez. Blum is of the firm belief that the US really did murder him.

It’s not such a far-fetched assertion given that former US treasury official Paul Craig Roberts notes that Chavez was an enemy of Washington’s hegemony over other countries, of its alliance with elite ruling cliques who steal from the people they grind down and of its foreign policy based on lies and military aggression, bombs and invasions.

At the relatively young age of 58, we should therefore be rightly suspicious that Chavez had cancer, intractable respiratory infections and a major heart attack, one after the other. It is known that during the Cold War the US worked to develop biological substances that could kill without leaving a trace. Indeed, political analyst Nil Nikandrov from the Strategic Culture Foundation has documented some of the biological weapons and ‘experiments’ that the US has been developing and employing for many decades.

In December 2011, Chávez wondered out loud if it would it be so strange that ‘they’ve’ invented the technology to spread cancer and we won’t know about it for 50 years? He was speaking one day after Argentina’s leftist president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, announced she had been diagnosed with thyroid cancer. This was after three other prominent leftist Latin America leaders had been diagnosed with cancer: Brazil’s president,Dilma Rousseff, Paraguay’s Fernando Lugo and the former Brazilian leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Chavez called this an “epidemic” of cancer among Latin American presidents and a strange and alarming phenomenon. 

Several organisations in the US have already filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the CIA, asking for information regarding or plans to poison or otherwise assassinate the President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez.

Paul Craig Roberts says that, unlike US politicians, Chavez was respected throughout the non-western world and was awarded honorary doctorates from China, Russia, Brazil, and other countries, but not from Harvard, Yale, Cambridge, and Oxford. Like Rafael Correa, the three-term elected president of Ecuador, who granted political asylum to Julian Assange, and Evo Morales, the first indigenous president of Bolivia since the Spanish conquest, Chavez stood up for his beliefs and was popular, having been elected to four terms as president.

Chavez spent Venezeula’s oil wealth on social programmes, including state-run food markets, cash benefits for poor families, free health clinics and education projects. Economist and co-director of the Centre for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) Mark Weisbrot notes that since 2004, when the Chavez government gained control over the oil industry, poverty has been cut in half and extreme poverty by 70%. In a report conducted by the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLAC), the ‘2011 Social Panorama of Latin America’, stated that in 2010 the number of Venezuelans living in poverty reached 27.8 %, making Venezuela the third-lowest poverty rate among Latin American countries.

Chavez could have chosen to make things very cosy for himself by lining his own pockets and deciding to become Uncle Sam’s puppet, like the US-backed kingdoms of the oil-richGulf states. He opted not to do so. Chavez could not be bought.

His 2006 speech at the UN General Assembly highlighted this when he referred to George W Bush as the devil himself who spoke the day before as if he owned the world. He went on to state that, as the spokesman of imperialism, Bush came to share his nostrums with the UN to try to preserve the current pattern of domination, exploitation and pillage of the peoples of the world. Chavez went on to speak about the false democracy of elites that is imposed by force and on others by weapons and bombs. 

There is little doubt that, one way or another, the US was out to get Chavez, just like it had been for many years out to get Cuba’s Fidel Castro, who had warned Chavez to be extra careful of what he ate in the face of potential US attempts to poison him. Sound advice given that, according to William Blum, since the end of World War Two the US has attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders. The US had already supported a coup to oust Chavez in 2002, but failed.

Writer Annie Day states that the US has been responsible for over ten million deaths since 1945, either directly or indirectly, through its wars or use of proxy armies. Even the former CIA officer John Stockman had the figure at six million by the mid to early 1980s. What would the death of just one more person matter to the US if it had indeed been responsible for the death of Hugo Chavez?

Venezuela’s acting president, Nicolas Maduro, has said the country would open a scientific investigation to see whether Chavez was poisoned “by dark forces that wanted him out of the way.” He is reported by CNN to have said that he is almost certain that there was foul play based on the data he has.

In the meantime, the hope of the US elite is now that Chavez is gone, his socialist experiment will implode with a more than a helping hand from its strategically placed proxies within the Venezuelan opposition and the CIA.

Colin Todhunter : Originally from the northwest of England, Colin Todhunter has spent many years in India. He has written extensively for the Deccan Herald (the Bangalore-based broadsheet), New Indian Express and Morning Star (Britain). His articles have also appeared in various other newspapers, journals and books. His East by Northwest website is at: Http://Colintodhunter.Blogspot.Com

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