Chavez Says Russia to Help Venezuela Make Rifles

[cal04]

Russia will help Venezuela build plants to make Kalashnikov rifles and ammunition after the United States restricted arms sales to the South American nation, President Hugo Chavez said on Tuesday. Chavez also told a press conference in Quito, Ecuador, that a delivery of 30,000 Kalashnikov automatic rifles was due to arrive from Russia in early June.

``The Russians are going to install a Kalashnikov rifle plant and a munitions factory. So we can defend every street, every hill, every corner,'' he said in remarks broadcast in Venezuela. Washington banned all weapons sales to Chavez's leftist government this month because of U.S. concern about his ties with Cuba and Iran and what it called his inaction against guerrillas in neighboring Colombia.

The sanctions led to a diplomatic freeze with Venezuela, a major U.S. energy supplier and the world's No. 5 oil exporter. Chavez rattled the White House earlier with a deal to buy 100,000 Russian automatic weapons. Earlier this year, the United States expressed concern about Spain's plans to sell $1.56 billion in military ships and planes to Venezuela. Chavez charges the United States with orchestrating a 2002 coup that briefly toppled his government and frequently accuses the United States of planning to invade Venezuela.

``The invasion plan is prepared, we even have part of this plan. They change it of course,'' Chavez said, although he added he was working to avoid such an attack. ashington denies it plans to invade Venezuela and says Chavez is destabilizing the region. Russia is the world's No. 2 oil exporter. Russia's Gazprom is exploring for natural gas in Venezuela, and Russian oil major LUKOIL says it wants to invest up to $1 billion in developing Venezuelan deposits.

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-venezuela-russia.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

[gordianot]

1. If Bush was smart they would sell the rifles, a trade opportunity lost.

Threaten an invasion drum up business then sell the arms.


Of course Bush is not smart.

[Selatius]

2. I'd fear an internal coup by local corporatists more than an invasion

The US is beat to shit in Iraq, and Bush has wet dreams about bombing Iran into the Stone Age.

The likeliest form of aggression the US could undertake against Venezuela is supplying coup plotters with intelligence and weapons to assassinate Chavez and liquidate the legislature.

Then a corporatist government will be installed, and everybody who questions the government disappears.

[Judi Lynn]

3. I just found an article you might find worthwhile a few minutes ago.

It discusses the goals of the first coup, which I've never seen defined to this degree. I just thought of it thinking about your remarks about sabotage from within. You can be sure this pathetic array of greedy, murderous thieves will leave no stone unturned in using U.S. taxpayers' money to savage ANYONE who's in their road, and that definitely includes Hugo Chavez!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

INTRODUCTION

The power elite in the United States has never been happy with democratically-elected Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, but it took the Bush administration to turn up the heat against him. Matters reached a boiling point in April with the coup d'etat against Chávez which surprisingly lasted only two days as millions of Venezuelan poor came to his defense. Many of the details about the ousting of Chávez and his replacement by corporate mogul Pedro Carmona Estanga, during those 48 hours, have yet to be sleuthed out, but key evidence implicating Bush and his cohorts has already accumulated.

The primary clues are revealed in the repeated criticisms of Chávez by Washington--echoed in the commercial media--and its immediate virtual endorsement of the Carmona regime by its failure to condemn the coup. In this stance, the U.S. stood alone. The unmistakable backdrop behind the U.S. position is Venezuela's status as the fourth largest oil-exporting country in the world, and currently the third largest source of U.S. oil imports.(1) "Venezuela is a major cash cow for Phillips Petroleum and ExxonMobil. Chevron Texaco and Occidental Petroleum are two other major oil companies with interests in Venezuela and Colombia."(2)

The mantra of complaints against Chávez who had been elected in record landslide votes in 1998 and 2000, included his Bolivarian reforms to "take from the rich and give to the poor;" his refusal to allow U.S. planes to fly over Venezuelan territory for its war in Colombia; his opposition to the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA); and his leadership in OPEC where he works for a fairer deal for Venezuela and other oil-producing countries by pushing up oil prices. (In the process, Venezuela dropped below Canada, Saudi Arabia, and Mexico in supplying oil to the U.S.) Also particularly rankling to the Bush Administration with its abundance of right-wing Cubans, is Chávez's sale of oil to Cuba in exchange for medical care.

Venezuela has been receiving about half of its revenues from the state owned Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA).(3) So providing more for the country's poor multitudes necessarily meant maximizing the gains from Venezuela's rich national resource, oil. This entailed altering the 60-year-old agreement with foreign oil companies "that charges them as little as one percent in royalties," plus handing them huge tax breaks, according to the London Guardian (4) The giant transnational oil corporations and business interests, coveting all that black gold, had far different plans. Not surprisingly, the PDVSA figured heavily in all the intrigue and machinations leading to the coup. "Opposition business leaders have said openly that they want to depose Chávez "so they can boost oil production or even privatize the country's cash cow ....they have been enraged ...over Chávez's efforts to take resources from the rich to aid the poor, who represent 80 percent of the population," says Newsday writer, Letta Tayler.(5)

As he donned his presidential sash (ordered months before from Spain (6)) and dined sumptuously with his co-conspirators, the 48 hour usurper, Carmona, moved almost instantaneously to turn around Chávez's Bolivarian policies and consolidate what amounts to an "oiligarchy." Within 48 hours, he dissolved the parliament and the supreme court, dismissed all mayors and governors, stopped the shipment of oil to Cuba, and started a massive wave of repression across the country. But there is more.
The goal: privatization of Venezuela's oil
According to an article in Proceso by Aram Ruben Aharonian (7), private investigations revealed that one of the moves of the 48-hour coup leaders was "the privatization of PDVSA, turning it over to a U.S. company linked to President George Bush and the Spanish company Repsol; plus the sale of CITGO, the U.S. subsidiary of PDVSA, to Gustavo Cisneros and his partners in the north: as well as an end to the Venezuelan government's exclusive subsoil rights."

Aharonian continues: "For this to happen, it was necessary to suspend the 1999 constitution and take advantage of the conflict at the state oil company, where top management was following orders sent from the north through its former president Luis Giusti. And support came from businessman Isaac Pérez Recao, for whom Carmona had worked in the Venoco oil company, and who actively participated in the coup and provided financing." (8) Giusti has ties with the White House as an energy advisor. (9)

Cisneros, a longtime friend of former President George Bush, who had hosted Bush on a fishing trip a few months ago, heads up a corporate empire stretching from the U.S. to Patagonia. Cisneros' huge dominion is made up of DIRACTV, Venevisión, Coca Cola, and Televisa. (10)
(snip/...)

http://www.globalresearch.org/view_article.php?aid=506926235

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I posted this on another thread right after finding it, but I wanted to make sure you saw it, as it contains some valuable points.

[Endangered Specie]

4. I'm curious what kind of gun rights ordinary citizens have?

[Heidi]

5. Locking.

Duplicate of: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x2313861

Heidi,
DU Moderator