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Loses credibility Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
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U.S. Credibility Wanes in Venezuela Crisis
Tue Apr 16, 7:13 PM ET
Jim Lobe,OneWorld US
Four days after the administration of United States President George W. Bush (news - web sites) welcomed an apparent military coup d'etat against Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez, the state department is trying hard to undo some of the damage done to Washington's credibility as a protector of democracy in the Western hemisphere.
"We are encouraged by President Chavez's calls for national reflection, and we urge all Venezuelans to take advantage of this opportunity to promote national reconciliation and a genuine democratic dialogue," spokesman Philip Reeker said Monday, the day after Chavez regained office following 48 hours in military detention.
Reeker stressed that Washington fully supported a fact-finding mission dispatched to Caracas Monday by the Organization of American States (OAS) to assess the health of democracy in Venezuela after a week of unprecedented turmoil.
But analysts in Washington said that the administration's performance after Chavez' ouster last Thursday and restoration to power Sunday had undermined its claims to uphold democracy in Latin America.
This episode "badly damages U.S. credibility on democracy questions and revealed that the U.S. had completely isolated itself on this issue," said Michael Shifter, vice president of Washington-based think tank Inter-American Dialogue. "The Latins will see in this traditional U.S. double standards on democratic governments."
Shifter and others pointed to several events since Chavez's ouster last Thursday night after at least a dozen people were killed, reportedly by pro-Chavez gunmen, during protests around the presidential palace in Caracas.
The first came Friday after the installation by the military of an interim president, businessman Pedro Carmona, to replace Chavez who was reportedly arrested and taken to a military base on Venezuela's Caribbean coast.
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer (news - web sites) declined to call Thursday's events a coup d'etat and blamed Chavez himself for having provoked his ouster. Fleischer and the state department also repeated as fact reports that Chavez had resigned, dismissed his vice-president and cabinet, and thereby opened the way to Carmona's investiture.
But Chavez's family and supporters strongly disputed this account of events. Their denials, as well as Carmona's unexpectedly sweeping decrees dissolving the national Congress and the constitution brought hundreds of thousands of citizens onto the streets and split the military, paving the way for Chavez's return to Caracas Sunday morning.
"[The Administration was] awfully quick to embrace the opposition's version of events," noted Bill Spencer, director of the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), a human rights group. "They should have been extremely cautious about the apparently unconstitutional removal of an elected head of state from power."
Even as the state department issued its account, 19 Latin American heads of state meeting in San Jose, Costa Rica, condemned Chavez's ouster and invoked the OAS' Democracy Charter adopted last September which requires an urgent meeting of the hemispheric body and far-reaching sanctions against governments which seize unconstitutional power in member-states.
A meeting between U.S. Ambassador Charles Shapiro and Carmona Saturday, during which the ambassador referred to him publicly as "president," stoked anger among Chavez's supporters, and even members of Chavez's opposition saw it as confirmation that Washington supported the unexpected radical direction in which the new regime appeared to be taking Venezuela.
When the OAS convened Saturday night, Washington found itself completely isolated from other member-states which condemned "the alteration of constitutional order in Venezuela," a judgment which the administration had previously resisted. The U.S. representative went along with the final resolution.
Despite Chavez's reinstatement by the following morning, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice (news - web sites) appeared on the television public-affairs program 'Meet the Press,' repeating the state department's line that Chavez only had himself to blame.
"He needs to respect constitutional processes," she warned. "We do hope Chavez recognizes that the whole world is watching, and that he takes advantage of this opportunity to right his own ship, which has been moving frankly in the wrong direction for quite a long time."
"Hers was an especially regrettable tutelary presentation," said retired U.S. ambassador Robert White, a Latin America specialist now with the Center for International Policy. Another analyst, who asked not to be identified, called her performance "unbelievably patronizing in light of the circumstances."
WOLA's Spencer said the administration's performance suggested that it was returning to Washington's historic support for its traditional allies among the economic elites and armed forces in Latin America.
"On September 11, the U.S. signs the [OAS] Democratic Charter but then suddenly things seem to be back to the old days of the Cold War, when you embrace people who are friendly to you and oppose people you don't like."
At the same time, government officials, who insisted on anonymity, blamed senior political appointees in the state department and the National Security Council for Washington's performance and insisted that career foreign-service officers had favored a far more cautious stance in line with other hemispheric governments but were overruled.
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