38 Years After a Triple Assassination, Grenada’s Short-Lived Revolution Still Inspires - Toward Freedom (2024)

Carole Concha BellSeptember 23, 2021Carole Concha BellAdmin, Americas, Archives

Australian embassy officials in Peru were surprised when they met Dr. Rodrigo Acuña’s revolutionary Chilean parents. They wondered how the both of them had managed to escape the 1973 U.S.-backed coup unharmed. But before approving their refugee application, embassy officials isolated Acuña’s mother, asking her to promise she wouldn’t engage in political activities in Australia. Later, on the flight to Sydney, his father ended up having what Acuña describes as a “post-traumatic stress disorder episode.”

“When he arrived at Sydney International Airport, he had to be placed on a stretcher and given medical attention,” Acuña told Toward Freedom. “That’s how my family arrived in Sydney, Australia.”

Now, Acuña, an academic, is part of a group representing Chilean exiles in Australia. The group has written an open letter to Minister for Foreign Affairs Marise Payne, expressing its dismay at revelations Australia may have collaborated with the United States in the events that led to the removal of democratically-elected Chilean socialist President Salvador Allende.

What Documents Reveal

The letter includes several demands, the most controversial being files be fully declassified and details about Australia’s involvement with the CIA and the Pinochet regime be made available to the public.

Declassified documents already reveal the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) were complicit in undermining the government of the sovereign Latin American country in the run-up to the military coup.

Documents prove ASIS installed offices in Santiago, Chile, from 1970 to 1973, with the sole purpose of undermining Allende’s socialist project, leading up to and even after the coup. For example, Australian parliament member E. Gough Whitlam stated in 1977, “… Australian intelligence personnel were still working as proxies and nominees of the CIA in destabilizing the government of Chile.” However, ASIS could not be reached for comment.

The fall-out that followed the coup was devastating for the normally politically stable country that, until then, had enjoyed a tradition of democracy. Allende was voted into presidency in 1970 with a social-justice agenda that included nationalizing its assets, including its lucrative copper mines, in which U.S. copper conglomerate Anaconda held a huge stake. Chile’s incoming radical agenda threatened the markets and international investors, so the United States began pouring huge sums of money into destabilizing Allende’s Popular Unity administration. Tactics included public relations smear campaigns via CIA-funded right-wing newspaper El Mercurio.

It’s estimated the United States spent $8 million on misinformation campaigning during Allende’s three years in office. Though much is known about the U.S. role in Allende’s ouster, what Australia’s surveillance agency did is much less widely understood.

That’s why Acuña said it’s important to denounce Australia’s role in the violent 1973 coup.

“How dare Australia interfere in the internal affairs of a sovereign state in a region as far away as Latin America to please a request from Washington,” he said. “The Allende government was far from perfect, but it was democratically elected by the people of Chile.”

The documents released to Dr. Clinton Fernandes, former intelligence analyst and Australian academic, are just the tip of the iceberg. His repeated requests for further declassification have been denied on grounds the revelations are far too damaging and “must remain secret.” But Chilean coup victims strongly disagree.

“This denunciation of ASIS’ role in the 1973 coup in Chile must be made because we, as first-, second- or even third-generation Chileans, have the right to express it,” Acuña said.

Australia’s Double Talk

Australia is no stranger to taking in Chilean political exiles. The first one was ex-Chilean President General Ramón Freire in 1838. In the aftermath of the 1973 coup, between 100,000 to 500,000 Chileans were expelled from the country or displaced across the globe.

Many sought refuge in the United States and in Europe (Sweden, France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom), while around 6,000 were taken in by Australia. The newly arrived refugees experienced severe trauma, because their friends and family members had been disappeared, and the majority had been tortured.

However, alongside refugees, Australia also took in a number of former Chilean secret-service agents responsible for the torture, interrogation and possibly the disappearance of left-wing activists in Chile. For example, Bondi Nannie Adriana Rivas is fighting extradition to Chile, where she will face charges of crimes against humanity. She worked at Cuartel Simón Bolívar, the infamous interrogation center in the capital of Santiago, as secretary to Manuel Contreras, the notorious head of operations for Chile’s secret police, Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA). Rivas is accused of participating in the torture and kidnapping of seven members of the Communist Party, including Victor Diaz, who, like many of Pinochet’s victims, remains missing.

Lawyer Adriana Navarro and Acuña state in the letter that unknown agents harassed many Chilean political exiles in Australia because they supported the return of democracy to Chile. Their political activities included writing letters to local parliament ministers and staging protests in cities like Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Canberra. Acuña said he suspects that like how Australia’s intelligence organizations have a close relationship with the CIA to share intelligence, the ASIS likely also has a close relationship with U.S. allies like Chile.

“That is the only logical explanation as to how someone with such a profile like Rivas even made it into Australia in the first place,” Acuña said. “We Chilean-Australians would not have any dignity or self-respect if we did not denounce in the harshest language Australia’s role in the violent coup in Chile in 1973, demanded an apology and asked for a full declassification of ASIS activities in Chile in the 1970s.”

However, the official state position that revelations may severely harm Australia’s reputation means campaigners may face a lengthy legal battle to uncover the truth.

Carole Concha Bell is an Anglo-Chilean writer and Ph.D. student at King’s College London.

Danny ShawApril 14, 2022Danny ShawAdmin, Archives, Reviews

​​Coup: A Story of Violence and Resistance in Bolivia, by Linda Farthing and Thomas Becker (Haymarket Books: Chicago, 2021)

A new book, Coup: A Story of Violence and Resistance in Bolivia, provides an in-depth, balanced view of the 2019 coup and the ongoing Bolivian revolutionary process. Journalist Linda Farthing and attorney Thomas Becker’s 306-page book evaluates the balance of class forces that led to the coup, as well as the anti-imperialist forces who were ultimately able to repel it and seize political power again in the plurinational state of 11.4 million.

The Plurinational State of Bolivia Emerges

In 2006, Bolivia embarked upon a new path, with an emphasis on social benefits reminiscent of revolutions past, from the Soviet Union to Nicaragua to Grenada.

The plurinational leadership, representing 36 different Indigenous languages, fought against a legacy of white supremacy, which many experienced as “apartheid without pass laws” (30). (Pass laws were used in South Africa to police Africans, forcing them to carry identification at all times.) In Bolivia, they established the Ministry of Institutional Transparency and Fight Against Corruption to uproot corrupt interests and clientelism sabotaging government attempts at reform (33). Social movements were now part of the people’s government. Part II of the book, titled “Fourteen Years of the MAS,” charts these enormous social gains that made it clear to the world that the decolonization of every facet of society, from the educational system to the media, was possible (71). MAS stands for Movimiento al Socialismo, or Movement Toward Socialism.

At the helm of this long overdue social transformation was coca farmer, trade unionist and veteran of the Cochabamba Water War and Gas Conflict, Juan Evo Morales Ayma. Morales emerged as the inspiring local and international representative of the Aymara, Quechua, Uru, and other Indigenous nationalities and working-class mestizos long marginalized in Bolivian politics and the economy. Every September at the United Nations General Assembly, Morales—as Bolivia’s president—articulated a defense of Pachamama, the Andean Earth Mother, spearheading a trailblazing, international environmental movement from the bottom. At the same time, MAS leadership, particularly Morales, was present in Managua, Havana and Caracas, forging an internationalist, Bolivarian unity project.

It was clear to all anti-imperialist observers that Bolivia and the global hegemon to the north—the United States—were on a collision course. In 2008, MAS leadership ordered U.S. ambassador Philip Goldberg to leave the country after they found out USAID had used its Office of Transition Initiatives to give $4.5 million to the pro-secessionist Santa Cruz departmental government. The Bolivians then expelled the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency from their country.

Supporters of profound social change inside and outside of Bolivia wondered: How long before imperialism and their local agents seek to decapitate this vital leadership and halt the progressive social changes under way?

‘Black November’

Like all U.S.-backed coups in South America and the world over, this one was based on violence and intimidation.

Farthing and Becker document the mobilization of fascist groupings based out of the European enclave of Santa Cruz, as well as police raids targeting MAS leaders and the destruction of the wiphala and other Indigenous symbols. Lighter-skinned European descendants and mestizos screamed “F*ck Pachamama,” blamed the MAS for the corruption that existed in the country, and forced Morales and other leaders to go into hiding and exile (141).

Once in office, Añez and her cabinet picks worked to undo 13 years of social gains. They retired their embassies from progressive countries, kicked out 725 Cuban doctors, and re-established relations with the United States and Israel (166).

In November 2019, 35 people were murdered for standing up to the coup (155).

The class-conscious researchers dedicate chapter 5 to documenting the extreme, racist repression to which millions of Bolivians were subjected. Through interviews with massacre survivors, the authors reconstruct how soldiers shot into crowds that had marched outside of the city of Cochabamba, turning another city called Sacaba into a “war zone” (147). “At the end of the day, Añez’s fourth in office, state forces had killed at least 10 and injured over 120 protesters and bystanders. All casualties were Indigenous, not a single police officer or soldier was harmed” (149).

When Lucho Arce took power as president in 2021, he recognized the blood that was shed to restore MAS to power, “asking for a moment of silence for those killed in Senkata, El Alto; Sacaba, Cochabamba; Montero, Santo Cruz, Betanzo, Potosi, Zona Sur La Paz; Pedregal, La Paz” (194).

Resuming the Path of Revolution

On November 9, Morales returned to his homeland. Millions came out into the streets, converging on Chapare, a MAS base, to see their humble leader, who never stopped standing up to the U.S. empire and their local agents. Admiring families brought him his favorite meal, chuño (freeze-dried potatoes) and charque (dehydrated meat), expressing how Morales “has made us proud to be Indigenous” and “we wouldn’t be here without Evo” (203).

Arce was the economic minister under Morales. He represents the ongoing defense and promotion of the class interests of the poor. Arce’s government presented this month an economic reconstruction program dedicated to building additional housing projects for the underprivileged, infusing $2.6 billion into the economy to satisfy mass consumer demands, opening up lines of credit, placing taxes on personal fortunes above $4.3 million, and increasing subsidies and pension plans (200).

Farthing and Becker present a balanced view of the Bolivian experience anti-imperialists everywhere can learn from. They don’t hesitate to dive into MAS’s challenges, excesses and mistakes. They contextualize the errors within centuries of Spanish colonial bureaucracy and underdevelopment. Potosi historian Camilo Katari also examines this wicked inheritance and how it continues to plague the Bolivian state today. Revolutions, now in the driver’s seat of history, don’t just attract the best of us. Careerists, opportunists, and other neocolonial bitter-enders jostle within local and national bureaucracies to secure their own sinecures and petty interests.

The Bolivarian Camp Pushes Forward

Bolivia occupies a unique space in the U.S. left’s imagination. Sometimes it may seem like they are spared some of the harshest neoliberal critiques. The truth is CNN en español and other corporate outlets continue to function as mouthpieces for the Añez camp and vilify Bolivia’s process. The full slate of corporate media outlets and leftist-liberal outlets go after MAS arguably as hard as they go after Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba.

Bolivia, Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela—the anchors of the Bolivarian camp—have been spearheading the multi-centered global process. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro recently finished high-level meetings with Nicaraguan and South African leadership to continue building unity against the United States’ hegemony. These maroon states—those in which a large percentage of the population is of African descent—represent a permanent threat to the unipolarity U.S. transnationals are hellbent on imposing around the globe.

Coup is an important contribution, lest we forget where we need to stand and fight at this historical moment as neoliberalism and unipolarity are on the wane and a multipolar world surges forward from below.

Danny Shaw is a professor of Caribbean and Latin American Studies at the City University of New York. He frequently travels within the Americas region. A Senior Research Fellow at the Center on Hemispheric Affairs, Danny is fluent in Haitian Kreyol, Spanish, Portuguese and Cape Verdean Kriolu.

Jacqueline LuqmanMay 11, 2022Jacqueline LuqmanAdmin, Americas, Archives

Editor’s Note: The following represents the writer’s opinion and was first published in Black Agenda Report.

From April 11 to 13, the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela hosted the “International Summit Against Fascism ” in Caracas. Two hundred journalists and activists from five continents attended the summit, where the 20th anniversary of the short-lived coup d’état against Hugo Chávez was commemorated, in the context of the importance of media in movements and as a milestone in the continued fight against the global consolidation of right-wing political forces and rising fascism.

The three-day event featured panel discussions about the right-wing forces the people of Venezuela defeated in 2002 compared to the fascist elements operating in countries across the Global South, and now in Ukraine, as well as the relevant emergence of fascism in the United States that emanates from both political parties to support dictators and police states.

Popular communication and the role of media were extensively discussed, as the complicity of the Venezuelan media was recalled in several panel discussions. The coordination of all major Venezuelan media outlets to disseminate the lie that former President Hugo Chávez had relinquished his presidency in 2002 was not only recounted as part of the timeline of events of the overturned coup but also compared to the present consolidation of US media and those of its allies regarding the proxy war in Ukraine. The willingness of media CEOs and news anchors to lie to the people of Venezuela in 2002 seemed to be an omen for what was described as the media dictatorship that is spinning an equally false narrative about Ukraine right now.

The Venezuelan media was not the sole topic in the examination of the 2002 coup attempt. The United States government’s support of the violent and undemocratic right-wing in the country was also a common theme raised by many presenters. The role of members of the US foreign policy team such as then Secretary of State Colin Powell and CIA Director George Tenet whose demonization of Chávez in hearings before Congress set the stage for US intervention in Venezuela. Chávez – who had been president for just two years at the time of the coup – had committed two unforgivable offenses:

1. He held meetings with the leaders of the sworn enemies of the US: Cuba, Iran, and Libya, and
2. He criticized the U.S. response to 9/11 in Afghanistan

Kidnapped by the fascist plotters in the government and facilitated by the media, Chávez was secreted away and held captive for two days while the Venezuelan people were told that there was a new president in town. But if that were the end of the story, there would have been no need for this conference.

While the play-by-play of the coup revealed details that most Americans had surely never heard before – such as how all the media outlets declared there was a new government in place on the morning, but played nothing but cartoons on every station for the rest of the day while the coup government was hastily being legitimized. The most fascinating and important aspects of this important historical event was the role of communication among the people in returning Chávez to power and restoring the constitutional democracy that the people shaped under him.

During the panel on Popular Resistance and Response, Yesenia Fuentes , president of the Association of Victims of April 11, recounted how she – a poor single mother – heard from neighbors that the media had lied, that Chávez had not resigned and was still president. Having not been particularly political before Chávez, Fuentes said she joined her neighbors and countrymen who took to the streets marching toward Miraflores – the presidential palace – to demand the whereabouts of the president they elected in a landslide just two years earlier.

It is important that Fuentes survived being shot in the face by Venezuelan soldiers ordered to open fire on the people. But what might be more important in a purely political sense is that Fuentes and tens of thousands of Venezuelans took to the streets in defiance of the intense media propaganda, in defense of deadly fascist violence, to demand that the constitution the people helped shape after the landslide election of Hugo Chávez be restored. Yes, the people wanted their president back, but they were fighting for the democracy they shaped even more.

And this was the context in which the people appealed to the military to join them in demanding the release of President Chávez two days after he was kidnapped. Media images from the people flooding the streets, pressing against the gates of Miraflores, the Presidential palace, with signs demanding to know, “Dondé está Chávez? Que hablas! – Where is Chavez? What do you say?”

These details and others about how popular resistance among the people overturned the first-ever media-led US-backed fascist coup in 2002 were shared during the panel, which also connected that history with the need to commit to and expand popular communication today.

The challenges facing popular communication were raised in panels involving current Venezuelan journalists who talked about World War 2.0: Digital Political Communication In Globalization. They focused on the power of social media and independent media in the struggle against global fascism and its rapid consolidation. The coup in 2002 was an example of how media consolidation was used to subvert the will of the people then, and how media consolidation does the same thing today.

To accentuate that point, Ukrainian journalist Liubov Alexandriana Korsakov presented details about the 8-year civil war that has been raging in the Donbas region. She spoke of media silence on that war, including complicity in crafting a false narrative about the Russian military action in Ukraine. At the end of her presentation, she held up a flag of the Donbas militia, emblazoned with the letter Z – and urged continued support and journalistic attention on the fight against fascists in the Kiev army who were armed and legitimized by the US. A flag and a letter, incidentally, that have been banned in Kiev by the so-called democratic government of Volodymyr Zelensky.

Attending Militia Day celebrations was a disconcerting experience since in the US citizens’ relationship with the police and military is not an amicable one, even though many of them come from the working class and poor masses. However, the legacy of April 11-13 as well as the Bolivarian Revolution reshaped the relationship between the people and the military. Carlos Ron, Venezuela’s Vice Minister of North America, shared the story of how the famous letter from President Chávez was delivered to the people. A young soldier heard from the media that Chávez had resigned. Tasked with guarding the kidnapped president, the soldier asked Chávez if it was true, if he had really resigned. Chávez answered that he had not and he never would do such a thing. The soldier convinced Chávez to write a letter, sign it, and put it in a nearby trashcan because no one would look for anything there. He would retrieve the letter and get it to whomever Chávez told him to. Letter in hand, the soldier delivered it to the former Attorney General, but then went on to tell his fellow servicemen that the news about Chávez resigning was a lie, and he had proof.

Meanwhile, the Attorney General took the letter to the media and uttered one sentence, “President Chávez has not renounced,” and that was enough to send the people into the streets to defend their constitution and demand the return of Chávez. But on the way, they were met by soldiers and pleaded with them to adhere to the constitution they also participated in shaping, and many did.

Therefore, Militia Day does not present the contradictions of the military being agents of the state who are against the people as they operate in the US. Despite whatever internal struggles and contradictions they experience, the military largely supported and continues to support the Bolivarian Revolution that they were key in restoring on April 13.

President Nicolas Maduro commemorated April 11 with a press conference to honor the people’s popular resistance to the coup, with the attendees of the summit as his special guests. President Maduro sat behind a remarkably simple long desk with a portrait of Simon Bolivar and the Venezuelan flags adorning the podium as he recounted the deep history of April 11-13, complete with showing relevant newsreels and providing several well-timed and sharply pointed jabs at the coup-plotters and their backers in the US. But even as he recounted the steps leading up to the coup and how it was overturned by popular resistance and communication, he took the opportunity to not just focus on Venezuela’s struggle, but to offer solidarity to Chilean victims of fascist police violence in the city of Renato, and offered the same assistance to Colombians suffering the same fate.

The current struggles in Venezuela against ongoing U.S. repression are not disconnected from Hugo Chavez; he is not in the past, but he is very present in the consciousness of the people he focused on the most – the Indigenous, Afro-Venezuelans, peasants in the mountains, and the poor in the barrios in the hills above Caracas and those throughout the country.

The Cuartel 4F and museum – the final resting place and museum for President Chávez – is located among the people in the mostly poor barrio of the Monte Piedad sector where he tried to wage his armed struggle against the fascist government of Carlos Andrés Pérez in 1992. After being pardoned from prison in 1994, Chavez started the Fifth Republic Movement which was more centrist than revolutionary, but was focused on lifting those Venezuelans who had been left out of the political process and society up and bringing them into participating in a new kind of government.

Visiting the museum at the Cuartel de 4F where his body lies in a marble-encased tomb surrounded by ceremonial guards and reflective pools of water, Chavez’s grassroots political education in the speeches he gave in those neighborhoods on flatbed trucks, speaking to people in forgotten villages in the mountains, and in the middle of the most impoverished barrios in the cities is showcased. Inspired by his desire to free all Venezuelans from poverty, inequality, oppression, and political isolation, the people voted in record numbers to put Chávez in the presidential office in 2000, and as a result one of his first acts was to immediately begin the process of including the people who voted for him in rewriting the country’s constitution. This was the beginning of the Bolivarian Revolution, and the coup in 2002 was designed to stop a true people-powered and focused state from taking shape.

Walking through the new exhibit commemorating April 11-13, the sights, sounds, and lessons of that time illuminate how Chávez’s revolution spurred the people to defend their new democracy against the most powerful fascist state in the world. The inspiration he drew upon – from his own upbringing as one of the forgotten poor in a small village to his faith in Jesus Christ as a force for social equality and liberation, his commitment to protecting the people and environment they live in – was on full display to erase any confusion about the ability for those concepts of faith and revolution to co-exist successfully. They did in Chávez and they still do in many Venezuelans who will openly weep if asked how they feel about their Comandante.

At the end of the summit, the phrase, “The people, united, will never be defeated” takes on a whole new and relevant life, and the word democracy has a legitimate meaning.

Because Venezuela continues to prove that statement to be true.

Jacqueline Luqman is a radical activist based in Washington, D.C.; as well as co-founder of Luqman Nation, an independent Black media outlet that can be found on YouTube (here and here) and on Facebook; co-host of Radio Sputnik’s “By Any Means Necessary;” and a Toward Freedom board member.