Pentagon chief escalates threats against Venezuela

Echoing US rhetoric from the Cold War, Rumsfeld described Venezuela’s agreement to buy military hardware from Russia as a threat to the hemisphere. “Certainly I’m concerned,” he said, referring to the arms deal, which involves the purchase of 100,000 AK-47 rifles as well as 10 military helicopters from Moscow.

“I can’t imagine what is going to happen to 100,000 AK-47s,” Rumsfeld said in Brazil Wednesday before meeting the country’s president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. “I cannot imagine why Venezuela needs 100,000 AK-47s.... I can’t imagine that if it did happen, that it would be good for the hemisphere.”

The orchestration of propaganda campaigns over arms deals to justify US military aggression is an old game in Washington. In 1954, the news that the nationalist government of President Jacabo Arbenz Guzman in Guatemala had purchased small arms from Czechoslovakia provided the pretext for a CIA-orchestrated coup that reversed land reform efforts and ushered in more than 30 years of dictatorship and repression.

Then, the intervention was directed at restoring the United Fruit Company’s monopolization of the country’s most fertile land and its ability to reap profits without the encumbrance of labor laws and taxation.

Read More
http://wsws.org/articles/2005/mar2005/rums-m26.shtml