Hmm Bolivia has oil?

[Zeluvia]

http://www.watchingamerica.com/abnvz000001.shtml

This article relates a story about the United States supposedly trying to force a coup in Bolivia after Bolivia nationlized its oil rescources.

Questions to the panel:

Is this Hugo Chaviez's version of propaganda?

What US oil companies lost out when Bolivia nationalized?

Could there be a grain of truth to these accusations?

If so, what is the truth?

And what is up with Venezula?

From http://venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=1000

Following the April 2002 Coup attempt, Alí Rodríguez, the new PDVSA president assigned Juan Fernandez, who was later to be the leader of the December 2002 PDVSA strike, to cancel the contract with INTESA. Fernandez negotiated that the contract would end, perhaps not so coincidentally, by the end of December 2002. INTESA joined the strike, however, and shut down all of its services to PDVSA, well before the contract expired. The result was that PDVSA could not transfer its data processing to new systems, nor could it process its orders and bills for oil shipments. PDVSA ended up having to process such things manually, since passwords and the general computing infrastructure were unavailable, causing the strike to be much more damaging to the company than it would have been, if the data processing had been in PDVSA’s hands.

A recent investigation into INTESA, and especially into its majority owner SAIC (60%), revealed some information that ought to be quite disturbing to the government of Hugo Chávez.[22] That is, INTESA, which controlled all of PDVSA’s information, is in turn controlled by SAIC, a Fortune 500 company (revenues in 2002: $6.1 billion) that is deeply involved in the U.S. defense industry, particularly as it relates to nuclear technology, defense intelligence, and computing technology. Its managers included two former U.S. Secretaries of Defense (William Perry and Melvin Laird) and two former CIA directors (John Deutch and Robert Gates). Its current Board of Directors includes the former commander of the U.S. Special Forces (Wayne Downing), a former coordinator of the National Security Council (Jasper Welch), and the former director of the National Security Agency (Bobby Ray Inman). Whether or not SAIC was actively involved in the PDVSA strike and whether it passes crucial company information on to other oil companies is unknown. However, the very fact that these connections exist ought to be a cause of great concern to PDVSA and the Venezuelan government.

[James Peter]

Would the US government welcome a coup in Bolivia which was less pro-Chavez? Certainly.

Would those who have just lost large amounts of money welcome the chance to get it back? Again, of course.

The question is how far are they prepared to go to get what they want. History suggests that they might go quite a long way if sufficient amounts of money are at stake.

So of course its propoganda, but it also probably contains more than a grain of truth.

[HerodionRomulus]

We invaded the Dominican Republic in 1958 to protect the profits of US companies.
We helped overthrow a DEMOCRATICALLY-ELECTED government in Chile, leading to years of dictatorship and troubles.
We invaded Panama to overthrow Noriega so he wouldn't blow the whistle on the CIA connection to coke smuggling.
In the early 20th century we helped Panama to gain independence so we could have the canal.
We overthrew the legitimate and benign government of Hawaii so that US businesses could profit.

In short, we have a long and sorry history of meddling in the affairs of other countries just to serve the god Mammon.