A Conversation with President Hugo

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M: The land was previously owned by the state, right?

H: Most of it, yes, this was state owned land, with the exception of certain properties that had been invaded illegally by private landlords who didn't have the ownership documents -- we are in the process of recovering and distributing these lands.

M: And what about urban land reform?

H: That's a project of our poor people's empowerment program. It's based on the principle that poor people do better when they're given the tools they need to leave poverty behind. One of the means we've been using is urban land redistribution, and our goal is to redistribute 500 thousand urban land titles, which would benefit more than 2 million people in the biggest cities. And most of these people have never before owned land.

M: If we can switch topics... I would like to talk about the coup and the U.S. role in it. We know that there were meetings between the leaders of the coup and US officials in the months before it happened, and an increase in U.S. funding for opposition groups before the coup. Other circumstantial evidence of U.S. involvement was reported in the press. There's an old joke that goes: "Why hasn't there ever been a military coup in the US? Because there's no American embassy in the US!"

H: Someone was telling me that joke this morning...

M: So, how involved do you think the US was in the coup?

H: Even with a certain amount of evidence and doubts in a lot of people's minds, the US government has told the world that it wasn't involved.

M: Although they did support it at first.

H: It seems that we can place the US position into three distinct periods. First, before the coup, the US was without a doubt supporting the opposition, even indirectly, meeting with the coup-plotters. Afterwards, during the coup, there are several military officers that have testified to seeing US military personnel at Fort Tiuna coordinating with the coup-plotters, communicating by radio with some central base of operations. There are Venezuelan military officials that claim to have seen a Black Hawk helicopter and American planes parked in Maiquetia on April 11 and 12.

The US ambassador was in Miraflores [the Presidential Palace] the day of the coup once the coup government was in place. There's a letter from the Venezuelan charge d'affaires in Washington at the time, a man by the name of Guerrera. As I was in jail the afternoon of the 12th, Guerrera sent a letter from Washington to Miraflores to the so-called transitional government, saying that a high level official from the US government had indicated to him his satisfaction with Chavez's ouster and with the installation of the new government. The official had mentioned however that they desperately needed Chavez's signed formal resignation letter. For that reason, they sent the cardinal of the Catholic Church that Saturday the 13th in the afternoon, to try to plead with me in the name of God to sign the resignation letter; that Washington was waiting for it following the coup. Well, as you said yourself, the US government denied any participation in the coup a thousand and one times. I've said that I can't blame them because I don't have direct evidence, there's just some circumstantial evidence and some lingering doubts in my mind. In the end, each person has to draw their own conclusions.

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