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Dear Venezuela Solidarity Network Supporter,
The Venezuela Solidarity Network has been running just as fast as we can to try to keep up with the relentless campaign by the Bush regime and corporate media to oust Venezuela’s elected president, Hugo Chavez, and return that country to the plantation of corporate globalization.
The hysteria and sheer volume of words devoted to demonize Chavez and paint a picture of Venezuela as a country ruled by a dangerous madman rivals what we were subjected to during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.
Venezuelan voters went to the polls and defeated proposed constitutional amendments by a 1.3% margin and President Chavez accepted the defeat and congratulated the opposition after only 88% of the ballots had been counted. Is that the behavior of a tyrant?
Despite Venezuela’s display of true democracy, U.S. media pundits and members of Congress will continue to portray Chavez as a horrible dictator that must be removed. This is why it is crucial that you support the work of the Venezuela Solidarity Network to expose and oppose US intervention and to tell US residents the real story about Venezuela’s vibrant democracy and the successes of the Bolivarian process to use oil wealth to empower the poor majority to lift themselves out of poverty and marginalization.
You can click here to contribute by MasterCard or Visa at our secure on-line donation site.
We can’t do it without your financial help. I know that you have many competing demands for your limited donation dollars. The early start to next year’s presidential contest has virtually “sucked the oxygen” out of the movement for progressive foreign policy organizing. Our board may have to soon make some decisions about VSN’s future if we don’t succeed in getting our income up to the level of our expenses.
Yet, if Bush is going to overthrow another sovereign government before he leaves office it pretty well has to be Venezuela’s. The Venezuela Solidarity Network needs your help to educate people in this country about the reality of the Bolivarian process and to alert people to the US government’s efforts to crush the process before it spreads.
In the past year the Venezuela Solidarity Network has:
• Taken two delegations of US activists to Venezuela to witness its realities for themselves.
• Hired its first two staff members — East Coast and a West Coast regional coordinators.
• Added over 2,000 people to the Emergency Response Network who have agreed to mobilize in response to US interventions and corporate media disinformation.
• Attended several conferences and given workshops.
• Conducted numerous radio interviews.
• Written articles published in web and print media.
• Set up a speakers bureau of progressive experts on Venezuela.
• Produced a web page filled with information and organizing tools
• Succeeded in pressuring a major video game producer, partially owned by Irish rock star Bono, to delay release, and make major scenario changes, in an upcoming video game set in Venezuela.
We are an independent, grassroots, US-based organization that relies completely on individual donations to fund our work. That independence has forced us to struggle this past year as too many people who know they were lied to about Vietnam, who know they were lied to about Allende’s Chile, who know they were lied to about the Central America wars, and the Gulf war, and the invasion of Iraq … still have become doubtful and confused when those same lies, told by the same liars, are told about Venezuela.
The most important project we are working on for the new year is a symposium on the campus of the historic Black college, Howard University, in Washington, DC March 14-16. The symposium will directly respond to the disinformation and lack of knowledge of what is happening in Venezuela and US-Venezuela relations. The panels will feature distinguished US and Venezuelan scholars and leaders of the popular movements that are the engines of creativity for this new model.
We will videotape and use all the new technologies of information transfer to ensure that this symposium becomes a national teach-in for our own movement and beyond. It was the teach-ins of the late 1960s that played an important role to mobilize this nation’s youth against the Vietnam war. It is our goal to use the March 14-16 symposium to ignite a new movement against military and economic intervention in Latin America and to raise up practical, hopeful alternatives to savage capitalism, corporate-driven globalization, and US empire building.
This is only achievable with your generous support. We have to buy plane tickets for the Venezuelan speakers. We have to publicize the symposium widely. We have to rent the auditorium, equipment and technology. We have to feed and house participants. All this costs money, and as I said earlier, our resources have been severely taxed by the unrelenting propaganda war against Venezuela this past year.
We need your help now. Your tax deductible donation to the Venezuela Solidarity Network will mean the difference between success and failure. The time to organize is now, not in the days after a coup or US invasion. You have the opportunity to play a key role to support a truly better model for the world.
In solidarity,
Chuck Kaufman
Interim Coordinator