Julian Borger in Washington and Alex Bellos, South America correspondent Wednesday April 17, 2002 The Guardian
The Bush administration was under intense scrutiny yesterday for its role in last weekend's abortive coup in Venezuela, after admitting that US officials had held a series of meetings in recent months with Venezuelan military officers and opposition activists.
The White House yesterday confirmed that a few weeks before the coup attempt, administration officials met Pedro Carmona, the business leader who took over the interim government after President Hugo Chavez was arrested on Friday. But the White House press secretary, Ari Fleischer, denied that the US had offered any support for a putsch.
The US defence department also confirmed that the Venezuelan army's chief of staff, General Lucas Romero Rincon, visited the Pentagon in December and met the assistant secretary of defence for western hemispheric affairs, Roger Pardo-Maurer.
The Pentagon said: "We made it very, very clear that the United States' intent was to support democracy and human rights, and that we would in no way support any coups or unconstitutional activity."
However, it was not made clear why the talks broached the subject of a coup, four months before the event. Mr Fleischer said the subject had been brought up at meetings with Venezuelan opposition leaders because US diplomats in Caracas had "for the past several months" been picking up coup rumours. "In the conversations they had they explicitly told opposition leaders the United States would not support a coup," he added.
However, a defence department official quoted by the New York Times yesterday said: "We were not discouraging people."
"We were sending informal, subtle signals that we don't like this guy. We didn't say, 'No, don't you dare' and we weren't advocates saying, 'Here's some arms; we'll help you overthrow this guy.'"
Mr Chavez yesterday hinted at the possibility of US involvement in the coup attempt, noting that only days before he was ousted, dozens of Venezuelan military personnel working in the country's Washington, Bogota and Brasilia embassies returned to Caracas with no explanation. The implication was that these were military staff sympathetic to the opposition whom he had sent abroad when he became president in 1999.
Mr Chavez had earlier said he would investigate the presence of what he said was an American plane on the island prison where he was detained by the Venezuelan military. Mr Fleischer said yesterday he did not know whether Washington had provided a plane to fly the Venezuelan president into exile. He thought that "the transportation was arranged after his resignation through the Venezuelan military".
A Latin American diplomat in Washington said that when Mr Carmona and other opposition leaders came to the US they met Otto Reich, the assistant secretary of state for western hemisphere affairs.
As the crisis deepened, Mr Reich set the tone of US policy. According to one diplomat, Mr Reich told ambassadors on Friday that although the US did not support a coup, President Chavez had been the first to "disrupt Venezuela's constitutional order".
The same message was echoed on Saturday by the US ambassador to the Organisation of American States (OAS), Roger Noriega, at an emergency meeting in Washington.
One OAS diplomat said: "We were in that room for 14 hours, and for most of that 14 hours, Noriega was pushing the line that it was Chavez that had created the problem."
The OAS denounced the coup attempt, as did all Venezuela's neighbours. Washington, however, acknowledged the new government. "A transitional civilian government has been installed," Mr Fleischer said on Saturday. "This government has promised early elections."
Some of the key participants in US meetings with Venezuelan figures in the run-up to the coup were veterans of Reagan-era "dirty tricks" operations. Mr Pardo-Maurer served as the chief of staff to the Nicaraguan contras' representative in Washington between 1986 and 1989.
Mr Reich was the head of the office of public diplomacy in the state department, which was later found to have been involved in covert pro-contra propaganda.