The Murder of Venezuela’s Top Prosecutor: Danilo Anderson and Condoleeza Rice
by Toni Solo
On Tuesday November 16th, George Bush put forward Condoleeza Rice as his proposed Secretary of State to take over the diplomacy of US warmongering from the outgoing fraud, Colin Powell. Two days later on November 18th leading Venezuelan judicial prosecutor Danilo Anderson was killed in a car bomb attack eerily reminiscent of the murder of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffit in Washington in 1976 by Cuban terrorists working for Augusto Pinochet and protected by the CIA. The Venezuelan authorities believe Anderson was killed by two charges of C4 plastic explosive fixed to his car and detonated remotely, apparently by cell phone. The timing of Rice’s nomination and Anderson’s murder are unlikely to be fortuitous.
With Rice’s appointment, George Bush sustains the incestuous link between his regime and earlier, still extant, plutocrat state terror Godfathers like George Bush Sr., James Baker and George Schultz. Rice, a protege of Schultz, the former Bechtel president, could hardly be a more emblematic representative of the nexus between state terror and big business. Chevron may have renamed the former “Condoleeza Rice” oil tanker “Altair Voyager”, but that all-too-recent link to an outfit boasting it “… now ranks among the most important international petroleum producers in Venezuela and Colombia, is one of the largest private integrated oil companies in Brazil and is the third-leading producer in Argentina” bodes ill for people in Latin America. (1)
Why was Anderson murdered?
Danilo Anderson was an investigating magistrate in charge of several prominent and politically sensitive cases. His work proceeded in the context of recent elections confirming overwhelming popular support for President Hugo Chavez. Among the cases within Anderson’s brief were those against the leader of a mob that attacked the Cuban Embassy in Caracas during the failed coup d’etat of April 12th (2002) and against members of the Caracas Metropolitan Police accused of unlawful attacks under opposition ex-mayor Alfredo Pena. Anderson was also processing cases against owners of Venezuelan TV and Press media implicated in the April coup of 2002 as well as the signatories of the coup declaration overthrowing the elected government.
Perhaps the most internationally sensitive case he was working on was that against the Sumate organization, a supposedly impartial NGO funded by the CIA’s companion organization the National Endowment for Democracy. In fact, Sumate actively campaigned with US government money to defeat President Chavez throughout the long process ending in last August’s recall referendum. Such activity contravened Sumate’s neutral non-profit status, breaking Venezuelan law in the process.
Writer and academic Heinz Dieterich has written cogently about Anderson’s murder, “The menace of Danilo for Washington’s terrorist project was two-fold: he threatened one of its main instruments of power, Venezuela’s corrupt class justice system and too he was becoming a symbol of the honest patriot and servant of the majority of the new Bolivarian nation….Danilo Anderson’s murder shows that the subversion has made a qualitative leap to a generalised offensive. From now on, people emblematic of the process whose death may have a high propaganda value for Washington will be in danger. Likewise, the subversion will begin attacks against energy and transport infrastructure and carry out more murders and incursions along the Colombian border…Looking back in history, we can say that the Bolivarian revolution has entered the phase of the Cuban revolution of 1960 when the US-Cuban counter-revolution launched attacks, sabotage and murders from nuclei in the Sierra Escambrey or, too, Nicaragua from 1983 onwards.” (rebellion.org)