In a follow up to her first book The Chavez Code: Cracking US Intervention in Venezuela, Eva Golinger has written another excellent book that provides more insight and analysis into current US policy towards Venezuela. Bush VS Chavez takes a look at US policy towards Venezuela since the late 1990's with an emphasis on what tactics the US has used since the attempted coup in 2002.

In The Chavez Code, Golinger focuses on the role of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) (the government agency that has been used around the world as a tool for backing political forces that are friendly to US interests). In Bush VS Chavez, the NED is mentioned but only as one of the agencies used to undermine democracy in Venezuela. Golinger investigates all of the agencies within the US government that have contributed to either supporting anti-Chavez forces within Venezuela or directly confronting the Chavez-led government. These agencies, in addition to NED, are USAID (US Agency for International Development), the US State Department, the US Military, the US Intelligence community, and the Center for Security Policy, which was commissioned by the US government to craft a position paper on Venezuela in May of 2005. Golinger is able to provide a detailed analysis of each of these agencies' roles since she did the hard work of looking at all the internal declassified source materials from the US government relating to Venezuela. The publisher of Bush VS Chavez has posted these original source documents on their website in order to allow the public to view what the author used in her research.

So what exactly have these government agencies been up? Golinger documents that NED and USAID have been aggressively been funding anti-Chavez forces throughout the country. One group is Sumate, a Venezuela organization that claims to focus on open and free elections. The reality is that Sumate has used US funding to orchestrate things like a recall referendum in 2003. Sumate has been at the forefront of the US campaign to destabilize Venezuela and were even rewarded for their efforts when Bush invited their director to the White House in May of 2005. This is ironic, since no member of the Chavez administration has received such an invitation.

In addition to the funding of anti-Chavez forces, the US strategy has included military intimidation. In the first half of 2006 the US military conducted four separate military "exercises" in what the Pentagon calls "Operation Partnership of the Americas." Golinger points out that these exercises, which conducted out of the US bases in Panama, were part of Plan Balboa, which some analysts see as a preparation for direct US military intervention. Even John Negroponte, the Director of National Intelligence, admitted that the US "sent a nuclear submarine to intercept communications off the coast of Venezuela in April of 2006." Along with this kind of direct military action the US has also used other agencies such as the DEA to spy on Venezuela. The Drug Enforcement Agency has even gone so far as to accuse the Chavez administration of drug trafficking even though they have never presented any credible evidence.

The last major component of the US campaign against Venezuela is to use diplomatic agencies, particularly the US Ambassador to Venezuela William Brownfield. Brownfield, a seasoned foreign policy diplomat has spent most of his time traveling in the Curacao region of Venezuela. Curacao has become the main region of Venezuela to foster anti-Chavez activities. Brownfield has gone so far as to encourage the governor of that region to advocate for an independent state. Brownfield has also negotiated additional US military activity and has developed strong relations with the anti-Chavez business community, particularly the media and energy companies.

Few books to date have done such an excellent job of presenting the multi-strategy approach to US policy against Venezuela. Bush VS Chavez is one of the best to date and is useful for anyone who wants to understand how US foreign policy functions abroad.

Eva Golinger, Bush VS Chavez: Washington's War on Venezuela, (Monthly Review Press, 2007).