[Editor’s comment: This is what it’s all about, the right of Venezuela and it’s people to own the ground they stand on and everything underneath it (South Africa for example has very similar rights, and it was in Apartheid Capitalist South Africa that made Anglo the multi-billion dollar behemoth that it is). But it’s the way the corporate media reports Anglo American’s loss of mining rights in Venezuela. It reveals exactly what the ‘struggle to win the hearts and minds of the people’ is really all about, resources and the ‘God-given right’ of Western capitalism to take whatever it pleases wherever it is. This is what all the sound and fury is all about, all else is smoke and mirrors. Ed]

VHeadline, Thursday, January 10, 2008 — True to traditional Bloomberg media manipulation from Caracas, Steven Bodzin has reported that Anglo American Plc’s Loma de Niquel unit has had six concessions rescinded by Venezuela for contract violation.  The MIBAM decision to cancel the Cofemina 1, 2, 4, 5, 6 and 7 concessions was legally notified in the Gaceta Oficial (Gaceta Número 38.844. Caracas, lunes 7 de enero de 2008) giving inspectors have 90 days from January 4 to seize 1,935 hectares (4,780 acres) of land and equipment associated with the concessions.

So far so good! Disingenuously, Bloomberg’s reporter then adroitly connects the nickel mining operation in quite another part of Venezuela with gold projects in the deep southeastern Guayana sector of Venezuela a VERY long distance away the Anglo American mine contract.

Bloomberg also obscures the fact that the ownership of Venezuela’s sovereign national resources is in the hands of the Venezuela people (government) by highlighting what it claims to be clashes “with the government of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who wants the state to hold a controlling ownership in all new projects.”

Bloomberg fails to clarify that while South African Gold Fields Ltd. left Venezuela in October when it discovered that its purchase of Bolivar Gold did not include property rights to the land, that Canadian Crystallex International Corp (waiting for the necessary final permit to start the Las Cristinas gold mine) does indeed have a mine operating contract while the property itself is fully recognized, as it should, as being under 100% sovereign Venezuelan ownership.

Disinformation rampant on the Internet claims that “dictator Chavez” is NATIONALIZING the nation’s mineral resources, totally forgetting that Venezuela nationalized its resource sector way back in 1976 and nothing has changed in that regard since then other than that Chavez is legally asserting that Venezuela owns its own country and its own resources and has complete sovereign dominion over who, why, what and where it is exploited.

While Bloomberg’s reporters may owe their allegiances somewhere closer to Wall Street in New York, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’ allegiances are quite clearly with the citizens of his nation and their social and economic benefit … were he to do otherwise (as many previous Venezuelan presidents, unfortunately, were wont to do!) he would be failing in his constitutional duties.

It is precisely President Hugo Chavez’ assumption of these constitutional responsibilities that have put him at loggerheads with Washington D.C. which has sought to control subservient nation’s resources to its OWN benefit, not that nation’s with the historical knock-on effect of rampant poverty among the exploited.  President Chavez is doing his bit in the effort to cast off the shackles imposed by this form of neo-colonialism and is therefore the object of hatred from those sectors who discover they are now unable to get away Scot Free with the wholesale plundering of former years.

Nevertheless, Venezuela DOES accept and respect both domestic and foreign investment that also accepts and respects Venezuela’s national sovereignty over its own resources.  What appears to have happened here is that Anglo American has failed to honor its contractual responsibilities and having been afforded the chance to “use it or lose it,” they are now being shown the door because of their unwillingness to comply with Venezuela’s new, legal and democratic order.