To the best of my knowledge Chavez never claimed the USA caused either the Haiti or Chilean earthquakes. He did claim the USA was using the Haiti quake as a pretext to invade that country in order to use it as a springboard to attack Cuba, or him, or something.....
One right, one wrong.
You're right that Chavez did not claim the US caused the Haiti earthquakes. That was discussed in a thread over in Social Issues,
"Obama causes earthquakes...", back in January. A surprising number of people demonstrated their gullibility in that one.
Kuko 4000 posted a link in that thread to
a good explanation of what happened:
BoRev.net said:
The news is reporting on something maddeningly crazy that Hugo Chavez has said, only when you conduct your own independent investigation involving sophisticated journalistic techniques (Google) you find out that it is all, in fact, complete ********. Here's how it worked this time, pretty much exactly like it works every other time:
1. Some Venezuelan blogger wrote a weird story about the U.S. causing the Haiti earthquake with some sort of earthquake weapon.
2. A website operated by a Venezuelan state TV channel included a link to the post in their roundup of Haiti coverage from all over the country.
3. Some right-wing newspaper in Spain published a story about the link, referring to it as a Venezuelan state "press release."
4. Fox News reports the Spanish story, saying the earthquake weapon claim comes from "Hugo Chavez' mouthpiece."
5. Randomly, Vladimir Putin's English language teevee channel Russia Today claims that Chavez himself made the statement. This video report is picked up all over the ****ing place, Drudge sirens!!
6. Right wing news "analysts" opine about what level of threat this represents to the United States.
You're wrong about Chavez claiming the US invaded Haiti as part of a plan to invade Cuba or Venezuela.
Or, if he did say any such thing, I did not find it when this claim got brought up in that previous earthquake thread. There was
a Reuters' item about Chavez's invasion remarks which I found and read. It did not give a complete transcript of Chavez's remarks, but did summarize them and quote from them. From that, it did not sound like he said anything like you claim he did. What he said sounded more like a policy criticism of how the US was handling relief efforts: that he thought the US was sending more soldiers than needed for the situation and should instead be sending more humanitarian aid.
Reuters said:
"I read that 3,000 soldiers are arriving, Marines armed as if they were going to war. There is not a shortage of guns there, my God. Doctors, medicine, fuel, field hospitals, that's what the United States should send," Chavez said on his weekly television show. "They are occupying Haiti undercover."
"On top of that, you don't see them in the streets. Are they picking up bodies? ... Are they looking for the injured? You don't see them. I haven't seen them. Where are they?"
Chavez promised to send as much gasoline as Haiti needs for electricity generation and transport.
A perennial foe of U.S. "imperialism," Chavez said he did not wish to diminish the humanitarian effort made by the United States and was only questioning the need for so many troops.
If you can find a transcript of Chavez's remarks in which he talks about the US using the Haiti earthquake as a step towards invading either Cuba or Venezuela, I would be interested in seeing it. But until someone
does provide text of such remarks, this looks to me like a case of people who are predisposed to dislike Chavez being a bit gullible at believing bad things said about him.
I don't know enough about Chavez to like or dislike him. But I do dislike people on a skeptical site attributing remarks to someone without bothering to look up what the person actually said. How are we going to convince others, such as believers in the paranormal, to look up the facts of a matter before spouting off, if we are not willing to do that ourselves?
