[Perhaps it’s an overstatement to say that Bush and his immediate team would countenance the violent demise of Hugo Chávez (although in April 2002 they sanctioned an attempted coup against the Venezuelan leader which could easily have ended with his death.) For many months now, the Venezuelan president has claimed that the White House has targeted him for assassination. In March, the State Department retorted that Chávez’s spate of accusations regarding a CIA plot to assassinate him were “wild.” However, serious doubts emerged over the weight of the administration’s latest display of supposed indifference to Chávez’s fate when Felix Rodriguez, a former CIA operative in Central America and influential Bush-backer in South Florida, claimed in a Miami TV interview that regarding Venezuela, the administration has] contingency plans. ... could be economic measures and even at some point military measures.

Felix Rodriguez