Posted on 12/10/2005 1:46:14 PM PST by RWR8189
IF THE SAHARA DESERT WENT Marxist, ran a Cold War-era joke, pretty soon it would have to import sand. Today the gag might be: If Venezuela, the world's fifth-largest oil exporter, elected Hugo Chávez, pretty soon it would have to import petroleum. Except it's not a gag. In December 2002, less than four years into Chávez's presidency, Venezuelans began importing oil. The wells hadn't gone dry. Rather, the state petroleum firm, Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), which was then controlled by the opposition, had called a general strike to protest Chávez's increasingly autocratic rule.
Chávez balked at their demands--that he either call a free election or resign--and instead fired some 12,000 of the company's 38,000 workers. He emerged from the fracas with absolute power over PDVSA, though at the time that didn't seem like much to wish for. Venezuela's oil industry--along with its broader economy--had been crippled by the strike, which came just months after an abortive coup failed to dislodge Chávez. One expert predicted the country had lost the equivalent of 400,000 barrels per day. Since then, of course, global prices have skyrocketed--and Chávez has made out like a bandit. It's no exaggeration to say that petroleum isthe lifeblood of his "Bolivarian Revolution."
Indeed, to the extent that America and the world take notice of Chávez, it's almost entirely a function of his oil wealth. The thuggish Venezuelan leftist, a former army colonel, has been spending cash in the Western Hemisphere like a drunken sailor; and the chief beneficiary of this largesse has been Fidel Castro's Cuba. "If he didn't have that money behind him," says GOP congressman Connie Mack IV, a Chávez critic, "I don't think people would take him as seriously."
Would Bill Delahunt? The Massachusetts congressman, a Democrat, recently brokered an oil contract with Chávez worth some $9 million. Under the terms of the deal--which grew out of a Delahunt-Chávez meeting in Caracas last August--a Houston-based PDVSA subsidiary, CITGO, will send 12 million gallons of cheap home-heating fuel to various charities and more than 40,000 lower-income Bay Staters this winter. About three quarters of the oil will go directly to poor families; the rest will go to local organizations serving the needy.
Delahunt was cock-a-hoop over the agreement, which he trumpeted as a token of Chávez's concern for the indigent. He denied it had a political context. "It was about people," he told the Boston Globe. "It was genuinely humanitarian in its intention and in its impact." That's not how the Bush administration saw it. Here was a lone congressman playing freelance diplomat and allowing a stridently anti-American--and antidemocratic--bully to score propaganda points. But Delahunt didn't seem to mind. "I don't work for Condoleezza Rice," he told the Globe. "I don't report to the State Department. I report to the people who elected me in the state of Massachusetts. I belong to an independent branch of government."
No doubt folks in his Quincy-area district will be delighted to get discounted fuel this winter. Take Linda and Paul Kelly, the Quincy couple in whose front yard the contract was signed at a press conference on November 22. "Just because [Chávez] has problems with President Bush, that's not going to affect me," Mrs. Kelly explained to the Globe. "My political views aren't going to keep me warm. I know people keep talking about this, but it's a gesture that someone wanted to make and give to me, and it's going to help lots of people, not just me."
In case the Kellys and their neighbors forget who's supplying the low-cost oil, the Venezuelan government took out a full-page ad in several U.S. newspapers to remind them. "How Venezuela is keeping the home fires burning in Massachusetts," it blared. Fair enough. But who will keep the home fires burning in Venezuela? The irony of the Delahunt-Chávez deal, as former ExxonMobil executive and Tufts professor Bruce Everett has pointed out, is that nearly half of all Venezuelans live in abject poverty. Yet Chávez has "taken money belonging to these desperately poor people to give to Mr. Delahunt's constituents"--who, by the way, reside in one of America's richest states.
The deal might not have gone through absent the work of Joseph P. Kennedy II, son of Robert F. Kennedy and a former Democratic congressman, as well as chairman of the Boston-based Citizens Energy Corp. Along with the Massachusetts Energy Consumers Alliance, Citizens now has the task of distributing the Venezuelan oil. When company officials inked the contract with PDVSA in the Kellys' front yard, Delahunt seized the moment to blast Big Oil for not cutting costs. "With temperatures dropping and oil prices soaring, we're all worried sick about people without the means to heat their homes," he said. "It is gratifying that at least one major oil company is willing to step up."
It's the kind of plaudit Hugo Chávez craves: the image of Venezuela, spurred by his creed of "21st-century socialism," riding gallantly to the rescue of poor Americans whose own private oil firms can't be bothered to lift a finger. "Delahunt allowed himself to be used," says veteran Latin America hand Otto Reich, who served under both Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. "It's a very smart political act" by Chávez.
Delahunt has in past years emerged as a leading Democratic voice on Western Hemisphere issues. Though he's been more supportive than many House Democrats of military aid for the pro-American Uribe government in Colombia, he tacks decidedly leftward on Cuba and Venezuela: opposing the embargo and calling for détente with Chávez. "He's given Chávez a lot of cover in the U.S. Congress," Reich says, noting that Delahunt has defended the maverick Venezuelan populist and called for rethinking George W. Bush's South America policy. According to a Delahunt aide, the recent U.S.-Venezuela dialogue "has been disrespectful in both directions."
The Quincy native speaks for a cluster of Democrats, and even a few Republicans, who say Chávez deserves more "respect" than he's gotten from the current administration. That group includes New York congressman José Serrano, a longtime Castro apologist and Chávez booster who--by no coincidence--has also secured cheap Venezuelan oil for his constituents. CITGO is now providing some 8 million gallons of home-heating fuel to nonprofit housing agencies in the Bronx.
One can't help wondering if Chávez is wasting his petrodollars. No matter how much underpriced oil he pumps into Boston, New York, and Chicago, he cannot gloss over his abysmal history of squelching civil liberties, packing the Venezuelan courts, trampling the constitution, and using the army to suppress dissent. Then there's his record abroad. In concert with Castro and other rogues, he's tried his hand at subverting the region's pro-American democracies, such as Uribe's Colombia. Chávez dreams of leading a Latin American unity project. He claims as his inspiration Simón Bolívar, the 19th-century freedom fighter. But given Chávez's chummy alliance with Castro, U.S. policymakers worry that, in spirit, his model may be Che Guevara.
There was plenty of Che paraphernalia outside the recent Summit of the Americas in Mar del Plata, Argentina, where Chávez railed against hemispheric free trade pacts and led a ferocious anti-Bush rally. He has called the U.S. president a "killer," an "assassin," a "madman," a "crazy man," and, more jauntily, "Mr. Danger." He frequently warns of a pending American invasion of Venezuela. Last January, after Condoleezza Rice gently rebuked Chávez during her confirmation hearings for secretary of state, the ex-paratrooper fired back. Rice was merely upset, Chávez said on his weekly TV show, because he--Chávez--wouldn't sleep with her. She was also "a true illiterate."
Such loutish bluster, says Latin America specialist Mark Falcoff, has made Chávez something of a laughingstock in the region. According to Falcoff, serious Latin American leaders--even those on the left--privately dismiss him as a "clown." "He can't control his big mouth," says Falcoff. "That denigrates his prestige." With the exception of Cuba and Bolivia--where Marxist coca-grower Eva Morales appears poised to win the presidency later this month--Chávez exercises scant influence. None of the region's cultural and economic giants--Mexico, Chile, Brazil--seems keen on playing a subordinate role in Chávez's Latin-unity venture.
The crucial variable in Venezuela is still oil. As Falcoff notes, Chávez has done a terrible job of managing the petroleum industry through PDVSA. He's merely lucked out with the abnormally high oil prices. Three to five years down the road, if the cost of petroleum ebbs, Falcoff predicts Chávez will be terribly unpopular in Venezuela--as he was pre-9/11, before the oil market took off. But then, as Reich asks, "Who knows if the price of oil is going to go down? What if it doubles?" In that case, expect more U.S. congressmen to travel to Caracas with their hands out.
Duncan Currie is a reporter at The Weekly Standard.
Massachusetts DemocRAT, Venezuelan Communist: Aside from geography, what's the difference?
"I wonder what he'll say when Chavez exports his communist revolution to the rest of South America?" He will be right there cheering Chavez on.
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The next time you drive past a CITGO station, remember that it belongs to Hugo Chavez.
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