Posted on 04/14/2002 4:01:40 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
But a high-ranking official for a Latin American government has disclosed to me details about that visit that should send shock waves throughout our government.
During a private meeting between Chavez and Khatami, I was told, Chavez made it known to the Iranian leader that he would like to "introduce nuclear elements into Venezuela." My contact said "nuclear elements" meant "nuclear weapons."
It will be easy for many to dismiss such talk as false or the fantasies of a madman, but that would be a critical mistake. I have no doubt that Chavez is mentally disturbed, and I also have no doubt that his hatred of the United States and President Bush in particular is dictating his erratic behavior. High oil prices have made Chavez an antagonist to be reckoned with, and we ignore such a menace at our peril......***
"We are all going to read 'Quixote' to feed ourselves once again with that spirit of a fighter who came to undo injustice and fix the world," the populist leader announced on TV in April, promptly printing 1 million copies of Miguel de Cervantes's 1605 tome.
Everyone interviewed in the plaza on a recent afternoon was ready to discuss the man of La Mancha. Better still for the president, many are making positive comparisons between the idealistic would-be knight who roams Spain and dares to dream, and Chávez, a leader from humble origins who sees himself as the champion of the poor, traversing Latin America to speak to the masses about a better, common future.
Author Cristina Marcano, whose biography of the Venezuelan president was published this year, says Chávez "loves the story and surely sees himself as some sort of modern-day Don Quixote," because, she says, "he likes to see himself in very heroic terms.
............................And inspired by the enthusiastic response, Chávez, once jailed for attempting a coup before finally being elected president in 1998, has called for the publication of 1 million copies of another literary masterpiece, the novel "Les Misérables" by 19th-century French writer Victor Hugo.
No doubt the life of Jean Valjean, imprisoned briefly in his youth before going on to a life of great success and selfless dedication to the downtrodden, is intended to remind Venezuelans of someone.***
"We are here at the gates of the assembly supporting you. We will never forget that you helped us," intoned one bullhorn-bearing demonstrator, as crowds repeated.
Under the leadership of leftist President Hugo Chavez, Venezuela's oil industry has gone from being a big business to something more like a national passion. With oil now the centerpiece of national politics, the intricacies of state oil giant Petróleos de Venezuela SA, or PDVSA, have become front-page news and dinner table conversation.
Energy authorities, once treated as boring technocrats, are now being accorded the status of celebrities. These displays are a sign of the powerful political backing for policies confronting oil companies with huge demands.
The throng, clad in signature red T-shirts emblazoned with the logo of the energy ministry, spent the next seven hours watching testimony on widescreen TVs.
On the screen, Ramirez delivered a condemnation of the opening of Venezuela's oil fields in the 1990s to international oil companies.
The minister's nationalist sound bites were greeted with hearty cheers. Opposition deputies who grilled Ramirez on widely reported declines in oil production were booed like umpires on the take.
"The people have to show their commitment to Minister Ramirez. He has done so much for the development of this country," Rogelio Bautista, 43, a student of Mision Ribas, a high school completion program financed by PDVSA. Packed between a throng of demonstrators thick with the unmistakable smell of newly printed T-shirts, Bautista cheered outside the congressional hearings next to a 10-foot-long banner that read "Bush, get your claws out of PDVSA." ...............................***
She did not directly mention Venezuela but Washington and other critics of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez say that although twice elected, the Venezuelan president is showing authoritarian tendencies in office.
Speaking before the conference began, Chavez accused the United States of trying to impose a "global dictatorship" and said that it, not Venezuela, should face OAS scrutiny.
"So, they're going to try to monitor the Venezuelan government through the OAS, they must be joking!" Chavez said, speaking on his weekly "Hello President" TV and radio show.
'GLOBAL DICTATORSHIP'
"If there is any government that should be monitored by the OAS, then it should be the U.S. government, a government which backs terrorists, invades nations, tramples over its own people, seeks to install a global dictatorship," he said.
......Despite the fierce rhetoric from Chavez, a U.S. official said Rice greeted Venezuelan Foreign Minister Ali Rodriguez and thanked him for his comments at a private meeting of OAS ministers on Sunday afternoon.
But in a gesture sure to anger Chavez, Rice plans to meet Maria Corina Machado, a prominent opponent of the Venezuelan president, on Monday, six days after President Bush welcomed her to the White House.****
"But Chavez doesn't need to close newspapers in order to force people to censor themselves. He doesn't need thousands of political prisoners if he can make examples of a few people in every sector of society, a labor leader here, a journalist there. And he doesn't need to cancel elections if he can use his appointees to change the rules so that the voting can be easily manipulated. It is a terrific facade, but inside is an atmosphere of total control and fear. Traveling around the country, as I do, it's shocking to see how frightened people are about what the government can do to their lives."
Machado got to make her case to Bush and to the OAS ambassadors only because her organization was invited to the nongovernmental forum by the United States. A Venezuelan attempt to overturn the invitation procedure and ban her failed. Though her criminal trial is due to resume on Friday, she came and spoke freely; though she enraged Chavez with her blunt words outside the White House, she will return to Caracas and face the court system he now controls. By so conspicuously trying to stop her, she says, "the government has given evidence that everyone in the OAS can see, of how they use intimidation to silence dissent. If in Venezuela you speak out you are punished....***
Among his latest actions: an announcement that PDVSA would start paying foreign oil companies in Venezuelan currency, not just U.S. dollars. That means oil firms will be subject to Venezuela's stringent foreign exchange controls, inserting a further element of risk in their business.
.........Only in February, Ali Moshiri, ChevronTexaco's top man for Latin America, told aides to Sen. Richard Lugar, a powerful Indiana Republican who suggested that the United States should reduce its oil dependence on Venezuela, that the U.S. energy relations with Venezuela ''had to be separated from political relations,'' one staffer recalled.
But Exxon Mobil has been critical of the new Venezuelan measures.
''Any time a government begins to exhibit characteristics of not wanting to honor contracts, that's going to cause you a lot of pause with respect to your enthusiasm for putting more money into that particular location,'' Roy Tillerson, the firm's president, told analysts in March.
This week the firm told the Associated Press that ''arbitration remains an option'' if Venezuela does not respect its original contract in its Cerro Negro heavy crude project, although the company would continue to press for a friendly solution.
Many are wondering how far Chávez will go.
Asked if Chávez could simply nationalize the foreign oil companies' assets in Venezuelan assets -- in effect seize the property -- Matthew Simmons, who runs a Houston investment bank specializing in energy, said he had no doubts.
''Oh yes,'' he said. ``In front of our eyes.''***
Venezuelan information minister Andres Izarra was even forced to issue an apology to the press after accusing them Tuesday morning of reporting false ''rumors'' of the Castro visit.
Describing the energy summit as ''an historic encounter,'' Castro said he had decided to attend at the last minute, after feeling ``embarrassment that it might seem I wasn't coming because I had too much work.''
He added: ``Everything else is secondary -- for me, Venezuela and the Venezuelans come first, which also means the struggle for my country, the Caribbean [and] the peoples of Latin America.''
The visit is unpopular with anti-Chávez groups, who have accused Cuba of interference in local affairs.
They are particularly incensed at the recent choice of Castro as patron of a class of Venezuelan officer-graduates.
Venezuela, which has the largest oil reserves in the western hemisphere, already provides more than 80,000 barrels a day to Cuba and large quantities to other Caribbean nations under highly advantageous financial terms.
The Chávez aid has helped Cuba continue to recover from its economic collapse following the end of Soviet subsidies in the early 1990s.
Chávez said the two-day summit would ''deepen'' the energy relationship with the Caribbean by setting up an ''energy arc'' that would help protect member nations from the ''squandering'' of resources by rich countries. …………***
The problem was nowhere more visible than in the case of suspected trafficker Eudo González, who according to neighbors often threw parties for police and allowed them to use a firing range on his Bejuma ranch.
But the heavily armed police and intelligence officers who showed up at his gate on Feb. 11, 2004, were not looking to party. By the time they were done, González and at least five of his employees were dead -- killed in a ''shootout'' that left not a scratch on any of the cops.
González and his brother Hermágoras were well known to counter-drug officials. A court in Virginia indicted Eudo on heroin charges in the mid-1990s. And officials of two foreign lawenforcement agencies told The Herald he was involved in drugs, gun-running and money-laundering, and could be Venezuela's top trafficker.
But the González brothers allegedly enjoyed the friendship of law enforcement officials far beyond the parties at Eudo's ranch.
When the police killed Eudo, he was carrying a National Guard identification card signed by the Guard's former head of intelligence, Gen. Alexis Maneiro, according to reports published by Mauro Marcano, a newspaper columnist and local radio program host in the small town of Maturín. Marcano also served as a municipal councilman in Maturín, a town in the region east of Bejuma where Maneiro once headed the National Guard detachment.
JOURNALIST KILLED
Marcano, 55, who was shot and killed by a gunman in September as he left his apartment, had long alleged the existence of a drug-smuggling group dubbed the Cartel of the Suns after the insignias of rank worn by Venezuelan generals -- as U.S. generals wear stars.
One foreign diplomat in Caracas familiar with anti-drug operations described the cartel as ``a large group of generals in the army and the National Guard, especially . . . They control a certain number of shipments out of Colombia, and they get a cut of those shipments.''
The Western counter-drug official who asked for anonymity estimated that the group might be responsible for three-to-five tons of cocaine a month and 20-30 kilograms of heroin.
Venezuelan government officials have said little on the topic.
After The Herald made several attempts to interview Gen. Frank Morgado, head of the National Guard's anti-narcotics command, about the Maneiro case, Morgado responded via fax that his unit ''has no information relating to that matter.'' He suggested consulting ``the relevant authorities.''
Maneiro did not return repeated Herald phone calls to his office.
But the National Guard's own commitment to the fight against drugs has come under question.
EXITING THE TASK FORCE
Earlier this year, Guardsmen unexpectedly seized U.S.-donated equipment and vehicles from a mixed police-and-judicial investigative unit and withdrew from the task force, which works closely with U.S. officials. After several weeks of haggling, the Guard returned the equipment but has not rejoined the task force.
And last month, the government abruptly removed Camero -- one of the key U.S. allies in the government, according to officials at the American embassy here -- from her post at CONACUID. Also ousted were two senior officials in the prosecutor's office with oversight of drug cases.
''There have been some recent bumps in the road,'' U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela William Brownfield acknowledged to The Herald last month.
Gen. Maneiro's career has not prospered since the Marcano killing. Shortly afterward, he was removed from his post as commander of the Guard's 7th Region, which includes Maturín, and assigned to run the National Guard academy in Caracas.
But investigators have not questioned him or any other senior military and police figures previously fingered by Marcano, according to Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based independent group that tracks abuses against journalists.
''The investigation,'' said one of its recent reports, ``has come to a complete halt.''***
The defendants include María Corina Machado, who in May was invited to the White House for talks with President Bush and in June met with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during an Organization of American States General Assembly in Fort Lauderdale.
The case against Machado, Alejandro Plaz, Ricardo Estévez and Luis Enrique Palacios hinges on a $53,000 grant that Súmate received from the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy, a congressionally funded body accused by the Venezuelan government of being a front for the Central Intelligence Agency.
In a separate case, Machado is accused of ''civil rebellion'' for allegedly signing a decree to dissolve the country's independent branches of government during the 2002 coup attempt that briefly toppled Chávez, the leftist-populist leader.
Founded in 2002, Súmate played a major role in the campaign to force a midterm recall referendum against Chávez in August 2004 by gathering more than two million signatures. The president won 60 percent of the votes and survived the recall. ................***
President Hugo Chavez said the firms' workers would be given help to set up co-operatives and re-start production for the benefit of the community.
He said the move was needed to fight poverty and end Venezuela's dependence on "the perverse model of capitalism".
Some business leaders fear it may lead to a wider attack on private property.
'Perfectly productive'
Speaking on his weekly television programme, Mr Chavez said the measures were necessary.
Either capitalism, which is the road to hell, or socialism, for those who want to build the kingdom of God here on Earth ………….***
CARACAS - Venezuelans' support for Fidel Castro's model of government and the installation of socialism here has been growing, two recent polls show, although a majority remains critical of the Cuban system.
The polls suggest that President Hugo Chávez, Castro's closest ally, is succeeding in shifting public opinion toward the left as he pushes his ''revolution'' among a population that historically identified more with the values of Miami than Havana.
Chávez, whose own approval rates are running at over 70 percent, makes frequent pro-Cuba speeches, and more than 20,000 Cuban medical personnel and sports instructors work in poor neighborhoods here.
A poll released last weekend by the Caracas-based Datanálisis company showed 11.6 percent approved using Castro's Cuba as a model for Venezuela, while 63.2 percent said they were opposed.
The percentage of pro-Cuban sentiment represented a significant increase. In July 2002, in response to the same question, only 3 percent expressed support and more than 91 percent were opposed. As recently as this January, the support was under 6 percent.
Another nationwide poll, carried out by Seijas & Asociados in late May and early June, showed that about 48 percent of respondents preferred a socialist over a capitalist system, with less than 26 percent preferring the latter.
After years of denying that his ''Bolivarian revolution'' -- named after independence hero Simón Bolívar -- was socialist, Chávez now openly calls himself a socialist and attacks what he calls the ''perversions'' of capitalism.
Datanálisis director Luis Vicente León warned, however, that the various poll results must be analyzed ''with tweezers'' and do not necessarily mean that Venezuelans want a Cuban-styled system in their country.
Venezuelans, León said, associate the Cuban system not with socialism but with communism, which the majority abhors. ''There remains a very high level of rejection of extreme models such as communism,'' he said.
''Chávez has not succeeded with his discourse in diminishing people's association of capitalism with well-being and development,'' León told The Herald. ``Nor has the opposition succeeded in demonizing socialism by reference to Chávez's relationship with Fidel.''
Venezuela and Cuba recently agreed to increase by the end of the year the number of Cuban medical personnel here to 30,000. The Information Ministry has reported that more than 9,000 Venezuelans have been treated in Cuba for everything from cataracts to heart disease. ………………………..***
Hugo and Fidel bring the news[Full text] The concept of Cuba's Fidel Castro and Venezuela's Hugo Chavez teaming up to create a regional television news network in Latin America takes some getting used to and maybe a stiff drink.
Cuba hasn't seen any semblance of freedom of the press or freedom of expression since the early 1960s, and Castro last year rounded up a group of 75 independent journalists and sentenced them to prison terms of up to 28 years.
Chavez hasn't gone that far but has enacted ominous laws that penalize media outlets that "offend or show disrespect for the president" or propagate information that might "cause panic or anxiety" among the people. More recently he decreed that half the music aired on radio must be of Venezuelan origin. Ciao, Britney Spears.
Yet, on Sunday, Telesur, a new regional Latin American television network modeled after the wildly successful al-Jazeera makes its debut from studios in Caracas. Venezuela, flush with money from the boom in oil prices, will bankroll 51 percent of the initial $20 million investment. The governments of Cuba, Uruguay and Argentina will provide other funding.
For those wondering about the editorial independence of Telesur, suffice it to say Venezuela's minister of communications will do double duty as the station's president. According to the BBC Monitoring World Media, some of Telesur's trial programming on June 3 included segments of the "International Forum against Terrorism and for Peace and Truth" from the Havana Convention Center. Ratings were not available, but that sounds about as riveting as vintage Soviet TV serials about tractor manufacturing.
Telesur, Spanish for "TeleSouth," may yet prove skeptics wrong and become a reputable and independent regional news outlet. That would be good for Latin America, which relies on foreign networks for its news, including CNN, from Atlanta, and a chain based in Spain.
There is a need for a network with an indigenous Latin focus. Telesur takes that mission literally: One correspondent will be Ati Kiwa, an Arahuaco Indian from Colombia, who will appear dressed in the tribe's regalia. Her visage will be a sharp departure from many of the Caucasian, blond news readers on Latin TV, who look like they were FedExed from Idaho.
"Today we know much more about Chechnya than what's happening on the corner, in Colombia or in Central America, because all the information that the North generates comes into focus about subjects that interest the North," Aram Aharonian, Telesur's director general, told the Los Angeles Times.
Some signs don't bode well. One Chilean contributor defined Telesur as an "anti-neoliberal medium ... critical of the First World's efforts to impose conservatism throughout the continent." Balance and objectivity will have to wait.
Whatever his politics, Aharonian understands one thing: People will vote with their fingers against bad TV. "The only censorship will be by the viewers," he told Newsweek. "If they are not satisfied they'll simply click the remote and change channels." [end]
All the same, Mr Chávez's successes are fragile ones. For one thing, it is hard to see what tangible benefits Venezuelans derive from this diplomacy. Mr Chávez has alienated both of his country's main trading partners, the United States and Colombia. Oil revenues are increasingly being spent without democratic scrutiny. A once-professional diplomatic service has been turned into a branch of the revolution, its dissidents either purged or neutralised. And although the alliance with Cuba has brought new social programmes, their cost and long-term benefits are hard to determine. Despite the oil boom, unemployment officially stands at 11%.
There are also limits to the region's tolerance of chavista expansionism. Only Cuba has signed up for ALBA. The richer Caribbean countries are unenthusiastic about Petrocaribe. Petrosur and Petroandina feature much rhetoric and little action. Cuba apart, no other country shares Mr Chávez's distaste for representative democracy, or his disdain for regional bodies such as the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
In a setback for Mr Chávez, on July 27th the Inter-American Development Bank, the region's largest official lender, chose as its new president Luis Alberto Moreno, Colombia's ambassador to Washington who was discreetly backed by Mr Bush. Mr Moreno easily defeated candidates from Brazil and Venezuela.
Argentine officials have welcomed imports of fuel from Venezuela, and its help in making contacts with China, but they are cooling towards Mr Chávez. Were evidence to emerge of his hand in Bolivia's turmoil, South America would become even warier. Should Lula's troubles deny him a second term, Brazil is likely to move to the centre-right, shifting the regional balance. The death of Mr Castro, who is 78 and frail, would be a body blow to Mr Chávez. So, of course, would a fall in oil prices.
A Summit of the Americas, involving 34 countries (all except Cuba), in Argentina in November should be a pointer to the prevailing diplomatic winds. The United States wants to stop the meeting becoming a platform for Mr Chávez. But if Mr Bush turns up empty-handed (CAFTA apart), Latin Americans will continue to pay court to that generous neighbour in Caracas.***
Sixty-five years later, an exodus of that community is well underway. The reason is not far to seek. The land that embraced those refugees has become unfriendly. Consider the traumatic morning of November 29, 2004. As parents and school buses delivered children to Colegio Hebraica, a Jewish grade school in Caracas, 25 secret police commandos in combat gear and face masks burst into the main building. Scores of preschoolers were locked in the school as panicked parents tried to retrieve them. The children were eventually freed, but the raid went on.
The government-appointed judge who ordered the raid said the commandos were looking for weapons linked to a bombing that killed Danilo Anderson, a crooked local prosecutor who had made a fortune shaking down the government's political opponents. The raid followed speculation aired on a state-run television station that Anderson's killing was the work of Mossad, the Israeli foreign intelligence agency; presumably this guesswork justified the storming of a Jewish elementary school.
The Hebraica raid was not an isolated or random act of state-sponsored anti-Jewish violence. Hostility to Jews has become one of the hallmarks of the Venezuelan government under Hugo Chávez, the radical populist who became president in 1999, and of Chavismo, the neo-fascist ideology named for him. In January, the State Department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor released a "Report on Global Anti-Semitism." The report documents how openly anti-Semitic the Venezuelan government now is. Besides the raid on the Jewish school, it noted that "President Chávez cautioned citizens against following the lead of Jewish citizens in the effort to overturn his referendum victory. Anti-Semitic leaflets also were available to the public in an Interior and Justice Ministry office waiting room."
Chávez first ran for president on a reform platform, winning in a landslide. What few understood then was that Chávez planned to revolutionize the country following a plan masterminded by his longtime friend Norberto Ceresole, an Argentinian writer infamous for his books denying the Holocaust and his conspiracy theories about Jewish plans to control the planet.
The title of Ceresole's 1999 book on Chávez and Venezuela, Caudillo, Ejército, Pueblo ("Leader, Army, People"), eerily recalls the German national socialist maxim, "One People, One Country, One Leader." (The first chapter is titled "The Jewish Question and the state of Israel.") After denying the Holocaust, he explains that the greatest threat to Chavismo comes from the Jews of Venezuela. A self-described Communist and fascist, Ceresole became an expert in national socialism after designing Juan Domingo Perón's electoral platform in Argentina. In Ceresole's hands, representative democracy mutates into "participatory" systems led by cult-like figures; tellingly, Chávez praises the "participatory democracy" of Libya, Syria, Iran, and Cuba. Ceresole's structure channels the people's will through the charismatic strongman; the military functions as the central political body. Ceresole's roadmap for Venezuela suffered some setbacks, including a 2002 coup that displaced Chávez for 48 hours and a national strike that almost toppled the government. But Venezuela's dramatic political metamorphosis was nonetheless complete by the time Ceresole died in 2003.
Chavismo's purpose, however, is not just to create a stable autocracy. At its core is a far-reaching foreign policy that aims to establish a loosely aligned federation of revolutionary republics as a resistance bloc in the Americas. The Chavista worldview sees the globe as a place where the United States, Europe, and Israel must be opposed by militarized one-man regimes.
In an interview with Voice of America in 1999, the late Constantine Menges of the Hudson Institute predicted that "Chávez will stir up revolution and violence throughout Latin America. The longer he is in power, the more he can use the oil wells of Venezuela to do so." When Menges spoke, the price of oil had briefly dipped below $10 per barrel. Since then, oil prices have quintupled, making the Chávez government the richest in Venezuelan history and vastly multiplying the damage it can do. ……………………………..***
The allegation is contained in a July 27 letter from the department's top congressional affairs official, Matthew Reynolds, to Rep. Ileana Ros Lehtinen of Florida, a member of the House International Relations Committee.
The letter was perhaps the clearest expression of administration concerns about the activities of Venezuela's leftist government in the Andean region. It said the State Department is troubled by the close relationship between the governments of Venezuela and Cuba.
''Cuba has a 46-year record of fostering instability and thwarting democracy at home and abroad,'' Reynolds said. ………………….***
RTE, the Irish national broadcasters, carried an interview with one of the fugitives, Jim Monaghan. He said all three had returned to Ireland recently, ''and, as you can imagine, a lot of people in a lot of countries had to help us."
Monaghan would not provide details of how the three evaded the international arrest warrant facing them. He insisted he did not consider himself ''on the run" -- and hoped that Ireland would not extradite them to Colombia.
Monaghan, Niall Connolly, and Martin McCauley were arrested in August 2001 as they were trying to board a flight out of Colombia after spending about 18 months with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, Colombia's major rebel group known by the acronym FARC.
The men were charged with training rebels to make and deploy IRA-style weaponry, including truck-mounted mortars. They initially were acquitted of all major charges, but were ordered to remain in Colombia pending the government's appeal to a higher court, which in December convicted and imposed 17-year prison sentences on the men. The three immediately disappeared.
Since then, Irish and British media reports have placed all three either in Venezuela or Cuba, where Connolly had been based for several years.
The trio's unexpected reappearance on Irish soil sent shock waves through Northern Ireland's peace process, which has been taking dynamic turns in recent days.
The IRA last week declared that its 1997 cease-fire was permanent and promised to resume disarmament soon, and Britain began dismantling army installations in response.
Spokesmen for the British and Irish governments denied yesterday any advance knowledge of the three men's return....***
This isn't a commercial for Al Jazeera, but that would be a close guess. It's a promotional campaign for a continent wide, pan-American satellite news channel that made its debut on July 24.
Witness Telesur, the brainchild of Cuban communist Fidel Castro and his ideological spawn Hugo Chávez. They say that it was created to both compete with foreign media conglomerates and offer a side of the news that is uniquely Latino. Independent, they say, from any voice but that of the people. The truth, however, is far from their propaganda platforms. Telesur is being funded by the leftist governments in Uruguay, Argentina, and Cuba, with Venezuela alone controlling 51% of the company. It will be housed in Caracas at the headquarters of Venezuela state media, where Chávez regularly opines for hours on end about impending imperialist invasion to the delight of only 2% of the Venezuelan public. …………………***
The news came four days after leftist President Hugo Chávez said he was ending cooperation with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, accusing it of ``using the war on drugs as a cover, even to support drug trafficking, [and] to gather intelligence in Venezuela against the government.''
U.S. relations with Chávez have grown increasingly tense amid Washington complaints that he has turned to authoritarian ways and become a destabilizing factor in Latin America. In turn, he has accused the Bush administration of plotting to topple him.
The latest spat could lead the U.S. government to deny its annual recertification, due next month, that Venezuela is collaborating in the U.S. war on drugs. Decertification can mean the loss of U.S. financial assistance. But according to the U.S. embassy, Caracas receives no such aid, leaving Washington without financial leverage against Chávez.
''I was already thinking of decertification as more than likely'' for Venezuela, said John Walsh, a specialist in Andean drug policy at the Washington Office on Latin America, a liberal think tank.
''It suits interests on both sides, so I wouldn't be surprised if there is decertification,'' he added. ……………..***
In Venezuela, Pres. Hugo Chavez has taken the idea a step further, threatening to halt oil exports if alleged attacks on his country continue, according to Agence France Press. Appearing last week as a witness at a symbolic “anti-imperialist court” in Caracas, Chavez said, “Washington’s molestation may cause more serious problems; our two oil tankers going to the U.S. everyday may go to another country.” He added that the “Northern America market is not compulsory for us.” Venezuela exports 1.5 million barrels of oil to the United States daily.
According to the Islamic Republic News Agency, the Iranian newspaper’s editorial described oil as “the most potent economic weapon for settling scores,” and suggested an embargo on oil sales to the United States and European countries that are pressuring Iran to end its nuclear program. It also criticized what it sees as a double standard, noting that Israel, Pakistan and India have nuclear weapons, and that most of them have conducted tests. ....***
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