Chávez also has alarmed neighboring Colombia with his sympathetic attitude for that nation's murderous Marxist narco-guerrillas, whose members admitted murdering in 1999 three U.S. citizens who had worked as activists for indigenous Colombians. Their bodies were dumped across the border in Venezuela.***
Pope Worries About Venezuela's New Communist Leader***Pope John Paul II and some of his closest aides expressed their concern Friday to Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez about the Catholic Church in that country, and advocated cooperation between the civil and religious authorities.
The Venezuelan leader arrived in the Vatican accompanied by a small entourage, according to a Vatican press statement.
Chávez came to power in 1998 and has quickly aligned himself with Fidel Castro, has imported thousands of Cuban "advisers" to help support his secret police, has been helping to arm Marxist guerrillas in Colombia, and has established ties with radical regimes from Saddam Hussein's Iraq to Khadafy's Libya.***
Fidel, Saddam and Hugo --An improbable but growing friendship of three military revolutionaries***Mr. Chávez is the most intriguing new leader to emerge in Latin America since Mr. Castro - and he is the lynchpin between Mr. Castro and Mr. Saddam. Although Cuba had been sending doctors and health workers to Iraq for years, there had not been any major contacts between the two countries until Mr. Chávez appeared on the scene. This fall, Mr. Chávez became the first democratically elected foreign head of state to visit Iraq since the Gulf War, ostensibly to invite Mr. Saddam to a summit of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. But it also was an in-your face gesture toward the United States.
With France and Russia, two of the five veto-wielding members of the Security Council, determined to see the sanctions against Iraq ended, the United States can do little to prevent them from withering away. Mr. Saddam has no intention of allowing UN weapons inspectors back into his country, and he knows that renewed bombing of Iraq is out of the question. Confident that the United States and the British would not risk shooting down a civilian airliner in the southern or northern "no-fly" zone, Mr. Saddam has resumed regular domestic commercial flights for the first time in a decade.
Iraq has the world's second-largest reserves of oil, after Saudi Arabia, which it exports legally under UN controls and smuggles out on a huge scale. Mr. Saddam is not short of cash for whatever adventure next occurs to him, and, with Mr. Chávez, he can influence the international oil supply and its prices.
As for Venezuela, a main source of U.S. imported oil, Mr. Chávez has been raising his profile within OPEC, having presided in Caracas in late September over a summit of that organization. Late in November, Mr. Saddam showed on two occasions what he can do to the oil market when he briefly threatened to halt the shipping of oil, a move Mr. Chávez knew about beforehand.
The Iraqi link is one aspect of Mr. Chávez's international involvements that the United States must not underestimate, with Cuba playing a central role. Since he took office in February 1999, Mr. Chávez has proclaimed his "identification" with the Cuban revolution. He visited Havana and entertained Mr. Castro in Caracas for five days last October. Mr. Castro treated Mr. Chávez as a son, an attitude seldom displayed by the Cuban leader toward any young people. During that same visit, Mr. Chávez granted Cuba large crude-oil price discounts, as he has done selectively elsewhere in the Caribbean, and agreed to help complete building a Cuban oil refinery.
Mr. Castro is Mr. Chávez's guide in the art of gently and gradually introducing authoritarian government to Venezuela. Mr. Chávez abolished the Senate and established a unicameral Parliament whose members support him. He has a new constitution, approved by a simple majority of voters in a referendum, that grants him considerable power.
To complicate matters and his relations with the United States, Mr. Chávez has been openly supporting leftist guerrilla movements in neighboring Colombia. The rebels control big swaths of Colombian territory, along with numerous coca plantations. Washington has already committed $1.3 billion, mainly in military aid, to the eradication of both guerrillas and coca plantations. This could foreshadow a big U.S. commitment in Colombia and an eventual conflict with Mr. Chávez that may interfere with the flow of oil north from Venezuela.***
Bahr al-Ulum, from the new government formed after Saddam Hussein was toppled by US-led forces in April, arrived Tuesday in Vienna at the invitation of the OPEC president, who is also Qatar's energy minister.
But Venezuelan Oil Minister Rafael Ramirez was still insisting Tuesday that the Iraqi government should be recognized internationally before being allowed to sit as a full member at a meeting of the cartel.
In an effort to avert an embarrassing snub to Iraq, the cartel held a late-night meeting Tuesday to try to reach an agreement over how the country, one of OPEC's founding members, should be represented at the conference.
Ramirez later confirmed that Venezuela would no longer oppose Iraq's sitting as a full member.***