Replies

Brazil Sees Coalition With Venezuela, Cuba***"We will form an 'axis of good,' good for the people, good for the future," Chavez said at the time. But Brazilian political scientists dismissed the possibility of an "Axis of Good" being created by the meetings between Silva, Castro and Chavez. "There is no way this represents the beginning of Chavez' 'Axis of Good' and much less the 'Axis of Evil' imagined by right-wing Americans," said Luciano Dias, a political scientist at the Brasilia-based Brazilian Institute of Political Studies. Silva, who is popularly known as Lula, "would never even consider creating a nucleus of leftists in Latin America, he is too smart for that," Dias said. U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher would not comment Thursday on the possibility of the alliance.

Chavez left his strikebound and politically riven country despite the crippling work stoppage aimed at toppling him from the presidency of the world's fifth largest oil producer. Silva also has a compelling reason for staying on friendly terms with Chavez: The long border the two countries share. "Brazil worries very much about violence in Venezuela spilling over into Brazil," Haber said. "So you want to have peaceful relations with the Venezuelan, regardless of who is in charge."

During his breakfast with Silva, Chavez also brought up the idea of increasing cooperation among Latin American state-owned oil industries and set up a company called Petro-America. "It would become a sort of Latin American OPEC," Chavez said. "It would start with Venezuela's PDVSA and Brazil's Petrobras," and could come to include Ecopetrol from Colombia, PetroEcuador from Ecuador, and PetroTrinidad from Trinidad and Tobago." Last week, Cardoso's outgoing administration sent a tanker to Venezuela carrying 520,000 barrels of gasoline, but that barely dented shortages around the country. If Silva decides to help Chavez with Brazilian oil workers, it probably won't accomplish much either, said Albert Fishlow, who heads Columbia University's Brazilian studies program. "If he does it will be minimal and not enough to affect the situation," Fishlow said.***

More Facts Uncovered in Chavez - Al Qaeda Collaboration*** Major Juan Diaz Castillo, Chavez's personal pilot, was assigned the job of planning the delivery of the $1 million collaboration to the terrorist group. Now an active member of the country's resistance movement, he is today revealing details of the transfer and of other subversive acts carried out in the name of Chavez's so called "Bolivarian Revolution".

" - They are criminals and killers," he lambasts the inner circle of Chavez cohorts. And he is not afraid of naming names: "The job was given to me by Hugo Chavez. I coordinated with current Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello, then Interior Minister Luis Alfonso Davila, and the current Vice President (then Defense Minister) Jose Vicente Rangel. When we determined the difficulty of sending three Hercules C-130 transport planes to Afghanistan, Diosdado Cabello decided to send cash instead.

" - In the last week of September, 2001, one million U.S. dollars was transferred to Dr Walter Marquez, Venezuela's representative for the region. Of that amount, one hundred thousand was used for food and clothing for the Taliban government, and the remaining nine hundred thousand dollars went to the Taliban in cash, with the understanding that it was to support the Al Qaeda terrorists in their relocation efforts."

Cuban involvement: "Chavez is Castro's puppet"

Asked why Chavez would support Al Qaeda, the high-level military defector offered two explanations. " - First of all, Chavez had for a long time wanted a direct line of communication with Al Qaeda. He had asked Libya for that, but with no success. Then came 9/11 and Chavez was impressed," remembers the pilot of the presidential airplane.

" - Second, Chavez looks up to Fidel Castro. The Cuban dictator has collaborated with terrorist groups for years. Chavez emulates Fidel Casto. It sounds bizarre, but Chavez is a bizarre man. He was already starting to go off the rails in 2001, and he wanted direct contacts to all the major terror groups in the world." According to Diaz Castillo, Chavez depends on Fidel Castro's advice in governing Venezuela. The pilot revealed that during the last four years, roughly 4,000 Venezuelans have been receiving military and intelligence training in Cuba. The Cuban communist dictator assists Venezuela's embattled crypto-communist in holding onto power, at whatever cost, because Cuba depends on Venezuela's oil billions to stay afloat. Earlier this year, Fidel Castro said that "for the Cuban revolution to survive, it is necessary for the Bolivarian revolution to survive," in reference to Chavez's Marxist experiment.***