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When It's About Oil (Not Bombast) Nothing
is Off the Table--Not Even Assassination
Hunting
Hugo
By CONN HALLINAN
There are times when the tensions between
Venezuela and the Bush Administration seem closer to Commedia
dell'arte than politics. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez
compares President George W. Bush to the devil, right down to
the smell of sulfur during a speech at the UN General Assembly.
Homeland Security responds by strip-searching Nicolás
Maduro Moros, Venezuela's foreign minister, at JFK airport. Venezuela
seizes 176 pounds of frozen chicken on its way to the U.S. Embassy
in Caracas.
But recent White House initiatives
suggest that the administration has more than tit for tat in
mind.
In late June, U.S. Southern
Command, the arm of the U.S. military in Latin America, concluded
that efforts by Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia to extend state
control over their oil and gas reserves posed a threat to U.S.
oil supplies. While Latin America produces only 8.4% of the world's
oil output, it supplies 30% of the oil consumed in the United
States.
"A re-emergence of state
control of the energy sector will likely increase inefficiencies
and, beyond an increase in short-term profits, will hamper efforts
to increase long-term supplies and production," the study
concludes. In an interview with the Financial Times, Col.
Joe Nunez, a professor of strategy at the U.S. Army War College,
added an observation that ought to send a collective chill down
the backs of the three countries named: "It is incumbent
upon the Command to contemplate beyond strictly military matters."
That one of the U.S. military's
most powerful arms should find itself deep in the energy business
should hardly come as a surprise. Four months after Bush took
office, Vice President Dick Cheney's National Energy Policy Development
Group recommended that the administration "make energy security
policy a priority of our trade and foreign policy." The
Administration has faithfully followed that blueprint, using
war and muscular diplomacy to corner U.S. energy supplies in
the Middle East and Central Asia.
What most Americans don't know
is that Venezuela's reserves are enormous. According to a department
of energy estimate, they are considerably greater than Saudi
Arabia's, and may be as high as 1.3 trillion barrels. Most Venezuelan
oil is heavy and expensive to refine, but as long as oil stays
above $50 a barrel-and few doubt it will go lower-it is an almost
endless gold mine.
The bone the U.S. is picking
with Hugo is not about bombast. It's about oil.
Shortly after Southern Command's
report, the White House appointed J. Patrick Maher, a 32-year
Central Intelligence Agency veteran, to head up a special task
force for gathering intelligence on Venezuela and Cuba. The only
other similar posts are for North Korea and Iran, members of
the so-called "axis of evil" reportedly developing
nuclear weapons. In a move that almost exactly parallels how
intelligence was handled in the run up to the Iraq War, as "Mission
Manager," Maher will bypass the CIA and report directly
to Bush.
Maher's appointment followed
a full court press by a group of neoconservatives grouped around
National Security Director John Negroponte, then-CIA chief Porter
Goss, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and her deputy, Robert
Zoellick.
The campaign against Chavez
on the executive side is matched by a similar push in Congress.
Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN), chairman of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, recently urged the Bush administration to
adopt "contingency plans" in case of a disruption of
oil supplies from Venezuela. In a July letter to Rice, the senator
said that Venezuela has an "undue ability to impact USA
security and our economy." Lugar went on to warn that there
was a "real risk" that Venezuela could "act in
concert" with other countries and that "we have a responsibility
to plan appropriate contingencies that protect the American people."
The current campaign against
Chavez is really Round Two in the White House's drive to unseat
him. As Freedom of Information Act documents reveal, the Bush
administration already tried to overthrow Chavez in an April
2002 coup.
Otto Reich, then assistant
secretary of state for Western Hemispheric Affairs, met several
times with coup leaders. Rogelio Pardo-Maurer, deputy secretary
of defense for Western Hemispheric Affairs, met with military
coup leader Gen. Lucas Romero Rincon. Cuban exile Reich and Pardo-Maurer
were major players in the 1980s Contra war against Nicaragua.
Pardo-Maurer was the Contras' most visible Washington spokesman
back then and Reich was forced to resign from his job as head
of public diplomacy in the Reagan administration's State Department
for planting false stories in the U.S. media.
The CIA, through the National
Endowment for Democracy and the United States Agency for International
Development, bankrolled Chavez's opponents, and helped organize
and support the strike by white collar oil workers and ships
captains eight months after the coup collapsed.
Since then, the Bush administration
has kept up a drumbeat of attacks. Rice warned that Chavez was
"a major threat to the region." U.S. Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld compared Chavez to Adolph Hitler. Zoellick told
senators that Chavez was part of a new "creeping authoritarianism."
In March, a National Security Strategy document charged that
Chavez was "undermining democracy." At an Oct. 2 meeting
of Latin American defense ministers in Managua, Nicaragua, Gen.
Bantz J. Craddock of the Southern Command called Chavez a "destabilizing"
force in the region.
What really worries the U.S.
is that Chavez is trying to diversify Venezuela's clientele.
Venezuela is currently building a $335 million pipeline across
Colombia in order to ship more oil to China, and is working on
plans for a $20 billion natural gas pipeline through the Amazon
and on to markets in Chile, Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina.
China is pouring in billions
to develop fields in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador to give
it the inside corner on future resources. The "China connection"
is one that concerns the Bush administration, not only because
it siphons off oil that normally would go to the United States,
but also because the White House sees China as a rival and has
done its best to elbow Peking out of the Middle East and Central
Asia.
But Latin America is a different
place than it was a decade ago when it was mired in debt, characterized
by low growth, and beholden to the International Monetary Fund
and the World Bank. When Rice told House members that the Bush
administration was building a "united front" against
Venezuela, it is likely to be a narrow front indeed.
Venezuela has helped bail Ecuador
and Argentina out of debt, invested in projects in Bolivia, and
is selling oil to Cuba at a deep discount. According to Greg
Palast writing in The Progressive, Chavez has withdrawn
$20 billion from the U.S. Federal Reserves, and "at the
same time, lent or committed a like sum to Argentina, Ecuador,
and other Latin American countries."
Given Chavez's enormous popularity
in his country and elsewhere in Latin America, it is hard to
see what the White House can do about Venezuela's president.
But that is not likely to discourage it from trying, and the
people the administration has recruited to target him are just
the kind of operatives who won't shy away from anything up to,
and including, the unthinkable: assassination.
Conn Hallinan is a foreign policy analyst for Foreign
Policy In Focus and a lecturer in journalism at the University
of California, Santa Cruz.
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