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Posted on 11/03/2001 7:13:17 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
CARACAS -- The Bush administration has ordered an unusual inter-agency review of United States relations with Venezuela, a major oil supplier, after harsh criticism of Washington's bombing campaign in Afghanistan by senior Venezuelan officials, including President Hugo Chavez.
The State Department confirmed Friday that the U.S. ambassador to Venezuela, Donna Hrinak, had returned to Washington for "consultations" with several government agencies "to discuss the current state of our bilateral relationship with Venezuela."
A State Department spokesman stressed Hrinak's return was not an official diplomatic "recall," the measure used to signal formal displeasure. Hrinak is to return to Caracas after the inter-agency meetings scheduled for Monday and Tuesday.
Even so, analysts said, the consultations were a clear sign that Washington's uneasy relationship with Chavez, a populist ex-army officer and self-proclaimed left-wing revolutionary, has taken a turn for the worse in the post Sept. 11 world.
Under a strict interpretation of President Bush's international antiterrorism "with us or against us" doctrine, the recent statements from Caracas would appear to fall into the latter category.
The terrorism tiff was sparked Monday when Chavez attacked the U.S. bombing in Afghanistan, holding up photos of dead children and telling his countrymen that the U.S. response to the Sept. 11 attack "has no justification." A series of terse diplomatic exchanges only served to further muddy the waters.
Support for the U.S. bombing campaign has been strong in Latin America, with the predictable exception of Cuba. Although Chavez is Castro's closest ally in the region, U.S. officials had hoped the Venezuelan leader would keep his response muted in deference to his country's important economic ties with the United States.
Venezuela supplies about 15 percent of U.S. crude oil needs, accounting for about 60 percent of its total output. Moreover, the state oil company PDVSA owns a chain of refineries in the U.S., supplying some 15,000 Citgo gas stations.
Although U.S. officials declined to characterize the specific nature of next week's consultations, they said Venezuela's stance on terrorism was being examined at a high level.
The talks may in part be designed to clear up confusion over contradictory statements coming from Caracas, which have begun to raise serious doubts about the stability of Chavez's government.
Despite official concern over the remarks, analysts say they would be surprised if the United States took any punitive measures that might jeopardize one of Washington's more strategically important relations in the region.
"The structure of the relationship is such that there's not a lot of room for maneuver," said Mark Falcoff, a Latin America expert at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. "We need his oil, and he needs to sell it to us."
Falcoff said he was surprised Washington had allowed the issue to reach the level of verbal sparring. "Chavez is an adolescent whose hormones are raging," he said. "It plays into his hands right now particularly, as his popularity is slumping and oil prices have fallen."
Since Chavez assumed the presidency in Febrary 1999, the U.S. motto in dealing with him has been: "Watch his hands, not his lips."
Officials are accustomed to his outbursts of anti-U.S. rhetoric. But, they are also aware, the onetime coup leader tends to be less radical in deed than in word.
In a post-Cold War world, U.S. officials felt there was no need to worry when Chavez began cozying up to Castro. They also chose to largely ignore his too-close relations with leftist guerrillas in neighboring Colombia, so long as he was not caught supplying them with weapons.
When Chavez made a high-profile visit to Saddam Hussein in Baghdad last year, it was dismissed as irritating rather than potentially dangerous.
Chavez has so far chosen to express his anti-Americanism in relatively minor ways. He has annoyed the Pentagon by refusing to allow access to Venezuelan airspace for drug interdiction flights. After a Christmas 1999 flood that killed thousands, he invoked "sovereignty" as a reason for not allowing U.S. military engineers into the country to help rebuild roads and infrastructure.
Since Sept. 11, however, tensions between Washington and Caracas have risen. In common with virtually every other world leader, Chavez condemned the attacks in Washington and New York.
But last month he embarked on a whirlwind, three-week tour of 15 nations, in the course of which he, and his ministers, succeeded in raising serious doubts about his government's antiterrorist credentials.
During a visit to Paris, Chavez criticized the jail conditions of Venezuelan-born Ilich Ramirez (better known as "Carlos the Jackal") who is serving a life sentence for terrorism in France.
Venezuela's defense minister, Jose Vicente Rangel, went further, declaring that the government did not consider Ramirez a terrorist since "he has never been convicted of terrorism in Venezuela."
Venezuela's ambassador to Washington was called into the State Department to explain what was going on. But the United States was not alone in its concern.
Armed forces commander Gen. Lucas Rincon, who had been traveling with Chavez, returned hastily to Caracas and made a statement which flatly contradicted Rangel, his presumed boss. A terrorist was a terrorist, said Rincon, wherever he was convicted, and the armed forces were "100 percent behind" the United States.
Then on Monday, in one of his notorious, three-hour nationwide broadcasts, Chavez held up pictures he said were of Afghan children killed in U.S. bombing raids. And he made two remarks in particular that incensed the United States: First, he called the bombing a "massacre of the innocents;" and second, he said, "this cannot be a mistake."
Relations seemed to have been healed after Hrinak emerged from a meeting Wednesday with Venezuelan Foreign Minister Luis Davila to say the minister had confirmed that his country was "a partner in the war against terrorism".
Davila seemed to have a different view of their conversation. To the embassy's astonishment, he went on the air with a communique in which he said he had warned Hrinak to avoid "interference in the domestic affairs" of Venezuela.
Before leaving for Washington, Hrinak hit back with two radio interviews, again calling on Venezuela to clarify its position.
Some Venezuelan analysts say this time Chavez appears bent on confrontation with the United States. "One gets the impression," said Elsa Cardozo, professor of international relations at Venezuela's central university, "that even if the (Venezuelan) government understood the danger they would not care -- there would be no change in the policy."
Cardozo thinks the government sees the Sept. 11 attacks as "nothing less than the beginning of the collapse of the United States and its hegemony."
Analysts say the government's strategy is based on an assumption that as a major oil supplier to the U.S. market, they are shielded from the negative consequences of their words and deeds.
But oil isn't the only issue. If the bilateral relationship worsened, Venezuela could find itself suffering a growing isolation from international sources of finance. "Venezuela is facing lonely isolation," said Cardozo, "on a crusade that only exists inside the head of President Chavez."
- Phil Gunson is a Times correspondent based in Caracas.
Chavez is a moron. We can surive without their oil, they can't survive without our money. People driving go-carts shouldn't play chicken with 16-wheelers.
Venezuela Catholics Condemn Church Bomb Incidents Interior Minister Luis Miquilena told reporters on Tuesday those responsible were ''provocateurs who are trying to stir up trouble and distort certain realities.''
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have we cut-off relations yet? or have the beltway "girly-men" wet themselves; n don't know what to do....
Chavez has been slowly moving his people into positions of power and removing democratic protections. He's playing class warfare for all he can. He's rewritten the school curriculum and brought in Cuban "teachers." He's confiscating land, restricting gun ownership and doing it all in the name of a peaceful revolution. It looks grim. All this information and more is at the LINK "What is Hugo Chavez up to?" in Post #1.
Well ... maybe. Short term consider the amount of oil exported from other countries with either hostile or shaky goverments e.g. *Saudi Arabia, *Libya, *Iran, *Iraq, *Sudan, Columbia, Bolivia, and Equador in the bad news category. *Indonesia, *Algeria, *Tunisia, Russia and the rest of the *Gulf States in the "maybe" category. [*Significant Islamic Populations].
This leaves Mexico, Canada, Norway and the Brits as stable and friendly exporting countries.
North Sea production has probably peaked.
Canada has significant tar sand resources but you don't just go out and drill for that stuff -- it takes years to build the infrastructure. I am sure that I have missed a few, but you see where this is leading.
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