Will Washington Tolerate A Chinese-Venezuelan Petro Pact?

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/012105_washington_tolerate.shtml

Although Venezuela has long been one of the U.S.'s top four foreign suppliers of crude, relations between the two countries have grown quite acrimonious since the Bush administration's tacit support of the failed coup against populist president Hugo Chavez in April of 2002. How the Bush administration has been dealing with Caracas repeats a well-known cycle to any student of U.S./Latin American relations: support of overt or covert coups against democratically-elected regimes eventually ignites a backlash of popular support for the embattled government against the "imperialist gringos." This is likely to motivate Washington to even more aggressively back its favored opposition, generating an even stronger wave of popular backlash.

The crucial difference between the recent U.S. support of the middle-class opposition in Venezuela - mainly through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the U.S. Agency for International Aid (USAID) - versus its earlier backing of the Somoza, Batista, Duvalier and Pinochet dictatorships, is that Washington can ill afford to antagonize the populist government from which it receives anywhere between 11% and 15% of its imported petroleum. This is one situation where Washington simply cannot risk an oil crisis for the sake of indulging the administration's numerous nostalgic cold warriors, like Assistant Secretary of State Roger Noriega and Undersecretary of State John Bolton. But despite the Bush administration's tacit support of the 2002 coup and the substantial funds that the NED poured into the failed recall referendum last August, Chavez has, so far, not given any indication that he intends to cut petroleum exports to the U.S. He did, however, tell Washington to not "even think about trying something similar in Venezuela," referring to what he claims was Washington's orchestrated coup against former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in February, 2004. Should the U.S. follow this course, he optimistically observed that Venezuela "has enough allies on this continent to start a 100-year war," and that "U.S. citizens could forget about ever getting Venezuelan oil."

Enter the Dragon

In December 2004, President Chavez met with his Chinese counterpart, Hu Jintao, in Beijing to discuss a new bilateral agreement regarding access to Venezuela's energy market. In Chavez' words, "this is what is needed in the world in order to break with unilateralism." As a result, Caracas will help Beijing with additions to the latter's strategic oil reserves in exchange for Chinese investment in Venezuela's agricultural sector and the development of fifteen currently shut down oil fields. This meeting was preceded by Chavez's renewed calls for the creation of PetroSur, a Latin American version of OPEC. In an interview with IPS, political scientist Alberto Garrido, of the University of Los Andes, reasoned that Chavez "is trying to give a regional, Latin American dimension to his Bolivarian revolution, as reflected in documents from his movement that date back to far before he made it to power."

This dimension cannot simply be chalked up to the Chavistas' heady nationalistic rhetoric or to Chavez's frequent cheeky barbs against Washington. Rather, Chavez likely sees such a block as a defensive bulwark against any conceivable future U.S. intervention against him as well as a means of gaining the kind of steely international leverage that has been famously found in OPEC. Garrido continued, Venezuela "is not only buying Russian weapons to free itself from military dependence on Washington, but the government is also trying to get Venezuelans ready for a possible scenario of confrontation, as reflected by (Chavez's) recent calls to prepare the reserve."

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[Dr Strangelove]

1. Look What Its Doing For Iran

They recently penciled a deal with China to the tune of 100Bil, sorry to tired to dig up a link, but it safe to say that China is seeking to secure it's petroleum future same as us, and they have money guns and WAY more man power than we do to help them in this. We think Iraq is bad, Iran actually has an army and an air force and they are getting better equipped by the day, bet on it!

[Selatius]

2. In other news, Uruguay went leftist as well recently

They've been living under a two-party duopoly for decades (sounds soberingly familiar), and both parties basically became two wings of one status quo party. Well, they eventually booted them out and elected a progressive government. Uruguay now joins Brazil and Venezuela.