NYTimes.com Article: A Man With Big Ideas, a Small Country . . . and Oil

[jpino@xxxxxxxxxxxx]

This article from NYTimes.com
has been sent to you by Julio Cesar Pino jpino@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Marxism List

Nestor: what can you tell me about this alleged "Argentine neo-fascist" advisor 
to H.
Chavez? Sounds like a smart guy geopolitically.

Julio Cesar Pino
jpino@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

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A Man With Big Ideas, a Small Country . . . and Oil
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/09/24/weekinreview/24ROHT.html

September 24, 2000
THE WORLD
By LARRY ROHTER

CARACAS, Venezuela -- Hugo Cháve Chávez spent his first 18 months as
president of Venezuela consolidating his power on the domestic
front. Now, with the price of oil nearing $40 a barrel and the
Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries scheduled to gather
here this week for a conference of its heads of state, he is about
to step out onto the world stage in a big way.

 For those unfamiliar with Venezuela's president, a 46-year-old
former paratrooper who in 1992 led an unsuccessful coup attempt,
the experience promises to be overwhelming. When it comes to
international relations, Mr. Chávez is a whirlwind of ideas, plans
and visions (as he is with every other subject that interests him),
and many of these are intended to reshape the world order. This
leaves him often critical of or even hostile to American positions.

 "Venezuela is just too small for him," said Michael Shifter,
senior fellow at the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington- based
policy analysis group. "He fancies himself as a regional and
hemispheric leader, wants to play a major role on the global stage,
and is testing the limits of how far he can go in terms of pushing
his ideas and showing off his posture in global politics."

 Such ambitions may seem messianic and way out of proportion in a
country of modest size and huge economic and social problems. But
Venezuela has twice as many people as Cuba, and Mr. Chávez has a
pair of arrows in his quiver that his friend and mentor Fidel
Castro could never claim: the largest oil reserves outside the
Middle East and a long history as a main supplier of gasoline and
heating oil to the United States.

 That situation of mutual dependence gives Venezuela considerable
leverage in its dealings with the United States, and Mr. Chávez, by
arranging to have his energy minister named the president of OPEC,
has been skillful in using oil as an instrument of foreign policy.
As befits a former soldier, his own view of the world and how it
should be shaped is strongly colored by geopolitical and strategic
considerations.

 "The 20th century was a bipolar century, but the 21st is not going
to be unipolar," he vowed in a speech here in August. "The 21st
century should be multipolar, and we all ought to push for the
development of such a world. So long live a united Asia, a united
Africa, a united Europe."

 On this, as in several other areas, Mr. Chávez's views are similar
to those of one of his early advisers, a neo-fascist Argentine
theorist named Norberto Ceresole, who contends that Latin America
must forge alliances with the Middle East and Asia to
counterbalance the power of the United States and what he (but not
Mr. Chávez) calls "the Jewish financial mafia." In its opposition
to American hegemony, this view has something in common with those
of countries like France and above all China, with whom Mr. Chávez
has sought closer ties.

 "Soviet power has collapsed, but that does not mean that
neoliberal capitalism has to be the model followed by the peoples
of the West," he said during a visit to Beijing last fall. "If only
for that reason, we invite China to keep its flag flying, because
this world cannot be run by a universal police force that seeks to
control everything."

 In more concrete terms, Mr. Chávez believes that "his mission in
the world is to restore some sort of equilibrium that favors less
developed countries," said Janet Kelly, a professor at the
Institute of Higher Administrative Studies in Caracas who is
working on a book about Venezuelan-American relations. "When you
combine that with his liking of the center stage, it means he is
going to be acting constantly to promote any movement in the world
that goes against what he would perceive as the U.S.-dominated
agenda."

 One key to pursuing that goal is closer ties with what he calls
"our 10 partners, friends and brothers in OPEC." In August, Mr.
Chávez visited all the OPEC countries to invite their leaders to
the summit meeting this week, raising hackles in Washington when he
became the first head of state to call on Saddam Hussein in Baghdad
since the gulf war and when, during a stop in Libya, he described
Muammar el-Qaddafi as his ally.

 "In geopolitical terms, the OPEC tour was masterful," said Riordan
Roett, director of the Western Hemisphere Program at Johns Hopkins
University. "It demonstrated that Venezuela was not just a Latin
American backwater." He added that while the State Department may
have complained about the Iraq trip, "more people in the third
world now know about Chávez than they do about any other Latin
American leader except Fidel Castro."

 Mr. Chávez's relationship with the Cuban leader is complex. While
he said last year that Venezuela and Cuba are swimming together
"towards the same sea of happiness and of real social justice and
peace," he also seems to realize that Mr. Castro's star has faded,
leaving a vacuum that he, with all his eloquence, exuberance and
personal warmth, can perhaps fill.

 "There is admiration for Fidel, but it is linked not so much to
Cuba's domestic system, which I do not think Chávez is interested
in trying out, as it is adopting some of Fidel's style, such as the
David against Goliath stance and the sense of humor that galls the
other side," Dr. Kelly said. "He is more a student of Fidel the
defiant than Fidel the Communist." Like Mr. Castro, Mr. Chávez
seems to enjoy nothing more than tweaking the United States, which
Washington, in a reflection of Venezuela's importance as an oil
supplier, thus far has generally endured with patience.

 But there are real policy differences, too. Mr. Chávez has
withdrawn the Venezuelan military from regional naval exercises in
the Caribbean and refused to allow United States planes monitoring
drug trafficking to fly in Venezuelan airspace. Washington's
decision to use $1.3 billion to support Colombia's government in
its war against guerrillas and drug dealers promises to make the
relationship even more difficult.

 Some of Mr. Chávez's former associates accuse him of supplying
guns to leftist Colombian insurgents known as the FARC. He has
denied that, but has also made it clear that he dislikes the
American-sponsored Plan Colombia, warning that it may lead to "the
Vietnamization of the entire Amazon region" and describing the
helicopters Washington is sending to the Colombian government as
"death machines."

 "In reality, Hugo Chávez and his government are on the side of the
FARC," Richard Gott writes in "The Shadow of the Liberator: The
Impact of Hugo Chávez on Venezuela and Latin America" (Verso), a
new and flattering biography. "Chávez wants the FARC to win, or at
any rate to be so successful in the peace negotiations that its
incorporation into the government will entirely change the
political complexion of Colombia."

 Mr. Chávez's principal intellectual hero is Simón Bolívar, the
hero of South American independence who dreamed of and fought for a
united continent. Mr. Chávez has argued for the formation of a
South Atlantic Treaty Organization, a Latin American counterpart to
the International Monetary Fund and a single currency for all of
South America, but he clearly wants more.

 "The idea of a reunified America, of a Bolivarian America, has
arisen again," he said in a speech in July on the Liberator's
birthday. And to Hugo Chávez, there is a natural leader of that
movement   himself.
   


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