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 Posted: Fri Feb 10, 2006 12:44 pm Post subject: Bolivarian Boliburguesia - Venezuela |
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Bolivarian Boliburguesia - Venezuela
| Quote: | | Caracas is, in many respects, a failed city, and it looks and feels like a place that has spun out of control. The crime rate is shockingly high; there were an estimated five hundred and fifty murders in the first three months of this year. Indigents live openly in the public parks and along the embankments of the city’s sewage trough of a river, the Guaire. Here and there are skyscrapers built in the boom years of the sixties and seventies, their concrete carcasses discolored and crumbling. Hundreds of thousands of shanties scar the surrounding green mountains. Garbage lies uncollected, and the streets are choked with traffic—and, since Venezuela is flush with oil money, there are brand-new cars everywhere. Four hundred and fifty thousand new vehicles were sold last year. Wealthy Venezuelans, meanwhile, live in gated communities and secure apartment buildings on hilltops with panoramic views over Caracas; a nouveau-riche class has emerged from the official ranks and is known, disparagingly, as the boliburguesia, for Bolivarian bourgeoisie. (From Fidel’s Heir, The influence of Hugo Chávez, by Jon Lee Anderson, The New Yorker, June 23/08, p. 53) |
The Smithsonian
Magazine Subscription
Venezuela steers a new course
As oil profits fund a social revolution,
President Hugo Chavez picks a fight
with his country's biggest customer --
the United States
By Katherine Ellison
January, 2006
| Quote: | ...At the Summit of the Americas in early November, he sought to bury a measure Bush has favored, telling a cheering crowd of some 40,000: "Each of us brought a shovel, a gravedigger's shovel, because [this] is the tomb of the Free Trade Area of the Americas." (Before Thanksgiving, he sought to slight Bush by offering discounted heating oil to the poor in a few U.S. cities through his state-run oil company's U.S. subsidiary, Citgo).
In addition, high-ranking Bush administration officials suggest that Chavez is funneling support to radical movements elsewhere in Latin America, particularly in Colombia and Bolivia. They point to Chavez's recent purchase of 100,000 Russian AK-47s. Venezuelan officials say they are for use by civilian militias to defend against a U.S. invasion.
Oil is another U.S. concern - though perhaps not to the degree Chavez likes to suggest. In 2004, Venezuela was the fourth-ranking oil exporter to the United States, sending approximately 1.3 million barrels a day, or about 8 percent of the total U.S. supply. Chavez has promised increase shipments to oil-thirsty China, but building a pipeline through Panama for trans-Pacific shipments could take several years and considerable expense. A more immediate concern, with ramifications for U.S. oil customers, is that Venezuela's state-run energy company is, by many accounts, going to seed because money that normally would have been reinvested in it has gone instead to Chavez's social programs.
For now, the U.S. "Empire" is the only geographically feasible market for Chavez's exports. But oil remains his trump card as he keeps up his enthusiastic spending in the months before this year's election. And while the new constitution limits him to just one more presidential term, he says he has no plans to retire before 2023. (-- pgs. 60-67) |
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editor
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Posts: 2940
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| Posted: Wed Jul 30, 2008 12:11 pm Post subject: |
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From Impossible Odds:
The New Yorker
Magazine Subscription
Fidel’s Heir
The influence of Hugo Chávez
By Jon Lee Anderson
June 23/08
| Quote: | ... In May, 2007, Chávez ordered the nationalization of pumping and refining facilities in La Faja owned by foreign oil companies. The move was one of a series of measures that Chávez had taken to increase Venezuela’s share of oil revenues, including increases in royalty payments from 16.6 per cent to 33.3 per cent, and its ownership stake from around forty to at least sixty per cent. (As recently as 2004, these companies were paying royalties of one per cent of the oil’s value.) Most of the oil companies, including Chevron and B.P., agreed to the terms; ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobil did not, and pulled out.
ExxonMobil had been pumping as many as a hundred and twenty thousand barrels a day out of La Faja. Seeking compensation, the company secured injunctions from judges in the United States, Great Britain, and the Netherlands that froze up to twelve billion dollars in overseas assets of Venezuela’s state oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A., or P.D.V.S.A. Chávez, decrying “imperialist aggression,” threatened to cut off all oil sales to the United States. Analysts estimate that if he should ever make good on that threat the price, which has already risen vertiginously, would spiral even farther upward. (A London court later overturned the British injunction, in what was seen as a major victory for Chávez, but the legal fight continues. ExxonMobil will not say publicly how much it asked for, except that the sum is “multiple billions of dollars.”) ... (emphasis added)
Five years ago, Chávez took direct control of the state oil company, P.D.V.S.A., after sitting out a two-month strike by its union. He fired more than eighteen thousand employees, replacing many of them with his supporters. Since then, he has used P.D.V.S.A.’s revenues to fund his most revolutionary schemes, which include the so-called missions to Venezuela’s poor. Rafael Ramírez, the P.D.V.S.A. chief, told me that Chávez intended to use P.D.V.S.A. as the vehicle for transforming Venezuela from an “oil sultanate to a productive society within a socialist framework.” Like a state within a state, the oil company has begun to replicate or supersede many of the functions of the national government. New P.D.V.S.A. branches oversee everything from agriculture to shipping, construction, and food distribution. “The plan is to make P.D.V.S.A. like Gazprom,” Ramírez told me, referring to the Russian energy giant, “but with a social role.” ...
Chávez began our conversation by asking, “Tell us, why didn’t Saddam put up more of a fight when the Yankees invaded?” Before I could reply, General Rangel said that the Americans had successfully degraded Iraq’s air-defense system in the run-up to the war. Chávez looked at me for confirmation, and when I agreed he smiled, and said that, just in case the Americans were thinking of doing anything similar to Venezuela, he had bought an air-defense system from Belarus. (In the past four years, Venezuela has spent four billion dollars on foreign arms purchases, mostly from Russia.) The Belarusian system probably wasn’t the most sophisticated in the world, Chávez said, but it was what Venezuela could get: “We do what we can to defend ourselves.” ...
Since 2001, Cuba has received shipments of subsidized Venezuelan oil, estimated to be worth $2.5 billion a year, in exchange for the services of thousands of Cuban teachers, sports instructors, and doctors, who work in Venezuela’s slums and rural areas. Thousands of Venezuelans are studying in Cuba, and more than a hundred thousand Venezuelans with eye problems have been sent to Cuba for specialized medical treatment. In 2004, Chávez and Castro signed a sweeping trade deal that eliminated tariffs between their countries, and simultaneously committed themselves to Chávez’s Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas, or ALBA, which means “dawn” in Spanish. ALBA is intended to counter the “neoliberal” trading bloc envisaged under the U.S.-sponsored Free Trade Area of the Americas. (Bolivia, Nicaragua, and the small Caribbean island nation of Dominica have since joined ALBA.) Chávez has become Cuba’s primary benefactor while positioning himself as the inheritor of Fidel’s mantle. ...
Venezuela outspends the United States in foreign aid to the rest of Latin America by a factor of at least five. Last year, U.S. aid amounted to $1.6 billion, a third of which went to Colombia, mainly to fund Plan Colombia, a drug-eradication program administered by the U.S. security contractor DynCorp. Chávez, meanwhile, pledged $8.8 billion for the region. This included subsidized oil for Cuba, Nicaragua, and Bolivia; the purchase of public debt in Argentina; and development projects in Haiti. (Chávez has, in addition, provided discounted heating oil to poor Americans through Citgo, the Venzuelan state oil company’s U.S. subsidiary.)
There is also evidence that Chávez has fostered a relationship with the Colombian Marxist guerrilla organization Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, or FARC. The FARC operates along Venezuela’s border with Colombia and holds hundreds of hostages—civilians, soldiers, and politicians—in secret camps. Chávez has, at times, publicly distanced himself from the FARC, most recently last week, but the group’s espousal of Bolivarian ideals, and its strategic position, appears to have tempted him into seeing the organization as a means, if only by proxy, of confronting the U.S.; Colombia is one of America’s closest allies in the region. ...
The summit (in Santo Domingo, in the Dominican Republic, where some twenty Latin-American leaders were gathering to address the crisis between Colombia and Venezuela) began the next morning, in a convention center set among the
resort hotels and casinos on Santo Domingo’s seafront.
... The session seemed close to breaking down. Then Chávez spoke. He began by telling stories, goading the others and drawing them in. In the nineties, he said, he had been accused of giving arms to Bolivia’s President, Evo Morales, who was then a cocalero activist and a congressman, and to another indigenous Bolivian leader, Felipe Quispe. Chávez said to Morales, “Evo—I think Quispe’s even more radical than you.” Morales smiled modestly.
Chávez said he found ironic the accusation that he was providing three hundred million dollars to the FARC, since he had recently financed a three-hundred-million-dollar gas pipeline for Colombia—he and Uribe had attended the groundbreaking together. Chávez looked across at Cristina Kirchner, the President of Argentina, whose populist, left-of-center government is supportive of his. “Witness the infamy that was invented that I had sent suitcases full of dollars to Cristina.” (Last August, a Venezuelan-American businessman travelling to Buenos Aires was found to be carrying eight hundred thousand dollars in undeclared cash in his suitcase. Although Chávez has denied it, the widespread assumption is that he was secretly financing Kirchner’s Presidential campaign.) “And now it’s suitcases in the jungle!”
By now, many of the leaders were laughing. Chávez had created an atmosphere of entente cordiale, and momentarily blunted Uribe’s charges against him. “I could have sent plenty of rifles to the FARC,” Chávez said. “I could have sent them plenty of dollars—I will not do it, ever.” ... (--- pgs. 46-57) |
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