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Diane Abbott :
Venezuela and its quest for a UN Security Council seat
This week Caricom has been debating Venezuela's bid for a UN Security Council seat. Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez certainly appears to be thriving in his role as public enemy number one (in the Americas ) to the United States.
In the past few days he has been showing off the new Russian fighter jets he is planning to acquire in defiance of a US arms embargo; signing a treaty to enter a South American trade bloc with Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay and making speeches about further South American regional integration.There is a lavishly funded CIA propaganda offensive against Chavez. For instance, American newspapers will carry photographs of anti-Chavez demonstrations, but will somehow not have the space for photographs of much larger pro-Chavez demonstrations that happen on the same day.
This media bias means that there are some aspects of the Venezuelan situation that are not sufficiently understood. For instance, not many people grasp how much race plays a part in the strong feelings the Venezuelan elites have against Chavez.
For five centuries, Venezuela has been run by a white elite, the pureblooded descendants of Spanish colonialists. But 80% of Venezuelans are brown like Chavez. And there has been social segregation that reflects the racial fault line.In the capital Caracas rich white Venezuelans live in luxurious skyscrapers in a city centre whose skyline resembles New York. But poor brown Venezuelans live in shantytowns on the hillsides surrounding the city. No wonder the members of the elite reserve a special contempt for Chavez.
BBC journalist Greg Palast said in a recent article: "Look at the Chronicle/AP photo of the anti-Chavez marchers in Venezuela. Note their colour white. And not just any white. A creamy rich white. I interviewed them and recorded in this order: a banker in high heels and push-up bra; an oil industry executive (same outfit); and a plantation owner who rode to Caracas in a silver Jaguar. And the colour of the pro-Chavez marchers? Dark Brown. Brown and round as cola nuts. Just like their hero, President Chavez. They wore an unvarying uniform of jeans and T-shirts".And it is brown Venezuelans who have benefited from Chavez's social programmes including free health care, subsidised food and land reform. Perhaps most journalists do not remark on the racial issue because they take it for granted that white people should run things.
Chavez is actually a very thoughtful and well-read man with important things to say about globalisation. But he is perhaps best known for his anti-Americanism. And, taken out of context, many of his remarks seem unnecessarily crude and offensive.
However, his anti-Bush anti-American polemics are very popular, both in Venezuela itself, and in the rest of the region.But to understand the strength of Chavez's feeling against America you have to understand how deeply the Americans were implicated in the failed coup against him in 2002.
An award-winning film The Revolution Will Not Be Televised www.chavezthefilm. com/index_ex.htm has extraordinary footage of the coup attempt including coup plotters boasting next day on television how they had done it.The plan was to get the people on the street and when they reached their peak activate the army.
And at first it did seem like a text-book CIA operation; exactly the kind of US-funded and instigated activity that had successfully destabilised regimes in the region from Cheddi Jagan in 1960s Guyana to Salvador Allende in Chile in the 1970s and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in the 1980s.The coup leaders were in close contact with the US government (one eventually fled to Miami), American officers were at the base where Chavez was held during the coup, an American plane landed there apparently to take him out of the country, and American military vessels were seen in Venezuelan waters.
But the army stayed loyal to Chavez. This and the overwhelming support of ordinary people meant that he was restored to power within days.But the Americans do not want to get rid of Chavez just because he is rude about them. Venezuela is America's largest supplier of oil. Chavez controls 1.3 trillion barrels of oil - more than the entire declared oil reserves of the rest of the planet. And, as the Iraqis have found to their cost, US foreign policy is currently driven by oil and the need to ensure that there are puppet regimes wherever there is a major US supplier.
But, far from being a puppet regime, amongst the first things that Chavez did on taking power were to cut oil production, raise the oil price, revitalise the oil producers club OPEC, spearhead a mammoth US$20 billion project to build a gas pipeline in order to make Venezuela's natural gas available across South America and begin a process of making cheap oil available in the region.
There could not be a set of policies more opposed to the interest of US oil barons.There is a discussion going as to whether (whatever Caricom decides) Jamaica should support Venezuela or Guatemala for the Security Council seat. The US is clearly terrified that Chavez will gain an international platform. So it is putting enormous pressure on the region to support Guatemala .
No doubt, Prime Minister Portia Simpson will make a decision that is in Jamaica's long-term best interests. But, whatever happens about the Security Council seat, it would be unfortunate if Chavez's florid anti-American rhetoric detracted from his very real achievements and important critique of globalisation.
Diane Abbott is a columnist wirh the Jamaica Observer. Petroleumworld not necessarily share these views.
Editor's Note: This commentary was published by Jamaica Observer, on
Sunday, July 9, 2006 , Petroleumworld reprint this article in the interest of our readers.
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Petroleumworld 07 09 06
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