Interview with Hugo Chávez
By Greg
Palast
You’d think George Bush
would get down on his knees and kiss Hugo Chávez’s behind. Not only
has Chávez delivered cheap oil to the Bronx and other poor communities in
the United States. And not only did he offer to bring aid to the victims of
Katrina.
In my interview with the president of
Venezuela on March 28, he made Bush the following astonishing offer: Chávez
would drop the price of oil to $50 a barrel, “not too high, a fair
price,” he said—a third less than the $75 a barrel for oil recently
posted on the spot market. That would bring down the price at the pump by about
a buck, from $3 to $2 a gallon.
But our
President has basically told Chávez to take his cheaper oil and stick it up
his pipeline. Before I explain why Bush has done so, let me explain why
Chávez has the power to pull it off – and the method in the seeming
madness of his “take-my-oil-please!”
deal.
Venezuela, Chávez told me,
has more oil than Saudi Arabia. A nutty boast? Not by a long shot. In fact, his
surprising claim comes from a most surprising source: the U.S. Department of
Energy. In an internal report, the DOE estimates that Venezuela has five times
the Saudis’ reserves.
However,
most of Venezuela’s mega-horde of crude is in the form of
“extra-heavy” oil—liquid asphalt—which is ghastly
expensive to pull up and refine. Oil has to sell above $30 a barrel to make the
investment in extra-heavy oil worthwhile. A big dip in oil’s
price—and, after all, oil cost only $18 a barrel six years ago—would
bankrupt heavy-oil investors. Hence Chávez’s offer: Drop the price to
$50—and keep it there. That would guarantee Venezuela’s investment
in heavy oil.
But the ascendance of
Venezuela within OPEC necessarily means the decline of the power of the House of
Saud. And the Bush family wouldn’t like that one bit. It comes down to
“petro-dollars.” When George W. ferried then-Crown Prince (now King)
Abdullah of Saudi Arabia around the Crawford ranch in a golf cart it
wasn’t because America needs Arabian oil. The Saudis will always sell us
their petroleum. What Bush needs is Saudi petro-dollars. Saudi Arabia has, over
the past three decades, kindly recycled the cash sucked from the wallets of
American SUV owners and sent much of the loot right back to New York to buy U.S.
Treasury bills and other U.S.
assets.
The Gulf potentates understand
that in return for lending the U.S. Treasury the cash to fund George
Bush’s $2 trillion rise in the nation’s debt, they receive
protection in return. They lend us petro-dollars, we lend them the 82nd
Airborne.
Chávez would put an end
to all that. He’ll sell us oil relatively cheaply—but intends to
keep the petro-dollars in Latin America. Recently, Chávez withdrew $20
billion from the U.S. Federal Reserve and, at the same time, lent or committed a
like sum to Argentina, Ecuador, and other Latin American
nations.
Chávez, notes The Wall
Street Journal, has become a “tropical IMF.” And indeed, as the
Venezuelan president told me, he wants to abolish the Washington-based
International Monetary Fund, with its brutal free-market diktats, and replace it
with an “International Humanitarian Fund,” an IHF, or more
accurately, an International Hugo Fund. In addition, Chávez wants OPEC to
officially recognize Venezuela as the cartel’s reserve leader, which
neither the Saudis nor Bush will take kindly
to.
Politically, Venezuela is torn in
two. Chávez’s “Bolivarian Revolution,” a close replica of
Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal—a progressive income tax, public
works, social security, cheap electricity—makes him wildly popular with
the poor. And most Venezuelans are poor. His critics, a four-centuries’
old white elite, unused to sharing oil wealth, portray him as a Castro-hugging
anti-Christ.
Chávez’s
government, which used to brush off these critics, has turned aggressive on
them. I challenged Chávez several times over charges brought against
Súmate, his main opposition group. The two founders of the nongovernmental
organization, which led the recall campaign against Chávez, face eight
years in prison for taking money from the Bush Administration and the
International Republican [Party] Institute. No nation permits foreign funding of
political campaigns, but the charges (no one is in jail) seem like a heavy
hammer to use on the minor infractions of these pathetic
gadflies.
Bush’s reaction to
Chávez has been a mix of hostility and provocation. Washington supported
the coup attempt against Chávez in 2002, and Condoleezza Rice and Donald
Rumsfeld have repeatedly denounced him. The revised National Security Strategy
of the United States of America, released in March, says, “In Venezuela, a
demagogue awash in oil money is undermining democracy and seeking to destabilize
the region.”
So when the Reverend
Pat Robertson, a Bush ally, told his faithful in August 2005 that Chávez
has to go, it was not unreasonable to assume that he was articulating an
Administration wish. “If he thinks we’re trying to assassinate
him,” Robertson said, “I think that we really ought to go ahead and
do it. It’s a whole lot cheaper than starting a war . . . and I
don’t think any oil shipments will
stop.”
There are only two ways to
defeat the rise of Chávez as the New Abdullah of the Americas. First, the
unattractive option: Cut the price of oil below $30 a barrel. That would make
Chávez’s crude worthless. Or, option two: Kill
him.
Q: Your opponents are saying that
you are beginning a slow-motion dictatorship. Is that what we are
seeing?
Hugo Chávez: They have
been saying that for a long time. When they’re short of ideas, any excuse
will do as a vehicle for lies. That is totally false. I would like to invite the
citizens of Great Britain and the citizens of the U.S. and the citizens of the
world to come here and walk freely through the streets of Venezuela, to talk to
anyone they want, to watch television, to read the papers. We are building a
true democracy, with human rights for everyone, social rights, education, health
care, pensions, social security, and
jobs.
Q: Some of your opponents are
being charged with the crime of taking money from George Bush. Will you send
them to jail?
Chávez: It’s
not up to me to decide that. We have the institutions that do that. These people
have admitted they have received money from the government of the United States.
It’s up to the prosecutors to decide what to do, but the truth is that we
can’t allow the U.S. to finance the destabilization of our country. What
would happen if we financed somebody in the U.S. to destabilize the government
of George Bush? They would go to prison,
certainly.
Q: How do you respond to
Bush’s charge that you are destabilizing the region and interfering in the
elections of other Latin American
countries?
Chávez: Mr. Bush is an
illegitimate President. In Florida, his brother Jeb deleted many black voters
from the electoral registers. So this President is the result of a fraud. Not
only that, he is also currently applying a dictatorship in the U.S. People can
be put in jail without being charged. They tap phones without court orders. They
check what books people take out of public libraries. They arrested Cindy
Sheehan because of a T-shirt she was wearing demanding the return of the troops
from Iraq. They abuse blacks and Latinos. And if we are going to talk about
meddling in other countries, then the U.S. is the champion of meddling in other
people’s affairs. They invaded Guatemala, they overthrew Salvador Allende,
invaded Panama and the Dominican Republic. They were involved in the coup
d’état in Argentina 30 years
ago.
Q: Is the U.S. interfering in your
elections here?
Chávez: They have
interfered for 200 years. They have tried to prevent us from winning the
elections, they supported the coup d’état, they gave millions of
dollars to the coup plotters, they supported the media, newspapers, outlaw
movements, military intervention, and espionage. But here the empire is
finished, and I believe that before the end of this century, it will be finished
in the rest of the world. We will see the burial of the empire of the
eagle.
Q: You don’t interfere in
the elections of other nations in Latin
America?
Chávez: Absolutely not. I
concern myself with Venezuela. However, what’s going on now is that some
rightwing movements are transforming me into a pawn in the domestic politics of
their countries, by making statements that are groundless. About candidates like
Morales [of Bolivia], for example. They said I financed the candidacy of
President Lula [Brazil], which is totally false. They said I financed the
candidacy of Kirchner [Argentina], which is totally false. In Mexico, recently,
the rightwing party has used my image for its own profit. What’s happened
is that in Latin America there is a turn to the left. They have gotten tired of
the Washington consensus—a neoliberalism that has aggravated misery and
poverty.
Q: You have spent millions of
dollars of your nation’s oil wealth throughout Latin America. Are you
really helping these other nations or are you simply buying political support
for your regime?
Chávez: We are
brothers and sisters. That’s one of the reasons for the wrath of the
empire. You know that Venezuela has the biggest oil reserves in the world. And
the biggest gas reserves in this hemisphere, the eighth in the world. Up until
seven years ago, Venezuela was a U.S. oil colony. All of our oil was going up to
the north, and the gas was being used by the U.S. and not by us. Now we are
diversifying. Our oil is helping the poor. We are selling to the Dominican
Republic, Haiti, Cuba, some Central American countries, Uruguay,
Argentina.
Q: And the
Bronx?
Chávez: In the Bronx it is
a donation. In all the cases I just mentioned before, it is trade. However,
it’s not free trade, just fair commerce. We also have an international
humanitarian fund as a result of oil
revenues.
Q: Why did George Bush turn
down your help for New Orleans after the
hurricane?
Chávez: You should ask
him, but from the very beginning of the terrible disaster of Katrina, our people
in the U.S., like the president of CITGO, went to New Orleans to rescue people.
We were in close contact by phone with Jesse Jackson. We hired buses. We got
food and water. We tried to protect them; they are our brothers and sisters.
Doesn’t matter if they are African, Asian, Cuban,
whatever.
Q: Are you replacing the
World Bank and the International Monetary Fund as “Daddy Big
Bucks”?
Chávez: I do wish that the
IMF and the World Bank would disappear
soon.
Q: And it would be the Bank of
Hugo?
Chávez: No. The
International Humanitarian Bank. We are just creating an alternative way to
conduct financial exchange. It is based on cooperation. For example, we send oil
to Uruguay for their refinery and they are paying us with
cows.
Q: Milk for
oil.
Chávez: That’s right.
Milk for oil. The Argentineans also pay us with cows. And they give us medical
equipment to combat cancer. It’s a transfer of technology. We also
exchange oil for software technology. Uruguay is one of the biggest producers of
software. We are breaking with the neoliberal model. We do not believe in free
trade. We believe in fair trade and exchange, not competition but cooperation.
I’m not giving away oil for free. Just using oil, first to benefit our
people, to relieve poverty. For a hundred years we have been one of the largest
oil-producing countries in the world but with a 60 percent poverty rate and now
we are canceling the historical
debt.
Q: Speaking of the free market,
you’ve demanded back taxes from U.S. oil companies. You have eliminated
contracts for North American, British, and European oil companies. Are you
trying to slice out the British and American oil companies from
Venezuela?
Chávez: No, we
don’t want them to go, and I don’t think they want to leave the
country, either. We need each other. It’s simply that we have recovered
our oil sovereignty. They didn’t pay taxes. They didn’t pay
royalties. They didn’t give an account of their actions to the government.
They had more land than had previously been established in the contracts. They
didn’t comply with the agreed technology exchange. They polluted the
environment and didn’t pay anything towards the cleanup. They now have to
comply with the law.
Q: You’ve
said that you imagine the price of oil rising to $100 dollars per barrel. Are
you going to use your new oil wealth to squeeze the
planet?
Chávez: No, no. We have no
intention of squeezing anyone. Now, we have been squeezed and very hard. Five
hundred years of squeezing us and stifling us, the people of the South. I do
believe that demand is increasing and supply is dropping and the large
reservoirs are running out. But it’s not our fault. In the future, there
must be an agreement between the large consumers and the large
producers.
Q: What happens when the oil
money runs out, what happens when the price of oil falls as it always does? Will
the Bolivarian revolution of Hugo Chávez simply collapse because
there’s no money to pay for the big free
ride?
Chávez: I don’t think
it will collapse, in the unlikely case of oil running out today. The revolution
will survive. It does not rely solely on oil for its survival. There is a
national will, there is a national idea, a national project. However, we are
today implementing a strategic program called the Oil Sowing Plan: using oil
wealth so Venezuela can become an agricultural country, a tourist destination,
an industrialized country with a diversified economy. We are investing billions
of dollars in the infrastructure: power generators using thermal energy, a large
railway, roads, highways, new towns, new universities, new schools, recuperating
land, building tractors, and giving loans to farmers. One day we won’t
have any more oil, but that will be in the twenty-second century. Venezuela has
oil for another 200 years.
Q: But the
revolution can come to an end if there’s another coup and it succeeds. Do
you believe Bush is still trying to overthrow your
government?
Chávez: He would like
to, but what you want is one thing, and what you cannot really obtain is
another.
Investigative
reporter Greg Palast is the author of “Armed Madhouse: Dispatches from the
Front Lines of the Class War.” (This interview recently appeared in the
July 2006 issue of The Progressive Magazine.)
Posted: Fri - September 1, 2006 at 08:00 PM