Colombia Bueno, Venezuela Malo

Alec Dubro

March 06, 2007

When President Bush flies off to Latin America later this week, you can bet your huarachas that he won’t be stopping off in Venezuela. George Bush has made no secret of his distaste for the socialist regime of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

So much does Bush dislike Chavez that the Bush people have tried to 1) overthrow him, and when that failed to stick, 2) isolate him, or as the Financial Times said, “contain” him, as we did with the Soviets. Effort 1, as you recall, was a U.S. effort to back a coup by the Venezuelan opposition, but the plotters lost their nerve after they had kidnapped Chavez. Effort 2 was an attempt to inoculate other Latin American countries from the Chavez revolution virus. That, too, largely failed as countries like Bolivia and Ecuador elected left-leaning governments.

But Chavez’ latest moves have plunged the Bush administration into a case of the vapors. Chavez has announced plans to nationalize a number of industries and to reorganize the oil industry to give Venezuela a larger share of the profits. For this most petroleum-centric of all U.S. administrations, them’s fighting words. Fortunately for us all, the American military is tied up elsewhere, and the conflict, for the moment, is largely verbal.

Of course, President Chavez has not made things any easier by indulging in a series of well-publicized insults aimed at Bush, such as his jibe before the United Nations that Bush was “the devil.” In 2005, Chavez told a meeting of Latin American executives that, “The people of the United States are being governed by a killer, a genocidal murderer and a madman…” Certainly, many Americans have said the same thing, but they’re not heads of state, and don’t risk hemispheric armed conflict.

At any rate, Bush will bypass Venezuela and head instead for that model of democracy and human rights, Colombia. In Bogota, Bush will meet with the urbane and moneyed Alvaro Uribe Vélez who, like Bush himself, attended Harvard and has a high regard for the sanctity of capital. Uribe has moved to disarm the right-wing paramilitary death squads, but hasn’t moved too far. According to Human Rights Watch, the administration “has yet to take effective action to break these ties by investigating and prosecuting high-ranking members of the armed forces credibly alleged to have collaborated with paramilitary groups.” That’s somewhat of an understatement. According to the Washington Office On Latin America (WOLA):

Maria Consejo Áraújo, Colombia’s Foreign Minister, resigned this week, four days after the Colombian Supreme Court brought charges against her brother, Senator Alvaro Áraújo, and four other politicians for allegedly colluding with right-wing paramilitaries.

You might think we would get something for this money besides the resentment of other countries who get a much smaller slice of the pie. But the truth is, there has been no significant diminution of drugs in Colombia and coming into the U.S. It’s true that some of the action has moved elsewhere, but Colombia continues to both grow and process coca and opium. And as for the guerillas, they still control large swathes of the country.

But maybe it’s not immediate gratification in Colombia that Bush is seeking. Right now Colombia only ranks in the top 15 oil suppliers to the U.S. But if the pipelines could be better secured, this percentage could easily rise. Not everything with Bush is about oil, but a lot is. Certainly the oil barons would like to have an alternative source of oil in the region, preferably in a country whose president does not threaten to nationalize the industry.

None of this is to say that Venezuela is either secure or observant of human rights. Since Chavez’ rise to power, there has been a lot of telegenic, politically-inspired violence in the country, but as an actual danger to citizens, it pales beside ordinary crime. According to the U.S. State Department, “Venezuela and its capital, Caracas, have one of the highest per capita murder rates in the world.  Virtually all murders go unsolved.”  When last checked, firearm murders were the country’s leading cause of death—more than heart disease or cancer. At the same time, according to Human Rights Watch, “Thousands of extrajudicial executions by police officers have been reported over the past several years, although the problem long predates the current administration.”

Nevertheless, the Bush administration, with the help of some of the American media, continues to hammer away at Chavez’ economic and social reforms, and paints Chavez as a menace to the region. They issue alarms when Venezuela buys new military equipment, although the U.S. military budget is 500 times that of Venezuela. They claim that Venezuela is the new drug trans-shipment point when the same is true of every other country in the region. But the one thing Bush gets right is that Chavez is a formidable contender for the hearts and minds of Latin Americans.

Since the U.S. has pretty much lost the threat of significant military intervention in Latin America, it would make sense for Bush to extend a hand toward Chavez and other economic nationalists. But at the moment, Chavez has no nukes and he continues to sell oil to the hungry North American market.

So, once again, an American president is seen favoring Latin America’s right wing, and getting very little in return.