Chávez seeks influence with oil diplomacy
In just one month, Venezuela has cut deals with five countries.
When protesters in Ecuador started dynamiting pipelines and vandalizing pumping machinery last week, crippling oil exports - Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez sprang to the rescue.
"We are going to help Ecuador," Mr. Chávez announced from Cuba, where he was making his 13th visit since coming to power in 1999. "Venezuela will cover the [oil export] commitments that the Ecuadorean government has not been able to fulfill these days. They will not have to pay a cent."
A generous offer, but not a surprising one.
Chávez, whom Christian televangelist Pat Robertson says the US should assassinate, has been traveling the hemisphere offering preferential oil deals, barters, and loans to leftist and left-of-center governments. In the past 30 days, the leader of the world's fifth-largest oil exporting country, has inked deals with Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, and Paraguay. Thirteen Caribbean nations signed a deal for cheap oil in June. And since April, Cuba has been getting almost all of its oil from Venezuela in exchange for doctors and gym teachers.
It is, Chávez says, his way of helping neighboring countries cut energy costs and improve living standards in the region. "Altruism," says Eric Wingerter, a spokesman at the Venezuela Information Office in Washington, D.C., simply. "This is part of larger process involving regional solidarity and helping other countries economically."
But critics charge Chávez is buying friends and influence with the objective of extending his regional hegemony - and undermining the US.
"Chávez is a man with a mission. He is determined to use the enormous windfall from record oil prices to pursue his Bolivarian Revolution on the regional stage as aggressively as possible," says Michael Shifter, vice president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a think tank in Washington, D.C. "He is intent on building a counterweight to US influence in the Western Hemisphere."
Chávez's antiglobalization and anti-US discourse, which comes part and parcel with the petrodollars, adds Shifter, "is resonating more and more with marginal sectors throughout the region, many of whom have been ignored by the US and are now looking for alternatives to their stubbornly acute poverty."
Carlos Granier, an economist at Cedice, a Caracas think tank, says that the 13-nation Petrocaribe group formed by Chávez, is described as a "nonprofit political enterprise" of strategic importance by Venezuela. "This peculiar jargon hardly conceals the pretense to use "oil as a diplomatic weapon," says Mr. Granier.
Ricardo Hausmann, an economist at Harvard University's Kennedy School and a former minister of planning in Venezuela says, "There is no economic rationale in these deals.... It is a political investment." The opportunity cost of the deals - a loss of payment at market price - is clear, says Professor Hausmann. "What is less transparent is what Venezuela is going to get in return - is it good will? Is it Latin American support for the day when Chávez decides to radicalize his revolution, prompting an international reaction?"
