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AUGUSTO PINOCHET'S heart attack was not occasioned by the re-election of Hugo Chavez as the President of Venezuela, but it might as well have been. Doctors at the Santiago Military Hospital worked hard to stabilise the condition of the 91-year-old dictator of Chile (1973-1990). Chavez is everything that Pinochet despises. A working-class man of Indian extraction with strong socialist views, Chavez holds an antipathy to the Creole elites who were Pinochet's base.
"Socialism is love," Chavez announced after his decisive victory. The phrase bounced across Latin America, from Pinochet's hospital bed to the halls of power in Washington, D.C. The United States government, in 1973, gave Pinochet the green light to act against Chile's socialist President, Salvador Allende. In 2002, U.S. officials tried to repeat the act in Venezuela. It failed. No such green or amber light shines now. Pinochet's contemporaries are not able to move, and Allende's heirs are too many. Washington is isolated. U.S. policy towards Latin America is in disarray.
Engaging Venezuela
When U.S. State Department spokesperson Sean McCormack walked into a nondescript briefing room on December 4 to meet the press, he came prepared to deal with two major developments in Latin America. The previous day, the Venezuelan people had re-elected Chavez to the presidency for the fourth time, making him, in the words of the Brazilian academic Helio Jaguaribe, "the most elected President in the hemisphere". The same weekend, celebrations across Cuba honoured Fidel Castro, who turned 80. During the festivities, Raul Castro renewed his offer to sit with representatives of the U.S. government and resolve their long-standing disputes. If nothing comes in the current moment, Castro said, "after almost half a century, we are willing to wait patiently until the moment when common sense prevails in Washington power circles".
McCormack acknowledged the Chavez victory and hoped that the U.S. and Venezuela would develop "a positive constructive relationship". When a journalist reminded McCormack that Chavez had only recently called Bush the "Devil," the official dismissed the rhetoric. "Obviously when you see some of the rhetoric that comes out that might make things a little more difficult in terms of the relationship. But that doesn't preclude our being at the table to work together, at least from our perspective." Ecuador's Rafael Correa had said Chavez's statements insulted the devil, and yet, after his victory in late November, Bush called to congratulate him.
Despite the antipathy between Bush and Chavez, and the two distinct political philosophies they espouse, Venezuela and the U.S. are major trade partners. Sixty per cent of Venezuela's substantial oil exports go to the U.S. (11 per cent of total U.S. oil imports come from Venezuela). Chavez intimates that he wants China to become a leading oil importer from Venezuela, but this will take immense infrastructural changes and include high transport costs. In the medium term, at least, the U.S. and Venezuela have conjoined interests.
The influential Council on Foreign Relations released an important study in November entitled Living With Hugo: U.S. Policy Toward Hugo Chavez's Venezuela. The study, written by Financial Times' Richard Lapper, challenged the belligerent approach taken by the Bush administration in its early years (at least from 2000 to 2004). "Lingering suspicion of U.S. involvement in the 2002 coup," Lapper writes, "makes American pro-democracy rhetoric seem insincere." Miguel Angel Cortés, the Spanish Minister for Ibero-American Cooperation, offered proof that the U.S. closely supported the coup and tried to mobilise Latin American countries on behalf of the plotters.
The key figure in this was the State Department's Otto Reich, a former U.S. Ambassador to Caracas and one of the architects of the 1980s Contra war in Nicaragua. Reich was in touch with the plotters, and to bolster them he dragooned the Ambassadors of Latin American countries to his office to sign a statement in support of the coup. They refused. Chavez returned to office, and Reich and the U.S. line were exposed. Shortly thereafter, Reich resigned as the State Department's point person for the Western hemisphere, was briefly replaced by the far-Right Roger Noriega, who was replaced by the far more sober career diplomat Thomas Shannon. Shannon's elevation in 2005 indicated that changes were afoot.
In January 2006, the Council on Foreign Relations' head of Latin American Affairs, Julia E. Sweig, warned that Washington's bromides do not resonate south of the Rio Grande. "Its myopic and increasingly dissonant message of more trade and war on drugs and terrorists offers no answers to the bread-and-butter issues Latin America's new leaders face."
The United Nations estimates that about 40 per cent of Latin America's 500 million citizens live in poverty. Neoliberal reforms do not speak to them as loudly as the Chavista social programmes. As Lapper writes, "Chavez has been able to provide what financial austerity policies and macroeconomic stability could not: concrete improvements to the lives of the poor. For the moment, this success has boosted his popularity and diminished the appeal of the United States."
Lapper's "principled pragmatism" includes such elements as an invitation by Washington to Venezuelan officials for "working-level discussions" on bilateral issues such as border security, energy, drugs and public health. On counter-narcotics, the U.S. and Venezuela already work together. Lapper and others propose that Washington invite Caracas for a regional dialogue on energy security and that Venezuela be encouraged to participate in the Inter-American Development Bank's programme to support sustainable energy and biofuel development in Latin America.
It is unlikely that Chavez will accept the suggestions on energy, or get into the U.S. agenda on energy security, but Lapper is prepared for that. "This gesture from Washington," he writes, "would help demonstrate to the region that the United States is trying to work pragmatically with Caracas despite Chavez's rhetoric. If Caracas rejects the overture, the United States would be in a stronger position to convince other countries in the region that Chavez is at fault for failing to reduce tension." In other words, this principled pragmatism would either bring Chavez into line with a U.S. agenda or help alienate him from his Latin American neighbours. Either way, Washington might win.
Military demurs
The U.S. Department of Defence and the White House feign lack of interest in this agenda shift by the State Department. In 2005, the Pentagon developed its first scenario for military conflict with Venezuela, which it considered a "pop-up threat". The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) named Venezuela in the list of its "Top Five Unstable Countries" and increased its intelligence personnel by 50 per cent.
U.S. military presence in South America has been challenged frontally by the new regimes. Ecuador's Correa vowed not to renew the U.S. military's lease of the Manta airbase, which the U.S. now uses as a high-tech listening post and is home to a fleet of narcotics indictment aircraft. If Correa keeps his word, the U.S. will be left with only one major base in the region, the one that is secretly maintained at Mariscal Estigarribia in Paraguay.
In mid-2006, the U.S. Directorate of Defence Trade Controls restricted the sale of arms and military services to Venezuela. The amounts are not large for the U.S. arms industry ($59 million in the past four years), but the U.S. used this measure to pressure the Spanish and the Russians to curtail their sales.
Announcing the new policy, the State Department's Janelle Hironimus pointed out that "Venezuela has publicly championed the Iraqi insurgency". All this worries the Council's Julia Sweig, who sees in this a "Cubanisation of American policy toward Venezuela".
Perhaps Sweig need not worry. It appears that the Pentagon and the intelligence community are not so much interested in an embargo on Venezuela as on peeling away Caracas from Havana.
In August 2006, John Negroponte, the Director of National Intelligence (and the architect of the 1980s Contras), developed a special mission for the CIA. In a public statement, Negroponte noted, "Such efforts are critical today as policymakers have increasingly focussed on the challenges that Cuba and Venezuela pose to American foreign policy."
Asked about this development, the State Department's Shannon said, "Venezuela has an opportunity, we believe, to play an important and useful role in Cuba's future if it chooses to associate itself with a successful democratic transition." In other words, the new U.S. strategy is to encourage forces in Venezuela to jettison their links with the Cuban revolution.
Meanwhile, U.S. military aid to Latin America stands at $122 million, over 34 times its 2000 level. El Salvador, which assists the U.S. in Iraq, leads the list with $23 million, and Bolivia, Argentina, the Dominican Republic and Panama are behind with between $5 m and $6 m apiece. These are modest figures. The money follows the logic of U.S. Southern Command head General James Hill, who told Congress in 2004 that he was under orders to suppress both the "traditional terrorists" (drug gangs and guerilla groups) and the "emerging terrorists," who he defined as "radical populists" who galvanise "deep-seated frustrations of the failure of democratic reforms to deliver results". Chavez, Evo Morales, Correa, and others fit the second bill.
Such statements are ominous. Between the General and the State Department, a gulf has opened. It remains to be seen whose strategy will dominate.
Vijay Prashad is co-editor of the recently released Dispatches from Latin America: Experiments Against Neo-Liberalism (New Delhi, Leftword).
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