Venezuelan Foreign Minister Ali Rodriguez warned Friday that the
Bush administration may be plotting to overthrow his country's leftist leader,
Hugo Chavez, in what he called a throwback to Washington's long history of
gunboat diplomacy in Latin America.
In a speech at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, Rodriguez added
fuel to the burning dispute between the White House and Chavez, saying U.S.
officials' recent criticisms of the Venezuelan president were "ignorant" and
"arrogant."
"There have been lots of attacks against Venezuela from the United States
recently, and we have lots of prior experience with this sort of thing,"
Rodriguez said, citing successful CIA-influenced overthrows of leftist leaders
in Guatemala in 1954, the Dominican Republic in 1965 and Chile in 1973.
Rodriguez, one of Chavez's closest advisers, has been the main strategist
behind Venezuela's push to rally other leading oil exporters to cut production
and jack up world oil prices. A Marxist guerrilla in the 1960s, Rodriguez
later became secretary-general of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting
Countries, as well as Venezuela's oil minister and president of its state-
owned oil monopoly, Petroleos de Venezuela, S.A.
In the escalating rhetoric between Caracas and Washington, Chavez warned
in a radio address Sunday of a U.S. assassination plot and threatened to stop
supplying oil to the United States if it makes an attempt on his life.
Condoleezza Rice, in her Senate confirmation hearings last month to
become secretary of state, said the United States "cannot remain indifferent
to what Venezuela is doing beyond its borders," referring primarily to
Chavez's close relations with Cuba and his support for leftist movements in
the region.
Yet Rodriguez's visit to the Bay Area illustrated how Venezuela, as the
fourth-largest source of imported oil to the United States, has clout no other
Latin American nation can match.
Rodriguez spent Thursday negotiating with officials at ChevronTexaco's
headquarters in San Ramon. At the Commonwealth Club, he was accompanied by Ali
Moshiri, managing director of ChevronTexaco's Latin America division. The oil
giant is a multibillion-dollar investor in Venezuela, producing large
quantities of oil and building two huge plants to produce liquefied natural
gas for the U.S. markets.
"Strategically, Venezuela is very important. We believe it has the
potential to provide 35 percent of U.S. energy, in oil and natural gas,"
Moshiri said after Rodriguez's speech, adding, "Venezuela has been treating
the private sector very well."
Chavez survived a recall vote in August with 59 percent of the vote, and
his treasury receives $30 billion annually in oil revenues.
"The United States hasn't faced anything like Chavez for a very long time,
" said Riordan Roett, director of the Western Hemisphere program at Johns
Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in Washington.
Roett described the divisions between Washington and Caracas as the Bush
administration's "ideological distaste" for Chavez and the Venezuelan's
"grandiose ideas" of uniting Latin America under a nationalist, semi-
revolutionary banner.
"We thought populist leftist leaders were buried in history," Roett said,
"but the United States and the hemisphere are faced with the most truculent
and ambitious leader in decades, and he is likely to grow more powerful."
After a visit to Moscow in December, Chavez angered the Bush
administration by announcing that he was purchasing guns and warplanes. The
White House protested to the Kremlin, and U.S. officials warned that the arms
could be sent to the leftist guerrillas in neighboring Colombia.
©2005 San Francisco Chronicle
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