Michael Rowan is the author of The Threat Closer to Home: Hugo Chavez and the War Against America and is a political consultant for U.S. and Latin American leaders. He has advised former Bolivian president Jaime Paz Zamora and Costa Rican president Oscar Arias. Mr. Rowan has also counseled winning Democratic candidates in 30 U.S. states. He is a former president of the International Association of Political Consultants.
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Hugo Chavez, the president of Venezuela, is a much more dangerous individuals than the famously elusive leader of al-Quaeda. He has made the United States his sworn enemy, and the sad truth is that few people are really listening.
“I’m still a subversive,” Chavez has admitted. “I think the entire world should be subverted.”
Hugo Chavez to Jan James of the Associated Press, September 23, 2007
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One cannot discount how much Castro’s aura has shaped Chavez’s thoughts and actions.
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There are many who harbor bad intentions towards the United States, but only a few who possess the capability to do anything about it. Chavez is one of these few because:
His de facto dictatorship gives him absolute control over Venezuela’s military, oil production, and treasury.
He harbors oil reserves second only to those of Saudi Arabia; Venezuela’s annual windfall profits exceed the net worth of Bill Gates.
He has a strategic military and oil alliance with a major American foe and terrorism sponsor, the Islamic Republic of Iran
He has more soldiers on active and reserve duty and more modern weapons – mostly from Russia and China – than any other nation in Latin America
Fulfilling Castro’s dream, he has funded a Communist insurgency against the United States, effectively annexing Bolivia, Nicaragua, Dominica, and Ecuador as surrogate states, and is developing cells in dozens of countries to create new fronts in this struggle.
He is allied with the narcotics-financed guerrillas against the government of Colombia, which the United States supports in its war against drug trafficking
He has numerous assocaiions with terorrists, money launderers, kidnappers, and drug traffickers.
He has more hard assets (the Citgo oil company) and soft assets (Hollywood stars, politicians, lobbyists, and media connections) than any other foreign power.
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Chavez longs for the ear when there will be no liberal international order to constrain his dream of a worldwide “socialist” revolution: no World Bank, no International Monetary Fund, no Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, no World Trade Organization, no international law, not economic necessity for modernization and globalilzation. And perhaps more important, he longs for the day when the United States no longer policies the world’s playing fields. Chavez has spent more than $100 billion trying to minimize the impact of each international institution on Latin America. He is clearly opposed to international cooperation that does not endorse the Cuba-Venezuela government philosophy.
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According to reports from among its 2,400 former members, the FARC resembles a mafia crime gang more than a Communist guerrilla army, but Chavez disagrees, calling the FARC, “insurgent forces that have a political project.” They “are not terrorists, they are true armies… they must be recognized.”
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Chavez’s goal in life are to complete Simon Bolivar’s dream to united Latin America and Castro’s dream to communize it.
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Since he was elected, Chavez’s public relations machinery has spent close to a billion dollars in the United States to convince Americas that he alone is telling the true story.
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There are a number of influential Americans who have been attracted by Chavez’s money. These influde the 1996 Republican vice-presidential candidate Jack Kemp, who has repaed large dees trying to sell Chavez’s oil to the U.S. government; Tom Boggs, one of the most powerful lobbyists in Washington D.C.; Giuliani Partners, the lobbying arms of the former New York mayor and presidential hopeful (principal lobbyists for Chavez’s CITGO oil company in Texas); former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney’s Bain Associates, which prospered by handling Chavez’s oil and bond interests; and Joseph P. Kennedy II of Massachusetts, who advertises Chavez’s oil discounts to low-income Americans, a program that reaches more than a million American families (Kennedy and Chavez cast this program as nonpolitical philanthropy).
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Chavez’s schoolteacher parents could not afford to raise all of their six children at home, so the two older boys, Adan and Hugo, were sent to live with their grandmother, Rosa Ines. Several distinguished Chavez-watchers, including Alvaro Vargas Llosa, have theorized that his being locked in cloastes at home and then sent away by his parents to grow up elsewhere constituted a seminal rejection that gave rise to what Vargas Llosa called Chavez’s “messianic inferiority complex” – his overarching yearning to be loved and his irrepressible need to act out.
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Chavez began living the life of a Communist double agent. “During the day I’m a career military officer who does his job,” he told his lover Herma Marksman, “but at night I work on achieving the transformations this country needs.” His nights were filled with secret meetings of Communist subversives and co-conspirators, often in disguises, planning the armed overthrow of the government.
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In 1979, he was transferred to Caracas to teach at his former military academic. It was the perfect perch from which to build a network of officers sympathetic to his revolutionary cause.
Chavez also expanded the circle of his ideological mentors. By far the most important of these was Douglas Bravo, an unreconstructed communist who disobeyed Moscow’s orders after détente to give up the armed struggle against the United States. Bravo was the leader of the Party of the Venezuelan Revolution (PVR) and the Armed Forces of National Liberation. Chavez actively recruited his military friends to the PVR, couching it in the rhetoric of Bolivarianism to make it more palatable to their sensibilities.
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From 1981 to 1984, a determined Chavez began secretly converting his students at the military academy to co-conspirators; ironically his day job was to teach Venezuelan military history with an emphasis on promoting military professionalism and noninvolvement in politics.
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Chavez emerged from jail in 1994 a hero to Venezuela’s poor. He had also, while imprisoned, assiduously courted the international left, who helped him build an impressive war-chest – including, it was recently revealed, $150,000 from the FARC guerrillas of Colombia.
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John Maisto, the US ambassador to Venezuela, at one point called Chavez a “terrorist” because of his coup attempt and denied him a visa to visit the United States. In reply, Chavez mocked Maisto by taking his Visa credit card from his wallet and waiving it about, saying, “I already have a Visa!”
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Corruption made a good campaign issue for Chavez, but when it came time to do something about it, he balked. Chavez initially appointed Jesus Urdaneta – one of the four saman tree oath takers – as anticorruption czar. But Urdaneta was too energetic and effective for the President, within five months he had identified forty cases of corruption within Chavez’s own administration. Chavez refused to back his czar, who was eventually pushed out of office by the very people he was investigating. Chavez did nothing to save him.
In 1999 Chavez started a give-away project called “Plan Bolivar 2000.” Implemented by Chavez loyalists organized in groups known as Bolivarian Circles, the project was modeled after the Communist bloc committees in Castro’s Cuba The plan was basically a social welfare program that mirrored the populist ethic…. In eighteen months, Bolivar 2000 had become so corrupt that it had to be disbanded.
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Independent studies estimate that the amounts taken from Venezuelan poverty and development funds by middlemen, brokers, and subcontractors – all of whom charge an “administrative” cost for passing on the funds – range as high as 80 percent to 90 percent. By contrast, the U.S. government, the World Bank, nongovernmental organizations, and international charities limit their administrative costs to 20 percent of project funds; the Nobal Peace Prize winning Doctors without Borders, for example, spends only 16 percent on administration.
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Between 1999 and 2009, Chavez has spent some 20,000 hours on television.
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Hugo Chavez is implementing a sophisticated oil war against the United Sates. To understand this you have to look back to 1999, when he asked the Venezuelan Congress for emergency executive powers and got them, whereupon he consolidated government power to his advantage. His big move was to take full control over the national oil company PDVSA. Chavez replaced PDVSA’s directors and managers with military or political loyalists, many of whom knew little to nothing about the oil business. This action rankled the company’s professional and technical employees – some 50,000 of them – who enjoyed the only true meritocracy in the country. Citgo…. Later received similar treatment.
Chavez in effect demodernized and de-Americanized PDVAS, which had adopted organizational efficiency cultures similar to its predecessors ExxonMobil and Shell, by claiming that they were ideologically incorrect. Chavez compared this to Haiti’s elimination of French culture under Toussain L’Ouverture in the early 1800s.
The president’s effort to dumb down the business was evident early on. In 1999 Chavez fired Science Applications International Corporations (Known as SAIC), an enormous U.S.-based global information technology firm that had served as PDVSA’s back office since 1995 (as it had for British Petroleum and other energy companies).
SAIC appealed to an international court and got a judgement against Chavez for stealing SAIC’s knowledge without compensation. Chavez ignored the judgement, refusing to pay “one penny”.
Stripped of SAIC technology and thousands of oil professionals who quit out of frustration, PDVSA steadily lost operational capacity from 1999 to 2001. Well maintenance suffered; production investment was slashed, oil productivity declined; environmental standards were ignored; and safety accidents proliferated. After the 2002 stroke that led to Chavez’s brief removal from power, PDVSA sacked some 18,000 more of it’s knowledge workers. Its production fell to 2.4 million barrels per day.
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After Venezuela’s 2006 presidential election, Chavez…told three American oil companies – ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, and Chevron – to turn over 60 percent of their heavy oil exploration [which they had spent a decade and nearly $20 billion developing] or leave Venezuela.
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Oil has caused a massive shift in the wealth of nations. All told, $12 trillion has been transferred from the oil consumers to the oil producers since 2002. This is a very large figure – it is comparable to the 2006 GDP of the United States – and it has contributed greatly to our unprecedented trade deficit; a weakening of the dollar; and the weakness of the U.S. financial system in surviving the housing mortgage crisis.
Two decades ago, private companies controlled half the world’s oil reserved, but today they only control 13 percent… While many Americans believe that big oil is behind the high prices at the gas pump, the fact is that the national oil companies controlled by Chavez of Venezuela, Ahmadinejad of Iran, and Putin of Russia are the real culprits.
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When Chavez’s plane first landed in Havana in 1994, Fidel Castro greeted him at the airport. What made Hugo Chavez important to Castro then was the same thing that makes him important to the United States now: oil. Castro’s plan to weaken America – which he had to shelve when the Soviet Union collapsed and Cuba lost its USSR oil and financial subsidy – was dusted off.
The Chavez Castro condominium was a two-way street. Chavez soon began delivering from 50,000 to 90,000 barrels of oil per day to Castro, a subsidy eventually worth $3 billion to $4 billion per year, which far exceeded the sugar subsidy Castro once received from the Soviet Union until Gorbachev ended it around 1980. Castro used the huge infusion of Chavez’s cash to solidify his absolute control in Cuba and to crack down on political dissidents.
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Chavez’s predatory, undemocratic, and destabilizing actions are not limited to Venezuela.
Chavez is striving to remake Latin America in his own image, and for his own purposes – purposes that mirror Fidel Castro’s half-aborted but never abandoned plans for hemispheric revolution hatched half a decade ago.
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Hugo Chavez sees himself as leading the revolutionary charge that Fidel Castro always wanted to mount but was never able to spread beyond the shores of the island prison he created in the Caribbean. Ye four decades after taking power, Castro found a surrogate, a right arm who could carry on the work that he could not.
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[Chavez] routinely uses oil to bribe Latin American states into lining up against the United States, either by subsidizing oil in the surrogate state or by using oil to interfere in other countries’ elections.
For instance, in 1999 Chavez created Petrocaribe, a company that provides oil discounts with delayed payments to thirteen Caribbean nations. It was so successful at fulfilling it’s real purpose – buying influence and loyalty – that two years later Chavez created PetroSur, which does the same for twenty Central and South American nations, at an annual cost to Venezuela’s treasury of an estimated $1 billion.
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From 2005 to 2007 alone, Chavez gave away a total of $39 billion in oil and cash; $9.9 billion to Argentina, $7.5 billion to Cuba, $4.9 billion to Ecuador, and $4.9 billion from Nicaragua were the largest sums Chavez gave…
At a time when U.S. influence is waning – in part owing to Washington’s preoccupation with Iraq and the Middle East – Chavez has filled the void. The United States provides less than $1 billion in foreign economic aid to the entire region, a figure that rises to only $1.6 billion in foreign economic aid to the entire region… Chavez, meanwhile, spends nearly $9 billion in the region every single year. And his money is always welcome because it comes with no strings. The World Bank and IMF, by contrast, require concomitant reforms – for instance, efforts to fight corruption, drug trafficking, and money laundering – in return for grants and loans.
Consequently, over the course of a handful of years, virtually all the Latin American countries have wound up dependent on Venezuela’s oil or money or both. These include not just resource-poor nations; in Latin America only Mexico and Peru are fully independent of Chavez’s money.
One consequence: at the Organization of American States (OAS), which serves as a mini-United Nations for Latin America, Venezuela has assumed the position of the “veto” vote that once belonged to the United States.
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Since Chavez has been president of Venezuela, the OAS has not passed on substantive resolution supported by the United States when Chavez was on the opposite side.
In all, since coming to power in 1999, Chavez has spent or committed an estimated $110 billion – some say twice the amount needed to eliminate poverty in Venezuela forever – in more than thirty countries to advance his anti-American agenda. Since 2005, Chavez’s total foreign aid budget for Latin America has been more than $50 billion – much more than the amount of U.S. foreign aid for the region over the same period.
Many of these expenditures have been hidden from the Venezuelan public in secret off-budget slush funds.The result is that Chavez now, by any measure, the most powerful figure in Latin America.
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During Morale’s first year in office, 2006, Chavez contributed a whopping $1 billion in aid to Bolivia (equivalent to 12 percent of the country’s GDP). He also provided access to one of Venezuela’s presidential jets, sent a forty-soldier personal guard to accompany Morales at all times, subsidized the pay of Bolivia’s military, and paid to send thousands of Cuban doctors to Bolivia’s barrio health clinics.
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After his political success in Bolivia, Chavez has aggressively supported every anti-American presidential candidate in the region. U.S. policymakers console themselves by claiming that Chavez’s favorites have mostly been defeated by pro-American centrists. The truth is more complex. Chavez came close to winning every one of those contests, and lost only when he overplayed his hand. More troubling, U.S. influence and prestige in Latin America is at perhaps its lowest ebb ever; today, being considered America’s ally is the political kiss of death.
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Since turning unabashedly criminal, the FARC has imported arms, exported drugs, recruited minors, kidnapped thousands for ransom, executed hostages, hijacked planes, planted land mines, operated an extortion and protection racket in peasant communities, committed atrocities against innocent civilians, and massacred farmers as traitors…
A long-held ambition of the FARC’s leadership is to have the group officially recognized as a belligerent force, a legitimate army in rebellion. Such a designation – conferred by individual nations and under international law – would give the FARC rights normally accorded only to sovereign powers.
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Uribe, a calm and soft-spoken attorney, set out methodologically to finish what Pastrana had begun.
To Chavez, any friend of the United States is his enemy, and any enemy of a friend of the United States is his friend – even a terrorist organization working to destabilize one of his country’s most important neighbors.
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The relationship [between Chavez and the FARC] began more than a decade and a half ago, in the wake of Chavez’s failed coup. In 1992, the FARC gave a jailed Chavez $150,000, money that launched him to the presidency.
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Perhaps the most sinister aspect to Chavez’s relationship with the FARC is the help he has provided to maximize its cocaine sales to the United States and Europe. British journalist John Carlin, who writes for The Guardian, a newspaper generally supportive of Chavez, secured interviews with several of the 2,400 FARC guerrillas who deserted the group in 2007. One of his subject told him that “the guerillas have a non-aggression pact with the Venezuelan military. The Venezuelan government lets FARC operate freely because they share the same left-wing, Bolivarian ideals, and because FARC bribes their people. Without cocaine revenues, the FARC would disappear, its former members assert. “If it were not for cocaine, the fuel that feeds the Colombian war, FARC would long ago have disbanded.”
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Iran and Venezuela are working together to drive up the price of oil in hopes of crippling the American economy and enhancing their hegemonies in the Middle East and Latin America. They are using their windfall petro-revenues to finance a simmering war – sometimes cold, sometimes hot, sometimes covert, sometimes overt – against the United States.
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As Chavez told Venezuelans repeatedly, Saddam’s fate was also what he feared for himself.
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Hugo Chavez’s first reaction after the attack on the camp of narcoterrorist Raul Reyes was to accuse Colombia of behaving like Israel. “We’re not going to allow an Israel in the region,” he said.
Actually the parallel is not far off. Like Colombia, Israel is a state that wishes to live in peace with its neighbors, but they insist on destroying it. Israel’s fondest wish would be for the Palestinians to be capable of building a peaceful and prosperous nation with which Israel could establish normal relations.
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American officials have also submitted some 130 written requests for basic biographical or immigration-related information, such as entry and exit dates into and out of Venezuela, for suspected terrorists. Not one of the requests has generated a substantive response.
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Michael Rowan talked about the book he co-wrote, The Threat Closer to Home: Hugo Chavez and the War Against America, on C-SPAN. Former U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela Otto Reich joined him to comment on the book. Ray Walser moderated. Discussion topics included the global geopolitical impact of Venezuela’s decreasing economic and personal freedoms and what the U.S. can do. Then both men responded to questions from members of the audience.