![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/arielsheen.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/06\/The-Threat-Closer-to-Home-Michael-Rowan.jpg?resize=333%2C500&ssl=1\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Michael Rowan is the author of The Threat Closer to Home: Hugo Chavez and the War Against America<\/a>\u00a0and 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.<\/p>\n (2)<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m still a subversive,\u201d Chavez has admitted. \u201cI think the entire world should be subverted.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Hugo Chavez to Jan James of the Associated Press, September 23, 2007<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n (4)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n One cannot discount how much Castro\u2019s aura has shaped Chavez\u2019s thoughts and actions.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n (5)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n 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:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n His de facto dictatorship gives him absolute control over Venezuela\u2019s military, oil production, and treasury.<\/p>\n He harbors oil reserves second only to those of Saudi Arabia; Venezuela\u2019s annual windfall profits exceed the net worth of Bill Gates.<\/p>\n He has a strategic military and oil alliance with a major American foe and terrorism sponsor, the Islamic Republic of Iran<\/p>\n He has more soldiers on active and reserve duty and more modern weapons \u2013 mostly from Russia and China \u2013 than any other nation in Latin America<\/p>\n Fulfilling Castro\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n He is allied with the narcotics-financed guerrillas against the government of Colombia, which the United States supports in its war against drug trafficking<\/p>\n He has numerous assocaiions with terorrists, money launderers, kidnappers, and drug traffickers.<\/p>\n He has more hard assets (the Citgo oil company) and soft assets (Hollywood stars, politicians, lobbyists, and media connections) than any other foreign power.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n (6)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Chavez longs for the ear when there will be no liberal international order to constrain his dream of a worldwide \u201csocialist\u201d 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n (10)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n 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, \u201cinsurgent forces that have a political project.\u201d They \u201care not terrorists, they are true armies\u2026 they must be recognized.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n (11)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Chavez\u2019s goal in life are to complete Simon Bolivar\u2019s dream to united Latin America and Castro\u2019s dream to communize it.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n (13)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Since he was elected, Chavez\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n (14)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n There are a number of influential Americans who have been attracted by Chavez\u2019s money. These influde the 1996 Republican vice-presidential candidate Jack Kemp, who has repaed large dees trying to sell Chavez\u2019s 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\u2019s CITGO oil company in Texas); former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney\u2019s Bain Associates, which prospered by handling Chavez\u2019s oil and bond interests; and Joseph P. Kennedy II of Massachusetts, who advertises Chavez\u2019s 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).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n (19)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Chavez\u2019s 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\u2019s \u201cmessianic inferiority complex\u201d \u2013 his overarching yearning to be loved and his irrepressible need to act out.<\/p>\n (26)<\/p>\n Chavez began living the life of a Communist double agent. \u201cDuring the day I\u2019m a career military officer who does his job,\u201d he told his lover Herma Marksman, \u201cbut at night I work on achieving the transformations this country needs.\u201d His nights were filled with secret meetings of Communist subversives and co-conspirators, often in disguises, planning the armed overthrow of the government.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n (27)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s orders after d\u00e9tente 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.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n (32)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n (45)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Chavez emerged from jail in 1994 a hero to Venezuela\u2019s poor. He had also, while imprisoned, assiduously courted the international left, who helped him build an impressive war-chest \u2013 including, it was recently revealed, $150,000 from the FARC guerrillas of Colombia.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n (46)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n John Maisto, the US ambassador to Venezuela, at one point called Chavez a \u201cterrorist\u201d 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, \u201cI already have a Visa!\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n (48)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n 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 \u2013 one of the four saman tree oath takers \u2013 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In 1999 Chavez started a give-away project called \u201cPlan Bolivar 2000.\u201d Implemented by Chavez loyalists organized in groups known as Bolivarian Circles, the project was modeled after the Communist bloc committees in Castro\u2019s Cuba The plan was basically a social welfare program that mirrored the populist ethic\u2026. In eighteen months, Bolivar 2000 had become so corrupt that it had to be disbanded.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n (49)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Independent studies estimate that the amounts taken from Venezuelan poverty and development funds by middlemen, brokers, and subcontractors \u2013 all of whom charge an \u201cadministrative\u201d cost for passing on the funds \u2013 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.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n (52)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Between 1999 and 2009, Chavez has spent some 20,000 hours on television.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n (69)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n 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\u2019s directors and managers with military or political loyalists, many of whom knew little to nothing about the oil business. This action rankled the company\u2019s professional and technical employees \u2013 some 50,000 of them \u2013 who enjoyed the only true meritocracy in the country. Citgo\u2026. Later received similar treatment.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n 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\u2019s elimination of French culture under Toussain L\u2019Ouverture in the early 1800s.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The president\u2019s 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\u2019s back office since 1995 (as it had for British Petroleum and other energy companies).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n SAIC appealed to an international court and got a judgement against Chavez for stealing SAIC\u2019s knowledge without compensation. Chavez ignored the judgement, refusing to pay \u201cone penny\u201d.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n 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\u2019s brief removal from power, PDVSA sacked some 18,000 more of it\u2019s knowledge workers. Its production fell to 2.4 million barrels per day.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n (68)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n After Venezuela\u2019s 2006 presidential election, Chavez\u2026told three American oil companies \u2013 ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, and Chevron \u2013 to turn over 60 percent of their heavy oil exploration [which they had spent a decade and nearly $20 billion developing] or leave Venezuela.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n (72)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n 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 \u2013 it is comparable to the 2006 GDP of the United States \u2013 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.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Two decades ago, private companies controlled half the world\u2019s oil reserved, but today they only control 13 percent\u2026 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.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n (73)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n When Chavez\u2019s 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\u2019s plan to weaken America \u2013 which he had to shelve when the Soviet Union collapsed and Cuba lost its USSR oil and financial subsidy \u2013 was dusted off.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s cash to solidify his absolute control in Cuba and to crack down on political dissidents.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n (79)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Chavez\u2019s predatory, undemocratic, and destabilizing actions are not limited to Venezuela.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Chavez is striving to remake Latin America in his own image, and for his own purposes \u2013 purposes that mirror Fidel Castro\u2019s half-aborted but never abandoned plans for hemispheric revolution hatched half a decade ago.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n (81)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n (82)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n [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\u2019 elections.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n 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\u2019s real purpose \u2013 buying influence and loyalty \u2013 that two years later Chavez created PetroSur, which does the same for twenty Central and South American nations, at an annual cost to Venezuela\u2019s treasury of an estimated $1 billion.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n (83)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n 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\u2026<\/p>\n <\/p>\n At a time when U.S. influence is waning \u2013 in part owing to Washington\u2019s preoccupation with Iraq and the Middle East \u2013 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\u2026 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 \u2013 for instance, efforts to fight corruption, drug trafficking, and money laundering \u2013 in return for grants and loans.<\/p>\n Consequently, over the course of a handful of years, virtually all the Latin American countries have wound up dependent on Venezuela\u2019s oil or money or both. These include not just resource-poor nations; in Latin America only Mexico and Peru are fully independent of Chavez\u2019s money.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cveto\u201d vote that once belonged to the United States.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n (84)<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n In all, since coming to power in 1999, Chavez has spent or committed an estimated $110 billion \u2013 some say twice the amount needed to eliminate poverty in Venezuela forever \u2013 in more than thirty countries to advance his anti-American agenda. Since 2005, Chavez\u2019s total foreign aid budget for Latin America has been more than $50 billion \u2013 much more than the amount of U.S. foreign aid for the region over the same period.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n (85)<\/p>\n During Morale\u2019s first year in office, 2006, Chavez contributed a whopping $1 billion in aid to Bolivia (equivalent to 12 percent of the country\u2019s GDP). He also provided access to one of Venezuela\u2019s presidential jets, sent a forty-soldier personal guard to accompany Morales at all times, subsidized the pay of Bolivia\u2019s military, and paid to send thousands of Cuban doctors to Bolivia\u2019s barrio health clinics.<\/p>\n (86)<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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\u2019s ally is the political kiss of death.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n (91)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n 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\u2026<\/p>\n <\/p>\n A long-held ambition of the FARC\u2019s leadership is to have the group officially recognized as a belligerent force, a legitimate army in rebellion. Such a designation \u2013 conferred by individual nations and under international law \u2013 would give the FARC rights normally accorded only to sovereign powers.<\/p>\n (93)<\/p>\n Uribe, a calm and soft-spoken attorney, set out methodologically to finish what Pastrana had begun.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n To Chavez, any friend of the United States is his enemy, and any enemy of a friend of the United States is his friend \u2013 even a terrorist organization working to destabilize one of his country\u2019s most important neighbors.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n (94)<\/p>\n The relationship [between Chavez and the FARC] began more than a decade and a half ago, in the wake of Chavez\u2019s failed coup. In 1992, the FARC gave a jailed Chavez $150,000, money that launched him to the presidency.<\/p>\n (95)<\/p>\n Perhaps the most sinister aspect to Chavez\u2019s 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 \u201cthe 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. \u201cIf it were not for cocaine, the fuel that feeds the Colombian war, FARC would long ago have disbanded.\u201d<\/p>\n (104)<\/p>\n 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 \u2013 sometimes cold, sometimes hot, sometimes covert, sometimes overt \u2013 against the United States.<\/p>\n (105)<\/p>\n As Chavez told Venezuelans repeatedly, Saddam\u2019s fate was also what he feared for himself.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n (119)<\/p>\n Hugo Chavez\u2019s first reaction after the attack on the camp of narcoterrorist Raul Reyes was to accuse Colombia of behaving like Israel. \u201cWe\u2019re not going to allow an Israel in the region,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n 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\u2019s fondest wish would be for the Palestinians to be capable of building a peaceful and prosperous nation with which Israel could establish normal relations.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n (123)<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n (126)<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Michael Rowan talked about the book he co-wrote, The Threat Closer to Home: Hugo Chavez and the War Against America<\/a>, 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\u2019s decreasing economic and personal freedoms and what the U.S. can do. Then both men responded to questions from members of the audience.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Michael Rowan is the author of The Threat Closer to Home: Hugo Chavez and the War Against America\u00a0and 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. … Continue reading “Notes on The Threat Closer to Home: Hugo Chavez and the War Against America”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5,93,126,116,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7843","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","category-cuba","category-intelligence","category-systemic-subversion","category-venezuela"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8e7kf-22v","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arielsheen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7843","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arielsheen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arielsheen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arielsheen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arielsheen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7843"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/arielsheen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7843\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7845,"href":"https:\/\/arielsheen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7843\/revisions\/7845"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arielsheen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7843"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arielsheen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7843"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arielsheen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7843"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}