Chavez, oil, banks and Gore

Within the last few hours, Hugo Chavez, Venezuela’s answer to the question never asked, announced that he was seizing operational control of the Orinoco Belt oil reserves. From Reuters;

The importance of this is that we are taking back control of the Orinoco Belt which the president rightly calls the world’s biggest crude reserve,” said Marco Ojeda, an oil union leader before a planned rally to mark the transfer.

The four projects are valued at more than $30 billion and can convert about 600,000 barrels per day (bpd) of heavy, tarry crude into valuable synthetic oil.

This comes the day after Venezuela announced it was pulling out of the IMF and the World Bank. From the AP;

President Hugo Chavez announced Monday he would formally pull Venezuela out of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, a largely symbolic move because the nation has already paid off its debts to the lending institutions.

“We will no longer have to go to Washington nor to the IMF nor to the World Bank, not to anyone,” said the leftist leader, who has long railed against the Washington-based lending institutions.

Well, that’s all jim dandy. But it all comes just a few days after Al Gore snubbed Columbian President Alvaro Uribe at a climate change conference in Miami. From Wall Street Journal’s Mary Anatasia O’Grady (may require subscription);

Al Gore may not have known that he was taking the side of a former terrorist and ally of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez when he waded into Colombian politics 10 days ago. But that’s not much consolation to 45 million Colombians who watched their country’s already fragile international image suffer another unjust blow, this time at the hands of a former U.S. vice president.

The event was a climate-change conference in Miami, where Mr. Gore and Colombian President Álvaro Uribe were set to share the stage. At the last minute, Mr. Gore notified the conference organizers that he refused to appear with Mr. Uribe because of “deeply troubling” allegations of human- rights violations swirling around the Colombian government.

It is not clear whether the ex-veep knows that making unsubstantiated claims of human-rights violations has been a key guerrilla weapon for more than a decade, along with the more traditional practices of murdering, maiming and kidnapping civilians. Nor is it clear whether Mr. Gore knew that the recycled charges that caught his attention are being hyped by Colombian Sen. Gustavo Petro, a close friend of Mr. Chávez and former member of the pro-Cuban M-19 terrorist group. What we do know is that Mr. Gore’s line of reasoning — that Colombia is not good enough to rub shoulders with the righteous gringos — is also being peddled by some Democrats in Congress, the AFL-CIO and other forces of anti-globalization. The endgame is all about killing the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement.

I find it difficult to believe that Al Gore didn’t know that he was interferring in one of the President’s most successful programs in bringing our hemisphere’s neighbors and allies closer and a real attempt at trying to stem the illegal immigration flow at it’s source.

I’m also pretty certain that Chavez moved against the oil companies and the banks secure in the knowledge that he has the tacit support of Al Gore and the Leftists in this country. Afterall, as long as Chavez remains anti-Bush, he’s in good company with the Democrats, Iran and al Qaida.

Gore’s refusal to meet with the leader of our closest Latin American ally in the war against terror, and one of our few allies that won’t kowtow to Chavez’s attempt to become the next Simon Bolivar was probably puposely orchestrated to embarrass Uribe and to punish him politically for standing with Bush, despite the benefit to his own countrymen and the region.

Manbearpig is just a childish, immature halfwit.

Thanks, again, Florida. 

Category: Economy, Foreign Policy, Hugo Chavez, Politics