Editorial.
The Washington Post.
Thursday, November 2, 2000; Page A28
HERE IS one prediction about the next president: He's going to need a
strategy toward Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. That's so because Mr. Chavez, a former
colonel who led a failed coup before winning power democratically two years ago,
is not just another Latin American strongman. He is a strongman who controls the
biggest oil reserves outside the Middle East, who supplies the United States
with a good chunk of its energy imports and who seems intent on spreading his
brand of leftist anti-Americanism throughout the region.
Mr. Chavez's role model appears to be Cuba's Fidel Castro, who concluded a
five-day visit to Venezuela on Monday. Mr. Chavez proclaimed that "our two
peoples are one and the same," and strutted about with his mentor in
copycat military outfits. Mr. Castro reminisced that the young Chavez government
reminded him of the early years of revolutionary Cuba, and dismissed Gov. George
W. Bush and Vice President Al Gore as "little gentlemen" of no
substance. As a going-home present, Mr. Castro got a promise of greatly
subsidized oil shipments.
Even before this embrace, Mr. Chavez had been conducting the kind of
anti-American foreign policy that Che Guevara might have smiled at. He turned
the recent OPEC summit into a platform to sound off against the West; he has
gone to Iraq to visit Saddam Hussein; he has flirted with the leftist opposition
in Bolivia and with Colombia's drug-peddling guerrillas. Meanwhile he has used
oil to buy influence in Central America and the Caribbean, recently signing a
deal to supply 12 countries there with cheap energy.
The next occupant of the White House may be tempted to hope that Mr. Chavez
is just posing. After all, the Venezuelan leader is democratically elected; he
mixes his wild rhetoric with pragmatic appeals for foreign investment; the U.S.
oil industry--whose voice would be especially loud in a Bush administration--has
an interest in mollifying him. But Mr. Chavez has now been sounding off against
the United States for two years. It would be foolish to assume he won't make
trouble where he can; one nightmare scenario has him recognizing the legitimacy
of a secessionist state declared by the Colombian rebels.
Rather than merely hoping for the best, the next president needs to limit
Mr. Chavez's opportunities to export his ideology. That means getting more
engaged with Latin America, as Gov. Bush has urged, including with the sort of
nation-building that he has often disparaged. If Latin America's democracies
fail and its economies collapse, popular frustration will create openings for
Mr. Chavez and his imitators. But if the United States helps moderate
governments succeed, the Chavez rhetoric may not matter.
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