orang miskin ama orang miskin bersatu, tidak mengenal
lintas negara.
si bush tolol langsung disetut KO oleh chaves.
============================================
How Venezuela's Chavez plays the aid game
Gwynne Dyer, London
It's all part of the long-running propaganda war
between Washington and Caracas, of course, but
President Hugo Chavez scored a major hit on Thursday
when he announced that a Venezuelan ship was nearing
the U.S. with 300,000 barrels of gasoline (petrol) to
help the stricken Gulf coast, where most oil-refining
capacity was crippled by Hurricane Katrina.
Speaking in New York, where he was attending the
United Nations World Summit, Chavez added that
Louisiana Governor Louise Blanco had accepted the
shipment in a telephone conversation that morning, and
that this was only the first installment of a promised
million-barrel supply.
Chavez, who has publicly blamed U.S. President George
W Bush for bungling the relief effort, said that
Venezuela was also ready to supply up to eight
electricity generators and eight water purification
plants. The Venezuelan-owned Citgo Petroleum Corp. has
pledged US$1 million in aid and set up relief shelters
for victims of the hurricane. It is the propaganda
opportunity of a lifetime for the radical Venezuelan
leader, who regularly accuses the Bush administration
of plotting to assassinate him and/or invade
Venezuela, and he is not holding back.
No doubt ordinary Venezuelans, and probably Chavez
himself, feel genuine sympathy for the stricken
survivors of Hurricane Katrina. Who could not? But
they also give Chavez the chance to send a message to
his own voters and the citizens of other Caribbean and
Central American countries. It is that the wicked
capitalists who run the U.S. government don't even
care about America's own poor people, especially if
they are black, and that the only hope is for mutual
help and solidarity among the poor themselves.
This has been Chavez's message for the Venezuelans
themselves ever since he came to power seven years
ago, and his immense popularity with the Venezuelan
poor (almost half of the oil-rich country's 25 million
people live below the poverty line) has been confirmed
in half a dozen elections and referendums. His message
is as much about racial justice as economic equality,
for Chavez himself, like most poor Venezuelans, is of
mixed African and native Indian ancestry, while the
country's old elite is overwhelmingly white.
Latterly, the surging oil price has given Chavez the
means to transfer this message to the international
stage. It has been called "petromedical" diplomacy,
and its foundation is a close collaboration between
Chavez and Cuban leader Fidel Castro. There are
profound differences of generation and political style
between Chavez's populist "Bolivarian" democracy and
Castro's Communist dictatorship, but their hostility
to U.S. domination of the region and their commitment
to the poor are the same, and they each bring one
major asset to the table.
Cuba's is its remarkable and entirely free health-care
system, which has one of the highest doctor-to-patient
ratios in the world. Venezuela's is oil. The two
countries had already done a swap in which Venezuela
supplies Cuba with cut-price oil in return for the
long-term loan of about 20,000 Cuban health workers
(including 14,000 doctors) whose free clinics have
been transforming health care in rural areas and in
the desperate, stinking barrios that surround
Venezuela's major cities, but soaring oil prices over
the past year opened up new possibilities.
On June 29, Venezuela and thirteen Caribbean countries
signed the Petrocaribe accord under which they will
pay only 60 percent of the market price of Venezuelan
oil, with the rest converted into a low-interest
25-year loan, whenever the oil price exceeds $50 a
barrel. Other countries in Latin America will soon be
signing similar agreements. And the message is always
about the solidarity of the poor against the powerful,
both domestically and internationally.
All this has attracted the anger of the current U.S.
administration, which accuses Chavez of seeking to
"destabilize" the region and is generally believed to
have backed a failed coup attempt against Chavez in
2002. So when television evangelist Pat Robertson, a
former presidential hopeful and a friend of President
Bush, called for Chavez's assassination on his
Christian Broadcasting Network last month, Chavez
responded not with invective but with a politically
adroit show of concern for those Americans who live in
conditions not entirely dissimilar to the Latin
American poor.
He offered to sell Venezuelan heating oil directly at
40 percent below market price to seven or eight
million poor Americans. "A large number of them die of
cold in the winter," he explained. He also offered
free eye surgery to Americans without health care
coverage, although the surgery would almost certainly
be done by Cuban doctors. (Castro has committed to
providing six million free cataract operations for
poor people from neighboring countries over the next
ten years.) It was intended to embarrass the United
States, and it did.
The current play over aid for the Katrina victims is
an extension of the same strategy. The hurricane's
aftermath vividly demonstrated the Third-World living
conditions and social isolation of many of America's
black poor to a global audience, and the Bush
administration could not decently block Venezuelan aid
for those people when it was accepting help from so
many other countries. Game, set and match to Chavez.
Well, game and set, anyway. The match will continue
for the indefinite future, unless Washington manages
to overthrow Chavez one of these days. But he is
certainly a competent player of the game.
The writer is a London-based independent journalist.
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