White House Offers No Vision On Venzuela Crisis

by Jim Lobe

With a possible invasion of Iraq pending, Washington is naturally worried about the continued impasse between President Hugo Chavez and his opposition and its impact on the world oil market, and U.S. oil supplies specifically. Venezuela normally supplies about 15 percent of U.S. oil imports.

But the administration of President George W. Bush, which is in the process of shuffling its top Latin America policymakers, appears to have few clear ideas about how to resolve the crisis, which has reduced the normal flow of 1.5 million barrels of oil a day to the United States to a trickle.

"The administration hasn't really known quite what to do for some time," said Michael Shifter, a South America specialist at the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue (IAD), a think-tank of analysts from both the United States and Latin America.

"So they've been playing catch-up on both the oil issue and on Brazil's latest mediation initiatives," he said. "So far as I can tell, they're still playing an essentially passive role, particularly compared with Brazil."

It was the government of Brazil's new president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, that both convened the "friends" -- Chile, Mexico, Spain, and Portugal, as well as the U.S. and Brazil -- and set its first ministerial meeting for Friday afternoon at the Washington headquarters of the Organization of American States (OAS).

OAS Secretary General Cesar Gaviria, who has led mediation efforts between Chavez and the opposition since last June, will also be taking part, and State Department officials told reporters Tuesday that Secretary of State Colin Powell will lead Washington's delegation.

But, like other top U.S. national-security officials, Powell has been preoccupied with the ongoing crises over Iraq, the Middle East, and North Korea, and analysts say they will be interested to see who, among a number of mid-ranking advisers with responsibility for Latin America policy, will have his ear.

Normally, the assistant secretary of state for western hemisphere affairs would be the key person, but that post is currently vacant due to Bush's decision announced earlier this month to replace Otto Reich, now being made a "special envoy" to Latin America, with Washington's current OAS ambassador, Roger Noriega. Another major contender for influence is the top Latin America aide at the National Security Council, John Maisto.

Reich, a strongly anti-Castro Cuban-American who served as U.S. ambassador in Caracas, stumbled last April when he cleared a statement that was widely seen as endorsing a regime established quickly after a coup against Chavez and then actively pressed Latin American diplomats in Washington to follow the U.S. lead.

When Chavez was triumphantly returned to office by his supporters and loyal army troops three days later, Washington was deeply embarrassed.

The embarrassment was so great that Washington has seemed to show an unprecedented reluctance to get openly involved in the crisis, a frustration for the opposition and a boon to Chavez, who was further strengthened by the recent election of fellow-populists in Brazil and Ecuador.

Like Reich, Noriega, a Mexican-American who has yet to be confirmed by the Senate, is identified closely with right-wing Republicans, mostly due to his long service on the staff of the former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Jesse Helms. Maisto, who succeeded Reich in Caracas, is a career foreign service officer who has reportedly urged a more assertive and anti-Chavez position since an opposition strike/lockout began paralysing the country almost two months ago.

Powell had wanted to replace Reich with another foreign-service officer, Anne Patterson, currently ambassador to Colombia, but deep-pocketed anti-Castro exiles reportedly persuaded the White House to choose Noriega instead.

"Any hope that Latin America would be treated more seriously was dispelled by Noriega's appointment," according to Larry Birns of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA). Birns, who described Noriega as a "cruder but otherwise indistinguishable version of Otto Reich," said Powell's failure to spend more political capital to fight for his choice "demonstrated how little he is interested in the region".

Most U.S. government analysts believe that Chavez has strengthened his position over the past several weeks, as many small businesses in Venezuela have abandoned the strike and Brazil appears to have taken the initiative on the mediation front. Washington initially objected to the formation of the "friendly" nations into a group, fearing that it would weaken Gaviria's efforts but has since been reassured that this would not be the case.

Independent analysts like Shifter and Burns are hoping that Washington will cooperate closely with Brazil in the group, and they see it as a major test for how the two hemispheric giants will get along under Lula's administration.

Brazil reportedly favors a solution that Chavez himself has long suggested: a referendum on his continued rule will be held in August -- the earliest possible date under the current constitution. If he should be defeated, his vice president would take over, with new elections to follow within four months.

The opposition has insisted that such a timetable is too slow, given the magnitude of the economic and political crisis that the country faces, and that Chavez in any event, they say, cannot be trusted to carry out a free and fair poll. At one point, the White House appeared to endorse the opposition's call for an early election, but quickly retracted its statement, insisting that any vote would have to comply with the constitution.

Birns said the August referendum is probably the most practical solution but has to be dressed up as a "face-saving compromise" to which the opposition agrees. If it is seen as a victory for Chavez, not only is the opposition likely to become more embittered and desperate, but Chavez himself may become more intractable.

But if Washington calls for a vote earlier than August, "there is almost certain to be a confrontation between Venezuela and the U.S., and quite likely between Brazil and the U.S."

Shifter also believes that the August referendum makes the most sense, and that "Washington should lean on the opposition to accept that".

He said he is increasingly concerned about what he called a growing alliance between the Venezuelan opposition and the right-wing Cuban-American community in Miami, which held a march on behalf of the opposition last weekend and also sponsored a press conference by three anti-Chavista military officers.

"It seems the opposition sees the Cubans in Miami as key to pressuring the administration. This is something to watch very closely," said Shifter.

"What's really happening is that the higher levels in the administration are not paying attention," he added. "They're so consumed by Iraq and North Korea that they don't seem to understand that, given the volatility and escalation of violence which so far has been only sporadic, this has the potential to be a complete disaster for U.S. foreign policy."