MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Cháves, Fidel and Bush

The imminent 1,5 million barrel per day oil output reduction sponsored by OPEC member countries, which is expected to force prices up in mid northern hemisphere winter, will have a negative impact in heating bills and could also attract the incoming Bush administration's attention in Venezuela. Maverick president and former paratrooper Hugo Cháves not only heads a country that is a vital oil supplier of the United States but also has injected life to the until recently disarrayed OPEC organization. What particularly frustrated Americans was the fact that president Cháves in a recent round up consensus tour of OPEC countries visited president Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, consequently managing to prop prices above the 30 dollars mark. President Cháves also has close links with the Colombian guerrilla groups that in his own words are fighting the "corrupt bourgeois system" of the ruling class in that country. The US government is granting Colombia 1,4 billion US dollars to combat the drug trade which is believed to be closely linked and even protected by the guerrilla movements that dominate a fifth of Colombian territory, and is not very pleased with those remarks. Besides Mr. Cháves by successive plebiscite and elections, virtually put an end in the polls, to the traditional political parties, eliminating Congress to Congress influence with other regional democracies. Furthermore he promoted an oil assistance program to most Caribbean and Central American countries, granting him an extraordinary political leverage, and crowned the effort with a state visit to Venezuela of Cuban leader Fidel Castro, one of the beneficiaries of the cheap oil program. Now Mr. Cháves is actively backing the oil production drop and remembers Western consumers that most of the gasoline price at the pump is made up of local taxes, and not OPEC's greediness. With just a few days for the taking office of elected president George Bush Jr., and for a family closely linked to the oil industry, whose father fought the Gulf War in an attempt to topple Saddam Hussein, and even before such characters as former Panamanian president Manuel Noriega, believed to be linked to the drug trade and informer of Mr. Fidel Castro,