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 News from Around the Americas | December 2005 
Chavez Defies Bush and Buys Arms from Spain
 Roméo Langlois - Le Figaro
| | An opponent of President Hugo Chavez takes part in protest against the Electoral National Council (CNE in Spanish) in Caracas on 27 November. The United States denied claims by Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez that it had encouraged three opposition parties to boycott weekend elections.(AFP/Andrew Alvarez) |
Ships and military aircraft sold to Caracas represent a 1.7 billion Euro sale. The United States has done everything to block the transaction.
Boosted by oil prices, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has just bought himself a new arsenal to defend his "Bolivarian Revolution," incidentally blowing a raspberry at Washington. In this context, the Spanish armaments industry has brought off a historic contract. The agreement, officialized Monday in Caracas in the presence of Spanish Defense Minister José Bono, anticipates Venezuela's purchase of four warships, as many coastal patrol boats, ten troop transport planes and two maritime reconnaissance planes. The estimated value of the transaction, which will re-launch a Spanish naval industry presently in bad shape: 1.7 billion Euros.
"More than a commercial act, it's a demonstration of dignity" on Spain's part, exclaimed a triumphant Hugo Chavez. The Chief of State warmly thanked King Juan Carlos, José Luis Zapatero's government, and all Spaniards - this "free and honorable" people who "do not bow to Empire," he stated.
The United States had, in fact, done everything to block this sale of military material to leftist populist Hugo Chavez's Venezuela, its president the continental champion of anti-Americanism, who happily characterizes George W. Bush as a "genocidal and crazy" president and accuses him regularly of weaving plots against his regime. On the grounds that the Spanish ships are endowed with American navigation technology, Washington is still trying to obtain an annulment of the transaction. But "if necessary, the company will use an alternative technology," José Bono retorted Monday.
Bogotá Accuses Caracas
The campaign to modernize the Venezuelan military and Hugo Chavez's spats with Washington are not limited to this purchase of Spanish ships and airplanes. The Pentagon, which had already tried to capsize Venezuela's planned purchase of a satellite from China, also worries about Caracas's desire to replace its fleet of 21 F-16 fighter planes with Russian Mig 29s. In the face of the American administration's suspension of the dispatch of replacement parts for the F-16, Hugo Chavez recently made Washington give in, by threatening to give the American planes to Cuba, or even to China.
According to political analyst Alberto Garrido, a fervent partisan of "Chavezism" who was quoted in the Miami Herald, "all the [Venezuelan] civil-military structure is organized to respond to the hypothesis of an asymmetric war." According to him, the generals have identified four possible threats: "One: the possibility of an extension of the Colombian conflict. Two: the intervention of a multinational force authorized by the United Nations or the Organization of American States - which is unlikely. Three: the possibility of a coup d'état. And four: an American invasion of Venezuela."
Hence Chavez's strategy of diversifying arms suppliers and the accelerated militarization of society, which makes detractors decry the "Cubanization" of Venezuela. A great friend of Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez has increased medical and educational missions - which include numerous Cubans - to poor neighborhoods. According to American intelligence agencies, 15,000 Cuban officers work on Venezuelan soil at present to export the "Chavez Revolution" to Latino countries.
Hugo Chavez's light weapons policy preoccupies Washington and its principal regional ally, the Colombia of right-wing President Alvaro Uribe, himself bogged down in a four-year-old conflict with Marxist guerrillas. In spite of their good trade relations, a little cold war air blows between these two countries, which share a violent border where guerrilla groups, extreme right-wing militias, and narco-traffickers prowl; and the mini-arms race between the two countries is the subject of many newspaper columns in the region. Bogotá accuses Caracas of supporting guerrilla groups; Hugo Chavez accuses his Colombian homologue of supporting Washington's "anti-Chavez" policy.
Now, beginning early next year, the Venezuelan president counts on launching the manufacture of a handgun made in Venezuela, called the RRR, for "Rapid Revolutionary Response." It will be sold for a modest sum to the army and police, but General Gustavo Ochoa Mendez, Director of the national armaments company, Cavim, does not exclude the possibility of distributing it to the civilian population also. Even more worrying for Bogotá and Washington is Venezuela's purchase, now underway, of 100,000 Kalashnikovs from Russia to replace the army's FAL rifles. Washington and Bogotá fear that they'll come to increase the firepower of Colombian armed groups. |
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