I saw in separate news reports from AP and UPI that President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, (at the U.N. Climate Summit in Copenhagen, Denmark), accused the Netherlands of using its islands of Aruba, Curacao and Bonaire (off Venezuela’s Caribbean coast), as bases for United States military forces to launch an attack on Venezuela.
President Chavez was quoted in the AP report as saying “Europe should know that the North American empire is filling these islands with weapons, assassins, American intelligence units, and spy planes and war ships.”
That sounds like there is quite an array of military forces on these three islands, ready to strike at Venezuela.
Has he used recon aircraft of his own, (and possibly his own intelligence agents on the ground) to gather this information and bring back the proof, and if so, when will he reveal this proof at the United Nations?
Or was President Chavez just being misinformed by counter-revolutionaries in his own government and military?
Could he be making up this immediate foreign threat to draw attention away from his own domestic political problems?
He seems to think that by making the US “empire” the enemy, his people will rally around him and not think about how their entire country is going to hell in the proverbial handbasket. And it’s weird, because the US is about the only country with the capacity and refineries to process the nasty crude oil from Venezuela. A significant pile of his income comes from the States. Yet he continues to rant and rave, knowing our thirst for oil will keep us from cutting him off. OK, mostly it’s my opinion, but I don’t think I’m too far off.
He’s nuts, tho. And power mad. But it’s nothing that couldn’t be cured by, oh, an asteroid falling across the bridge of his nose…
The Netherlands Antilles are small enough that you could run a complete reconnaissance using a Cessna 152 and a decent SLR camera in an afternoon.
There is no build-up of military on the islands, (they are not large enough to provide a staging area without totally disrupting the local tourist economy–and I have seen no articles in the travel section of the paper warning tourists to avoid NA because the USMC has clogged all the beaches).
No one in his government is probably stupid enough to be feeding him ludicrous information.
Yep, it’s certainly shocking. Next he’ll be claiming they have WMD and pose an immediate threat.
It must be all of 7 years since the CIA last tried to oust him via a coup?
On that point he might actually have some basis for concern–but certainly not while Obama is in office.
Heck, even GWB backed away from poking him with tht stick.
I was under the impression that Chavez was democratically elected and the Venezuela has had a positive development with regards to health care, education and economic growth during his time in power.
Well, yes, but that does not exclude the fact that he is acting loony when he talks about real or made up enemies.
(One should not forget that he is one of the few elected heads of state to come back after a coup was made against him, good enough to understand why he is paranoid, but not enough to forgive him when he is resorting to stupid paranoia)
For a given value of “democratically elected”, yes. Being a member of an opposition party or media outlet in Venezuela is not an ideal career path these days.
I’m all for South American politicians thumbing their noses at the US given the long history of American exploitation of the region, but Chavez is a power-hungry demagogue who is not doing his countrymen any favors. I suspect best US policy is to ignore the taunts and wait for his regime to implode on its own, especially if oil prices (and thus the revenues propping up the country) fall.
