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Some indigenous people in Alaska and Venezuela are saying no to Chavez. In Alaska, the Aleuts are saying no to his home heating oil subsidies for the winter, and in Venezuela the Bari indigenous are saying no to Chavez taking their tribal property.

Chavez wants his oil subsidies to poor communities in the US to show that he cares more about indigenous poverty than the US does. After his UN speech calling Bush the Devil and the US the greatest threat looming over our planet, he put on a Harlem media show with Alaskan Natives and American Indians to tout CITGO's gift of oil to warm poor indigenous people this coming winter. But when several of those villages refused the donation as unpatriotic since it comes from someone who wants to destroy the US, American donors came forth to replace the CITGO oil gift.

The oil heating subsidies to poor communities in the US are only a drop in the bucket of the $50 billion of foreign Chavez spending since 2005, but it may be the most cynical of the lot. While 15% of Alaska's Natives are poor, over 50% of Venezuelans are. "It makes us feel good to give," Chavez says, while half his people live in misery. Alaska poverty dropped from 67% to 15% when they were ceded their tribal lands.

"They [the indigenous] are the original tribes of this country and the real owners of this land," Chavez said to applause in Harlem. But the Bari people of Venezuela's Perija mountain area are up in arms against Chavez for taking tribal lands legally ceded to them in the 1970s for all time. Chavez is confiscating Indian lands owned by the Bari people and making them tenants of his government. If President Bush were to confiscate Alaska Native lands or American Indian reservations, Chavez would damn him as a devil, but when he does it, he's an angel. To him it's all relative. Lucifer, after all, started out as an archangel.

Michael Rowan's column is published by El Universal (Caracas) every Tuesday (mrowan@cantv.net) - Read about Michael Rowan's book "Getting Over Chavez and Poverty" at michael.rowan.book@gmail.com. Petroleumworld not necessarily share these views.

Editor's Note: This commentary was originally published special for El Universal, Oct. 10, 2006. Petroleumworld reprint this article in the interest of our readers. Petroleumworld not necessarily share these views.

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Petroleumworld News 10/13/06

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