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Oil-rich Bolivian and Venezuela speak against US 'empire'
By Michael Adler
AFP
VIENNA
Petroleumworld.com 05 14 06
Two firm admirers of Fidel Castro, the presidents of oil-and-gas-rich nations Bolivia and Venezuela, made clear at a protest rally that the anti-US, anti-imperialistic movement has a future.
"We must dismantle, neutralize and make vanish this cynical empire," Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez told a cheering crowd Saturday of 1,600 in a conference hall in Vienna decked with pictures of Che Guevara, who was Cuban President Castro's revolutionary comrade-in-arms. Che was killed in Bolivia in 1967.
Chavez scoffed at the US war against terrorism saying that the United States has itself become "a terrorist state, itself a genocidal state.
"We're all threatened. This empire has no limits," Chavez said, speaking in Spanish as did the others at the rally.
Cuban Vice President Carlos Lage Davila spoke about the "criminal Yankee blockade of Cuba" and Bolivian President Evo Morales mentioned his "great admiration for Fidel."
The youthful crowd, some with painted faces, were anti-globalization protestors at the final rally of an "anti-summit" against a more august gathering of European Union and Latin American leaders at another congress center in Vienna.
At the anti-summit, there were banners proclaiming "United States of Aggression," flanked by a portrait of Che and a masked man, and fervent chants of "The People, United."
And there were Chavez and Morales at the center of a stage also occupied by the Cuban vice-president, French anti-globalization activist Jose Bove, who once trashed a McDonald's restaurant, and the daughter of Che Guevara.
Morales told the crowd: "I came from your ranks. I am like you and our struggle led me to the presidency of my republic."
Morales had also taken the anti-imperialist message to the 60-nation EU-Latin American summit.
The man who became the leader of South America's poorest nation last December stole the show at the Vienna summit from Thursday to Saturday when he said his government would not compensate foreign firms for assets they might lose in his nationalization of Bolivia's oil and gas resources.
This set off alarm bells, resonating with concern that other countries might be inspired to seize their natural resources, and the impact this could have on already thinly-stretched world energy markets.
Chavez and Morales did nothing do allay those concerns at Saturday's rally.
Chavez, who enacted similar measures as Morales when he rewrote contracts and imposed retroactive tax hikes in Venezuela, the world's fifth-largest oil exporter, said the anti-imperialistic movement was "a new superpower that saves us ... public opinion on a global level."
"We've come here to fight, to organize ourselves for the struggle," he told the anti-summit of social movements.
"Since I am talking about fire, let us be arsonists, let us light the sacred flame," Chavez said.
But he stressed that he opposed the US government, not the American people, and has given cut-rate oil to poor US families and offered to do this now in Europe.
The New-York-based Council on Foreign Relations said in an analysis on its website that the United States has paid less attention to Latin America since the terrorist attacks in 2001.
The Council cited economics professor Nouriel Roubini saying the situation in Latin America is developing in "a way that is actually dangerous to US interests."
Council expert Julia Sweig said the problem is that when US representatives "say 'democracy,' Latin Americans hear 'imperialism.'"
At the rally, Chavez ended the over-three-hour-long evening by bringing the crowd to its feet with cries of "Vive Socialism, Vive Fidel, Vive the people of the world."
AFP 14 0123 GMT 05 06
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