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Chavez promise low-cost heating fuel for Europe
By Michael Adler
AFP
VIENNA
Petroleumworld.com 05 14 06
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said Saturday that he wants to provide heating oil to Europeans who can not afford it this coming winter, as he did in parts of the United States last winter.
Speaking to an anti-globalization rally in Vienna, Chavez said people had doubted "we would do this" in the United States, and now he wanted "to do the same thing in Europe."
"I want, modestly, to offer support to people who do not have resources for heating in the winter and to make sure that support arrives," Chavez told a cheering crowd of some 1,600.
He said Venezuela has oil refineries in Europe and that Venezuelan embassies were standing by to help but did not provide more details.
Venezuela had as of last November used the US-based Citgo company it owns to distribute over 45 million gallons (171 million liters) of subsidized, discount-price fuel in US cities like Philadelphia, Boston, and New York as well as others in the states of Maine, Vermont and Rhode Island.
This gesture irritated the US administration of President George W. Bush, which charges that Chavez is an anti-democratic populist and saw him as trying to curry political favor with the oil hand-out, something Chavez has denied.
The gesture was in any case a major public relations coup and support for Chavez's claim that while he regards the US government as an empire bent on world domination, he has nothing against the American people.
His outreach came as Americans worried about the high cost of fuel and questioned the windfalls enjoyed by US oil companies from the surge in energy prices.
Chavez told the rally in Vienna, organized as an "anti-summit" to a three-day summit here from Thursday to Saturday of 60 European Union and Latin American states, that the United States was an "empire with no limits" that must be opposed.
Venezuela's ambassador to the United States Bernardo Alvarez was quoted in TIME magazine in February as saying that Venezuela's gesture was a response to a call by 13 US senators to oil companies for heating fuel aid for lower-income residents in northern states.
AFP 14 0053 GMT 05 06
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