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Bush hits Chavez over ties to rebels
AP /Charles Dharapak
President Bush gestures while addressing the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, Wednesday, March 12, 2008, at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington.WASHINGTON
Petroleumworld.com March 13, 2008US President George W. Bush on Wednesday accused Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez of backing "terrorists" in neighboring Colombia and fueling an anti-American campaign with his country's oil wealth.
"As it tries to expand its influence in Latin America, the regime claims to promote social justice. In truth its agenda amounts to little more than empty promises and a thirst for power," Bush said in a speech.
"It has squandered its oil wealth in an effort to promote its hostile anti-American vision, it has left its own citizens to face food shortages while it threatens its neighbors," the US president charged.
Bush's sharp criticisms of Chavez came as the White House tried to portray stalled passage of a US-Colombia free trade agreement as critical to curbing the influence of Chavez throughout Latin America.
Bush sharply criticized Chavez's reaction to a March 1 Colombian raid on a rebel camp inside Ecuador that killed a leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) leftist rebel group.
"The president of Venezuela praised the terrorist leader as a good revolutionary and ordered his troops to the Colombian border," the US president said.
"This is the latest step in a disturbing pattern of provocative behavior by the regime in Caracas. He has also called for FARC terrorists to be recognized as a legitimate army; senior regime officials have met with FARC leaders in Venezuela," said Bush.
Chavez had deployed 10 army battalions to the Colombian border in the wake of the raid, which had prompted Quito and Caracas to suspend relations with Bogota.
The three countries resolved the dispute at a Latin American summit in Santo Domingo Friday, with Colombia promising never to repeat such raid again.
To general surprise, Chavez, who only days earlier had been stoking the fires, intervened during the summit to ease regional tensions and set himself up as the agent of peace.
In the same speech, Bush also mounted an aggressive defense of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which has drawn fire from Democratic White House hopefuls Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
"Listen, NAFTA has worked. People shouldn't back away from NAFTA," he said, asserting that the free trade pact grouping the Canada, Mexico and the United States was a job-creating engine and curbed illegal immigration.
In a televised debate last month in Ohio, both Obama and Clinton said if the next US president is a Democrat, Mexico and Canada would be pressured to renegotiate NAFTA.
Free trade, and NAFTA in particular, is a fiercely contentious issue in Ohio, which has been badly hit by the flight of blue collar jobs abroad, and increased global economic competition.
"Look, I understand supporting free trade agreements is not politically easy. There are a lot of special interest groups that are willing to spend a lot of money to make somebody's life miserable when it comes to supporting free trade agreements," said Bush.
"But I believe leadership requires people rising above this empty, hollow political rhetoric," he said.
Story from AFP
AFP 12 2118 GMT 03 08Copyright© 2008 respective author or news agency. All rights reserved.
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