Chavez, continued: playing with fire, fueled by crude

The Chavez issue is fascinating. Here's a charismatic populist/socialist talking trash to the United States with a cowboy in the Whitehouse. The US has a long history of involvement with violence in Central and South America, including removal of leaders through various means, and some have suggested that the CIA played a part in the failed coup against Chavez.

Yet Venezuela is the third largest supplier of crude to the US by some accounts.

A Latin America policy analyst I spoke to had this to say:

Chavez has made sure that his untimely demise would be followed by a real anti-US backlash. If he were choking on a piece of steak, the US would send in people to give him the heimlich.

The US cares a huge amount about Venezuela, despite what our ambassador says. What really scares people in DC is that Latin America, as a region, could become a continent akin to Africa -- too many civil wars, stagnant or reversing growth rates, growing inequality, crumbling infrastructure, environmental plight, governance by mob/coup, no rule of law, bastian to extremists, mass starvation due to ineptitude, you get the idea. Clearly all of Africa isn't all these things at once, but the past 30 years has seen a strong smattering of that scenario across Africa, and the State Dept guys can't imagine a worse scenario for Latin America.

But clearly the State Department isn't the entire government. Ask Oliver North. On one hand we've failed to remove Castro, but on the other there's a long list of Latin American heads of state who we've been directly involved with removing, peripherally involved with removing, tacitly approved removal of, or are rumored to have been involved with removing.

It's easy to get all conspiracy-ish, but when the Iran-link test baloons start floating and John "D is for Death Squad" Negroponte has too much time on his hands it's hard not to start thinking about black ops.

At the very least, Chavez presents the highest potential for comedy in the forgiegn policy arena that we've got going now. The rest of it is so damn serious.