Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

I looked around, away from Ground Zero, at the New York streets that had avoided the fire and now were returning to normal. I wondered what the people who walked those streets today thought about all this—not simply about the destruction of the towers, but also about the ruined pomegranate farms and the twenty-four thousand who starve every single day. I wondered if they thought about such things at all, if they could tear themselves away from their jobs and gas-guzzling cars and their interest payments long enough to consider their own contribution to the world they were passing on to their children. I wondered what they knew about Afghanistan—not the Afghanistan on television, the one littered with U.S. military tents and tanks, but the old man’s Afghanistan. I wondered what those twenty-four thousand who die every day think.

And then I saw myself again, sitting before a blank computer screen.

I forced my attention back to Ground Zero. At the moment, one thing was certain: my country was thinking about revenge, and it was focusing on countries like Afghanistan. But I was thinking about all the other places in the world where people hate our companies, our military, our policies, and our march toward global empire.

I wondered, What about Panama, Ecuador, Indonesia, Iran, Guatemala, most of Africa?

I pushed myself off the wall I had been leaning against and started walking away. A short, swarthy man was waving a newspaper in the air and shouting in Spanish. I stopped.

“Venezuela on the brink of revolution!” he yelled above the noise of the traffic, the honking horns, and the milling people.

I bought his paper and stood there for a moment scanning the lead article. It was about Hugo Chávez, Venezuela’s democratically elected, anti-American president, and the undercurrent of hatred generated by U.S. policies in Latin America.

What about Venezuela?

CHAPTER 33. Venezuela: Saved by Saddam

I had watched Venezuela for many years. It was a classic example of a country that rose from rags to riches as a result of oil. It was also a model of the turmoil oil wealth foments, of the disequilibrium between rich and poor, and of a country shamelessly exploited by the corporatocracy. It had become the epitome of a place where old-style EHMs like me converged with the new-style, corporate version.

The events I read about in the newspaper that day at Ground Zero were a direct result of the 1998 elections, when the poor and disenfranchised of Venezuela elected Hugo Chávez by a landslide as their president.¹ He immediately instituted drastic measures, taking control of the courts and other institutions and dissolving the Venezuelan Congress. He denounced the United States for its “shameless imperialism,” spoke out forcefully against globalization, and introduced a hydrocarbons law that was reminiscent, even in name, to the one Jaime Roldós had brought to Ecuador shortly before his airplane went down. The law doubled the royalties charged to foreign oil companies. Then Chávez defied the traditional independence of the state-owned oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, by replacing its top executives with people loyal to him.²

Venezuelan oil is crucial to economies around the world. In 2002 the nation was the world’s fourth-largest oil exporter and the number-three supplier to the United States.³ Petróleos de Venezuela, with forty thousand employees and $50 billion a year in sales, provides 80 percent of the country’s export revenue. It is by far the most important factor in Venezuela’s economy.⁴ By taking over the industry, Chávez had thrust himself onto the world stage as a major player.

Many Venezuelans saw this as destiny, the completion of a process that began eighty years earlier. On December 14, 1922, a huge oil blowout had gushed from the earth near Maracaibo. One hundred thousand barrels of crude sprayed into the air each day for the next three days, and this single geologic event changed Venezuela forever. By 1930, the country was the world’s largest oil exporter. Venezuelans looked to oil as a solution to all their problems.

Oil revenues during the next forty years enabled Venezuela to evolve from one of the most impoverished nations in the world to one of the wealthiest in Latin America. All of the country’s vital statistics improved: health care, education, employment, longevity, and infant survival rates. Businesses prospered.