Venezuela uses petro-dollars to help US poor

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http://www.canada.com/topics/news/world/story.html?id=cd22c792-9356-4c48-9274-c5b96977c391&k=1969


Sheldon Alberts, CanWest News Service
Published: Monday, December 04, 2006 Article tools

CARACAS, Venezuela — Even as Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez demonized the U.S. as an evil imperialist empire during campaign events leading to his re-election Sunday, the country’s state-owned oil company renewed a deal to provide 40 per cent discounts on furnace oil to 400,000 people in 15 U.S. states and the District of Columbia.

The act of generosity is dismissed by Chavez’s critics as pure propaganda and it is drawing mixed reaction among Venezuelans.

“I think he is just giving the money away,” huffs Carmen Herrara, a Venezuelan retiree. “There is a lot of poverty in this country that needs to be solved first.”

The heating-oil program offered by Venezuelan-owned Citgo is but one element of a complex relationship Chavez and the U.S. have with each other, one revolving predominantly around the politics and economics of oil.

Chavez, who won another six-year term as Venezuela’s president Sunday, rankled President George W. Bush in August 2005 when he offered to ship emergency fuel supplies to New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. He followed up by endorsing a plan by Citgo, the U.S. subsidiary of state-owned Petroleos de Venezuela S.A., to offer the heating-oil discounts through a non-profit Massachusetts-based group called Citizen’s Energy Corp.

The latest public-relations bonanza from that venture was a press conference last month at the home of Matilda Winslow — a 75-year-old widow — in Dorchester, a neighbourhood of Boston. With Venezuelan officials present, Winslow took delivery of a winter’s worth of heating oil.

In a telephone interview Monday, Winslow said she had no qualms about accepting discounted oil from a country whose leader called Bush “Mr. Danger” following Sunday’s elections.