www.gainesvilletimes.com Local News  -   Monday, March 10, 2003 From staff, wire reports

Estella Pifano-Steffen of Gainesville has a question for the international community: "Why are you silent about Venezuela?"

Pifano-Steffen, a Vene-zuelan native, joined about 100 protesters Sunday in Atlanta to bring attention to that country's economic and political distress.

"There were protests in 36 cities around the world today," Pifano-Steffen said, "but we're not going to hear about it. The oil spills at Lake Maracaibo are horrendous. Why isn't Greenpeace doing something?"

In January, USA Today reported oil is spilling into the lake since oil workers joined a national strike against President Hugo Chavez in December. The lake, 325 miles west of Caracas, has about 8,000 active oil wells with 15,000 to 28,000 miles of pipes and tubes snaking along the bottom.

"This is so difficult to understand," Pifano-Steffen said. "Greenpeace makes a big commotion about other things, but nothing about Venezuela as far as I can see. The world is focused on Iraq."

But Chavez claimed Sunday an international campaign involving the United States was trying to discredit his government, and he warned other countries not to be fooled by the so-called smear tactics.

"There are still newspaper headlines in various parts of the world (and) officials from some governments ... that are spreading lies," said Chavez, who has been fighting a national movement attempting to force him to resign or call early elections.

Sunday's protest was the fourth for Pifano-Steffen. Chavez opponents from Washington to Atlanta to Santiago, Chile, also marched.

Two weeks ago, Chavez strongly criticized the United States, Spain and Colombia for allegedly meddling in Venezuela's domestic affairs. Within days, bombs ripped through the Spanish and Colombian diplomatic missions in Caracas.

The U.S. Embassy later closed temporarily because of a security threat. No one has been arrested for the bombings.

Pifano-Steffen's nephew, Juan Ernesto Lossada, said he wants the United States to pressure Chavez into submitting to early elections.

"Chavez is the only president of a constitutional nation to visit (Saddam) Hussein," said Lossada, who has been visiting Gainesville for two months from Venezuela. "There are pictures to prove he visited him."

Lossada said inflation and unemployment are crippling the country's middle class and the poor.

"How can he say he is the president of the poor?" Lossada asked. "He has impoverished the nation, and the middle class is against him."

Venezuela is trying to emerge from a failed two-month general strike against Chavez. The protest, which ended last month, was strongest in the oil industry, the source of half of the government revenues and 80 percent of export earnings.

Venezuela was the world's fifth-largest oil exporter before the strike began Dec. 2 and still is importing gasoline because of difficulties in bringing refineries back online.

Chavez, who was first elected in 1998 and re-elected in 2000, says his foes want to replace him with old status quo, when an elite minority held power for decades.

Lossada will return to Venezuela on Friday and said he will continue to work to free the country from Chavez' rule.

"I will not allow that man to become the owner of Venezuela," he said.

Originally published Monday, March 10, 2003

www.nbc6.net POSTED: 3:48 p.m. EST March 9, 2003 UPDATED: 5:28 a.m. EST March 10, 2003

MIAMI -- Radical Islamic groups in the Middle East are getting between $300 million and $500 million a year from various criminal networks in Latin America, a top U.S. military commander said.

Gen. James T. Hill, commander of the U.S. Southern Command in Miami, said much of this money comes from drug trafficking, arms dealing and other illegal activities. Southern Command oversees U.S. military relations in Latin America.

Hill said the funds are sent abroad from several Latin American areas with large Middle Eastern populations, such as the "triple frontier" between Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil, and Margarita Island off the coast of Venezuela.

"The fastest-growing religion in Latin America today is Islam," Hill told The Miami Herald for a story published Sunday.

Hill said there was believed to be between three million and six million people of Middle Eastern descent in Latin America.

"There are radical Islamic groups associated with that population that are using it to create lots of money for their organizations," he said.

He said about $300 million to $500 million a year goes from Latin America to groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah and Al Gamaat.

Hill called for "increased coordination" among armed forces to fight narco-terrorism, conduct disaster relief operations and help stop the flow of money to international terrorist groups.

Emilio Viano, a terrorism expert at American University in Washington, said he was not surprised by Hill's assertions on funding for terrorist groups.

But he added that in some cases, increased international scrutiny after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks has made it harder for terrorist groups to launder money there.

Some experts, however, were skeptical about the new estimates of Islamic groups' fund-raising in Latin America.

Eduardo Gamarra, director of Florida International University's Latin American and Caribbean Center, called the estimates "absolutely ridiculous."

"A lot of figures have been bouncing around, but in the last year I've been looking at these particular issues, and most of what I found was speculation," he said.

www.vheadline.com Posted: Monday, March 10, 2003 By: Charles Hardy

VHeadline.com commentarist Charles Hardy writes: He must have been terrified.  He was alone, surrounded by screaming people beating on his automobile.  They stuck their arms through an open window.  Then they busted another with their sticks.  They were kicking and threatening.

What was going through his mind?  As I write this, I can only imagine.  Would he come out alive?  Would he ever see his family again?

He hadn't done anything against them ... he was simply there, fulfilling a responsibility as a public agent.  A fugitive was in the area ... he was a police officer who had been sent there ... and suddenly his life, not that of the fugitive, was in danger.

This is not a scene from one of Caracas barrios or from a favela of Rio de Janeiro.  It is what happened March 9, the International Day of the Woman, in the midst of upper and middle class people of Caracas.

The opposition had sponsored a demonstration in the middle of the highway running through the center of the city.  Its purpose was to show support for Carlos Fernandez, Carlos Ortega and Juan Fernandez. Carlos Fernandez is under house arrest ... the other two are wanted by the police for their participation in the events of the past three months in Venezuelan.

At the conclusion of the event, Juan Fernandez, the leader of the rebel "Petroleum People" appeared and spoke for a few moments.  As one neighbor has commented, "if he is not guilty of anything, he should subject himself to the authorities.  There is no doubt that he has access to the finest attorneys in the country to defend him."

In any case, when the DISIP police appeared, they and not Fernandez were treated as lawbreakers ... and suddenly one found himself alone and the recipient of the aggression of the crowd.

Today, the newspapers don't pay much ... if any ... attention to the poor policeman.  A report on the "happening," which I just heard on Globovision, says that a unit of the DISIP was partially-damaged.  What about the poor person that was inside that vehicle?

If the same thing had happened to a lone reporter of Globovision in a demonstration of those supporting the government, there would have been protests and front-page coverage ... and rightfully so.  But, when persons supporting the opposition act savagely, there's only "partial damage" to the government vehicle.

Only yesterday, Amnesty International was asking people to sign a document protesting the possible stoning of a woman in Africa for having committed adultery ... in Caracas, a human being could have been beaten to death by members of the civil society, simply because he was a policeman.

Dear friends of the civil society, I don't see much difference between your actions and those of the people in Africa.

Neither action is worthy of a society in the 21st century.

Charlie A native of Cheyenne, Wyoming (USA), VHeadline.com columnist Charles Hardy has many years experience  as an international correspondent in Venezuela. You may email him at: hardyce2@yahoo.com

www.vheadline.com Posted: Monday, March 10, 2003 By: Daniel Burnett

Date: Sun, 9 Mar 2003 05:27:08 -0500 From: Daniel Burnett dburnett1@nyc.rr.com To: Editor@vheadline.com Subject: The real problem facing Venezuela

Dear Editor: There is no shortage of commentary, discussion and heated debate on VHeadline.com and many other websites regarding the current political situation in Venezuela. This makes sense given how much the political crisis in Venezuela is dominating the news. However, this is unfortunate as it masks the real problems facing Venezuela -- namely the poor state of its economy ... and by this I'm not referring to whether the economy is increasing by X% or decreasing by Y% percent this year -- in the grand scheme of things that is insignificant.

• What I mean, when I refer to Venezuela’s economic problems, is the generalized poverty that it has endured for its entire existence, including during its oil boom.

Venezuela’s economy is grossly under-developed and is not in any way capable of giving the majority of its citizens a decent standard of living.

Even with its abundant natural resources, the per capita income of Venezuela pales when compared even with recently developed countries such as South Korea or Taiwan.

I am confident that, however, much we may disagree on the causes of the current crises we all agree that we would like to see the people of Venezuela be much more prosperous and have the increased quality of life that implies.

It is therefore ironic ... and very unfortunate ... that there is almost no discussion of how Venezuela’s poor economic situation could be changed. It is that discussion that I would like to begin by this letter.

It is an axiom of economics that in order to consume one must first produce. That is, to increase the Venezuelan standard of living (i.e. how much Venezuelans consume) we must first increase the productive capacity of Venezuela’s economy.

Given its small size, Venezuela must import most of the things that it consumes and virtually all of its technology. To be able to purchase things abroad, it must have money and the only way to get this money is to export things of value onto the world market.

Of course, it could also just borrow the money, but Venezuela has already taken that about as far as it can go as seen by the enormous size of its foreign debt.

Worse still, when one borrows money, one must pay it back with interest.

So, in reality, Venezuela is going to find its purchasing power of foreign goods ... and hence its standard of living ... limited to what it can produce and sell abroad. And herein lies the problem ... Venezuela doesn’t produce much of anything.

Of course, people are going to protest this statement by saying that Venezuela does produce something -- principally oil.

First of all, oil isn’t really "produced" ... it is just a natural resource that is extracted from the ground. True, it is at times a valuable resource. But it just doesn’t add up to enough to give Venezuelan’s a decent standard of living. Venezuela exports about $23 billion worth of it in a good year with high oil prices. Dividing the Venezuelan population 23.4 million by 23 billion comes to a little less than $1,000 per person per year. Obviously, the average Venezuelan is not going to live well off of oil.

Worse still, Venezuela’s non-oil exports total only about 6 billion dollars, which is pathetically, low, to say the least ... and even most of those are other natural resources.  So from this you really can see that Venezuela doesn’t produce anything.

• In one of his editorials a few weeks back, Mr. Coronel, accused President Chavez of having alienated the “productive” segment of Venezuelan society.

Now, I know what Mr. Coronel was referring to when he spoke of the “productive” segment of Venezuelan society -- he was referring to the business community, the professional class, and skilled workers.

Unfortunately, though, those segments of Venezuelan society are not very productive.

What I mean by that is that they do not create any wealth for Venezuela. Rather they consume the intrinsic wealth that Venezuela has. At the end of the day they do what everyone else in Venezuela does ... they live off the wealth that Venezuela derives from its natural resources.

This can be shown clearly just from statistics: Venezuela’s exports total 29 billion dollars. Oil accounts for about 23 billion of that and other natural resources (gold, iron ore, bauxite, etc.) and the public industries of the Guayana region account for much of the rest.

Venezuelan private industry ... presumably the “productive” segment of society that Mr. Coronel is referring to ... accounts for only a very small portion of Venezuela’s exports. And even most of the exports by the private sector consist of exports by foreign companies such as oil companies and the privatized SIDOR, not by Venezuelan companies.

So exports by private sector Venezuelan companies come to less than $1 billion per year. By way of comparison, Ecuador (which is half the size of Venezuela and itself quite poor) has a shrimp-farming industry that exports a billion dollars worth of shrimp each year. So the entire “productive” sector of Venezuelan society is being beaten by a bunch of Ecuadorian shrimp farmers.

(As an aside, the Ecuadorian private sector exports total about $4 billion a year or four times Venezuela’s private sector exports and 8 times greater on a per capita basis).

Venezuelans should be glad they don’t depend solely on the “productive” segment of Venezuelan society to support themselves ... if they did, they’d have long since starved to death.

Perhaps a better way to illustrate this point is by specific examples: Much has been made in the Venezuelan press of what a great businessman Carlos Fernandez is, and how fortunate Venezuela is to have someone like him ... someone who emigrated from Spain with very little and built a large, successful trucking company in Venezuela.

So has Carlos Fernandez’ undoubted business acumen contributed to the betterment of Venezuela and its economy? The answer is no.

The reason for this is very simple ... his trucking company brings no wealth into Venezuela ... it simply performs a service that would be performed more or less equally well by someone else if it didn’t exist (now if his company was manufacturing trucks or truck components and profitably exporting them, that would be another matter, but that is not what his company does). If his company ceased to exist tomorrow, it would simply be replaced by other trucking companies with no net loss for Venezuela.

The same holds true for virtually all Venezuelan industries. Much is made of what a tragedy the alleged degradation of PDVSA is for Venezuela. But in reality, who cares?

There is nothing that PDVSA does that any one of dozens of other oil companies couldn’t do. So you can fire all the PDVSA employees and have them replaced by other Venezuelans or foreign companies such as Shell, or Exxon, or British Petroleum or Texaco and the oil wealth that will accrue to Venezuela will remain the same.

Why? Because the workers of PDVSA ... as capable as they may have been ... never created any wealth, they just extracted wealth from the ground that was always there to begin with. And if they don’t do it someone else will.

This goes for companies on down the line: Coke leaves. Fine, Pepsi, RC Cola or some one else will replace them, because there is a profit to be made by providing this product to the Venezuelan market. The examples are endless.

This can be still further illustrated by juxtaposing it with countries that do have companies that produce wealth for them.

Take Nokia, the world’s largest manufacturer of cell phones, located in Finland. Does Nokia contribute to Finland’s well being? Considering that it has 22,000 well-paid employees in Finland and exports more than 10 billion dollars worth of goods from Finland to the rest of the world I would say that it does. It contributes to the Finns high standard of living in a myriad of other ways too ... the payment of billions of dollars in taxes, the large investment in the continued education of its employees and significant charitable contributions are but a few examples.

If Nokia didn’t exist would there be some other company in Finland that would take its place? Possibly, but almost certainly not. The reason for this is that, unlike the example of PDVSA, Nokia isn’t exploiting some unique characteristic of Finland or its natural resources. Rather Nokia owes its existence purely to the talent, hard work, and capital of the people who founded it. If Nokia disappeared tomorrow, it would almost certainly be replaced not by a Finnish company but by an American, British or Japanese one ... and Finland would find itself that much poorer.

All industrialized countries posses many wealth generating companies such as Nokia. Venezuela possesses no such companies. It is for precisely that reason that the standard of living of Venezuelans is so low. It simply doesn’t have a productive sector that generates sufficient wealth to give most Venezuelan’s a decent standard of living. That is also why any public welfare or other redistributionist projects that Chavez implements ... no matter how well intentioned ... will lead nowhere. Social welfare programs only work in countries that are already affluent. In Venezuela, there is simply not much to redistribute, save poverty.

That is the real problem facing Venezuela.

What Venezuela clearly needs to do to solve this problem is create companies that can develop and manufacture products that can be profitably sold on the international market.

It also needs a highly-educated and skilled workforce that can create and staff these companies.

So maybe instead of sitting here and bickering over which Venezuelan called the other a bad name first ... or who is more of a dictator than whom ... maybe we should try to figure out how to accomplish the aforementioned tasks.

Daniel Burnett dburnett1@nyc.rr.com New York, USA

www.irna.com

(ADDs further quotes, corrects dateline)
Tehran, March 10, IRNA -- Iran's Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh here Monday cautioned world oil exporters against being taken away by political developments in the Persian Gulf, saying there was no need for OPEC to increase output under the present situation.
"Under the present conditions, there are no economic
justifications for increasing the OPEC production," he told IRNA
ahead of a scheduled meeting of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in Vienna Tuesday.
Zanganeh said "OPEC must refrain from taking any politically
motivated measures" as it was reported that participants at the
Tuesday meeting sought to find a Western-friendly compromise to
guarantee world oil supplies.
"The Islamic Republic of Iran will not endorse decisions of
political connotations, and we are confident that OPEC will not take
decisions regarded by the world Muslim and Arab public opinion as supportive of the United States' military invasion against an OPEC fellow member," he said in reference to Iraq.
Facts and figures indicate that the market is not facing a
shortage at the moment, Zanganeh said, adding "if the current
production level and the increment supply from Venezuela continue, there will be a daily 3.1 million barrel over-supply in the second quarter".
The Iranian oil minister brushed aside fears of a possible upset
to global oil supply among oil markets and consumers on the back of a looming military showdown in the oil-rich Persian Gulf region, which have caused crude prices to spiral up to new highs.
"Prices, at any rate, are not reflecting market fundamentals.
There is the war premium. There is the uncertainty about future
political developments in both the Middle East and the Persian Gulf region.
"Impacts of speculation, logistical problem, products-related
issues, as well as the US gas market problems are also there, those have nothing to do with the OPEC production ceiling," Zanganeh added. "If the political tensions of the war with Iraq had been absent,
OPEC should have acted to cut its production ceiling. Thus, under the present conditions, there are no economic justifications for
increasing the OPEC production," he went on to say.
BH/AR
End