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 Chavez, 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 Chavez 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 Roldos had brought to Ecuador shortly before his airplane went down. The law doubled the royalties charged to foreign oil companies. Then Chavez defied the traditional independence of the state-owned oil company, Petroleos 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 Petroleos 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, Chavez 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.
During the 1973 OPEC oil embargo, petroleum prices skyrocketed and Venezuela’s national budget quadrupled. The EHMs went to work. The international banks flooded the country with loans that paid for vast infrastructure and industrial projects and for the highest skyscrapers on the continent. Then, in the 1980s, the corporate-style EHMs arrived. It was an ideal opportunity for them to cut their fledgling teeth. The Venezuelan middle class had become sizable, and provided a ripe market for a vast array of products, yet there was still a very large poor sector available to labor in the sweat-shops and factories.
Then oil prices crashed, and Venezuela could not repay its debts. In 1989, the IMF imposed harsh austerity measures and pressured Caracas to support the corporatocracy in many other ways. Venezuelans reacted violently; riots killed over two hundred people. The illusion of oil as a bottomless source of support was shattered. Between 1978 and 2003, Venezuela’s per capita income plummeted by over 40 percent.5
As poverty increased, resentment intensified. Polarization resulted, with the middle class pitted against the poor. As so often occurs in countries whose economies depend on oil production, demographics radically shifted. The sinking economy took its toll on the middle class, and many fell into the ranks of the poor.
The new demographics set the stage for Chavez—and for conflict with Washington. Once in power, the new president took actions that challenged the Bush administration. Just before the September 11 attacks, Washington was considering its options. The EHMs had failed; was it time to send in the jackals?
Then 9/11 changed all priorities. President Bush and his advisers focused on rallying the world community to support U.S. activities in Afghanistan and an invasion of Iraq. On top of that, the U.S. economy was in the middle of a recession. Venezuela was relegated to a back burner. However, it was obvious that at some point Bush and Chavez would come to blows. With Iraqi and other Middle Eastern oil supplies threatened, Washington could not afford to ignore Venezuela for long.
Wandering around Ground Zero and Wall Street, meeting the old Afghan man, and reading about Chavez’s Venezuela brought me to a point I had avoided for many years, and it forced me to take a hard look at the consequences of the things I had done over the past three decades. I could not possibly deny the role I had played or the fact that my work as an EHM now affected my daughter’s generation in very negative ways. I knew I could no longer postpone taking action to atone for what I had done. I had to come clean about my life, in a manner that would help people wake up to the fact of corporatocracy and understand why so much of the world hates us.
I started writing once again, but as I did so, it seemed to me that my story was too old. Somehow, I needed to bring it up to date. I considered traveling to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Venezuela and writing a contemporary commentary on those three countries. They seemed to embody an irony of current world affairs: each had undergone traumatic political turmoil and ended up with leaders who left a great deal to be desired (a cruel and despotic Taliban, a psychopathic Saddam, and an economically inept Chavez), yet in no case did the corporatocracy respond by attempting to solve the deeper problems of these countries. Rather, the response was simply to undermine leaders who stood in the way of our oil policies. In many respects, Venezuela was the most intriguing case because, while military intervention had already occurred in Afghanistan and appeared inevitable in Iraq, the administration’s response to Chavez remained a mystery. As far as I was concerned, the issue was not about whether Chavez was a good leader; it was about Washington’s reaction to a leader who stood in the way of the corporatocracy’s march to global empire.
Before I had time to organize such a trip, however, circumstances once again intervened. My nonprofit work took me to South America several times in 2002. A Venezuelan family whose businesses were going bankrupt under the Chavez regime joined one of my trips to the Amazon. We became close friends, and I heard their side of the story. I also met with Latin Americans from the other end of the economic spectrum, who considered Chavez a savior. The events unfolding in Caracas were symptomatic of the world we EHMs had created.
By December 2002, the situation in both Venezuela and in Iraq reached crisis points. The two countries were evolving into perfect counterpoints for each other. In Iraq, all the subtle efforts—both the EHMs and the jackals— had failed to force Saddam to comply, and now we were preparing for the ultimate solution, invasion. In Venezuela, the Bush administration was bringing Kermit Roosevelt’s Iranian model into play. As the
