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Chavez Dreams of Being Putin

Last week, Moscow blocked a United Nations Security Council resolution against Iran and gave Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez $2 billion in arms on credit. Chavez claims he needs them for defense, but the bill of sale includes 100 T-90 and T-72M1M tanks.

By supplying Chavez with a small army of tanks, Moscow has lit a fuse that could ignite a war between Venezuela and Columbia — a war that Chavez needs to distract his people from the country’s problems and that Prime Minister Vladimir Putin needs to raise the price of oil.

Chavez has dreams of becoming a leader who is for South America what Putin is for the former Soviet republics. Three years ago, Chavez put enormous effort into promoting a pro-Venezuelan candidate for the Peruvian presidency. The result was that his man, Ollanto Humala, lost the Peruvian elections in the same way that Putin’s hand-picked candidate for the Ukrainian presidency, Viktor Yanukovych, lost the elections there in 2004.

Since the current crisis began, Chavez has extended $100 million in credit to Honduran President Manuel Zelaya. The Honduran leader could have received aid from the United States, but in return he would have to account for how it was used. For the money from Chavez, that wasn’t necessary. Zelaya became very unpopular in his own country, and after attempts to change the country’s constitution, he was exiled.

Cuba has no toilet paper, citizens receive rations of 110 grams of chicken meat per person, and President Raul Castro announced that farmers would no longer plow their fields with tractors but with a more progressive earth mover — bulls. In the Cuban province of Santa Clara, 6,000 bulls are already being trained to pull a plow. The Cuban regime could not survive without financial support from Chavez.

With money from Chavez, Bolivian President Evo Morales pays his country’s pensioners and teenagers 200 bolivianos ($28) per month, and the average monthly salary is just 500 bolivianos ($70) per month. In Bolivia, there are no sources of money other than Chavez and cocaine.

Like Putin, Chavez brands his political enemies as criminals. Like Putin, he evicts nongovernmental organizations from his country, claiming they are agents of foreign intelligence. He claims that terrorists from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia are “rebel forces.” And the crimes he boisterously accuses the United States of committing — financing terrorism, subversive activity abroad, fascism and militarism — is a laundry list of his own misdeeds.

In short, Chavez, like Putin, sees himself as a world-class politician, and the reasons for his own lack of success are the same as the Kremlin’s: a disproportionate self-love and lightheadedness caused by the inebriating effect of too many petrodollars.

Under crisis conditions, it has turned out that Venezuela’s nationalized economy is in no condition to simultaneously support Colombian terrorists, Bolivia’s poor and Venezuelan voters. The only option open to Chavez is to conduct a new nationalization (the first took place in May) and to follow that with a war against Columbia — a country that Chavez is purposefully provoking by supporting FARC drug terrorists even while branding U.S. attempts to curb drug trafficking as preparatory to initiating aggression against Venezuela.

There is much less discussion about a possible war between Venezuela and Columbia than between Iran and Israel, but judging by the Arctic Sea ship incident and the delivery of tanks to Chavez, provoking both conflicts seems to be a foreign policy priority for the Kremlin.

Yulia Latynina hosts a political talk show on Ekho Moskvy radio.

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