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WASHINGTON — While most of Congress was spending an August recess tending to local constituents, Representative William D. Delahunt was in Caracas, sitting down to a four-hour, one-on-one dinner conversation with President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, one of the Bush administration's most ardent critics.
That meeting — unusual for a sitting member of Congress and a head of state so critical of the White House — sparked negotiations that led to the official announcement scheduled for today: A US subsidiary of a Venezuelan-owned company will provide 12 million gallons of discounted home heating oil to Massachusetts consumers and organizations serving the poor.
Delahunt, a Quincy Democrat who is emerging as one of his party's leading voices in Latin American affairs, said he was simply trying to smooth strained US-Venezuelan relations while helping low-income people in his home state.
Critics said Delahunt should not be working so closely with Chávez, an outspoken leftist.
Chávez is close to the Cuban dictator, Fidel Castro, who seems to delight in needling President Bush and his administration.
"He's been kind of an apologist for Chávez for some time," said Steve Johnson, a Latin American specialist at the conservative Heritage Foundation. Meeting with the leader who calls himself a revolutionary populist, Johnson said, "is not something I'd like my congressman to be doing."
Delahunt dismissed the criticism, saying he is doing his part to continue a dialogue with a country that is the fourth-largest provider of refined petroleum products to the United States. The heating oil agreement, he said, "was something that wasn't about politics, was not about the bilateral relationship. It was about people. It was genuinely humanitarian in its intention and in its impact."
Asked if he was subverting State Department policy toward Chávez, Delahunt said, "I don't work for Condoleezza Rice. I don't report to the State Department. I report to the people who elected me in the state of Massachusetts. I belong to an independent branch of government."
Critics have described Chávez as a democratically elected leader who governs in an undemocratic manner. Elected in 1998, Chávez was removed in a violent coup in April 2002. That development was recognized by the US government. Chávez has accused the United States of aiding the coup, a charge that US officials deny.
Troops loyal to Chávez returned him to power later that month, and he survived a recall effort in 2004 in an election that was found to have been conducted fairly by the Organization of American States and by the Carter Center, the Atlanta nonprofit group founded by former President Jimmy Carter.
Human rights groups have accused Chávez of curtailing press freedoms and of stacking the country's judicial system with sympathetic judges.
Yet he has won plaudits within his country for his efforts to help the poor; an independent Chilean polling group recently reported that Chávez has a 65 percent approval rating among Venezuelans, 30 points higher than Bush's domestic approval rating, Chávez defenders say.
Bernardo Álvarez, Venezuela's ambassador to the United States, said in an interview that Chávez now wants to help low-income people in the United States.
"We want a united and prosperous America — the whole Americas," Álvarez said. "This is our way of showing our friendship and mutual cooperation between the US people and the Venezuelan people."
Chávez has been less cooperative and friendly toward Bush, calling him a "crazy man" and an "assassin." When Bush was in Latin America earlier this month, Chavez derided him at anti-Bush rally and declared "dead" the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas, a Bush administration priority.
At a congressional hearing last week, the US assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, Thomas A. Shannon Jr., warned that the Chávez government was "subverting democratic institutions by using them to restrict the rights of those who disagree with it."
Alvarez said the animosity between Bush and Chávez stems from what he called a false impression of Latin American governments as a threat to American democracy and capitalism.
"I have the perception that people want to see Latin America through the lens of the Cold War. This is not what's going on in our country," Álvarez said.
As a legislator, Delahunt has been active in Latin American affairs for several years, and in 2002 he inaugurated a series of unofficial talks aimed at ending the acrimony between the Venezuelan government and the political opposition.
The idea, Delahunt said, was to get conflicting parties into a private, secluded place where they would talk to one another personally and participate in recreational activities together.
The group, which called itself "Grupo de Boston," met in 2002 and 2003 on Cape Cod. Participants often engaged in heated political talks in the mornings (one session needed an intervention to stop a fistfight).
They also went whale-watching and played intramural baseball in the afternoons, with mixed teams and a bipartisan group of legislators as umpires.
Bottles of Scotch were in the guest rooms, and all had been consumed by the end of the session, a Delahunt spokesman said.
The Grupo de Boston members continue to meet informally in Venezuela, and Álvarez said the initiative has eased tensions.
While the US government has a shaky diplomatic relationship with Venezuela, the two countries have substantial economic ties. Venezuela is the United States's third-largest Latin American trading partner and its 13th largest worldwide. And CITGO, the Venezuelan subsidiary that will distribute the discount heating oil, has a historic place in Boston: Its giant sign in Kenmore Square has been a city landmark for four decades.
Chávez has used oil wealth to make allies in the rest of Latin America, said Alan Henrikson, a diplomatic historian at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.
"It's consistent with what Chávez is doing elsewhere in the hemisphere," Henrikson said, "and it's also consistent with the activism of Representative Delahunt in the Caribbean Basin and South America."
source: http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2005/11/22/behind_scenes_unlikely_allies_spurred_oil_deal/ 22nov2005
Santa Claus, make way for Santa Chavez.
Poor residents and nonprofit groups in the South Bronx are about to receive a huge Christmas gift from Venezuela's firebrand President Hugo Chavez: Eight-million gallons of heating oil at bargain-basement prices.
Two months ago, in an interview with the Daily News during his visit to the United Nations, Chavez first made the startling offer of cheap fuel for this winter from his oil-rich country to a handful of poor communities in the United States.
At the time, critics of the radical populist Chavez, the Bush administration's biggest nemesis in South America, scoffed at his proposal.
But the Venezuelan leader is about to deliver.
"The first shipments of low-cost fuel from CITGO will begin arriving in my district by late next week," U.S. Rep. Jose Serrano (D-South Bronx) said yesterday.
CITGO, the Houston-based subsidiary of Venezuela's national oil company, owns 14,000 gas stations and eight refineries in the U.S. Because of that, Chavez has a ready-made distribution system and doesn't need any special approvals from the White House for his project.
"My constituents are facing some of the highest energy bills in recent history, even as oil companies are reporting the largest profits in recent memory," Serrano said. "I'm very pleased to have helped broker this historic agreement."
The Bronx congressman has been working feverishly for weeks to connect local nonprofit groups with CITGO and Venezuelan government officials. The South Bronx plan is similar to one announced yesterday in Boston for CITGO to supply 12 million gallons of discounted heating oil to 45,000 low-income families and nonprofits in Massachusetts.
Under the Chavez plan, CITGO will sell oil for way below the market price - about $1.35 a gallon instead of the current average of $2.25. The average Massachusetts homeowner would save about $180 for each 200-gallon shipment, enough to last about three weeks.
But the South Bronx project is a little more complicated because so many low-income residents live in rental apartments instead of individual homes.
"The Venezuelans want to make sure landlords don't pocket all the savings," Serrano said.
You can be sure, if there's a way to do so, New York City landlords will find it.
That's why Serrano recruited several local nonprofit housing corporations to be the first to join the discount-fuel program.
To assure that the bulk of savings are passed on to residents, not just to the nonprofit corporation, lawyers for CITGO are working out a pilot effort in which every renter will receive a cash voucher equal to the average fuel savings for each unit in the building.
"The idea is to make sure the financial help goes directly to the poor, not the middle man," Serrano said.
Details are still being ironed out by lawyers for all sides, Serrano said, which is why he will not announce the specific housing groups and buildings to receive the first fuel shipments until a press conference late next week.
"We'll start with a few groups, then expand it throughout the winter," Serrano said. Homeowners aren't the only ones eligible: Even schools in low-income areas could apply for the program.
In his interview with me two months ago, Chavez vowed to set aside 10% of all the oil that CITGO refineries produce for his oil-for-the-poor program.
His government is already directing hundreds of millions of dollars from its windfall petroleum profits to expand social programs for Venezuela's own poor, and it has begun providing cheap oil to more than a dozen poor Caribbean nations.
To the people at the Bush White House and their buddies at the Big Oil companies, sharing the wealth with those less fortunate is a dangerous idea.
Santa Claus is for children, they say, and profits are for shareholders, and this Chavez guy is giving oil a bad name.
source: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/local/story/367930p-313135c.html 22nov2005
Officials from Venezuela and Massachusetts have signed a deal providing cheap heating oil to low-income homes in the US state.
The fuel will be sold at some 40% below market prices to thousands of homes over the winter months.
Local congressman William Delahunt described the deal as "an expression of humanitarianism at its very best".
Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez is one of the Bush administration's biggest adversaries in Latin America.
He first announced his plan to provide cheap heating oil directly to lower-income Americans while visiting Cuba in August.
'About people'
The deal involves shipping some 45m litres of heating oil from Venezuela to Massachusetts at a discounted rate via Citgo Petroleum, a US-based subsidiary of the Venezuelan state owned oil company.
At a signing ceremony in Massachusetts, Mr Delahunt - a Democrat who helped broker the deal - rejected suggestions that it was politically motivated.
"This is a gesture about people," the Associated Press news agency quotes him as saying.
"It has nothing to do, as far as I'm concerned, with anything between the Bush administration and the Chavez administration."
Talks are under way to agree a similar deal to provide discounted heating oil from Venezuela to low-income residents in New York's Bronx district.
source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4461946.stm 22nov2005
QUINCY, Mass. — Thousands of low-income Massachusetts residents will receive discounted home heating oil this winter under an agreement signed Tuesday with Venezuela, whose government is a political adversary of the Bush administration.
A subsidiary of Venezuela's state-owned oil company will supply oil at 40 percent below market prices. It will be distributed by two nonprofit organizations, Citizens Energy Corp. and the Mass Energy Consumer Alliance.
The agreement gives President Hugo Chavez's government standing as a provider of heating assistance to poor U.S. residents at a time when U.S. oil companies have been reluctant to do so and Congress has failed to expand aid in response to rising oil prices.
U.S. Rep. William Delahunt, D-Mass., met with Chavez in August and helped broker the deal. He said his constituents' needs for heating assistance trump any political points the Chavez administration can score.
"This is a humanitarian gesture," Delahunt said, speaking after a news conference with Venezuelan officials outside the home of a constituent who will receive heating aid.
Citgo is the Houston-based subsidiary of Venezuela's state-owned oil company and has about 13,500 independently owned U.S. gas stations. It is offering Massachusetts more than 12 million gallons of discounted heating oil over the next four months, starting in December.
The two nonprofit organizations will screen recipients for financial need and cooperate with oil distributors that will make discounted deliveries to qualifying homes and institutions, such as homeless shelters and hospitals.
Chavez proposed offering fuel directly to poor U.S. communities during a visit to Cuba in August. He has said the aim is to bypass middlemen to reduce costs for the American poor — a group he argues has been severely neglected by Bush's government.
Chavez has become one of Latin America's most vocal critics of U.S.-style capitalism, which he calls a major cause of poverty. U.S. officials accuse Chavez of endangering Venezuelan democracy by assuming ever-greater powers. During a short-lived 2002 coup against Chavez, the U.S. government promptly recognized the new leaders, who were soon driven out amid a popular uprising.
Associated Press writer Marcel Honore contributed to this report from Caracas.
source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/22/AR2005112201516.html 22nov2005
QUINCY, Mass. —Tens of thousands of low-income Massachusetts residents will receive discounted home heating oil under an agreement signed Tuesday with Venezuela, a key supplier of U.S. oil imports whose government is a political adversary of the Bush administration.
The agreement would distribute oil from a subsidiary of Venezuela's state-owned oil company at 40 percent below market prices. It gives President Hugo Chavez's government standing as a provider of heating assistance to poor U.S. citizens at a time when U.S. oil companies have been reluctant to do so. Meanwhile, Congressional efforts to expand aid in response to a spike in winter heating costs have failed.
U.S. Rep. William Delahunt, a Massachusetts Democrat who met with Chavez in August and helped broker the deal, said his constituents' needs for heating assistance trump any political points the Chavez administration can score.
"This is a humanitarian gesture," Delahunt said, speaking after a news conference with Venezuelan officials outside the home of a constituent who will receive heating aid. "It has nothing to do, as far as I'm concerned, with anything between the Bush administration and the Chavez administration.
"This is going to alleviate the fears of people who were wondering whether they were going to be able to get through our cold, bitter New England winter."
Chavez has become one of Latin America's most vocal critics of U.S.-style capitalism, which he calls a major cause of poverty. U.S. officials, meanwhile, have accused Chavez of endangering Venezuelan democracy by assuming ever-greater powers. During a short-lived 2002 coup against Chavez, the U.S. government promptly recognized the new leaders, who were soon driven out amid a popular uprising.
Gov. Mitt Romney, a Republican like President Bush, cheered the agreement during a Statehouse news conference, saying, "I want to say thanks to U.S. Rep. Delahunt and all of those around the world working to get lower-priced energy to us."
He refused to respond to a question about the propriety of dealing with Chavez, however.
Citgo, a Houston-based subsidiary of Venezuela's state-owned oil company with about 13,500 independently owned U.S. gas stations, is offering Massachusetts more than 12 million gallons of discounted heating oil over the next four months, starting in December.
The Massachusetts agreement will assist tens of thousands of state residents, though it's expected to address only a small fraction of the need this winter.
The oil is to be shipped to a Massachusetts terminal in East Braintree and distributed statewide by two nonprofit organizations, Citizens Energy Corp. and the Mass Energy Consumer Alliance. The organizations will screen recipients for financial need and cooperate with oil distributors that will make discounted deliveries to qualifying homes and hundreds of institutions, such as homeless shelters and hospitals.
"We are honoring a promise made by our president," said Bernardo Alvarez, Venezuela's ambassador to the United States.
Talks are under way to reach a similar agreement to provide discounted Venezuelan heating oil to low-income residents in the Bronx in New York City.
Chavez proposed offering fuel directly to poor U.S. communities during a visit to Cuba in August. He has said the aim is to bypass middlemen to reduce costs for the American poor — a group he argues has been severely neglected by Bush's government.
The plan in Massachusetts is "eminently a political move" designed to compromise the White House's domestic position, said Patrick Esteruelas, an analyst with the New York-based Eurasia Group. He said it was also a way to emphasize what Chavez has long cited as the failings of U.S. policy.
The initiative is part of a larger effort by Chavez to use Venezuela's surging oil wealth to extend the country's influence.
Despite Chavez' disagreements with Bush, Venezuela remains a major supplier of fuel to the United States and is the world's fifth largest oil exporter.
Some members of Congress have asked major oil companies to use some of their industry's estimated $96 billion in record profits this year to help people having trouble paying their energy bills. Industry officials have said private funding of government aid programs would set a bad precedent.
Delahunt said Tuesday's agreement could set an example.
"I just hope that this sends a message, and that other oil companies will step up and help also," said Delahunt.
Meanwhile, Congressional efforts to expand heating aid programs have largely stalled. The Senate decided on Oct. 26 the money wasn't there for a substantial spending boost for the federal home heating program.
Associated Press writer Marcel Honore contributed to this report from Caracas.
source: http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2005/11/22/venezuelan_officials_to_provide_discounted_heating_oil_to_state?mode=PF 22nov2005
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