Venezuelan Fuel Cost This Man His Life

Cheap Venezuelan Fuel Cost Parasram Persaud His Life

Friday, November 17^th, 2006

On September 21, 2006, Hugo Chavez, the President of Venezuela, gave a speech at the Mount Olive Baptist Church in Harlem, New York. Chavez promised those that attended the speech in the church that he was going to double the discount on heating oil delivered to “needy Americans”. Hugo Chavez’s concern for needy Americans appears to be a top priority for the Venezuelan leader whenever he interacts with the American public and the media. Chavez becomes very energetic when he applies the social philosophy that he used to secure power in Venezuela upon other groups in foreign nation-state systems that may be interested and sympathetic to his ideological and political goals. With Chavez’s announcement of oil price reductions in Harlem, the Venezuelan leader also injected political divisions into his speech that outraged many Americans from all corners of the political spectrum. That means there is a political cost for America when Chavez distributes his country’s oil at a reduced price in the name of “needy foreign groups”. In other words, while announcing the delivery of cheaply priced oil to Harlem, Chavez then claims the right in the same speech to verbally attack the President of the United States and our written Constitution.

The fact that Hugo Chavez has seized political power through democratic elections should be a grave warning to other democracies around the globe. A perversion of democracy is in progress in Venezuela. You see, Hugo Chavez is not a democrat—he is a Marxist revolutionary.

In healthy democracies, voters cast votes for individuals that they believe will best lead the country or territory in which those voters reside. The tradition of voting should not involve promises made by the politician at the personal expense of the people themselves. If a politician were to promise everyone that voted for them ten acres of land, for example, that would be a perversion of a democratic election. The reason that it is a perversion is due to the fact that some citizens in the democracy would have their property taken away by force of government to give to other landless citizens in exchange for votes.

That is precisely one of the mechanisms that Hugo Chavez used to win over large voting blocks of poor and disenfranchised voters in Venezuela. By promising free land that would be taken from land-owners and given to Venezuela’s poor, Chavez would easily secure large voting blocks to sweep him into power through democratic vote. Another mechanism that Hugo Chavez used to secure the vote was the promise to distribute fuel at a reduced price. It costs an average of $2.75 (US) to fill up an SUV in Venezuela. In fact, the price of fuel in Venezuela is so reduced that the most popular vehicles driven by Venezuelans are of the SUV variety.

Hugo Chavez understands class warfare very well under the Marxist philosophy. The President of Venezuela is so comfortable with these techniques that he is now attempting to use them inside the United States. The high cost of fossil fuels in the United States has been an ongoing political issue as of late, and Chavez’s timing to give his speech in the Harlem church was a propaganda effort to tap into that national discontent.

There are several dangerous trends emerging from the Chavez PSYOP effort:

Hugo Chavez has publicly and dramatically nationalized his country’s oil reserves, allowing the Venezuelan President to travel the globe and promise cheap fuel to targeted groups in a class warfare effort. This activity is designed to destabilize the nation-states in which groups targeted for class warfare inhabit.

Hugo Chavez continuously advises that other countries with similar fuel reserves nationalize their oil and natural gas fields and force out all privately-held corporate interests and make them submit to state bureaucracies.

While Mexico currently claims that it has nationalized its oil fields to benefit the poor of Mexico, the Chavez model would restructure that nationalization ever further. Mexico recently avoided that fate when the leftist candidate for president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, was defeated at the polls by a very narrow margin of votes.

The Chavez model allows the Venezuelan President to distribute oil credits without input from private corporations and the oil markets themselves. The socialist state that Hugo Chavez has envisioned is unworkable in surrounding nation-state systems in Central and South America because those states do not possess the same nationalized oil reserves.

Hugo Chavez is already exporting support for far-left political candidates in other countries in the American hemisphere such as Daniel Ortega of the Sandinista Party. Daniel Ortega could be on the verge of returning to power in Nicaragua with vital assistance and resources supplied by Venezuela.

The Hugo Chavez “revolution” then is driven by Venezuelan oil while tempting neighbors in the region to adapt models of governance that Chavez has developed in coordination with Castro’s communist regime in Cuba.

Hugo Chavez has already explained where he intends to lead Venezuela should he be reelected on December 3, 2006, in Venezuela’s next presidential election. His first step will be to rewrite Venezuela’s constitution, giving him dictatorial powers. Remarkably, Chavez has already announced that if he is reelected to president that the “people” would be giving him consent to run the country perpetually. To Chavez, democracy is the vehicle to enter political office, and once in office there is no more need for democracy in Venezuela. The west has already learned from this experience in National Socialism when Adolf Hitler was democratically elected into power. The international community must confront democracies through the United Nations that allow for such irrational behavior.

Hugo Chavez’s Marxist oil exportation and distribution program does have flaws in its PSYOP potential. One such flaw emerged recently in an individual from Guyana—a man named Parasram Persaud.

Parasram Persaud was a miner originally from Guyana that would venture into Venezuela to purchase diesel fuel for his mining operation located just across the Venezuelan border along the Cuyuni River. On October 6, 2006, Parasram Persaud and some co-workers made their regular trip into Venezuela to collect the diesel fuel and then transported it by small boats back to their mining operation. As the men were crossing the Cuyuni River, however, the Venezuelan National Guard opened fire on the unarmed miners with military-issued weapons and Parasram Persaud was killed in the attack. His body was recovered in the Cuyuni River and then sent back to Guyana for autopsy. Parasram Persaud was essentially murdered by Venezuelan soldiers for purchasing diesel fuel at a Venezuelan gas station.

Venezuela’s initial response to the incident was that their National Guard soldiers did not harm any of the miners, but the evidence proves that Parasram Persaud suffered lethal high-velocity impacts to his upper torso from Venezuelan military assault rifles at close range.

Hugo Chavez undoubtedly will never comment about the ultimate price that Parasram Persaud paid for Venezuela’s cheap fuel. We have yet to see the price that America will pay for allowing Chavez to solicit American citizens in Harlem, New York.

Christopher Farmer

MS, National Security

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