According to the Washington Post, the $15 billion refinery is now two years away from completion, but with little input from Venezuela or its mercurial president, who for years backed projects region wide in his drive to make Venezuela the vanguard of a new era in Latin America.
Indeed, these days Chavez’s influence is waning across the region as Venezuela’s oil-powered economy has gone bust and concerns have been raised about his governing style, which includes the jailing of opponents.
The reversal has become ever more pronounced since 2009 when Venezuela’s economy began to flounder, has been startling compared with the days when Chavez jetted around South America giving fiery anti-American speeches and inaugurating works funded with petrodollars.
“He’s not flying high like he used to even two years ago,” said Luiz Felipe Lampreia, a former Brazilian foreign minister. “I think he’s losing his capacity to influence people and to lead, even with his own friends.”
Ever so quietly, some of the Venezuelan populist’s biggest projects have been abandoned or mothballed, or have yet to take flight, including a pipeline from Venezuela to Argentina, a South American development bank, housing, highways and a continental investment fund.
However, Chavez’s retreat in the region has come as Venezuela’s economy, dampened by dwindling oil production and hampered by state nationalizations of farmland and companies, contracted 3.3 percent in 2009 and 1.6 percent last year. Billions of dollars in capital have left the country, according to recent UN economic data for Venezuela, and the heavy consumer spending of the past has dried up.
The country’s golden goose, the oil industry, is producing 30 percent less oil than it did a decade ago, industry analysts say.
Opinion polls in Latin America also show that the president’s image has been tarnished as Chavez has resorted to a range of policies his opponents call anti-democratic, including attacking the news media and governing with decree powers. Chavez has also forged ever-closer ties to iron-fisted rulers, such as Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
The new dynamic for Venezuela is a reflection of a convergence of factors that have hampered Chavez’s objective of limiting US influence. President Obama enjoys high approval ratings across Latin America, and most South American leaders are centrists who embrace globalization and trade ties with the United States. Multilateral lenders that Chavez accused of being tools of US imperialism, such as the World Bank, are as active as ever and have lent record amounts across Latin America in recent years.
Some Latin American leaders, in private discussions with US diplomats, have expressed distaste for what they consider Chavez’s intrusive style across the continent, according to diplomatic cables.
This weekend, Ollanta Humala, a nationalist candidate for president in Peru who had been close to Chavez, said in an interview that it had been “an error” to have allied himself with the Venezuelan leader in his unsuccessful 2006 run at the presidency. Perhaps most significantly for Chavez, there has been a shift in Brazil whose sheer size and influence make it critical to Chavez’s goals of regional unity.
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who embraced Chavez was succeeded by, Dilma Rousseff, a reserved pragmatist focused on an ambitious domestic agenda. Analysts say Rousseff is well aware of Chavez’s poll numbers in Brazil, where a Pew poll in 2010 showed that only 13 percent of Brazilians had confidence in the Venezuelan leader.
Brazilian officials who worked with Chavez recalled being put off by the Venezuelan President‘s rhetoric. “His discourse was political, ideological, about the liberation of the Americas, of fighting the forces of imperialism. He imagined commanding a revolution in all the Americas against the United States.”
(아주경제 앤드류 이 기자)
reporter
Park Sae-jin
swatchsjp@ajunews.com