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Venezuelan Arms Purchases Ring Warning Bells

At a meeting of military minds in Nicaragua, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld joined his voice to a chorus of others questioning the need for Venezuela to buy up arms and broker defense agreements with nations like Iran and Russia. Noting that there didn?t appear to be any actual threat to Venezuela in the Western Hemisphere, the number of weapons flowing into Venezuela from either declared or implicit U.S. foes has been questioned by U.S. and South American neighbors of President Hugo Chavez?s regime. Chavez routinely claims that the U.S. is out to get him.

Chavez has in recent months attempted to create a coalition of Latin American nations opposed militarily to the United States, much in the spirit of the now-defunct Warsaw Pact led by the Soviet Union. However, the leaders of regional powers in South America such as Brazil have stated they see no need for such a military axis. Every so often, President Chavez will state that he has recently uncovered a new American plot against his life, many analysts think he might eventually do it so often that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The firebrand Venezuelan president, a former army general who was elected years after he led an attempted military coup against the democratically-elected government, recently denounced U.S. president George W. Bush as ?the devil? during the opening of the United Nations General Assembly. Chavez counts Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, genocide-promoting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, and Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad as his close friends.