Energy Tribune - June 2008 - Michael J. Economides - Robert Bryce - Sometimes the headlines out of Venezuela can only be met with a smile. For instance, in early May the government of Hugo Chávez announced that it had added 30 billion barrels of crude – the equivalent of all known U.S. oil reserves – to its proved reserves. China’s National Petroleum Corporation and Iran’s Petropars certified the new reserves, located in the Orinoco Belt. But here’s the part that requires a sense of humor: Venezuela’s energy and oil minister, Rafael Ramirez, refused to disclose how the country was defining those reserves. There’s no doubt that Venezuela has enormous oil reserves. Whether it’s 80 billion barrels or twice that number is almost irrelevant, due to the fact that crude oil output continues to decline and the country’s oil handling infrastructure is not being properly maintained. Other news coming out of Venezuela is not amusing at all. After two months of investigation, Interpol claimed in mid-May that documents extracted from computers used by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of ColombiaM(FARC), a guerrilla group, directly implicated Chávez as a funder. Chávez quickly dismissed the documents as fake, claiming they were partof an attempt by “imperialist lackeys” to discredit him. Ronald Noble, Interpol’s secretary-general, said his agency had found “no alteration of the data” by the Colombian military officials who seized the computers. One of them apparently belonged to FARC leader Raul Reyes, who was killed during the Colombians’ raid on a FARC camp in Ecuador. Both the U.S. and the European Union list FARC as a terrorist organization. It has long been implicated in cocaine trafficking and blamed for many of the Caño Limón oil pipeline bombings in Colombia. After the FARC camp raid, Chávez seemed eager to embrace his link to the group. The Miami Herald reported that he even called for a moment of silence in Venezuela to honor Reyes. Now, I’ve generally thought that Chávez was more of a flake than a menace. But if he has been supporting FARC – and it appears that he has – then Chávez is a threat to Latin American stability. That raises several questions, including: can anything be done to thwart him? What will this mean for the already-nervous oil markets? And finally, is Chávez foolish enough to instigate some type of military conflict in the region?. In this issue, writers with long histories in Venezuela provide their perspectives on their home country under Chávez. We don’t claim that these articles are objective. They aren’t written in the style that one might expect from The New York Times or The Washington Post. Instead, these are personal views on the conditions in Venezuela. Love Chávez or hate him, it appears he’s going to be around for a while. Just how long he’ll stay in power is anyone’s guess.