Chavez Guarantees Latin American Energy Supply for 100 Years

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez called for the creation of a Latin American energy system to prioritize local markets in a “true energy revolution,” guaranteeing oil and gas supply to the region for 100 years.

“All the oil and energy that Latin America needs is here in Venezuela,” Chavez said tonight at a graduation ceremony in Caracas. “That resource, once in the hands of the empire, is now in Venezuelan hands, and we have it to share with the people of Cuba and the Caribbean, Nicaragua and Central America, Brazil and South America, at least for 100 years.”
Chavez called proposals by U.S. President George W. Bush to substitute gasoline with ethanol in a bid to reduce U.S. reliance on foreign oil, “true craziness” that “go against nature” and threaten the region’s poorest inhabitants.

“To produce the ethanol necessary to replace the gasoline that the U.S. alone consumes, we’d have to plant almost all the land on this continent with corn or sugar cane — not to feed people, but to feed the cars of the U.S. empire,” he said. “That’s craziness.”

Chavez said the U.S. proposal would never sabotage relations between Venezuela and its ethanol-producing neighbor, Brazil, as Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has offered “serious” bio-fuel plans that are in fact different from what Bush has led the world to believe.

Bloomberg