Venezuela

The San Francisco Chronicle had an informative article on Venezuela in its Sunday edition:  Chavez drives a hard bargain, but Big Oil's options are limited by Robert Collier San Francisco Chronicle 09/24/06.  Collier writes:

Just as there is no love between President Hugo Chavez and the Bush administration, there is little love lost between Chavez and the foreign oilmen who are pumping up the huge reservoirs of underground oil. But they need each other. The United States needs Venezuela to help quench its bottomless thirst for oil, and Chavez needs America to buy it from him in order to fund his dreams of spreading his leftist ideology around the hemisphere.

The stakes here are huge. The area around El Tigre, known as the Orinoco Oil Belt, possesses the world's biggest petroleum reserves -- 1.3 trillion barrels of so-called extra-heavy oil. Chevron, Exxon Mobil, ConocoPhillips and dozens of other foreign firms are here, using recently developed technologies to extract the tarlike, sulfurous crude and refine it.

"Everyone agrees that the Orinoco Belt has the biggest reserves in the world," said Alberto Quiros, a Chavez critic and former president of Royal Dutch Shell's Venezuela operations. "What Chavez will do with them is another question, but there's no doubt that Venezuela will take Saudi Arabia's place as No. 1."  (my emphasis)

The rest of the article has quite a bit about the general state of negotiations between the Venezuelan government and the multinational oil companies.

Like most articles in the mainstream press on Venezuela, this one seems to take rather too seriously the official line on Chávez' "leftist ideology".  Venezuela under Hugo Chávez doesn't have to bean enemy of the United States.