Brasilia – President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva warned Venezuelan counterpart Hugo Chavez that interference by Caracas in the Southern Cone could jeopardize plans for a major gas pipeline, Brazil’s foreign minister said Tuesday.
Celso Amorim commented before the foreign affairs and defense committee of the Brazilian Senate, which summoned him to discuss the repercussions of Bolivia’s decision to nationalize its natural gas reserves.
But many of the questions directed to Amorim concerned the growing influence of Chavez in the Southern Cone, with several senators criticizing the inclusion of the Venezuelan in last week’s summit of the leaders of Argentina, Brazil and Bolivia.
The gathering in the Argentine resort town of Puerto Iguazu was convened hastily by Lula to address the implications of La Paz’s May 1 announcement of the gas nationalization.
Brazil gets 50 percent of its natural gas from Bolivia, which is also an increasingly important supplier to Argentina.
Though Venezuela is not directly a party to those arrangements, Chavez joined Lula, Argentina’s Nestor Kirchner and Bolivian President Evo Morales for the one-day meeting.
Amorim told the senators that Chavez’s presence in Puerto Iguazu “cannot be viewed outside the broader context of the energy integration of South America.”
“But our discomfort – and President Lula’s personal discomfort – with some of his actions was certainly conveyed to President Chavez,” the foreign minister added.
“That unhappiness was transmitted unequivocally by President Lula, to the point of saying that it jeopardizes not just the gas pipeline, but the whole idea of South American integration,” Amorim said.
Chavez is pushing what detractors call a pharaonic project to build a pipeline to carry natural gas more than 8,000 kilometers (almost 5,000 miles) from Venezuela to Brazil and Argentina, at a projected cost of $20 billion.
Amorim said that that conduit, assuming it is built, would then link up to other “entirely domestic” pipelines inside Brazil, and he agreed with senators who said the country cannot depend on external sources of the fuel. The minister did not explain how joining the Venezuelan project fits in with a drive for energy self-sufficiency.
Some senators suggested Tuesday that Chavez will have Venezuelan state oil giant PDVSA train Bolivians to run the oil and gas facilities now being operated by Brazil’s state-owned petroleum company, Petrobras, which is the firm with the most at stake in Morales’ nationalization initiative.
“I cannot judge. We don’t know what President Chavez’s intent was, but the concrete fact is that when certain threats were being transmitted through the press (from Bolivia to Brazil), that happened parallel with a large presence of PDVSA personnel” on Bolivian soil, Amorim said.
“It’s not a secret from anyone that Chavez exercises influence over the Bolivian president at a delicate time,” the official said.
The foreign minister also cited Chavez’s attendance two weeks ago at talks among the leaders of Bolivia, Uruguay and Paraguay, an event that included criticism of Mercosur, the trade bloc comprising Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay that Venezuela is in the process of joining as a full member.
Amorim said Brazilian officials have told Chavez that “it’s not Mercosur that has to adapt to Venezuela, but Venezuela that has to adapt to Mercosur. If not, we won’t reach an accord.”
The foreign minister said he didn’t know if the admonitions delivered by Lula have made an impression on Chavez.
“We will see,” Amorim said. “The conversations have been progressively frank”.
