AFRICA-VENEZUELA:
Weaving New Alliances with Cultural Threads
Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Oct 28 (IPS) - Venezuela, the biggest oil producer in Latin America
and the fifth biggest in the world, has launched an offensive to forge
closer diplomatic ties with Africa, initially focusing on political and
cultural questions while leaving the matter of energy cooperation to the
future.
"We want a new diplomatic map, with 18 embassies, each of which would serve
two other countries as well, in order to cover the entire continent," said
Venezuela's deputy foreign minister for Africa, Reinaldo Bolívar, on his
return from a tour that took him to Senegal, Nigeria, Ivory Coast and Benin.
Bolívar, whose office was created just a few months ago, has already visited
Morocco, Mali, Egypt and Sudan, and is now packing his bags to head to
southern Africa.
"We'll be the third country in the region in terms of presence in Africa,
after Brazil and Cuba," Bolívar told IPS.
The main objective of the government's new offensive is "to strengthen ties
with a continent that we have largely ignored for decades, despite our
belonging to the Group of 77 (the largest bloc in the United Nations, made
up of 132 developing countries) and the Non-Aligned Movement," he said.
Caracas has traditionally maintained formal relations with nearly all of
Africa, but it has only had embassies in Nigeria, the oil-producing
countries of North Africa, Tanzania - after former Tanzanian president
Julius Nyerere (1964-1985) promoted the creation of the group of 15
developing countries, aimed at fostering cooperation and providing input for
other international groups and bodies - and South Africa, after the
elimination of the apartheid regime of institutionalised racism and racial
segregation.
For several years, Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela - the members of the Group
of Three free trade agreement - kept a joint embassy in Namibia, which was
closed as part of a restructuring of the foreign services of Bogota and
Mexico, Bolívar noted.
"Now we want to support the work of our embassies by drawing on the
experiences and activities of Cuba and Brazil," said the official, who was
upbeat about Venezuela's imminent admission to the African Union as an
observer, for which it will open an office in the Ethiopian capital Addis
Ababa, the headquarters of the AU.
The first aims are "cultural and educational cooperation, to establish
agreements that provide a foundation for economic, trade and technological
exchanges," said Bolívar. "For example, textile experts will come from Mali,
a major cotton producer, and together with Cuba we are looking at founding a
medical school in southern Africa."
"We are also seeking political exchange and common positions in the
framework of the United Nations, 36 percent of whose 191 members are African
states," he added.
But there are also complex situations in Africa, Bolívar observed, pointing
for example to the conflict over the Western Sahara between Morocco and the
Polisario Front, with respect to which Caracas advocates "a permanent,
peaceful and lasting solution."
The intensification of ties with Africa is being undertaken in the second
year of President Hugo Chávez's international offensive aimed at weaving or
strengthening alliances to move towards a "multipolar world order" to
counteract U.S. hegemony.
In Latin America, the Chávez administration won approval for Venezuela to be
admitted as a full member of the Southern Common Market (Mercosur) trade
bloc, made up of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay, while offering
generously financed oil supplies to Venezuela's South American neighbours,
through the Petrosur joint venture, and to a number of Caribbean nations
through Petrocaribe.
In search of "strategic alliances," the president has also made several
visits to countries like China, India, Russia, France, Spain and Iran,
negotiating agreements for purchases of arms in several of these nations,
tractors in Iran and satellites in China.
The anti-Chávez opposition movement, which has won around 40 percent of the
vote in the numerous electoral processes held over the past few years, has
criticised the leftist leader's "oil diplomacy" as well as the series of
international meetings financed by his government, arguing that they are a
poor use of public funds.
With respect to Africa, cultural activities are an initial focus of the
diplomatic thrust.
The next step is a Nov. 13-20 cultural festival that Venezuela will host in
Caracas, with the participation of a dozen African artistic and cultural
groups like the Benin national ballet company and Gnaoua musicians from
Morocco, as well as a number of Venezuelan groups and artists.
"Venezuela, like other Latin American countries, owes a spiritual debt to
Africa," Jesús García, president of the non-governmental Afroamérica
Foundation, told IPS. "Thousands of slaves from the Wolof ethnic group of
Senegal or the Mina from the (West African) equatorial coast came to this
country."
The festival "gives us a chance to eradicate the 'Tarzan-like' vision of
Africa that we still have in Venezuela, where we often see it merely as a
primitive continent with enormous needs. We want African intellectuals to
come and show us their reality," said García.
In the activist's view, the government's offensive provides an opportunity
to support intergovernmental efforts by promoting agreements between
universities, parliaments, regional authorities and city governments in
Africa and Venezuela, "and with the rest of the region, in search of a new
relationship with Latin America and the Caribbean as well."
The backdrop, said García, "should be the energy question and possible
accords between Venezuela, which supplies13 percent of U.S. oil imports, and
African countries that within 10 years will provide one out of every four
barrels consumed in the United States."
In the mid- to long-term, Venezuela's new "Africa agenda" is seeking
strategic alliances in the area of energy, in both technological cooperation
and trade, in search of which Chávez will visit Africa next year, said
Bolívar.
Other initiatives include the creation of a Venezuela-Africa Friendship
House, new university courses on Africa, and a centre for research and
preservation of the African heritage.
"We are in debt to Africans, whose forced labour contributed to building
economic powers and to integrating cultures," said Bolívar.
(END/2005)
Send your comments to the editor |
