In full page ads placed in leading United States newspapers on Thursday, Venezuela’s state-owned oil company vaunted its ”humanitarian” assistance to low-income US residents struggling with soaring heating costs.
”We’re not just any oil company,” said the ad in The Washington Post and New York Times, describing a programme providing 45,4-million litres of heating oil at unspecified ”deeply discounted prices” to low income families, schools and hospitals in northeastern Massachusetts state.
Petroleos de Venezuela SA (PDVSA) is providing the oil through its US subsidiary, CITGO.
PDVSA ”partners” with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to invest a portion of its profits in social programmes for Venezuelans and ”is reaching out to other neighbours” as well, the advert said.
”Which brings us back to the United States, Venezuela’s long-time trading partner and friend,” it went on.
”CITGO’s fuel assistance programme is a simple act of generosity to help people in Massachusetts weather the combined economic storms of Katrina, Rita and the global oil shortage.
”This fuel assistance programme isn’t about politics. It’s about offering humanitarian aid to those who need it.”
It plans to extend its fuel assistance programme, distributed via local non-profits groups, to New York and ”other cold weather regions,” the advert said.
The gesture to residents of the world’s richest nation comes at a time when US oil company executives have been hauled before Congress to testify about skyrocketing energy prices.
Tensions are high, meanwhile, between Washington and Caracas. Several US leaders have recently said that Chavez, a major ally of communist Cuba’s Fidel Castro, is a destabilising influence in the region.
The outspoken leftist leader, who has called President George Bush a ”killer” and a ”madman,” was part of a successful push by five Latin American nations to foil Bush’s plan to advance a pan-American free-trade deal at an Americas summit last month.
Venezuela is the number four supplier of oil to the United States after Canada, Mexico and Saudi Arabia. – AFP
