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December 8, 2005

A really big arms sale

The deteriorating U.S.-Venezuelan relationship has generated a lot of news items over the past two weeks.

• Two members of the U.S. Congress, Bill Delahunt (D-Massachusetts) and José Serrano (D-New York), accepted an offer from Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez to provide deeply discounted heating oil, from the Venezuelan-owned oil company Citgo, to poor residents of their districts.
• A delegation of U.S. congresspeople and staff visiting Venezuela, including the chairman and ranking Democratic member of the House International Relations Committee (Henry Hyde (R-Illinois) and Tom Lantos (D-California), respectively) was prohibited from leaving its airplane at the Caracas airport.
• Bush administration officials described as a potential “destabilizing factor in the region” the Spanish government’s $2 billion sale to Venezuela of transport and reconnaissance aircraft and patrol vessels.
• Bush administration officials criticized Venezuela’s Sunday legislative elections, from which nearly all opposition parties withdrew, citing the 25 percent voter turnout as evidence of “a broad lack of confidence in the impartiality and transparency of the electoral process.”

Venezuela’s government doesn’t come out looking too bad in some of these episodes. The cheap-oil deal is a brilliant public-relations maneuver. It is much smarter than anything the Bush administration – with its heavy-handed approach to free trade, steady reductions in economic aid, and unilateral “decertifications” for various reasons – has managed to pull off in Latin America lately. Plus, it will help thousands of poor people in Massachusetts and the South Bronx. The opposition’s decision to boycott Sunday’s elections was a mistake: not only does it give Chávez total control of the legislature, it leaves these parties open to charges that they dropped out in part because they were running behind in the polls. If the electoral system is hopelessly tilted in Chávez’s favor, a better strategy would have been to go ahead with the elections, then to discredit them by documenting all abuses. As far as the airplane incident goes – it looks like an embarrassing Venezuelan blunder, but the full story has yet to come out.

Because of everything else going on, that third story – the arms sale from Spain – did not get much attention. That is a problem, because this transaction badly deserves a closer look. We advocate demilitarization here at CIP (it’s right there in our mission statement), and there’s no way to view this sale as anything other than a major step backward for demilitarization in Latin America.

The United States often (and often deservedly) gets a bad rap for an overly militarized approach to Latin America. U.S. arms sales to the region almost always exceed those from other countries, as well as the world. But no U.S. arms sale to Latin America over the past twenty years even comes close to the size of the Spanish sale to Venezuela. At $2 billion, it is:

• The largest arms sale in Spain’s history.
• 50 percent more than all U.S. arms sales to every Latin American and Caribbean country in 2003 and 2004 combined (about $1.33 billion). (Incidentally, despite poor relations the United States sold, or licensed private sales of, $49.99 million of defense articles to Venezuela in 2003 and $38.91 million in 2004.)
• Far larger than the controversial $500 million sale of F-16 fighter planes, and related equipment and services, to Chile in 2002. This was the first high-tech weapons sale to Latin America since 1997, when the Clinton administration lifted a twenty-year-old ban on such sales.
• Seven times more than all U.S. arms sales to Spain in 2004 ($282 million).
• Nearly half of what Colombia spends on its entire military and police each year (about $4.5 billion).

Venezuela is a sovereign country and can do what it wants with its money. Nothing about this arms sale violates international law. Cargo and reconnaissance planes are usually either unarmed or only lightly armed. And the sale will reportedly employ 1,000 people in Spain.

Nonetheless, we condemn this sale, just as we would condemn a similarly sized U.S. arms sale elsewhere in the hemisphere. (We are also concerned about Spain’s recent offer of 21 transport aircraft to Colombia.)

This $2 billion could have gone to social needs in Venezuela. While the Chávez government deserves strong praise for increasing social spending, it seems tragic to use $2 billion of Venezuela’s oil windfall on weapons when 38.5 percent of the population remains below the poverty line [PDF format].

This arms purchase risks an arms race in South America. While it may seem ridiculous for Venezuela’s neighbors to view this sale – or Venezuela in general – as a security threat, the region’s militaries think quite differently. Their job is to be on constant alert for potential external threats, and this large arms sale will have a significant effect on how they view potential threats, and the balance of forces, in South America. If anything, militaries elsewhere in the region will point to the Spanish sale to Venezuela when they pressure their countries’ elected civilian leaders for increases in defense spending and new arms purchases. This large arms sale, then, will have a ripple effect throughout the region: it could bring rising defense expenditures in many countries, and civil-military friction in countries whose civilian leaders are unwilling to spend scarce resources on big new arms purchases.

The arms purchase sets a bad precedent that the Bush administration might be encouraged to follow. Of course, the sale is more fodder for administration hardliners who want to take an even tougher approach toward the Chávez government. Meanwhile, by bringing Western Hemisphere arms sales to a new level, it could encourage the U.S. government to promote and approve similarly large arms transfers elsewhere in the region. The Bush administration already has a terrible record on arms control elsewhere in the world; the Spanish sale will only encourage them to extend that record to Latin America.

Posted by isacson at December 8, 2005 10:09 AM

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