editorial comment The art of making friends......... Go Chavez, Go!

From the jetty at San Juan de las Galdonas, a fishing village on the eastern coast of Venezuela, Pedro Salcedo casts his eye across the Caribbean. The sea is calm. A fine day for sailing.


Fishing, however, is just an occasional pastime for Mr Salcedo. He makes better money transporting drugs to far-flung islands in the Caribbean, for a couple of thousand dollars a journey.

‘‘Trinidad, Grenada, and nowadays we go as far as Puerto Rico,’’ he says. The US lies almost 900km away, two days on a small launch.

Mr Salcedo, and others like him, used to avoid soldiers from Venezuela’s National Guard, the body charged with combating drugs-trafficking in the country, through which up to one-third of the cocaine smuggled from Colombia passes. But increasingly often, US officials say, the fishermen are in competition with the National Guard, rogue elements of which also take part in drug-running.

This may be one reason why the US, the world’s largest consumer of cocaine, could remove Venezuela from its annual list of countries ‘‘certified’’ as adequately collaborating in the war on drugs. The State Department is expected to announce its list today, and some US officials say Venezuela will be ‘‘decertified’’, incurring sanctions.

Controversy over drugs was recently added to the list of factors that have become a fresh source of diplomatic tension between Caracas and Washington. Last month Hugo Chávez, Venezuela’s president, suspended a co-operation agreement with the US Drugs Enforcement Administration, alleging that its officials were ‘‘spying’’.

Days later it emerged that the US had revoked the visas of several National Guard officers for alleged complicity in drugs cases. But Venezuelan officials claim they are delivering ever improving results in the war on drugs, and that a decision to decertify Venezuela would be ‘‘political’’.

On Tuesday, Jesse Chacón, the interior minister, said the authorities had seized 18.7 tonnes of cocaine in the first eight months of the year, almost as much as the 19.6 tonnes seized in 2004.

John Walsh, a senior analyst at the Washington Office on Latin America, a liberal think-tank, agrees that it will be hard for a decertification decision to not be seen as political. ‘‘It’s difficult in this context to imagine that if there is a decertification it won’t be read as more political than substantive,’’ he says. ‘‘If the US isn’t careful once again they are going to give Chávez some material to work with.’’

Mr Chávez frequently criticises Washington’s policies as ‘‘imperialist’’, and charges that it is ‘‘hypocritical’’ of the world’s top drugs- consuming country to certify other countries.

This week, Venezuela offered an alternative arrangement to allow the DEA to continue operating under a more limited framework. A US embassy official said the draft agreement was being ‘‘studied’’.

Analysts have questioned the effectiveness of a drugs ‘‘black list’’. The decertification of the government of President Ernesto Samper in Colombia in the mid-1990s arguably had little lasting impact. And in Venezuela, sanctions that could amount to as little $500,000 (€400,000, £245,000) would be of little concern to Mr Chávez, whose government is dizzy on an unprecedented oil bonanza.

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