"Cap" Perez: No Longer Martyrs

Wearing a decorous gray tropical suit set off by a brightly flowered tie, Venezuela's President Carlos Andres ("Cap") Perez had a rare on-the-record interview with TIME Buenos Aires Bureau Chief Rudolph Rauch at the presidential residence in Caracas. Insulated from the noisy center of the capital by the spacious, well-tended gardens that surround the sprawling, colonial-style mansion, Perez was relaxed but assured in answering questions about his nation's foreign policy. Excerpts:

Q. How do you answer the charge that rising oil prices have caused the current world economic crisis?

A. The world crisis does not derive from the price of petroleum. Inflation in developed countries has grown since 1972 until it is now 16%. If oil prices had remained fixed, inflation would have been around 14%. It has both surprised and worried us considerably that the big countries, and above all the United States, have decided to make oil the whipping boy when the truth is that the world crisis is a direct consequence of the crisis of the consumer society.

Venezuela is not using oil as a weapon against the developed countries, but the moment finally arrived when Venezuela and the other oil-producing countries could set the price of oil at the level of, and in balance with, the cost of their imports. It is often said that the price of oil has risen several times as much as the prices of the imports we need, but this statement is only true since 1970 and does not take into account the years during which oil was available at very low prices.

Q. Can oil-producing and oil-consuming countries cooperate to avoid a collapse of the economic order?

A. We understand that a collapse or a long period of recession in the U.S. and in Europe would be even more traumatic for the developing countries. But we are also convinced that we will not solve the world economic problem by sacrificing our interests by lowering the price of oil. And anyway, we Latin Americans, as well as the countries of the so-called Third World, have lost the desire to be martyrs. Until yesterday, there was a buyers' market that imposed its conditions capriciously; today there is a sellers' market that does not want to impose its conditions but wants to discuss them with the buyers.

What has happened is that [the developed countries] do not want to listen to us but to command us. Every time they talk to us or send us a note, it is to tell us that oil is responsible for everything that is happening in the world. Really, we feel ourselves to be abandoned, mistreated and ill-considered.

Q. How will Venezuela exercise her new position of leadership in Latin America?

A. We believe that in this multipolar world, which has already definitely replaced the world of all-embracing leaderships, we should not talk about leadership by single countries. We must create Latin American leaderships so that our voice can be heard and our position respected in the different large blocs of countries into which humanity has been divided. Not blocs in the old sense of alliances, but in the sense of large economic groups with an identity of interest.

Q. Do you still believe that your administration is democracy's last chance in Venezuela?

A. What I said in my [election] campaign is that democracy is in crisis in Latin America. [There] are very few countries whose governments are the result of popular elections. If these countries, Venezuela among them, do not prove now that democracy is a system with sufficient force to generate an order of social justice, then democracy will suffer the same fate here that it has suffered in other parts of Latin America.

This circumstance should be taken into account by nations like the U.S. But we see that it is the other way around--that for having democratic governments perhaps we are considered weaker, for we are treated with less respect.

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