Chavez is using his country’s bulging oil accounts to sponsor samba parades in Brazil, provide free eye surgery for poor Mexicans and heating fuel for poor American families "from Maine to Philadelphia." Argentina has paid its .8-billion debt to the International Monetary Fund through aid from Venezuela. Four African countries have also benefited from Chavez’s largesse. In our part of the world, Indonesia as well.

All these amount to billion in foreign aid, which surpasses Washington’s allocation for development programs and the drug war in western South America.

Another feature of Chavez’s foreign program is selling oil at cut-throat prices to Caribbean countries, bolstering his claim as the modern Simon Bolivar.

It’s likely that his foreign aid will increase with Chavez’s government taking control of oil fields operated by France’s TOTAL and Italy’s ENI.

Analysts, however, wonder about the sustainability of Chavez’s foreign aid initiatives, as it depends on the price of oil. Critics are openly hostile. Bush’s national director of intelligence, John Negroponte, says that Chavez’s program is being implemented at the expense of the very real economic and social needs of his own country.

Indeed, there are still many poor Venezuelans. Equally, there are also many other poor people in the world who do not have the oil that Venezuela has.

What’s ironic, however, is the description of Chavez’s altruism by some Western commentators as "an exercise in populist decadence." There was a time when "decadent" preceded capitalism rather than socialism.

But as the poor all over the world will say, cash has no ideological color (apart from green, of course) unless Chavez’s foreign aid is conditioned (like IMF conditionality) on the beneficiary’s support for his "anti-imperialist" or "anti-Bush" posture.

Perhaps, "anti-globalism." But being "anti-Bush" does not require any material incentive, not even in America.