“Opium?”
He shrugged. “No trees, no water. The only way to feed our families.”
I felt a lump in my throat, a depressing sense of sadness combined with guilt. “We call raising opium poppies evil, yet many of our wealthiest people owe their fortunes to the drug trade.”
His eyes met mine and seemed to penetrate my soul. “You were a soldier,” he stated, nodding his head to confirm this simple fact. Then he rose slowly to his feet and hobbled down the steps. I wanted him to stay, but I felt powerless to say anything. I managed to get to my feet and start after him. At the bottom of the steps I was stopped by a sign. It included a picture of the building where I had been seated. At the top, it notified passersby that the sign had been erected by Heritage Trails of New York. It said:
The Mausoleum of Halicarnassus piled on top of the bell tower of St. Mark’s in Venice, at the corner of Wall and Broad — that’s the design concept behind 14 Wall Street. In its day the world’s tallest bank building, the 539-foot-high skyscraper originally housed the headquarters of Bankers Trust, one of the country’s wealthiest financial institutions.
I stood there in awe and looked up at this building. Shortly after the turn of the last century, 14 Wall Street had played the role the World Trade Center would later assume; it had been the very symbol of power and economic domination. It had also housed Bankers Trust, one of the firms I had employed to finance my energy company. It was an essential part of my heritage — the heritage, as the old Afghan man so aptly put it, of a soldier.
That I had ended up here this day, talking with him, seemed an odd coincidence. Coincidence. The word stopped me. I thought about how our reactions to coincidences mold our lives. How should I react to this one?
Continuing to walk, I scanned the heads in the crowd, but I could find no sign of him. At the next building, there was an immense statue shrouded in blue plastic. An engraving on the building’s stone face revealed that this was Federal Hall, 26 Wall Street, where on April 30, 1789, George Washington had taken the oath of office as first president of the United States. This was the exact spot where the first man given the responsibility to safeguard life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all people was sworn in. So close to Ground Zero; so close to Wall Street.
I went on around the block, to Pine Street. There I came face-to-face with the world headquarters of Chase, the bank David Rockefeller built, a bank seeded with oil money and harvested by men like me. This bank, an institution that served the EHMs and that was a master at promoting global empire, was in many ways the very symbol of the corporatocracy.
I recalled reading that the World Trade Center was a project started by David Rockefeller in 1960, and that in recent years the complex had been considered an albatross. It had the reputation of being a financial misfit, unsuited to modern fiber-optic and Internet technologies, and burdened with an inefficient and costly elevator system. Those two towers once had been nicknamed David and Nelson. Now the albatross was gone.
I kept walking, slowly, almost reluctantly. Despite the warmth of the afternoon, I felt a chill, and I realized that a strange anxiousness, a foreboding, had taken hold of me. I could not identify its source and I tried to brush it off, picking up my pace. I eventually found myself once again looking at that smoldering hole, the twisted metal, that great scar in the earth. I leaned against a building that had escaped the destruction and stared into the pit. I tried to imagine the people rushing out of the collapsing tower and the firefighters dashing in to help them. I tried to think about the people who had jumped, the desperation they felt. But none of these things came to me.
Instead, I saw Osama bin Laden accepting money, and weapons worth millions of dollars, from a man employed by a consulting company under contract to the United States government. Then I saw myself sitting at a computer with a blank screen.
I looked around, away from Ground Zero, at the New York streets that had avoided the fire and now were returning to normal. I wondered what the people who walked those streets today thought about all this — not simply about the destruction of the towers, but also about the ruined pomegranate farms and the twenty-four thousand who starve every single day. I wondered if they thought about such things at all, if they could tear themselves away from their jobs and gas-guzzling cars and their interest payments long enough to consider their own contribution to the world they were passing on to their children. I wondered what they knew about Afghanistan — not the Afghanistan on television, the one littered with U.S. military tents and tanks, but the old man’s Afghanistan. I wondered what those twenty-four thousand who die every day think.
And then I saw myself again, sitting before a blank computer screen.
I forced my attention back to Ground Zero. At the moment, one thing was certain: my country was thinking about revenge, and it was focusing on countries like Afghanistan. But I was thinking about all the other places in the world where people hate our companies, our military, our policies, and our march toward global empire.
I wondered, What about Panama, Ecuador, Indonesia, Iran, Guatemala, most of Africa?
I pushed myself off the wall I had been leaning against and started walking away. A short, swarthy man was waving a newspaper in the air and shouting in Spanish. I stopped.
“Venezuela on the brink of revolution!” he yelled above the noise of the traffic, the honking horns, and the milling people.
I bought his paper and stood there for a moment scanning the lead article. It was about Hugo Chávez, Venezuela’s democratically elected, anti-American president, and the undercurrent of hatred generated by U.S. policies in Latin America.
What about Venezuela?
CHAPTER 33. Venezuela: Saved by Saddam
I had watched Venezuela for many years. It was a classic example of a country that rose from rags to riches as a result of oil. It was also a model of the turmoil oil wealth foments, of the disequilibrium between rich and poor, and of a country shamelessly exploited by the corporatocracy. It had become the epitome of a place where old-style EHMs like me converged with the new-style, corporate version.
The events I read about in the newspaper that day at Ground Zero were a direct result of the 1998 elections, when the poor and disenfranchised of Venezuela elected Hugo Chávez by a landslide as their president.1 He immediately instituted drastic measures, taking control of the courts and other institutions and dissolving the Venezuelan Congress. He denounced the United States for its “shameless imperialism,” spoke out forcefully against globalization, and introduced a hydrocarbons law that was reminiscent, even in name, to the one Jaime Roldós had brought to Ecuador shortly before his airplane went down. The law doubled the royalties charged to foreign oil companies. Then Chávez defied the traditional independence of the state-owned oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, by replacing its top executives with people loyal to him.2
Venezuelan oil is crucial to economies around the world. In 2002 the nation was the world’s fourth-largest oil exporter and the number-three supplier to the United States.3 Petróleos de Venezuela, with forty thousand employees and $50 billion a year in sales, provides 80 percent of the country’s export revenue. It is by far the most important factor in Venezuela’s economy.4 By taking over the industry, Chávez had thrust himself onto the world stage as a major player.
Many Venezuelans saw this as destiny, the completion of a process that began eighty years earlier. On December 14, 1922, a huge oil blowout had gushed from the earth near Maracaibo. One hundred thousand barrels of crude sprayed into the air each day for the next three days, and this single geologic event changed Venezuela forever. By 1930, the country was the world’s largest oil exporter. Venezuelans looked to oil as a solution to all their problems.