The role of Betancourt, the "Chinese minister", as Commander Hugo Chávez came to call her, was to oversee the finance. The lenders were demanding a level of precision that the Venezuelan officials could not provide and Maniero was entrusted to broker the relationship until Betancourt joined Bandes. The Venezuelans were in a hurry to obtain foreign exchange, while the Chinese were interested in execution and planning.Īccording to official minutes, over a two-year period the Venezuelan-Chinese Joint Fund held around 600 briefings and almost a hundred operational meetings with the different stakeholders. Letters were exchanged with a string of reproaches.įrom the outset, the terms of the bilateral fund negotiation were unclear and suggest that behind closed doors the commercial relationship wasn’t entirely marked by mutual trust. Yet, operations at the management level were confusing. The high-level meetings were relaxed and friendly. This was a reference to the 972 MW Phase 1 thermoelectric power plant project jointly executed by Sinohydro and PDVSA, Venezuela’s national oil company. In 2011, Bandes’ Executive Management of Development Funds addressed a communication to Betancourt, its president, informing her that China's National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the country’s highest planning body, had been "very emphatic in not accepting projects in which the approved amounts are less than the contracted ones". Diálogo Chino has contributed additional reporting. These documents and others form the foundation of the series El Joropo del dragón ( Venezuela’s Dance with China).The stories are published in partnership with the Centro Latinoamericano de Investigación Periodística (Clip). Documents from the Venezuelan Social and Economic Development Bank revealed the concern of the Chinese partners about the projects in the bilateral agreement they demanded certainty in the fulfilment of the obligations.Ī has had access to communications between Caracas and Beijing from 2009 to 2012 as the two partners agreed to cooperate on development projects. Chinese officials demanded certainty that obligations would be fulfilled and even resisted e continuing with major projects if full payment of the amounts stipulated in the contracts was not guaranteed. In particular, they expressed discomfort with resources for projects that were contributed by China itself to the Large Volume and Long Term Fund, initiated in 2010. Internal communications between Bandes, headed by Betancourt, and the Venezuelan Embassy in China, headed by Maneiro, show that both picked up on their Chinese partners partners early unease with Venezuela’s informality with respect to the terms of the Chinese Fund's financing contract. It looked as if yuan and petrodollars would rain down for decades and it became easy to talk about the realisation of a mammoth 675 projects worth US$313.4 billion, financed only by the Chinese-Venezuelan Long Term Fund. They may not have caused it, but they witnessed it first hand. What happened between 20 under the watchful eye of these two women was a mess. The strategy left dozens of projects scrapped or half-finished, and showed that Betancourt was no Christine Lagarde, the former head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in terms of her financial expertise, and, in diplomatic terms, Maneiro was no Madeleine Albright, the US secretary of state under Bill Clinton. Either out of conviction or because they inherited a historical responsibility, they embraced the strategic ties with China: Betancourt through her presidency of the Venezuelan Development Bank (Bandes), and Maneiro via the Venezuelan Embassy in Beijing. A few years later, the Sino-Venezuelan alliance materialised and, between 20, they negotiated juicy contracts worth many millions of dollars (or yuan, it wasn’t always clear), largely overseen on the Venezuelan side by two women: Edmée Betancourt and Rocío Maneiro.īoth women were committed to the revolutionary cause proclaimed by then President Hugo Chávez. The government believed that it would pay back the Chinese loans, backed by the solid oil production at the time. In 2005, Venezuela courted China, which had just arrived in Latin America, and simultaneously launched dozens of projects with money injected by Beijing.
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