Venezuelans line up to pick through garbage at Ciudad Guayana's landfill, dumped from a government 
trash truck emblazoned with "Socialist Beautification Plan."
 

CAMDEN, NJ - Citgo, an American subsidiary of Venezuela's state-run oil company Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), said in a press release that it has relaunched its fuel subsidy program for Americans on Tuesday for the seventh year, despite earlier controversy.

According to the press release, Citgo was planning to give heating oil to over 400,000 recipients in the United States in 2012. "We do not want families to need to choose either keeping their homes with heating or paying other bare essentials, such as food or medicines," Citgo President Alejandro Granado stated. 

Citgo chose Camden, New Jersey to introduce the program, and chose a local grandmother to highlight as this year's first recipient. Democrats in the U.S. congress that have supported the program defend it as a means to get heating oil to poor families in the Northeast, where temperatures can drop precipitously in winter months.

But critics have challenged the "fairness" of giving subsidized heating oil to Americans when the severity of poverty in Venezuela is worse by an order of magnitude, and where those that are poor have nowhere else to go for help, unless they are connected to Chavez's political party.

As an example, critics cite a New York Times a story in September of 2010 entitled "Left Behind in Venezuela to Piece Lives Together," which featured photos of children in Ciudad Guayana, Venezula picking through trash in a massive landfill as government sanitation trucks weaved through them emblazoned with Chavez-inspired signs saying "Socialist Beautification Plan."

When questioned about the program in 2007, ex-Congressman Joseph Kennedy wrote in the Boston Globe, “Those who have no problem staying warm at night should not condemn others for accepting Venezuela’s oil. Rhetoric means little to an elderly woman who has to drag an old cot from her basement to sleep by the warmth of her kitchen stove or give up food or medicine to pay her heating bills.”

Kennedy also stated that he had approached major U.S. oil companies to provide the subsidized heating oil, but that they had all turned him down. “They all said no,” said Kennedy, “except for CITGO and the people of Venezuela.”

But according to New Jersey's heating bill and utility bill assistance programs website, there already exists a large number of programs funded by New Jersey taxpayers that offer assistance to the poor.

Venezuela, meanwhile, has faced recurring shortages of basic food staples since the Chavez regime implemented his socialist economic policies, which became even more pronounced since the implementation of price controls designed to slow inflation. 

The Citgo press release stated that since 2005, Citgo has spent over $400 million in energy aid for poor Americans, and granted the equivalent of more than $60 million in heating fuel to low-income American families. It did not mention Venezuela's poor.