Through its Texas-based subsidiary Citgo, Venezuela’s state-owned oil company offers deeply discounted or free home heating oil to Americans living in poor circumstances.  As part of this year's program, Citgo has offered to provide at no charge 100 gallons of heating oil to each of 12,000 households in rural Alaska.  Most of the approximately 150 eligible Alaska Native villages have accepted the offer, but a few have not.

In Alaska's native villages, the punishing winter cold is already coming through the walls of the lightly insulated plywood homes, many of the villagers are desperately poor, and heating-oil prices are among the highest in the nation.

And yet a few villages are refusing free heating oil from Venezuela, on the patriotic principle that no foreigner has the right to call their president "the devil."

The heating oil is being offered by the petroleum company controlled by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, President Bush's nemesis. While scores of Alaska's Eskimo and Indian villages say they have no choice but to accept, others would rather suffer.

Because Citgo does not actually operate in Alaska, the company is sending over $5 million in cash so heating oil can be purchased from local suppliers.

Four remote villages are known to have refused the free oil: Nelson Lagoon, Atka, St Paul, and St George.

The Aleutian Pribilof Islands Association, a native nonprofit organization that would have handled the heating oil donation on behalf of 291 households in Nelson Lagoon, Atka, St. Paul and St. George, rejected the offer because of the insults Chavez has hurled at Bush.
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Dimitri Philemonof, president and chief executive of the association, said accepting the aid would be "compromising ourselves." "I think we have some duty to our country, and I think it's loyalty," he said.

Since the association announced its rejection of Venezuelan aid, contributions have poured in from across the US, so the villagers may well have enough donated oil to last the winter.

The controversy over Venezuela’s offer has heightened interest in the impoverished condition of many Alaska Natives.  Many find it ironic that the state government, which last year received over $2.8 billion in oil revenues, is unable to ensure that poor residents get enough heating oil at reasonable prices.

The donation has refocused attention on the rampant and long-standing problems in the oil-rich state's Native villages, where poverty, fuel prices, unemployment and unchecked crime far surpass national averages.

For years, Alaska Natives have reproached the state and federal governments for sending too little money to their tiny, far-flung communities. Many lie at least 100 miles off the state's skeletal road system in climates where winter temperatures routinely plummet far below zero. Fuel and grocery prices are bloated by the high costs of long-distance shipping by small plane and barge.

The expense of transporting heavy goods, such as oil, over long distances between sparsely populated settlements readily explains the exorbitant cost of home heating oil in rural Alaska.  Nevertheless, the alacrity with which Native villages okayed Citgo’s offer has proved very embarrassing to the state.

The map below, from Google Earth, shows Nelson Lagoon and Atka, two of the four villages mentioned above.  Also shown for reference are Anchorage, Alaska’s largest city, and Whitehorse, Yukon.  (Click for larger view.)

Nelson Lagoon - Atka, Alaska

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