Approximately 21 IIRSA projects, including a number of trans-border projects, are slated for implementation in Venezuela. Together these projects require an estimated investment of $4.4 billion. All of them fall within the Andean integration hub, with the remainder falling in the Guianese Shield hub. The majority of projects correspond to the road transportation, border crossings, and energy sectors (with a focus on electricity transmission).
Given the mixed signals on economic liberalization and externally induced development coming from the top in Venezuela, its support for an initiative like IIRSA might seem difficult to predict. And yet, as one observer has written, “Venezuela’s government has been quite frankly in favour of the initiative, marketing it as a step toward Simon Bolivar’s dream of a united South America of independent states.” In this Venezuela’s President Chavez has become like his partner in the creation of PetroAmerica, President Lula of Brazil: unyielding in his onto-ourselves rhetoric, yet quite pragmatic in terms of soliciting foreign financing and technical support for large-scale development projects. Critics worry that an already marked trend toward the prioritization of infrastructure construction over environmental protection and human rights will continue, as in the case of Chavez’s support for expanding coal exploitation in the western state of Zulia as part of IIRSA.