Caracas, Venezuela, July 17, 2006 --Venezuela's embassy in the U.S. responded to the U.S. government's speculation that Venezuela might cutoff its oil supply to the U.S. by saying that the possibility of this happening unilaterally is "absurd." Venezuela's Ambassador to the United States, Bernardo Alvarez, gave the response in a letter written to U.S. Senator Richard Lugar, who had commissioned the U.S. Congress General Accounting Office (GAO) to make an analysis of a potential Venezuelan oil cutoff. [...]

The report mentions and Alvarez's letter restates that, "it was not Venezuela but the U.S. government, solely for political reasons, that has discontinued the bilateral technology and information energy exchange agreement between our two countries that had been successfully ongoing for over 20 years." For Alvarez, this is "a strong indication of the imposed prohibition on U.S. agencies, like the Department of Energy, to engage effectively with Venezuela."

This example and others show that while Venezuela wants to " remove politics from the energy equation, the United States, unfortunately, has acted in ways more apparent than real in this regard." [...]