The Miami Herald reported Monday that the Bush administration has begun a preliminary inquiry into whether Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela should be added to the official list of terrorism-sponsoring states. The news comes after Colombia revealed last week that a seized laptop computer belonging to a dead FARC terrorist identified Chavez as an active FARC collaborator. (FARC stands for Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, or in English, Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.)

Such a move by the U.S. government would put Venezuela in the company of Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, and Sudan. According to the news report:

Such a designation ”immediately imposes restrictions on the abilities of U.S. companies to work in Venezuela,” said James Lewis, a former State Department arms-trafficking expert now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “It would make it very hard for Venezuela to sell oil to the U.S.”

Maybe the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela could even make it into the elite ‘Axis of Evil.’

(See previous blog entry here. See the current issue of Organization Trends, “The American Friends of Hugo Chavez: Dial 1-800-4-TYRANT,” by Ana Maria Ortiz and Matthew Vadum, here.)

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