“I know what their opinions are, but I can’t give them to you here. I’ll tell you outside,” Alex Moreno, a guide and translator, said as the government workers around him grinned nervously. Exchanging uneasy glances, the employees of the electricity cooperative Cadafe, located in Valencia, Venezuela’s third-largest city, declined to share their opinions about the gifts of oil Venezuela has made to a number of countries around the world.One of the world’s top exporters of oil, Venezuela under President Hugo Chávez has gained international attention for providing the valuable resource to other countries largely for free. It has sent millions of barrels of oil as aid to foreign nations, from Bolivia to England, Greece, and the United States.

Once outside, Moreno revealed the staggering truth behind the workers’ anxiety: usually staunch supporters of the Venezuelan president, these “Chávistas” disagree deeply with one of their leader’s most prominent policies. “The workers don’t want this. The problem is that Venezuela is giving away too much oil,” Moreno said.

Ignacio Fernandez, a student at the elite university IESA in Caracas, an environment very different from the socialist-inspired cooperative, agrees. Comparing his country with China, he remarked, “China is a socialist country, but it became prosperous by investing its resources domestically, not by giving them away.”

The similarity of opinion between Chávez supporters like the cooperative workers and conservatives like Fernandez is quite remarkable in such a politically polarized nation. It reveals an urgent reality: President Chávez—a president who declares himself a supporter of democracy—needs to reevaluate how he distributes Venezuela’s most valuable commodity. He needs to recognize that by providing oil to other countries instead of selling it on the world market, Venezuela is bearing a heavy opportunity cost, amounting to billions of dollars. The solution, though, is clear and simple. A majority of the oil earmarked for foreign aid should be directed instead towards projects that can solve Venezuela’s own significant economic and social problems. With two-fifths of the country living below the poverty line, it is undeniable that there are plenty. Clearly, Chávez’s use of oil as foreign aid is a veiled attempt to increase his country’s political capital in the world arena. According to Luis Vierma, vice president of engineering and production at PDVSA, the official reason for Venezuela’s excessive generosity is, “for solidarity with people, to have more of a democratic use of these resources, not to have them for ourselves alone.” It is true that Venezuela has long used its oil to promote development in foreign countries with considerable success. However, since coming to power, Chávez has radically and irrationally expanded such programs, using oil as a blatant political tool to unify Latin America and thus hope to rival the United States in world power.

In the last two years, Venezuela has promised $5.5 billion in aid to Latin American countries alone. The U.S.’s $1.6 billion in foreign aid to Latin America last year is a paltry sum by comparison. “It’s clear Chávez sees this as a way of creating, as he phrases it, ‘Twenty-first Century Socialism,’” explained Louis Nevaer, author of New Business Opportunities in Latin America. “Chávez sees himself as the intellectual heir to Fidel Castro.”

Whatever his political motivation, the bottom line is that Chávez’s oil diplomacy accomplishes only one real thing—it diverts absolutely necessary funds from those in need in his own country. While the $5.5 billion in aid that Chávez promised to Latin America is an extremely large sum, the opportunity cost that Venezuela incurred by not selling that oil at market value is even greater. These lost profits could have funded the government’s social projects that alone cost more than $7 billion per year. These social projects form the cornerstones of Chávez’s efforts to help the poorest in Venezuela. As Moreno asked, “Venezuela is a country that produces meat, cheese, and milk. We are not a country that can feed itself. Why don’t we invest money in universities, health clinics—places that have a real advantage for us?” If Chávez truly wants to be generous, he should start with his own people.

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