Word: ambassadors
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...needs diplomacy and all its excruciating politeness? Not even the traditional "Yankee Go Home" was enough to convey the pique of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez on Thursday as he announced that he had given U.S. Ambassador Patrick Duddy 72 hours to leave Venezuela. "Shithead Yankees, go to hell!" Chávez thundered at a campaign rally in Carabobo state Thursday, announcing that he had also asked Venezuela's ambassador to Washington, Bernardo Alvarez, to return home until a new government is elected in the U.S. that will "respect the peoples and governments of Latin America...
...said he was taking the action in solidarity with Bolivia's President Evo Morales, who had expelled his own country's U.S. ambassador a day earlier. But he also accused the U.S. of being part of a plot to assassinate him, a scheme allegedly involving retired Venezuelan generals and opposition politicians...
...joint naval maneuvers with Russian warships in Venezuelan waters. Clearly Chávez is rattling a saber at Washington, but the more urgent question is whether U.S.-Venezuelan relations are at a breaking point. Chávez had been railing at Duddy in the media because of the ambassador's recent remarks suggesting that drug traffickers were finding it easier to use Venezuela as a transshipment point. But high-level sources inside Miraflores, the Caracas presidential palace, say Duddy is being expelled not for that controversy but because the Venezuelan government insists it has proof - which the sources say could...
...Miraflores sources added that Duddy was also being expelled "as a gesture of solidarity with Bolivia," whose leftist President, Chávez ally Evo Morales, expelled the U.S. ambassador there on Wednesday, accusing him of inciting anti-government violence. In a televised tirade on Thursday, Chávez said the U.S. is "trying to do [in Venezuela] what they were doing in Bolivia." Bush Administration officials' only response late Thursday night was that they were "investigating" Chávez's comments...
...Blaming the gringos for the civil unrest may seem a reach, but Morales knows where his people's hearts lie. In 2002, when the former coca farmer first ran for President, the U.S. Ambassador to Bolivia at the time, Manuel Rocha, made an off-the-cuff threat that Washington would withdraw millions of aid dollars should Morales win. Morales was an underdog at the time, but the threat drove his numbers through the roof - such is the anti-Yanqui sentiment in Bolivia. Indeed, some observers say it was Rocha's slip-up that forced a run-off between Morales...