Word: brazil
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First it was Venezuela, spending $4 billion on Russian fighter planes, Kalashnikovs and perhaps even submarines. Then it was Brazil, in August announcing a 53% increase in its military budget for 2008, the biggest such increase in more than a decade. The competition is still in the early stages but when two of Latin America's nouveau riche oil powers start splashing out on weapons, alarm bells ring over an arms race...
Indeed, Chavez's spending spree has given Brazil's long-dormant arms industry a bit of a political kick-start. Says Brazilian Senator Jose Sarney, a regular critic of Venezuela's president: "Hugo Chavez's armed forces have ordered 100,000 Kalashnikov rifles, 50 attack and transport helicopters, smart bombs, 24 Sukhoi Su-30 fighter planes. There is also talk of them buying nine submarines from Russia for $3 billion. It's very worrying. As Venezuela turns itself into a major military power, it obliges the other nations in South America to increase the power of their own forces...
...that Brazil and Venezuela have territory to fight over. Venezuela's border beefs are with its other neighbors, Colombia (over gas-rich waters) and Guyana (over areas west of the Essequibo river). He is unlikely to use arms to solve those disputes, either. His army is not as battle hardened as Colombia's - which has been fighting a prolonged civil war; and any intervention against Guyana is likely to draw in the U.S. and Guyana's former colonial ruler, Britain...
What the military build-up does, however, is give Chavez's Venezuela added prestige in the continental battle for political supremacy. Chavez has brought together South America's radical leftists under his socialist banner; while Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva leads a more measured coalition of social democrats. The two men are friends but both countries are getting used to being at the political and economic vanguard of South America. Military strength helps with that...
...Brazil's past obsession was potential conflict with its southern neighbor, Argentina. That has passed into history. Venezuela's military spending, however, has forced Brazil to realize that its security needs have shifted. It must now protect its jungle frontiers in the north and west from the depredations of drug smugglers. And it must also police the territorial waters that are home to regular new finds of oil and gas. The forces it needs to do that have suffered from neglect and disrepair. A recent editorial in the newspaper O Estado de Sao Paulo said that almost two-thirds...