Word: chã
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...sooner the better, considering the misery. The miners' slums have become cauldrons of drugs and prostitution in recent years. Sewage trickles through the unpaved streets. Houses are often built of nothing sturdier than flattened gasoline drums, and the surrounding terrain looks moonscaped from the slash-and-burn deforestation. Ch??vez has begun to organize the miners into some 3,000 government-backed cooperatives, which would be given legal access to any gold-mine reserves the government might take away from idle concessionaires, foreign or Venezuelan. But many miners remain skeptical, especially since the cooperative funds are moving as slowly through...
Goodman isn't alone. Ch??vez is determined to curtail U.S. and foreign influence in Latin America. He has panicked already bug-eyed energy markets this year by raising taxes and royalties on Venezuelan oil piped by what he calls scofflaw foreign oil firms, including U.S. giants like ExxonMobil. He's insisting that they convert their drilling contracts into joint ventures that give the government a majority stake...
That new populist bravado, which Ch??vez has backed up with a multibillion- dollar social-spending program at home, has spread to South American countries like Bolivia, where two Presidents have resigned in less than two years after raucous protests calling for the nationalization of vast, newly discovered natural-gas reserves. Says Amy Myers Jaffe, an analyst at the Baker Institute for Public Policy in Houston: "Ch??vez has seemingly become a leader who can galvanize antiglobalization agendas anywhere...
...Venezuelan mines create more heated debate than Las Cristinas. Rights to the mine were a Dickensian legal muddle for most of the 20th century until Ch??vez granted Crystallex the concession in 2002 for a bargain $15 million. But company executives cannot open Las Cristinas because, among other reasons, the Ch??vez government has not granted the necessary environmental permits, which, so far, have been mired in bureaucratic review. One problem may be the chronic concern, as government officials have said privately, that foreign companies like Crystallex rarely create as many jobs as promised. For now, Crystallex complains it must...
Industry analysts say even Ch??vez, for all his provocative socialist rhetoric, realizes that the best way to achieve those results is to tap into the capital and technology of the multinationals. Says Luis Rojas, vice president of Venezuela's mining chamber: "He knows foreign investment is the only way Venezuela can boost its production and increase its reserves." While Ch??vez's September speech may have scared the mother lode out of mining execs, many believe it was meant more to appease the restless miners than to presage the ouster of the foreigners...