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...Earlier on Thursday, Chávez had welcomed two long-range Russian bombers to Venezuela for training exercises, which will be followed in November by 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...
...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...
...Chávez rarely misses an opportunity to sound the Yanqui alarm when doing so has domestic political benefit. Critics, who are questioning whether the alleged coup plot was actually real, were quick to suggest that this latest anti-gringo outburst would conveniently deflect attention away from allegedly incriminating evidence against Chávez and his government emerging in an international corruption trial that began this month in Miami. The case involves a suitcase filled with $800,000 in cash that was seized at the Buenos Aires airport in the summer of 2007, allegedly being delivered on behalf of Ch...
...Others suggest that Chávez may be trying to whip up his base in advance of local and state elections in November. He and his party desperately need a strong showing in order to reverse the unusual downward political slide he's experienced since losing a national referendum last year in which he sought to expand his socialist projects and eliminate presidential term limits...
...Chávez's loud confrontations with Washington haven't been playing so well at home this year. Still, he has plenty of leverage: Venezuela is the U.S.'s fourth largest foreign supplier of oil, and Chávez has long threatened to cut off the flow if he were to find evidence Washington was moving to oust him - as he insists it did during a failed coup attempt in 2002. Regarding Duddy's expulsion, one Miraflores source points to the upcoming U.S presidential election and says, "We're taking these actions in large part because U.S.-Venezuela relations...