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Fredys Villanueva has abandoned his native Colombia for neighboring Venezuela. But he's not quite like the hundreds of thousands of Colombians who have fled their country's bloody 44-year civil war for the safety of the land of Hugo Chávez. Instead, he's like the 2 million or more Colombians who have moved to Venezuela because it offers greater employment opportunities and a more secure social-safety network. Perched on a sofa on the porch of his home in El Aguacate, a barrio outside Caracas, Villanueva is more than happy to be caught in the ideological...
...aluminum factory, a job that came with a free house and other benefits. "There's a health clinic over there," he says, pointing down a dusty road lined with haphazardly constructed brick houses. "The Cuban modules are nearby too," he adds, referring to the free clinics, started by Chávez, that use Cuban doctors in poor neighborhoods. "They give me free pills for my hypertension...
...more than 3 million to 4 million Colombians living there moved for economic reasons. Juan Carlos Tanus, president of the Association of Colombians in Venezuela, says Venezuela's advantages include jobs and subsidized food and health, which has been provided for the past 10 years by Chávez's socialist government. In fact, Tanus notes, from 2002 to 2008 - even as Colombia got safer thanks to Uribe's offensive against leftist guerrillas - the number of Colombians emigrating to Venezuela each year rose from 21,200 to 93,000. (See pictures of the jungle stronghold of Colombia's leftist guerrillas...
...trickle down - a failing that could simply continue the kind of inequality that has fueled civil wars in Colombia for centuries. "The economic growth statistics published in the media are one thing," says Patricia Yañez, a sociologist at the Central University of Venezuela in Caracas who studies Chávez's anti-poverty programs. Colombia's migratory data "suggest something different." Venezuelan state television has even been rolling out Colombian expatriates to praise Chávez's social programs and support him in his spat with Uribe over Colombia's recent decision to let U.S. troops use Colombian...
...starting daylight saving three weeks earlier. Nepal is 15 minutes ahead of India but an hour and 15 minutes behind China. Iran can't decide what to do about daylight saving; its parliament wants to observe it, while President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says no. And in 2007, President Hugo Chávez set Venezuela's clocks forward 30 minutes, supposedly to make the country more productive. In the end, time really is relative...