Word: chavez
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...Perez maintains that human rights conditions in jails are better now than before President Hugo Chavez came to power in 1998. But he was unable to produce official statistics on prison homicides. He said the state has a comprehensive plan for the prison system that includes training new prison staff, providing new equipment, and building 14 new jails to reduce overcrowding - construction on the first three is already under way, he says. But the dire conditions in a prison system that now houses many Europeans has prompted the European Commission to looking into funding a program to rebuild prisons...
...Officials at three Western embassies in Caracas say Interior Minister Pedro Carreno has not signed a single transfer document for their nationals since President Hugo Chavez appointed him in January - and they're getting antsy. They said that at a recent meeting with ministry officials, representatives from every major embassy grumbled that they were in the same predicament The ministry did not respond to requests for comment...
...Apart from his fiery rhetoric, what makes Chavez's move seem more jarring is the fact that, until he came to power in 1999, Venezuela had been a trend-bucking oasis for Big Oil. Venezuela did nationalize its oil industry in 1976, but in the 1990s it had steadily reopened its fields to foreign investment - in some cases handing the multinationals deals that even conservative Venezuelans considered too sweet. Chavez has just as steadily, and stridently, reversed that policy, paring down the multinationals' ownership while ratcheting up their taxes and royalties. And because Venezuela is America's fourth-largest foreign...
...affects the quantity of oil that not only Venezuela but other countries can export, and hence the price we pay for it. The lack of new investment in Mexico's oil fields, for example, has led to some of that nation's steepest production drops ever. The drilling ventures Chavez expropriated today involve tar-like heavy crude in Venezuela's Orinoco belt - perhaps enough to add some 300 billion barrels to the country's reserves, which would move it ahead of Saudi Arabia. But to make that heavy oil refinable requires billions of dollars, capital that Chavez's critics fear...
...Chavez, who is determined to reduce Venezuela's dependence on the U.S. market, is betting that high oil prices as well as deep-pocketed ideological allies like China and Iran will help make up for any investment shortfall. It's a risky gamble - but not much riskier than U.S. energy policy. Between 2001 and 2006, U.S. gasoline consumption decreased by a laughably small 1%, according to a recent study by the University of California at Davis. Americans could blunt the effects of policies like Chavez's by lessening their dependence on foreign oil. But that, it seems, would...