Word: chavezes
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...certain they're together. In Venezuela's most beloved poem, "The Grapes of Time," by Andres Eloy Blanco, an expatriate in Madrid weepily laments that he's not toasting midnight back in Caracas with his mother. That made it all the more emotional last week when Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, in his new role as mediator between the Colombian government and Colombia's fierce Marxist guerrillas, raised hopes that three of the rebels' hundreds of civilian hostages would be reunited with their families on New Year...
...what Chavez discovered as he rang in 2008 last night is that the grapes of time sour pretty quickly in violence-torn Colombia. The hostage release collapsed as 2007 ticked away. Many had hoped it would not only revive peace talks to end Colombia's bloody, four-decade-old civil war, but also be a precursor to freeing three Americans held by the guerrillas. The debacle has now left Chavez looking humiliated, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe looking churlish and the leftist rebels, the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces - known by their Spanish acronym, the FARC - looking more than ever like...
...reminders that principle is hardly a reliable currency in FARCland. The left-wing Chavez learned an important lesson about the 20,000-strong rebel army: it couldn't care less about its public relations image because it is powerful and rich enough not to have to care. Maybe it could have been counted on to keep its word a generation ago, when combating Colombia's epic social inequalities was still its primary objective. But today the FARC, which controls a mammoth swath of southern Colombia, is widely considered to be a ruthless mafia that earns as much as $1 billion...
...Colombian government intelligence, he said, suggests that 3-year-old Emmanuel was released two years ago to a foster family. Whether that's true or not, Uribe left the impression that he was passively-aggressively scuttling the release effort to avoid the embarrassment of having FARC hostages delivered to Chavez; last month Uribe all but cut off the Venezuelan leader from the government-rebel negotiations when a dispute erupted between the two Presidents and their notoriously oversize egos. Chavez wondered the same thing aloud to reporters. Uribe, whose government is embroiled in a scandal over alleged ties to the right...
...Venezuela," says Joyce, "comes fairly low down the list." But Chavez does give a face to the race and an impetus for nationalistic Brazilian politicians to vote for an increase in the military budget. Indeed, part of the proposed new funds will go toward resuscitating the country's dormant arms industry. "We had 1% [share] of the world's arms market in the 1970s and 1980s," says Reserve Colonel Geraldo Lesbat Cavagnari, coordinator of the Strategic Studies Group at Unicamp university. "We need to recuperate that industry and invest in it. That means producing for the Brazilian armed forces...