Word: chavezes
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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...
...Indeed, Chavez's spending spree has given Brazil's long-dormant arms industry a bit of a political kick-start. Says Brazilian Senator Jose Sarney, a regular critic of Venezuela's president: "Hugo Chavez's armed forces have ordered 100,000 Kalashnikov rifles, 50 attack and transport helicopters, smart bombs, 24 Sukhoi Su-30 fighter planes. There is also talk of them buying nine submarines from Russia for $3 billion. It's very worrying. As Venezuela turns itself into a major military power, it obliges the other nations in South America to increase the power of their own forces...
What the military build-up does, however, is give Chavez's Venezuela added prestige in the continental battle for political supremacy. Chavez has brought together South America's radical leftists under his socialist banner; while Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva leads a more measured coalition of social democrats. The two men are friends but both countries are getting used to being at the political and economic vanguard of South America. Military strength helps with that...
...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...