Word: venezuela
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...minister in late 2007 at a summit in Chile brought the king of Spain, a normally soft-spoken man, to shout, “Why don’t you shut up?” Yet Chávez will not be shutting up any time soon. On Monday, Venezuela passed a national referendum that removed term limits for public officials, allowing Chávez and his appointees to potentially remain in power for life...
...petro projects. And no one recalls any Venezuelan names on the list of 9/11 hijackers. Whatever the geopolitical calculus of Washington's coddling of Riyadh may be, Latin Americans still see the U.S. as giving Saudi Arabia's repressive monarchy a pass while reviling a democratically elected government in Venezuela. They see the same double standard at work in the U.S.'s maintaining an economic embargo on Cuba but not on China, despite Beijing's human-rights record, if anything, being worse than Havana...
...Since then, of course, U.S.-Venezuela relations have plummeted farther than a Lake Maracaibo oil drill. Both sides share the blame. But the 1999 phone call bears significance. If anything, Chávez has lately supplanted Castro as Washington's priority regional pariah, yet he celebrated a decade in power this month by winning a democratic referendum that scraps presidential term limits, allowing him to run for re-election for as long as he chooses to. (See pictures of people around the world watching Barack Obama's Inauguration...
...rest of Latin America doesn't sign on - and most nations in the region are not willing to freeze out Chávez. He may irritate them, but he also emboldens them, because his oil-fueled socialist revolution has changed the political conversation in the Americas. The fact that Venezuela's majority poor have been enfranchised for the first time has prodded the rest of Latin America to finally confront its corrosive social inequality. Even officials of moderate Latin governments say privately they're gratified that Washington's regional hegemony has been challenged and often blunted since...
...pain of falling oil prices. Analysts like John Walsh, a senior associate at the independent Washington Office on Latin America, may worry that indefinite re-election would allow Chávez to accumulate excessive power, but Walsh credits Chávez with actually "restoring a modicum of confidence in Venezuela's election system...