Word: venezuela
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Even if Chavez were to turn Caracas into Havana, there is little Washington could do. The U.S. depends on Venezuela as its fourth largest foreign-crude supplier, which all but precludes swinging the trade embargo stick Washington has used against Castro for 45 years. Political isolation is a weak bet, too. In a region with the world's widest gap between rich and poor, Chavez's gospel of Latin American self-determination has spawned a resurgent left and unusually coordinated anti-Yanqui sentiment, evidenced by the region's rejection of President Bush's hemispheric free-trade proposal. Warns Luis Vicente...
Hugo Chavez has gone through more chiefs of staff than Venezuela has had Miss Universes - which is quite a few. So when the Venezuelan President tapped his older brother Adan for the job last year, few outside Miraflores Palace took notice. They should have. Adan, since then appointed education minister, is Hugo's chief Marxist consultant - and a driving force behind Chavez's harder-than-usual left turn since his re-election last month. Chavez has announced plans to shut down an opposition-run TV network and nationalize Venezuela's largest telephone and electricity firms, while pushing his rubber-stamp...
...Chavez himself is Fidel Castro's real successor in Latin America. His nationalization scheme evokes the seizure of private businesses in Cuba after Castro's 1959 communist revolution: it ousts U.S.-based companies like Verizon, part-owner of the Venezuelan telecom giant CANTV, and the AES Corporation, which controls Venezuela's main power utility. Chavez asserted this week that while he'll compensate both U.S. firms, he won't pay them a market rate. And when the Bush Administration raised concerns about his burgeoning presidential powers, Chavez replied, in his usual charming fashion, "Go to hell, gringos...
...which employ most Latin Americans. Experts cite myriad other privations they say the U.S. needs to focus on south of the border, including far better access to basics like health care, schools and potable water, and more reliable institutions like honest courts and cops - the kind that can battle Venezuela's soaring murder rate as well as Mexican drug gangs so vicious they're tossing rivals' decapitated heads into nightclubs...
...Nobel peace prize. China and India, with their booming economies, were supposed to consume every last drop of oil the world could produce, guaranteeing shortages for the rest of us. And with instability mounting in the Middle East as well as in major oil-producing countries like Nigeria and Venezuela, it was only logical to predict many years of tight supplies - and ludicrous profits for the ExxonMobils of the world...