Word: venezuela
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Antonini, a Venezuelan businessman with U.S. citizenship, was indeed in a jam. A month earlier, he'd arrived in Buenos Aires on a chartered flight with Argentine energy officials and executives of Venezuela's state-run oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA). Argentine customs agents then caught him with a suitcase stuffed with $800,000 in cash. Antonini was allowed to return to the U.S. - but it seemed the entire hemisphere wanted to know if he'd been carrying the money for Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez as some sort of bribe for the Argentine government...
When Posada was detained after sneaking into the United States from Mexico in 2005, the U.S. could have extradited him to Venezuela to face charges in the 1976 bombing of a Cuban jetliner that killed all 73 persons aboard. He denies involvement, but declassified FBI documents implicate him in the crime. (A questionable military trial in Venezuela had acquitted Posada of the bombing charge and he was in jail awaiting a civilian retrial when he escaped from that country in 1985.) This time, federal prosecutors opted to try him on charges of lying about how he got into...
...hand him over. Given the bitter relations between Washington and Havana, it would simply look as though the Bush Administration were ignoring its own uncompromising anti-terrorist tenets in order to spite Castro. A U.S. immigration judge ruled that Posada would likely be tortured if he is sent to Venezuela - which is ruled by the pro-Castro government of left-wing President Hugo Chavez; that argument, however, can hardly be made with regard to Panama. (Chavez has insisted his government would never mistreat Posada...
...Venezuela's leftist President, Hugo Chávez, may have reduced poverty in this oil-rich country, but his Bolivarian Revolution has yet to bring safety and security to the streets. (This summer he's had to deploy national guard troops on public buses in the capital to keep them from being hijacked.) Many Venezuelans have responded by entrusting themselves to a group of dead "saints" who had lived delinquent lives. Ismaelito and other santos malandros such as Petroleo Crudo (Crude Oil), El Raton (The Mouse), La Malandra Isabelita, Machera and countless others were petty criminals in the 1960s...
...santos malandros may be popular among some of the faithful, but they are not, of course, recognized by the Roman Catholic Church. As is typical of the syncretic Catholicism of Latin America and the Caribbean, in Venezuela the faith openly accommodates non-Christian symbols and beliefs. The most prominent is Maria Lionza, the fertility goddess, proclaimed by the local belief system known as espiritismo. Her statue stands, quite literally, in the middle of one of Caracas' main highways...