Word: venezuelan
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...office in 2002, the armed forces have grown and modernized impressively enough to land body blows against the FARC, as demonstrated by Reyes' stunning demise. Chavez may have spent $4 billion over the past decade to buy everything from AK-47 rifles to Russian Sukhoi fighter planes, but the Venezuelan armed forces haven't seen real action since Chavez himself, then an army paratrooper, led a failed coup in 1992. So, Venezuela is likely at a military disadvantage - especially since many of its soldiers and officers aren't enthusiastic about either Chavez or the FARC. "There are too many Venezuelan...
...world leaders rattle a saber as flamboyantly as Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez does. On Sunday, in a piece of vintage Chavez theater, he ordered thousands of troops and tanks to the border with Colombia after that country's military had ventured a mile into Ecuador on Saturday to kill Raul Reyes, a top commander of Colombia's FARC guerrillas. The left-wing Chavez called conservative Colombian President Alvaro Uribe a "criminal" and a "lapdog of the U.S. empire," warning ominously that "this could be the start of a war in South America...
...Venezuela can't risk any threat to its oil industry, which still accounts for a third of the nation's gross domestic product, half of government revenues and 80% of export earnings. Even the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), of which Venezuela is a founding member, reports that Venezuelan crude production is still well below the more than 3 million barrels a day that the state-owned oil monopoly, Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), pumped before it suffered a debilitating management strike in 2002 and 2003. Experts agree that the shortfall in output is largely due to insufficient investment...
...cooled considerably toward Chavez's antics, and his defense of the FARC, which earns hundreds of million dollars a year via ransom kidnapping and protecting cocaine trafficking, isn't winning him much international sympathy. A war on his western border could also prove how freely the FARC roams inside Venezuelan territory - an allegation Chavez denies, along with the assertion by Colombian police that seized FARC documents show a long political and financial alliance between the Venezuelan leader and the Colombian rebels...
Shipments of powdered milk from Belarus are providing a temporary respite. The government is "increasing the amount of powdered milk in order to reduce the demand on liquid milk," says Roger Figueroa, executive director of the Venezuelan Milk Industry Chamber. Such shortages of milk and other food staples have intermittently plagued Venezuela since 2003, when the government imposed price controls. Now, the leftist government of President Hugo Chavez is blaming businesses for the crisis even as economic analysts believe the government's own policies have brought about the debacle...