Word: venezuelan
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Latin American left knows anything, it's the value of political theater. When leftist, coup-ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya tried to return to his country on Sunday in a small Venezuelan jet, buzzing the Tegucigalpa airport before soldiers blocked the runway, many inside the Organization of American States and the Obama Administration considered it a reckless stunt that might hamper a negotiated solution to the crisis. But as it turns out, the aerial spectacle may have aided their cause: it finally coalesced hundreds of thousands of Zelaya supporters on the ground and helped prompt Honduran coup leaders, already facing...
...tragic with the surreal as ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya tried to make a glorious return to his homeland. Exactly a week after being flown out of the country at gunpoint, Zelaya called the bluff of the coup leaders and attempted to fly into Tegucigalpa in a small Venezuelan jet to the cheers of his followers. It could have been a spectacular homecoming for the history books. But after unleashing their M-16s on the protesters surrounding the airport, soldiers blocked the runway with troops and trucks. Zelaya's plane circled the airport at a perilously low height, then zoomed...
...mustachioed, sombrero-wearing Zelaya makes for an unlikely leftist hero. A 56-year-old former rancher and timber merchant, he took office in 2006 after campaigning on a centrist platform. But once in power, he drew close to Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and quickly copied his formula for popularity: giving handouts to the poor and blaming all the country's problems on the rich. Amid rising crime and a spluttering economy, the establishment turned on Zelaya. The flashpoint came in June, when he called for a nonbinding referendum on changing the constitution to allow Presidents to stand...
...Within months, though, she was locked in acrimonious standoffs with everyone from farmers, who mobilized against her hikes in commodity-export taxes, to opposition leaders, who decried her efforts to nationalize private pension funds and her government's ties to a Venezuelan financial scandal. They also argued that Kirchner was still calling the shots from the presidential palace. Even her Vice President, Julio Cobos, last year cast the deciding Senate vote against her and for the farmers in a humiliating policy defeat...
...would be tempting for Washington to dismiss Sunday morning's military overthrow of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya as just a minor banana-republic convulsion. But the Obama Administration doesn't have that luxury. Zelaya is a member of the club of left-wing Latin American leaders - and its honcho, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, has already deemed this a hemispheric crisis that will challenge the new north-south bonhomie President Barack Obama established two months ago at the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad. Less than an hour after Honduran military aircraft had whisked Zelaya into apparent forced exile...