Word: vez
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Four years ago, Hugo Chávez scored one of the more impressive p.r. coups of the new century when he started delivering free heating oil to low-income Americans. Even if it was political opportunism, as conservative critics insisted, it got home-heating fuel to hundreds of thousands of yanquis during the past four winters, when the price was often skyrocketing. On Monday, however, with world oil prices plunging, the Venezuelan President decided to suspend his large-scale, multistate U.S. program in order to tend to financial concerns at home. Then on Wednesday, at the urging of U.S. politicians...
...which raises the question: If Chávez can keep donating fuel even as his oil revenues tumble, why can't any U.S. oil companies step up to do the same? (See pictures of the global financial crisis...
...left-wing Chávez caught Washington by surprise in the fall of 2005 when he announced that Citgo - the Houston-based subsidiary of Venezuela's state-run oil firm, Petróleos de Venezuela - would give millions of gallons of heating oil at half price, and eventually free, to struggling households in the American Northeast and Midwest. By this year, the service has expanded to more than 200,000 families in 23 states. The partisan controversy around it has also grown. Republicans grouse that taking fuel from Chávez, America's chief antagonist in the hemisphere, is unpatriotic...
...leader. Capitalism's excesses get deservedly excoriated for causing today's global catastrophe. But even Venezuela, which helps prop up Cuba's economy with cut-rate oil, has made it clear in recent elections that it's not the socialist hotbed that its left-wing President Hugo Chávez dreams of. Yes, the hypocritical drill among Latin leaders is that they censure Washington publicly but Havana privately. Still, most of them believe Cuba is as out of step with the rest of the Americas...
...vez also faces the very real risk of voter fatigue. If a referendum is held next year, it will be the third hard-fought election Venezuelans have been asked to engage in in as many years. Said opposition leader Manuel Rosales, the Maracaibo mayor-elect whom Chávez has recently threatened to imprison for allegedly plotting to assassinate him: "It's an insult to people that at this time we're already talking about a new electoral campaign, when they're overwhelmed by far more pressing problems." Maybe so, but Chávez "lives to be on the offensive...