Venezuela’s proven oil reserves are among the top ten in the world. Oil generates about 80 percent of the country’s total export revenue, contributes about half of the central government’s income, and is responsible for about one-third of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP). Increases in world oil prices in recent years have allowed Venezuelan [...]

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That man, Hugo Chávez, the president of Venezuela, began his love affair with the Bronx during a visit in 2005. Since then, he and his socialist government have funneled millions of dollars of aid to the South Bronx, home to New York’s poorest Congressional district, through Citgo Petroleum, the American subsidiary of Venezuela’s state-owned oil [...]

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Venezuela fired live missiles from fighter jets and ships Friday during exercises intended to demonstrate the firepower of President Hugo Chavez’s military.
Smoke rose from ships off the La Orchila island military base as Otomat MK2 missiles arced into the sky and Russian-made Sukhoi fighter jets flew in formation.
The televised war games allowed the military to [...]

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The creation of a South American Security Council, which would include oil-rich Venezuela, Chile and Argentina, was proposed by Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva at a meeting of 11 Latin American countries held in Brazil’s capital, Brasilia, in May.
The security council would be part of an even larger effort led by Brazil to [...]

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They called him “Angel.” He was the highest-ranking outside contact for the Colombian guerilla organization FARC. More and more details are now emerging that demonstrate the close relationship between Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and the jungle terrorists. By Jens Glüsing more…

The FARC Computer: German Left Wing May Have Ties to Colombian Extremists
No Ideology, Just Money [...]

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Chavez, 53, the country’s first dark-skinned leader, has used Venezuela’s immense oil wealth, says Jones, to improve life for millions of impoverished shantytown residents through health and education programmes such as no other leader ever attempted. For Washington, though, the “Bolivarian revolution” (named after Simon Bolivar, the leader of the independence struggle against Spain) is [...]

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Evidence of Venezuela’s support for terrorism could carry Hugo Chávez to the pariah status he deserves.
THE CONFIRMATION by an international forensics team that laptops and hard drives captured by Colombia originated in a camp of FARC terrorists ought to open a new era in relations between the democratic world and Hugo Chávez’s Venezuelan government. Whether [...]

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Documents that Colombia says it recovered from a slain guerrilla leader give the clearest indication yet that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez sought to arm and finance insurgents across the border.
The documents — more than a dozen internal rebel messages — detail several years of close cooperation between top officials in Venezuela’s government and military and [...]

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Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chávez, is in political trouble. He is clearly hoping that a new expropriation spree will fire up his supporters, at least long enough to keep his allies from suffering heavy defeats in November’s state and municipal elections.
In recent weeks, he ordered the nationalization of the foreign-owned cement industry and the country’s biggest [...]

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Lands have been confiscated and artificial price and wage controls are imposed on everything. Food shortages suddenly spring up and not surprisingly people are hoarding. There is virtually no investment in infrastructure and deterioration is evident everywhere. What is not obvious to many Venezuelans is that current government actions will take decades to remedy, even [...]

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Venezuela’s Minister of Defense General-in-Chief Gustavo Rangel was even blunter about the deleterious effects of Washington’s policies. Speaking at a press conference on April 8 in the Uruguayan capital of Montevideo, Rangel said that the U.S. embargo introduced in May 2006 on deliveries to Venezuela of armaments, military equipment and spare parts had had a [...]

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Venezuelan armed forces occupied 32 sugar plantations Thursday, the latest in a wave of takeovers that some say is a bid by President Hugo Chavez to regain political momentum and reverse his recent popularity slide.
The farms in Lara state were taken over by army units at the request of the Chavez government’s National Land Institute, [...]

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A spectacular find may prove what many have long suspected. E-mails and other files found on a FARC laptop in the jungles of Ecuador show that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez may have close relations with the terror group. By Jens Glüsing more…

Photo Gallery: Colombia’s Struggle against FARC
Sarkozy to the Rescue: France Announces Mission to Broker [...]

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Russia expects to sell at least three submarines to Venezuela in a deal to be inked when President Hugo Chavez visits next month, Russian news media reported Friday.
The Interfax news agency and the daily Kommersant cited unnamed military-industrial officials as saying that the subs would be diesel-electric models, of the Varshavyanka class.
“As of today, work [...]

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Venezuela’s president Hugo Chavez is establishing an effective anti-American network of activists and supporters. With oil approaching $110 a barrel, he has transformed himself into South America’s banker, paying off the debt in Argentina, being the supplier of weapons for FARC and other radical groups and stirring up well funded political activity whenever the opportunity [...]

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Hugo Chávez is on an arms-buying spree. Chávez has already bought $3.4 billion[1] worth of Russian weapons, including “100,000 AK-103s and AK-104 assault rifles, a munitions factory, 53 helicopters–including a dozen Mi-17 military helicopters–and 24 SU-30MK fighter jets.”[2] Venezuela is negotiating a multi-billion dollar, multi-year contract to purchase from Russia “five Project 636 Kilo-class diesel [...]

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The Venezuelan President’s show of force on Colombia’s border has heightened U.S. concerns about his escalating arms purchases from Russia
While Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez likes to boast that his revolution is constructing a new socialist man, he isn’t neglecting the country’s soldiers whose support is essential to his rule. Over the last three years, [...]

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The real news behind South America’s latest border fracas is Colombia’s looming victory in its own narcotics-powered civil war.
This is a victory Colombia’s chief international antagonist, Venezuelan caudillo Hugo Chavez, fears — for several calculating reasons.
Let’s start with Colombia’s slow and grueling democratic accomplishment. On Feb. 5, hundreds of thousands of Colombian citizens [...]

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“They are clearly cooperating with one another to sort of generate anti-American feeling in the Americas.”
And they’re using their oil money to do it.
Iran’s warming relationship with Venezuela has generated nearly 200 bilateral agreements, including increased cooperation between the two in the financial, metals and oil industries.
Ahmadinejad has also welcomed Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega to Iran [...]

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Britons tend to regard wars between South American countries as Ruritanian affairs. And the escalating dispute between Colombia and Venezuela certainly has its opéra bouffe aspects, not least because of the language of the Venezuelan strongman, Hugo Chávez: “Colombians must be liberated from the US empire”, “Dracula’s fangs are covered in blood”, etc. But the [...]

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The governments of Ecuador and Venezuela have sent troops to their borders with Colombia. It’s an angry response to a Colombian attack on FARC rebels in Ecuador on Saturday. Is war about to break out in South America? By Jens Glüsing in Rio de Janeiro more…

The World From Berlin: ‘Colombia Is Risking a Regional Escalation’
The [...]

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