Venezuela will have Latin America’s largest armed forces in terms of firepower by 2013, if the country’s oil revenues remain high in coming years.
President Hugo Chavez has purchased and placed firm orders for close to $6 billion in Russian weapons since 2005, but he is also shopping for weapons in China, Belarus, Spain, France and [...]

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He’s an ethnic nationalist with a mystical sense of Russian destiny. Cold and pragmatic, he won’t play by the world’s rules.
Does this ruthless, focused leader have a weakness? Yes: his temper. Despite his icy demeanor, Putin’s combustible. He takes rebuffs personally and can act impulsively — and destructively. Instead of lulling Europeans into an ever-greater [...]

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Download English Version - Dictatorship to Democracy
In February, the Iranian government showed a fictionalized video on the dangers of foreign plots against the state. One of its stars: a mysterious American named Gene Sharp.
In June 2007, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez publicly accused Mr. Sharp of stirring unrest in Venezuela. Last year in Vietnam, authorities arrested [...]

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Four Russian vessels and 1,000 Russian military personnel are to participate. The move could further strain Washington-Moscow ties.
The Venezuelan government announced Sunday that four Russian naval vessels will participate in joint exercises in the Caribbean this year, a move that could heighten already strained relations between Washington and Moscow.
Venezuela’s naval intelligence chief, Adm. Salbatore Cammarata [...]

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A New Cold war in the Caribbean?
The significance of the Izvestia bluster isn’t that the Russians could be coming again — Moscow’s Defense Minister later said any air force arrangement in Cuba would most likely involve stops for fuel rather than actual bases — but that they’ve returned to the idea of using the Caribbean [...]

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A Russian-Venezuelan axis is a 21st-century throwback to the Cold war Soviet-Cuban alliance. Such a partnership bodes ill for energy security, for freedom in both nations, and for the Western Hemisphere.
Despite differences in culture, language, and geography, the rulers of Russia and Venezuela are increasingly rejecting civil society and narrowing political space in their respective [...]

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Some autocratic governments are challenging U.S. policies and silencing domestic dissent. But their increased spending raises the risk of inflation, which could erode popular support.
But some of the most obvious effects are in countries whose leaders are most hostile to the United States: Venezuela’s populist President Hugo Chavez, Iran’s stringent Islamic rulers and Russia’s growing [...]

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How would we like it if Russia placed interceptor missiles in Cuba or Venezuela? That question is disingenuous. Both Russia and China have been quietly helping Iran with its missile and nuclear programs. And now they’re mad that we actually want to protect ourself from a rogue state that they’ve been helping for years. That’s [...]

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Attracted by the climate, favorable tax policy and laid-back lifestyle, home buyers and investors are flocking here from Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Europe and the United States.
The skyline increasingly resembles a mini-Sao Paulo, a dense forest of steel and concrete towers that includes dozens of new high-rise condominiums and apartment buildings. (Not enough of the buildings [...]

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“The big story is productivity in China,” he asserts, noting it is an incredible 9%, or three times the level of productivity in the US during its 1990s peak. Admiral Owens attributes this to the country’s high-quality infrastructure. It will allow the Chinese economy to soon become the second-largest in the world, with a GDP [...]

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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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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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Speak fraternally but carry a stick. Is there a new arms race—or just overdue retooling of armies?
Even as its leaders talk, Latin America is re-arming—or rather some South American countries are. In the broader region, including Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean, total defence spending shot up to $38 billion in 2007 from $25 billion [...]

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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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The United States and Colombia have long been wary of Venezuela’s peacetime military buildup, suspecting the weapons could end up in the hands of drug-trafficking Colombian rebels.
Now they have documented reasons for their worries — certified by Interpol.
Colombian rebel computer files described Thursday as authentic by the international police agency suggest a dramatic arms buildup [...]

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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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Left-wing governments in Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua and Bolivia have all become allies of Iran in recent years, and other countries in Latin America have diplomatic ties with the Islamic republic.
Shannon said Iran wants to ease its international isolation by showing it is able to win friends in Latin America, which has been historically in the [...]

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The reality is that as far as the current run-up in gasoline prices is concerned, other factors are more to blame: shrinking oil output from such key producers as Mexico, Russia and Venezuela; internal violence in Iraq and Nigeria; refinery inadequacies in the U.S. and elsewhere; speculative stockpiling by global oil brokers, and so on. [...]

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In recent years, China has voted in favor of several U.N. Security Council sanctions against Iran. But, working with Russia, Beijing has blocked more expansive sanctions that might have proved effective, arguing that they were not convinced Iran was pursuing nuclear weapons.
But then earlier this month, Iran announced that it is tripling the number [...]

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Latin America’s three leading economies – Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico – have dusted off old blueprints for nuclear generators and are developing projects that could more than double the region’s capacity from the power source. Chile, Uruguay, and Venezuela are following suit by studying projects to start nuclear energy programs.
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This new world order will be characterized by fierce international competition for dwindling stocks of oil, natural gas, coal and uranium, as well as by a tidal shift in power and wealth from energy-deficit states like China, Japan and the United States to energy-surplus states like Russia, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. In the process, the [...]

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