Free Republic

More than 1,000 Cuban doctors, sports trainers, sugar experts and other technicians are working in Venezuela. · The cooperation treaty includes the shipment of 53,000 barrels per day of Venezuelan oil to Cuba. CARACAS, Venezuela -- Venezuela's left-wing government Friday condemned as politically motivated a court decision to bar Cuban doctors from working in Caracas' slums and said they would remain in their jobs. The ruling Thursday by the First Administrative Court rekindled a fierce debate in Venezuela about growing cooperation between President Hugo Chavez's government and communist Cuba. Accepting an appeal by the Venezuelan Medical Federation, the court decided...

CARACAS (AFP) - Venezuelan opposition leaders have called on supporters to converge on downtown Caracas as they deliver some three million signatures calling for a recall vote on President Hugo Chavez. Government officials sought in vain Tuesday to get the protest postponed, saying they could not guarantee the marchers' security and rejecting the validity of the petitions collected by opposition groups. "We have not seen anything but disorganization and irresponsibility on the part of the organizers," said Carlos Bettiol, vice minister of public security. Tuesday was the midpoint of Chavez's six-year term, the first day under which Venezuela's Constitution allows...

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina - Venezuela's Hugo Chavez took his weekly TV talk show to Argentina on Sunday, extolling his leftist revolution as he sang tango lyrics and sidestepped mention of opposition moves for a recall referendum at home. The populist president, who typically speaks six hours at a stretch when broadcasting at home, squeezed his political patter into a two-hour transmission seen live here and in Venezuela. The Venezuelan leader, who was festive as he watched tango dancers and talked of Argentina's mouthwatering beef, had no comment on rivals at home mounting a petition drive against him. This was not...

VENEZUELAN President Hugo Chavez gets in the Carnival groove at a dinner at Prime Minister Patrick Manning’s residence, St Ann’s, Port of Spain, on Friday night. The media were not invited to the dinner but photos supplied by the Information Division show Chavez enjoying calypso and pan. Chavez left T&T yesterday.Chavez: T&T oil made us breathe again ‘We will repay love with love’ By Andy Johnson VENEZUELAN President Hugo Chavez left here yesterday saying that his country owed Trinidad and Tobago 500,000 years of love and gratitude. This, he said, was Venezuela’s way of saying thanks to Trinidad and Tobago...

CARACAS - The 64 boxes, in four-foot stacks, are packed with the signatures of nearly four million Venezuelans who want a recall referendum on President Hugo Chávez. But they sit in storage, waiting for the end of a political stalemate blocking any prospect that Venezuelans will vote soon on their president and resolve a crisis that has polarized and all but paralyzed their nation for 16 months. The National Assembly cannot agree on the fifth and final member of the elections council that would supervise the vote. Political leaders can't agree on whether those signatures are even valid. And Chávez,...

<p>When former Colombian Finance Minister Juan Manuel Santos told a Caracas audience last week that Venezuela is trying to buy 50 MiG fighter jets from a Russian manufacturer, the Venezuelan government bitterly denounced him.</p> <p>Although Mr. Santos does not represent the Colombian government and Colombian officials tried to stay out of the fray, his words risked further deterioration of the already strained relationship between the two nations.</p>

MARACAIBO, Venezuela - Children in clown costumes perform tricks for pocket change at street corners. A teenage dropout sells fish by the highway and engineers drive taxis. Indians abandon their ancestral lands to beg in the cities. Venezuela's economic crisis, the worst in decades, has spared no one - posing the greatest challenge to President Hugo Chavez's grand design of bridging the gap between wealthy and poor in this South American nation. Like Argentina at the opposite end of the continent, Venezuela has tried to remake its economy by breaking with the past. Argentina embraced Washington-backed free market policies. Venezuela...

CARACAS, Venezuela (Reuters) - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez launched a Cuban-backed campaign to eradicate illiteracy in his country on Tuesday, denying opposition charges that it was aimed at teaching Cuba-style communism. Seventy-four Cuban literacy experts were to train 100,000 Venezuelan teachers to give classes in reading and writing to 1.5 million Venezuelans -- nearly 9 percent of the population -- who are currently illiterate. The Cuban participation is opposed by foes of leftist Chavez. They accuse him of ruling like a dictator and trying to replicate Communist-ruled Cuba in Venezuela, the world's No. 5 oil exporter. In a video conference...

In an upscale neighborhood of eastern Caracas, demonstrators this week continued to congregate in Altamira Plaza to protest against President Hugo Chavez. A hotbed of Venezuela's political opposition during the opposition petroleum strike, the desolate plaza now looks a lot like an abandoned circus. But opposition leaders are just as agitated as they were at the height of the strike. "He is a terrorist and a communist," says Gustavo Ramírez, 32, a student who showed up at the gathering. "He has people in the country going hungry, and he wants to ensure that there's no freedom of expression." Though opposition...

The government of President Chávez may lack ideology and political direction, but it certainly knows how to cater to the sector of the population that is politically most important to its survival. A few months away from a much discussed referendum that would question the President’s tenure, Chávez is making sure that while the private enterprise gets starved, popular markets can sell at below market prices. In 116 days of foreign exchange control, the government has issued an estimated .5% of the average demanded dollars by Venezuelan importers and manufacturers. Many companies refuse to even file their paperwork in...