by the El Reportero’s news services
President Hugo Chávez said on March 8 in his weekly Aló Presidente broadcast that Colombia’s hardline defense minister, Juan Miguel Santos, was “a threat to the region” and warned that he would respond “with tanks” to any Colombian military encroachment on Venezuelan soil.
Chávez’s comments, which play well at home, do not represent any real threat to bilateral relations with Colombia.
Indeed the president made a point of calling on his counterpart Alvaro Uribe to preserve relations between the two, which are dominated above all by trade.
However, the comments do come at an interesting moment: the first meeting of the new South American Defense Council, a Brazil -Venezuela initiative to formally boost regional defense co-operation for the first time in the history of the Southern Cone, takes place today and tomorrow in Santiago, Chile.
Farc and drugs scandal rattles Ecuador as elections loom
An investigation into a cocaine shipment seized in 2007 has revealed hitherto unreported contacts between a senior official from the government of President Rafael Correa and the ex number-two leader of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias
de Colombia (FARC) almost up to the eve of the Colombian raid on his camp inside Ecuador in which he was killed. Its ramifications, which have already affected a regional human rights NGO, could prove damaging to Correa in the run-up to the 26 April general elections.
Where’s the crisis heading?
The insouciance about the world economic crisis in Latin America’s bigger economies has proved shortlived.
In Brazil and Mexico companies are slashing costs and downgrading forecasts.
Among the middle sized economies, only Peru seems to believe that it will escape the crisis unscathed. Venezuela and Colombia have expressed worries about the crisis but barely touched the policy tiller. Chile, typically, has taken action. It has decided to raid its sovereign wealth fund to pay for a welter of new infrastructure projects.
Ecuador has gone back and opted for blunt protectionism.
