Word: venezuela
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Fredys Villanueva has abandoned his native Colombia for neighboring Venezuela. But he's not quite like the hundreds of thousands of Colombians who have fled their country's bloody 44-year civil war for the safety of the land of Hugo Chávez. Instead, he's like the 2 million or more Colombians who have moved to Venezuela because it offers greater employment opportunities and a more secure social-safety network. Perched on a sofa on the porch of his home in El Aguacate, a barrio outside Caracas, Villanueva is more than happy to be caught in the ideological...
After going to Venezuela from Barranquilla, Colombia, in 2003, Villanueva, 55, found steady work with decent pay at an aluminum factory, a job that came with a free house and other benefits. "There's a health clinic over there," he says, pointing down a dusty road lined with haphazardly constructed brick houses. "The Cuban modules are nearby too," he adds, referring to the free clinics, started by Chávez, that use Cuban doctors in poor neighborhoods. "They give me free pills for my hypertension...
...estimates that some 200,000 Colombians are indeed in neighboring Venezuela as war refugees. But as many as 75% of the more than 3 million to 4 million Colombians living there moved for economic reasons. Juan Carlos Tanus, president of the Association of Colombians in Venezuela, says Venezuela's advantages include jobs and subsidized food and health, which has been provided for the past 10 years by Chávez's socialist government. In fact, Tanus notes, from 2002 to 2008 - even as Colombia got safer thanks to Uribe's offensive against leftist guerrillas - the number of Colombians emigrating...
Many Latin American governments, including Venezuela and its leftist bloc, had criticized Obama in recent months for seeming cowed by that GOP faction. But if the Honduras crisis ends successfully, it could steal thunder from the Chavez bloc and its anti-Washington agenda - and U.S. policy in Latin America might finally enter the 21st century...
...three weeks earlier. Nepal is 15 minutes ahead of India but an hour and 15 minutes behind China. Iran can't decide what to do about daylight saving; its parliament wants to observe it, while President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says no. And in 2007, President Hugo Chávez set Venezuela's clocks forward 30 minutes, supposedly to make the country more productive. In the end, time really is relative...