Chavez: Uruguay has joined the continent’s “left trend”

[Say_What]

Chavez: Uruguay has joined the continent’s “left trend”

<clips>

...The agreements include supplying Venezuelan oil at discount prices to Uruguay, loans on easy terms to purchase hydrocarbons in exchange for Uruguayan beef and agriculture products. Venezuela has signed similar understandings with Paraguay and Argentina. Mr. Chavez said this is a first step in attracting Uruguay into the fold of a greater project he’s sponsoring: creation of Petrosur, a huge multinational government hydrocarbons company comprising Venezuela and Brazil, along with Argentina and other countries of the region.

"Petrosur is moving forward: a company that is national, South American and powerful with government to government sales which can save us 15% of cost because it will eliminate middlemen”, emphasized Mr. Chavez who has repeatedly expressed his interest in diversifying markets for Venezuelan crude, preferably to Latin America and China.
"Venezuela has spent 100 years selling oil to the north, but never to the south, and that is now going to change".

Venezuela is the world’s fifth oil exporter and a major supplier to the United States, but since Mr. Chavez took office in 1999 relations have been increasingly strained with insistent recriminations.

http://www.falkland-malvinas.com/Detalle.asp?NUM=5195


Uruguay's new President Tabare Vazquez, is congratulated by Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez,Tuesday, March 1, 2005 at the Government Palace. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)

[David__77]

1. Chavez must be like strong and not like Sukarno.

Indonesia's revolutionary leader Sukarno led many grand experiments in creating a new social and economic order for the countries of the South. But he failed to build a powerful machine for repressing counterrevolution and foreign subversion.

[GHOSTDANCER]

2. South America is lookin brighter and brighter. :)

[Mika]

3. Another nation has joined the Axis of Good.

:party: :toast: :beer: :party:


:bounce: :bounce: :bounce: :bounce:

---

[Say_What]

4. Where the People Voted Against Fear

Written by Eduardo Galeano, Uruguayan writer and novelist who lived for a number of years exiled in Spain after being imprisoned and then finding out he was on the death squad list.

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Where the People Voted Against Fear

From the January 2005 issue of The Progressive . . .

A few days before the election of the President of the planet in North America, in South America elections and a plebiscite were held in a little-known, almost secret country called Uruguay. In these elections, for the first time in the country's history, the left won. And in the plebiscite, for the first time in world history, the privatization of water was rejected by popular vote, asserting that water is the right of all people.

The movement headed by President-elect Tabare Vazquez ended the monopoly of the two traditional parties--the Blanco and the Colorado parties--which governed Uruguay since the creation of the universe.

And after each election you would hear this exclamation: ''I thought that we Blancos won but it turns out we Colorados did"--or the other way around. Out of opportunism, yes, but also because after so many years of ruling together, the two parties had fused into one, disguised as two.

Tired of being cheated, this time the people made use of that little-used instrument, common sense. The people asked, Why do they promise change yet ask us to chose between the same and the same? Why didn't they make any of these changes in the eternity they have been in power?

Never had the abyss between the real country and electioneering rhetoric been so evident. In the real country, badly wounded, where the only growth is in the number of emigrants and beggars, the majority chose to cover their ears to block out the oratory of these Martians competing for the government of Jupiter with highfalutin words imported from the moon.

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1113-20.htm