October 2003 - Washington Times - Chavez foes slam land grants - 'Agrarian Reform' and "Land Redistribution' in Venezuela***Under the law, the land distributed to the peasants is still owned by the state, and the government must encourage the formation of peasant cooperatives and collective farms, where the state is to provide housing, health care and education. The law also gives the government power to dictate how private land can be used, based on soil conditions and the country's food-security needs.
Critics argue that the law violates the right to private property and is a throwback to state-planned communist economies.
"The model of the collective farm doesn't respond to our reality," said Roque Carmona, founder of Campesino Alliance, a nonprofit organization that helps small-scale farmers. "It looks good on paper, nothing more."
Government officials maintain that the ban on giving up ownership of state property is an attempt to avoid the failures of past land reforms in Venezuela and elsewhere, in which small farmers who lacked credit or government support eventually had to sell their plots to large landowners.
They also argue that forming peasant cooperatives is the only way campesinos can compete with large agribusinesses.
Mr. Chavez has defended the law in terms of social justice and by appealing to the need for "food security," mandated by the constitution passed in 1999 during his first year as president.***
June 2001 - Venezuelan Land Reform Pits Rich Against Poor*** ``The incendiary rhetoric of the president has awakened a lot of hate within the country's impoverished classes,'' said Jose Ruiz, head of the ranchers association of Portuguesa state where a farmer was recently murdered by alleged land invaders.
``They call us land invaders, but we are not, we are the natives here,'' said Leon, standing outside his shack beside a red flag of Chavez wearing his trademark paratrooper's beret. ''The invaders were the ones who expanded the national park so we had no-where left to live.'***
July 2001 - Venezuelans Protest Kidnappings (Chavez suspends gun licenses--threats to jail militiamen)*** Ranchers living along the country's remote 1,400-mile border with Colombia face the constant threat of kidnapping and extortion by Colombia's leftist guerrillas who can cross the border. Common criminals and gangs often cooperate with rebels.
Earlier this year cattlemen proposed forming private militias to fend off local criminals and rebels from neighboring Colombia. The idea was abandoned as President Hugo Chavez suspended the issuance of new gun licenses and threatened to jail would-be militiamen.***
Much of the business - legal and illegal - is controlled by a population of 30,000, mainly Shia Muslim Arabs who fled the Lebanese civil war. They run their enterprises from the shabby shopping malls and chaotic streets of Ciudad del Este but usually live in the more affluent Foz. Among them is a small but dedicated hardcore of militant Muslims. For years, often under the guise of charitable donations, millions of dollars have flowed from the Triple Frontier to Hizbollah, the Iranian-backed militant Lebanese Shi'ite faction. Money was also raised for Hamas, the Palestinian extremist group.
Despite a limited crackdown and handful of arrests by the Paraguayan authorities, David Aufhauser, the outgoing United States Treasury Department official on terrorist funding, last month described the Triple Frontier zone as home to a "rich marriage of drugs and terror". A senior US State Department official said: "In terms of terrorist financing, the area is a black hole."
The money trail is complex and difficult to trace but The Telegraph has learnt that American intelligence officials have electronically monitored cash transfers via banks in Sao Paulo and North America to a web of accounts in the Middle East linked to Hizbollah and Hamas. They also disclosed that the US has been using satellites to monitor telephone conversations in the area after learning that Middle East terror suspects were dialling so-called switching stations in Foz or Ciudad del Este and giving a password to have their calls re-routed to their destination.
The procedure made calls impossible to trace and avoided triggering interception mechanisms. More than a dozen switching stations have been found and closed down in recent months. To the frustration of the US, cracking down on the terror financing operations has been much more difficult, especially as Paraguay and Brazil want to resuscitate tourism at the falls and to avoid losing the Arabs' business acumen.
Corruption is rampant and financial controls have been lax for so long that they verge on the non-existent. Money-laundering is conducted through myriad front companies, under-invoicing is endemic and the plethora of foreign exchange offices, money-wiring companies and commercial banks offer ample scope for moving large sums unnoticed.
A recent Brazilian customs investigation indicated the scale of illicit financial movements through the Triple Frontier. It concluded that between 1996 and 2000, an estimated $35 billion (£22 billion) had been moved illegally from Brazilian accounts held in Foz via a Paraguayan bank in neighbouring Ciudad del Este to New York. "It is easy to understand Ciudad del Este," said a lawyer there. "All you need to know is that everyone here is a bandit."***
I can't believe it when I read this stuff.
Meu coracao Brasileiro 'ta quebrando...
I would have sworn my heart was Brasilian but my soul was American. Now the heart is breaking but at last I still have my soul...
The un?
Brazil's newly elected president, Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, has promised to expand the military in Latin America's largest country and turn Brazil into a nuclear power. ...