[q_an_a]

What is good about this whole Latin situation is that using the UN and a series of socialist governments will show the S American countries why Chile works and they do not. It is that Chile has decided to work out a system that supports the entrepenuer as the social future.

In five more years they will be so far ahead that even the LULU and Chavez wing of S. America will not be able to stop the desire for change by people that will call it the Chile revolution instead of the American revolution. It is still a combination of U of Chicago and Fernando Flores. Capitalism.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Chavez is all hat and no horse.
He really is Castro's parrot.

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Chavez takes cue from Castro - Venezuela Says Colombia Exporters To Be Paid, But Not Yet [Full Text] BOGOTA -(Dow Jones)- Venezuelan government officials said Thursday they plan to allow their importers to pay the $200 million to $300 million that Colombian exporters are owed for goods already sent to and received in Venezuela

But Venezuela Production and Trade Minister Ramon Rosales, speaking in Bogota at a meeting with Colombian exporters, added that it will be another two weeks before further details of the payment process will be avaialable.

Up to 800 Colombian exporters and other business leaders who deal with Venezuela are awaiting payments from Venezuela. The exporters are becoming impatient due to four-month-old currency restrictions in Venezuela that have tightened dollar flows, saddling importers there with dollar-debts they are unable to pay.

Also speaking at the meeting was Juan Emilio Posada, president of Colombia's largest airline, Alianza Summa. He said the carrier is owed $3.8 million in Venezuela and that this figure increases $1 million each month.

"What's the purpose of selling in a country that can't pay," Posada told reporters on the sidelines of the meeting. "The moment will soon arrive in which this type of business is unsustainable."

Summa flies to Caracas from Bogota three times a day.

Venezuela's Rosales responded, saying a special plan will be set up so airlines such as Alianza Summa can be paid.

During the first two months of the year, Colombian exports to Venezuela totaled $69 million, down from $233 million in the first two months of 2002. [End]

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When all these big talkers get together in one room it certainly is full of bluster but when they get home, reality is there to greet them.

Thanks, Hugo! President of Venezuela deserves free-market award***It's time to nominate Venezuela's populist President Hugo Chávez to the ''Milton Friedman Award'' for his indefatigable work to advance the cause of free-market policies and political harmony in the developing world.

I'm not kidding. No other head of state has done so much in such a short time to wreck his country's economy, and to discourage his neighbors from engaging in the kind of finger-waving populism that has brought about massive capital flight and record poverty levels in Venezuela.

If it weren't for the disastrous performance of Chávez's ''peaceful revolution,'' Brazil's new leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva would have probably launched the anti-free market policies he had championed for the past three decades, several foreign diplomats and politicians told me during a recent trip to Brazil. And Ecuador and Argentina probably would have followed suit.***